
NYPD can’t count cash they’ve seized because it would crash computers - leonatan
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/09/nypd-cant-count-cash-theyve-seized-because-it-would-crash-computers/
======
ramblenode
"We're not corrupt, just incompetent"

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.

~~~
hashkb
"We're not just corrupt, we're also incompetent."

------
Cozumel
From what I understand 'civil forfeiture' is basically a legalised shakedown,
the police can stop anyone and take whatever money they have. Canada actually
issued a travel advisory over it (
[https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140915/09500928521/canad...](https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140915/09500928521/canadian-
news-outlet-warns-canadians-that-us-law-enforcement-officers-will-pull-them-
over-seize-their-cash.shtml) )

So is it really surprising there's zero records kept? In other news, the dog
ate my homework!

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chrisbennet
Then they should stop seizing property until they can count the cash. I
suspect the real reason involves a coverup.

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dsfyu404ed
A reasonable thing to do would to stop taking people's property until they
have a system to account for its whereabouts.

I'm not saying that has any affect on reality, just that it would be a
reasonable thing to do.

~~~
Shivetya
More reasonable would be not taking anyone's property or cash until they are
found guilty of a crime and the asset is shown to be profit of the crime.

Anything else is theft by taking

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6DM
It is by no means an excuse for them, but having done some work in the
government contractor sector, this is not an impossible scenario. However, the
company that was contracted to build it should probably be forced to remedy
that soon, or pay.

~~~
theonemind
I've worked for state government. No amount of failure for any amount of money
paid would surprise me.

~~~
ryanmarsh
Curious, what's the biggest amount for failure you've seen during your time in
state govt?

~~~
theonemind
[http://www.statesman.com/news/news/state-regional-govt-
polit...](http://www.statesman.com/news/news/state-regional-govt-
politics/chronic-failures-threaten-ibm-contract-with-texas/nRwMD/)

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.

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nyolfen
this sounds like stonewalling to me. maybe they weren't counting on the optics
of the headline's phrasing sounding as charged as it does, but this reminds me
strongly of, for instance, the FBI intentionally being obtuse in their
processing of FOIA requests for sensitive subjects. they're not figuring out
the numbers because the headline "$x hundred million seized by NYPD from
citizens in 2015" sounds even worse.

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imgabe
Must be very convenient for the cops seizing the cash if nobody knows how much
is supposed to be there.

~~~
wmeredith
Yes. Quite.

------
S_A_P
Im currently working on a project for a large refined products company that is
run by IBM. Its totally plausible that they created a bad solution. The last
3-4 projects Ive worked on were run by Big 4 consulting companies, and with
each I've become more convinced that they are a drain on the economy.

------
johngalt
If this were some ancient 20+ year old proprietary system that no one wanted
to touch, I might buy it.

But a system built in 2012 can't provide a report on total cash seized?
Honestly?

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M_Grey
Honest question here... does _anyone_ believe this explanation from the NYPD?
I don't, and I find it hard to believe that anyone else does.

~~~
parent5446
It's one of those explanations so ridiculous it's either blatantly false or it
just has to be true.

~~~
M_Grey
In a way I suppose that gives such a claim from the NYPD the only shred of
credibility it could have had in the first place.

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xkcd-sucks
And I can't submit to a pat-down search due to my crippling social anxiety.

------
bcg1
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by an improperly
tuned instance of DB2.

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coldcode
Prove it chumps. Let me see that database. It's so easy for them to lie its
not even funny. Show me the money ... counting software.

~~~
dx034
Of course you can get the data, it's in a SQL database after all. The
consultants only made sure to build the system so that they get paid for
everything that wasn't explicitly specified (like querying by a parameter):

>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.

------
paulddraper
> The system...was built on top of SAP's enterprise resource planning software
> platform and IBM's DB2 database by Capgemini in 2012, and was used as a
> flagship case study by the company.

That's just embarrassing.

~~~
pjc50
It delivered exactly what the client wanted.

~~~
mywittyname
Exactly. This should not be an issue with inventory software written in 2012.
Especially not from an enterprise solution used by massive companies and
governments all over the world.

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.

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cdevs
All they have to say is "Change the column to (BIG INT) noob".

~~~
Grazester
I want wondering if someone used an INT instead of a LONG somewhere but then
that would be giving them the benefit of the doubt that this isn't nonsense
cover-up for corruption.

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spacemanmatt
Technically speaking, that story about crashing the system is BULLSHIT.

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an_account
Do they not have separate backups that can be queried?

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alien3d
Smile of the day.:)

