IS ROOM 203 REALLY WORTH $49 MILLION?

It sure looks great. And since it cost $49 million you would expect nothing less than praise from the police commissioner for what’s being done in Room 203 with its two-story-tall video monitor. But how effective is it really?

INSIDE LOOK AT NYPD’S $49M NERVE CENTER FOR FIGHTING CRIME
By Joe Kemp

New York Daily News
September 6, 2011

Walk into room 203 at police headquarters at any hour and you'll find several detectives hunched over work stations perched in front of a two-story-tall video monitor.

The screen displays diagrams and city maps as detectives in the Real Time Crime Center - the NYPD's high-tech crimefighting hub - comb through billions of records to help investigators track down violent criminals.

The Daily News was given a tour of the Police Department's so-called nerve center, which recently moved to the second floor of 1 Police Plaza after a face-lift.

The renovation of the Joint Operations Center, which includes the crime center, cost $49 million, 60% of which was federal money.

"It's a 2-4/7 operation," said Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly. "The detectives here are pushing information out to their fellow investigators in the field."

The center, which first opened on the eighth floor in July 2005, serves as an information warehouse with several growing databases that give officers the ability to sift through billions of records in a short time.

As soon as a violent crime is reported, investigators assigned to the case begin working with detectives at the RTCC, so cops at the scene can "hit the ground running," Kelly said.

"We do a whole analysis of the area," said Capt. Michael Godek, executive officer of the RTCC. "We take a lot of valuable information ... and we connect the dots."

And any clue to a perpetrator's identity helps.

The databases are filled with "thousands upon thousands" of entries - updated each day - that include criminals' nicknames, tattoos, addresses, arrest history and even their dental records.

"We find everything about you, and we give that to detectives," Godek said. "And we give them additional leads."

Most recently, detectives working in the state-of-the-art center helped to identify the gunman wanted for shooting two children, one critically, in the Bronx.

Luis Moore, 23, turned himself in to police less than a day after he allegedly shot 2-year-old Patience Boyd in the head and wounded 6-year-old Jayla Rodriguez on Aug. 29.

Moore, upset over a $400 pot debt, was gunning for Ricky Rodriguez, 20, who was hit in the lower back, police sources said.

Cops released Moore's mug shot to the press within hours of the shooting, after detectives at the Real Time Crime Center helped finger him as a suspect.

Quick collars are a key factor in keeping crime down in the city, Kelly said.

"We deal with a recidivist population," he said. "The quicker we take them off the street, the sooner we stop them from committing another crime."