Transit PoliceThe
principal owner of Information Technology
LLC owes much of his success to his
experiences with the NYC Transit Police.
As a Transit Police Officer in NYC you
quickly learn how to handle pressure.
Unlike their counterparts in the NYPD,
Transit Police Officers patrol the subways
alone, with radios that often did not work,
and you learn to depend on yourself because
help is usually not close by. If you
ever have the opportunity to hire a current
or retired NYC Transit Police Officer, don't
hesitate. You will be amazed at their
dedication and attention to detail.
After eight years of patrolling the
subways in all NYC boroughs except Staten
Island he was transferred to the Data
Processing Unit in January of 1990.
TOPCAT -
'Transit Omniform Program - Computerized
Arrest Terminal'
In 1992, after convincing management of the power
of the Personal Computer he was tasked to
develop a PC application to automate the
arrest process in Manhattan. The
application was written in Foxpro for
Windows on Windows for Workgroups 3.11. At
that time, if there was an issue with the
application, he would contact the server
group or the networking group. Of
course each group would blame the other for
any network or server issue that arose.
This forced him to become an expert on
networking and servers so the application
would work as designed. You now have
the opportunity to hire this individual.
The arrest process requires the Police
Officer to enter the same information on
many forms over and over again. Every form requires the
Perpetrator's information, Arresting
Officers information, the location of the
crime, etc. The same information then
had to be entered into two mainframe
computer systems. This can lead to
arrests being thrown out of court if there
were any discrepancies. If on one form
the officer wrote 1:00 am and other forms he
wrote 11:00 am. This could jeopardize
the case. The Manhattan DA said he
could defend an error if it is on every
form, but if the information is different on
each form, he would have a much more
difficult time explaining these
discrepancies to the court.
To automate the process, a new arrest
form (TP-67a) was created which the officer filled
out by hand. This form had every field
required by all of the separate forms. Then a Police
Administrative Aide entered the information
into the application. The application
then worked it's magic. In fact, to
this day, the NYPD does not match evidence
to each perpetrator arrested, but this
program performed this important function.
Also, there is a hierarchy of crimes that
was stored in EBCIDIC and he wrote a
function that translated it into ASCII which
windows applications is able to understand. All required
forms were printed on a laser printer and
the data was automatically uploaded to the
mainframe systems.
The program was praised by the Manhattan
DA's office and other police departments in
Manhattan. The source code was given to the
NYPD, NYC Housing Police and the Port
Authority Police so they could develop the
system for their departments.
The Manhattan District Attorney's office
produced a video to introduce this new
system. The link below will display
the video. It runs about 11 minutes.
TOPCAT Video
If you can't get the video
to play, you can download it by right
clicking on the link and then selecting to
save it to your computer.
