NEW YORK - When a syringe-wielding drill thief tried sticking up a Home Depot near Yankee Stadium, police figured out quickly that it wasn't a one-off. A man had also used a syringe a few weeks earlier while stealing a drill at another Home Depot 7 miles (11 km) south in Manhattan. The match, though, wasn't made by an officer looking through files. It was done by pattern-recognition computer software developed by the New York Police Department. The software, dubbed Patternizr, allows crime analysts stationed in each of the department's 77 precincts to compare robberies, larcenies and thefts to hundreds of thousands of crimes logged in the NYPD's database, transforming their hunt for crime patterns with the click of a button.

The department disclosed its use of the technology only this month, with Levine and Cholas-Wood detailing their work in the INFORMS Journal on Applied Analytics in an article alerting other departments how they could create similar software. Speaking about it with the news media for the first time, they told The Associated Press recently that theirs is the first police department in the country to use a pattern-recognition tool like this.