At NYPD headquarters, just across from City Hall, there's a place called the Real Time Crime Center.

It's a big room that has a giant monitor at the front of it that has pictures of tattoos, of footage from surveillance cameras, of other police databases.

This is Anhelle Diaz.

He's a lawyer at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU.

And all around it are a series of desks where individual officers that are part of the real-time crime center

are crunching searches and other information to try and investigate crimes.

It looks like the Hollywood version of a high-tech police department.

The place where a plucky investigator says enhance, and the perp's face snaps into view.

There's a two-story screen at the front of a dark room.

Rows and rows of detectives sit in the darkness. And they see real

time because they're talking about this is not like looking into cold cases. They're saying that

like this is the nerve center for what is actually happening on the streets of New York.

That's right. It's connected to thousands and thousands of public and private CCTV cameras.

It's connected to hundreds of different license plate readers.

It has access to all the information that's being uploaded related to people's social media monitoring practices,

to the repository of mugshots and juvenile photos that inform how the NYPD does its facial recognition searches.

So this is kind of like the NYPD's headquarters for surveillance technologies.

That's right.

This place has been around since 2005.

It's grown and changed in that time, along with the scope of police surveillance in New York.

License plate readers, CCTV cameras, 911 calls, it all funnels into this room.

Forget dusting for fingerprints. This is where police investigations happen now. In this suite of high-end technologies powering the real-time crime

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