The Computer & Mrs. Placente

It looked as if a trap had been set for one of the nation's ten most wanted criminals. Lurking beside a crowded New York City parkway one noon last week were four busloads of police brass, 125 newsmen and a dozen patrolmen, including six cops in two prowl cars casing every passing motorist.

They roared into action when a police radio squawked "QK-7554"--the license number of an oncoming Corvair. "It's a hit!" chortled one cop. "I've got the warrant!" shouted another. The cops flagged down the Corvair, flashed their warrant and arrested the driver--Gloria Placente, 34, a bewildered blonde housewife headed for the beach. Triumphantly, the cops explained their gimmick: a computer miles away had just squealed that Mrs. Placente had neglected to answer a summons after she ran a red light 16 months ago.

"What am I--some kind of criminal?" Mrs. Placente demanded. As scores of other gawking spectators rushed up, Mrs. Placente exploded: "You look like a bunch of lunatics. It should just happen to your wives. Better yet, it should happen to your mothers."

Swooping in Seconds. What happened to Mrs. Placente was the first public demonstration of "Operation Corral"--an acronym that police flacks spell out as "Computer Oriented Retrieval of Auto Larcenists." The core of Corral is a borrowed UNIVAC 490, one of Sperry Rand's $500,000 "real time" computers that can analyze an event while the event is happening. Corral's UNIVAC has been fed the license numbers of 30,000 stolen cars and the cars of 80,000 scofflaws--traffic violators who neglect to answer summonses or pay fines.

Linked by radio to the computer, police in one prowl car simply call off a sampling of passing license numbers. As a teletypist feeds the numbers into the computer, it compares them with the stored list. When it "hits" a wanted number, a bell rings, the number is automatically typed out, and the teletypist radios ahead to a second prowl car parked some 900 ft. down the road. The whole thing takes about 7 sec.--ample time for the second car to swoop on the prey.

Swatting a Gnat. So far, the main drawback is the legal requirement of a judge-signed warrant for each scofflaw. In a big city, no prowl car can possibly lug enough warrants. But police need no warrant to arrest anyone whom they reasonably believe to have committed a felony.

Since 65% to 90% of reported crimes involve cars, the cops see Corral as the sharpest new weapon in their fast-growing arsenal of computerized devices against crime (TIME, July 30). Though that is something to cheer about, last week's demonstration had the circus look of an elephant swatting a gnat. At least some of Mrs. Placente's ambushers might have been more profitably engaged in solving real crimes that occur in New York City on an average day: one murder, four rapes, 22 holdups, 41 assaults, 117 grand larcenies, 123 burglaries. Taken to court, Mrs. Placente ended the day with a trial date in November. It seems likely that many more scofflaws will soon be in the same fix.

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