Urban Technological Infrastructure
In 2014, the New York Police Department received $160 million from the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office to roll out a mobile communications initiative, “allowing the Department to outfit up to 6,000 police cars with ruggedized tablet computers, as well as provide 35,000 handheld devices to every police officer.” According to de Blasio, “we must have 21st century tools to deal with 21st century threats.”
The mayor’s posture about leveraging advanced tools to enhance urban government functionality is affirmed by a national movement toward ‘smart cities’. In fact, the Department of Transportation just awarded the city of Columbus, Ohio $40 million to build an infrastructure in support of electric vehicles.
While these initiatives spur creativity, competition, and positive change throughout the nation, their existence incorrectly assumes an up-to-date technological infrastructure upon which these ‘smart cities’ can develop.
On Thursday, September 27, 2016 I first read about the death of Zymere Perkins and yesterday, the New York Post intimated a system-wide failure in preventing his death. “It wasn’t just ACS that failed Zymere: so did the Departments of Education and Homeless Services.”
Based on initial reports, those ‘street-level bureaucrats’ handling the case made egregious errors in case management, and their failure in oversight, follow up, and inter-agency coordination resulted in the most horrible outcome. However, it is not surprising that Zymere Perkins (like many others) slipped through the cracks. As Michael Lipsky points out in “Street-Level Bureaucracy”, those service workers who interact with the public “need to process work loads expeditiously… and must develop shortcuts and simplifications to cope with the press of responsibilities” (18).
This duality, in investing $160 million for mobile tablets for one department whilst lacking tools to perform basic, everyday tasks in another is a technological shortcoming in New York. The city has neglected to prioritize those technologies that automate processes, provide real-time decision support, and foster inter-agency communication for street-level bureaucrats to do their jobs adequately, while boasting about 21st century innovations to solve modern crime. As the Zymere Perkins case demonstrates, the lives of so many depend on local agencies to function at their highest potential, and right now that expectation is not being met.
