NYPD can’t count cash they’ve seized because it would crash computers
Found on Ars Technica on Monday, 19 September 2016
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 NYPD has also invested heavily in an IBM DB2 data warehouse operation with the help of IBM Professional Services, so in theory they should be able to perform much of the analytics off-line without "crashing" the PETS system—with a little more consulting help.
It should be pretty safe to assume that they could produce the reports, but just don't want to. After all it would put some light onto the shady business of what commonly would be called theft.