Leave it to City of Gotham to be employing technology in its crime fighting efforts that would make Bruce Wayne proud. Following up on the success of the Comstat crime tracking program, the NYPD has begun using high tech approaches to gathering and storing information and putting that information at the fingertips of officers and detectives in the field.
Using a combination of an advanced database, wifi and a Google-like search capability, detectives can search for obscure details given to them from witnesses and be put on a suspects trail in minutes. Facts and notes that were once stored in vast warehouses, tucked away in boxes, file folders and other detectives' notebooks, are now available on-line.
There's no statistical way, at this point in time, to prove that the new system is having a dramatic effect on crime fighting but the NYT article gives several pieces of anecdotal evidence.
Crime fighting appears to be just one of many different benefits that city's are discovering about citywide, municipal wireless internet. Among those are "automated traffic monitoring, parking enforcement, and meter reading" and using wireless video cameras to watch for vandalism.
Bottom line... no matter what happens for consumers when Wireless Philly is up and running, if the City does it right and takes advantage, we could be in for a whole new era of smart government. (Or at least an era in which the phrase "smart government" doesn't cause some to chuckle or roll their eyes.)