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A detective in the Westchester County Police Real Time Crime Center received an alert at approximately 11:18 a.m. on Wednesday that a stolen Ford Explorer was being driven in downtown New Rochelle.
Officers quickly located the vehicle and boxed it in on North Avenue, near the intersection of Huguenot Street, prompting the driver and three passengers to bail and flee, police said.
According to police, an officer pursued two of the suspects along the Metro-North railroad tracks as additional county police officers and officers from the New Rochelle Police Department responded. Officials said that the two were quickly in police custody.
The Real Time Crime Center (RTCC) has paid dividends for county police since its installation last year, allowing detectives access to information that used to take hours to gather in just minutes.
Police said that the RTCC, which operates out of county police headquarters in Hawthorne, “is the newest initiative to make (Westchester) communities safer than ever.” It is staffed by detectives, “leveraging numerous modern technologies and public-private partnerships to take crime-fighting to the next level.”
“It puts a massive data warehouse at a detective’s fingertips, including shared law enforcement databases of police, corrections and probations records and cases; public records and other open-source data; live traffic cameras; license plate readers; tracking technology and other tools, including facial recognition software.”
The two suspects - whose names have not been released - were arrested and charged at Westchester County Police Headquarters in Hawthorne with felony criminal possession of stolen property and criminal trespass for running on the train tracks. No bail or arraignment information was immediately available. The two are due to answer the charges later this year.
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