New York’s CTO outlines his 2023 priorities

Public safety, simplifying government services, and expanding internet access are top of mind for Matthew Fraser, New York City’s Chief Technology Officer (CTO), as he reflects on his first 12 months in the role and looks forward to the year ahead.

Major projects in the offing include overhauling the Internet Master Plan released by the previous administration, and launching the MyCity portal to streamline government services.

Fraser was appointed in January last year when Mayor Eric Adams took office. Previously, Fraser was Deputy Commissioner of Information Technology for the New York Police Department (NYPD).

He told Cities Today in an interview that the first year had been about “stopping the bleeding”.

“We really focused on getting control of things that we found to be critical problems,” he explains. “Almost like looking at the city as a patient – before we can do long-term care, we have to deal with the trauma.”

Out with the Internet Master Plan

In September, Fraser launched the Big Apple Connect scheme to make free high-speed internet and basic cable TV available to 300,000 residents in over 200 New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) developments by the end of 2023.

Concerns were raised, though, by councilmembers and others about the future of the longer-term Internet Master Plan. In 2020, former mayor Bill de Blasio announced the plan to connect 1.5 million New Yorkers who had neither a mobile or home broadband service by building open access fibre optic infrastructure to incentivise private sector investment and competition. He earmarked US$157 million to connect 600,000 underserved residents and in 2021 announced a selection of vendors who would deploy fibre and deliver services – many of them minority- and women-owned businesses. The goal was to make both internet access and the telecom marketplace in New York more equitable.

The city is now changing course. Fraser says the programme was moving too slowly to reach the roughly 40 percent of public housing residents without access to broadband and that despite announcements, contracts had not been issued by the previous administration.

“Instead of us talking about these perpetual programmes that will do something, let’s get people who need resources access immediately,” he says.

Fraser says the US$157 million would have only covered a first phase, and the overall cost was estimated at US$2 billion.

He comments: “Marketplace diversity is a good thing – it’s an approach, it may not be the approach – but there are other types of technologies out there that give mesh wireless services through entire developments. That’s what we’re looking at now.”

Big Apple Connect is currently based on three-year agreements with existing cable TV franchisees.

“That gives us a decent runway to get to where we need to,” says Fraser, adding that the city will soon release a new RFP “to replace the legacy Internet Master Plan”.

Public safety

Crime and violence are major issues on the minds of Americans and public safety is a “huge concern” for the city too, according to Fraser.

The focus will be on “continuing to lean on things that have worked historically well for the city,” he says, citing examples such as ShotSpotter gunshot detection technology, security cameras, and body-worn cameras.

In areas of high serious crime, the city has used security cameras along with ShotSpotter to gather video evidence.

Fraser says: “We’ve seen that in areas where we’ve had both of those present, remands for those that have committed significant crimes have been at least 12 to 20 percent higher than in areas that don’t.”

He says cameras also act as a deterrent and the city will continue using a targeted approach to expand these programmes.

Some campaign groups have questioned the efficacy of the city using gunshot detection technology and raised concerns about the scale of its camera surveillance.

Fraser comments: “I believe that a lot of people that stand on very firm positions on this tend not to have to deal with the consequences of those that live in the areas that are afflicted by the violence.”

He also doesn’t think people can expect complete privacy in public spaces: “Anyone can literally pull out their phone, and then you can be on an Instagram video two seconds later without consent.”

Fraser adds: “And the best thing about the programmes that we’re talking about, especially our security camera programme, is that it’s in conjunction with the council districts and the state assembly districts so it’s not just the city saying we want to do this. A lot of those assets are funded by a community level.”

Community members can provide feedback on plans, and they sometimes request cameras in specific places, he explains.

Simplification

A key project for 2023 will be the first iteration of New York’s MyCity portal. Complexity and fragmentation can prevent disadvantaged residents from accessing services that they need and MyCity will therefore consolidate all the discrete services for a person or business into a single place.

The first process to be incorporated will be access to childcare subsidies, which to date has been manual and required lengthy forms, interaction with several city agencies, and scouring for hard-to-find information.

Via the new digital services, residents will be able to apply using a central interface with no need to worry about which departments are responsible on the back-end.

“We are focusing much more on human-centric design,” Fraser comments. This includes getting more feedback from residents during the design and planning phases.

He says simplification is paying off internally too. When Mayor Adams took office, he immediately consolidated all separate technology agencies under the Office of Technology and Innovation, led by Fraser.

This included the Office of Data Analytics, the Office of Information Privacy, and New York Cyber Command. It also meant that the technology departments within different agencies throughout the city, such as education and the NYPD, began reporting into the OTI.

A major benefit has been reducing waste in spending, according to Fraser. For example, he says that centralising mobile device purchasing and consolidating rate plans across agencies has cut telecom bills by US$15 million per year.

“The biggest thing that we’re focusing on is rationalising government,” Fraser says.