Other real-time features in the works include generating alerts when a "stop and frisk" report matches a name in an outstanding warrant in the data warehouse. New York is even considering emulating a city of London project and setting up thousands of cameras at major intersections around the city to scan license plates in real time, Tyler said (see "Closed-circuit TV may aid London bombing investigation). The data warehouse would be able to match those license plates and generate alerts if matches are made.

"Like the private sector, the NYPD data warehouse appears to be all about CDI -- except in this case, it's not customer data integration, it's criminal data integration," said James Kobielus, an analyst at Sterling, Va.-based Current Analysis Inc.

Kobielus, who had not been briefed by the NYPD, said the department's drive for real time is a good idea and parallels what many Fortune 500 firms are doing today. To ensure no latency, however, he recommended that the NYPD consider adding management and monitoring tools as the private-sector organizations are doing.

The data warehouse, currently 80GB in size and accessible through Cognos 8 business intelligence tools, should grow to about 400GB by the time the third phase is completed, Tyler said.

Onalfo said he would eventually like the data warehouse to serve as a central information hub for as many as 30 local government agencies, the district attorney's office and police departments in neighboring Nassau and Westchester counties. The data warehouse will also take over CompStat, launched in 1994 and credited widely for helping reduce crime in the city. Currently, it takes two to three employees at each precinct a full day to prepare weekly crime-trend reports. Eventually, precincts will be able to generate reports in a weekly, daily or even real-time fashion via dashboards that commanding officers can monitor.