The Los Angeles Police Department has opened a 24-hour operations center in a City Hall basement to provide instant crime and emergency analysis, reports the Los Angeles Daily News. The operation is the central piece of a newly created unit known as the Realtime Analysis Critical Response Division. It is modeled after a 24-hour crime information processing center in New York City. While New York spent $15 million developing its center, Los Angeles consolidated existing analytical functions into a single command post at a small fraction of the cost; no figures were available.
“Working as we often do here in Los Angeles on a shoestring budget, we’ve crafted something that in some ways goes beyond what they have in New York,” said Police Chief William Bratton, a former top cop in New York. The Realtime Analysis unit gives officers a resource to check in with at any time of the day or night for crime analysis. It will take feeds from city Department of Transportation cameras and be a central response point for the aftermath of natural disasters as well as crimes. The new system will allow officers to make connections right away between crimes in different parts of the city in a way they were not able to do before, said Capt. Blake Chow.