The New York City Police Department takes in millions of dollars in cash each year as evidence, often keeping the money through a procedure called civil forfeiture. But as New York City lawmakers pressed for greater transparency into how much was being seized and from whom, a department official claimed providing that information would be nearly impossible—because querying the 4-year old computer system that tracks evidence and property for the data would “lead to system crashes.”
The system, the Property and Evidence Tracking System (PETS), 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.
