NYPD can’t count cash they’ve seized because it would crash computers
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
Get external auditors to come in and look at the system. Unless the data is corrupt, there is a way of getting it into a useful and queryable form. It would be a shame for this investigation to quietly die because of prevarication from some gifted bureaucrats.
Knowing what a lot of us know about "computers," they can get this together in (being nice) a week, leaving 5 3/4 months to compose their PR strategy dealing with the fallout.
So is it really surprising there's zero records kept? In other news, the dog ate my homework!
I'm not saying that has any affect on reality, just that it would be a reasonable thing to do.
Anything else is theft by taking
Texas had a contract with IBM to consolidate all of the servers of all state agencies. I believe it was for $863 million dollars and 7 years. The first thing IBM was supposed to was to replace any hardware that needed replacing. They never replaced anything. A ticket to reboot a server took a week. As nearly as I can tell, IBM just underbid the contract, and figured that the court battles would be cheaper than making good on the contract. The on-going legal wrangling was literally constant. We just compiled our lists of grievances throughout our workdays and forwarded them on to our manager, where presumably, they got all aggregated again and eventually made it to the legal teams.
It was pretty horrendous. You could have developers or production at a dead halt for a week literally because a server (managed by IBM) needed to be rebooted, and they wouldn't do it. Managers would call and rage. I worked at a large agency, and we eventually got administrator access to the machines, which I think we were supposed to use only for read-only access... occasionally, we'd get told to actually reboot them or something. My impression was that IBM would be logging such infractions and just try to use them as more evidence of Texas violating the contract or something. At the very least, we weren't really supposed to use the access, but we did.
I wondered how the whole agency functioned with the IT infrastructure that badly planned. If you needed a new virtual machine, you'd be doing pretty well to get your request in 6 months in advance, literally. For them to click through creating when you literally know they have the capacity (because we had some insight into the infrastructure.) One of my managers went to some session, and there were more than 35 process steps to getting something like that done, if I recall corretly. Any step stalls, that's a black hole; you'd better be calling and checking on requests like that regularly, or they just dead-end somewhere. (Actually, nothing you didn't call about regularly ever got done, including reboots.) I think they got that down to 15ish steps eventually.
But a system built in 2012 can't provide a report on total cash seized? Honestly?
>It's entirely possible that PETS, which allows for automating intake of evidence, may be so complex in its database configuration that producing the data sought by the bill would require major revisions to the multi-million dollar system. However, the NYPD has also invested heavily in an IBM DB2 data warehouse operation with the help of IBM Professional Services, so in theory they should be able to perform much of the analytics off-line without "crashing" the PETS system—with a little more consulting help.
That's just embarrassing.
I can't for a second believe that this is an accidental oversight. If this is truly a problem, then it is because one of the design requirements was to make this a problem. Either that, or it's a procedural thing, where the value of cash evidence is captured, but not in a way that the system expects for aggregations. That way, it can be retrieved, but only if you know how to do the secret dance.
They obviously have to have this information because they are required to split their funds with the Feds. They just don't want to make it widely available.