At a conference in New Orleans in 2007, Jon Greiner, then the chief of police in Ogden, Utah, heard a presentation by the New York City Police Department about a sophisticated new data hub called a “real time crime center.”

In the early 1990s, the NYPD had pioneered a system called CompStat that aimed to discern patterns in crime data, since widely adopted by large police departments around the country. With the real time crime center, the idea was to go a step further: What if dispatchers could use the department’s vast trove of data to inform the police response to incidents as they occurred?

Around the country, the expansion of police technology has been driven more by conversations between police agencies and their vendors than between police and the public they serve. And as federal and state laws take their time to catch, who gets to decide how close a tool can really get to your constitutional rights? Read the full story.

—Rowan Moore Gerety

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun and distraction in these weird times. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet ’em at me.)

+ Grease is 43 years old this week!
+ Congratulations to Daniel Connolly, who has become the fourth man to beat a horse in an annual 22-mile race.
+ What’s up with Bill Gates’ Gatsby-esque green lantern?
+ These spinning wheel marker pen videos are ridiculously compelling.
+ Don’t call it a comeback—cassette tapes never (fully) went away.