Public Sector Operations Research: A Personal Journey

Abstract

It all started at an MIT fraternity mixer party in September 1965. Another brother and I, noting the need for additional female attendees—to balance the gender ratio—fulfilled our brotherly duties by bringing over from Boston’s Back Bay an additional six partygoers. The problem was that two of the recruits—whom we had not known previously— turned out to be professional thieves. Before we knew it, they had left the party, but not before ransacking the ladies’ powder room, taking from purses cash, credit cards, and IDs. That fact did not become apparent until 1:00 a.m., when all the trusting young women went to pick up their purses that they had innocently left in the powder room. When I heard of this, I felt terrible, personally responsible. Grand larceny. Little did I know that this one event would change my life and shape my future career. During the following weeks in an attempt to catch the thieves, I played the role of private detective. I followed up every lead they had given us. One said she went to a secretarial college in the Back Bay of Boston. I talked my way into the president’s office, claiming that one of their students had lost a valuable gold watch at that party; as a result I was able to see the photographs of each of the students registered at that college—but no luck. Similarly, I followed all other leads to no avail. Soon in my “Detective Larson” zeal I found myself carrying a half a dozen books in criminology and forensic sciences checked out from the MIT libraries. I became fascinated, for instance, with the potential for computers to automatically recognize latent fingerprints. The following semester I registered in one of MIT’s first courses in artificial intelligence to undertake the fingerprint project. One day MIT’s Professor Alvin W. Drake noticed me carrying seemingly random library books and asked me what they were. I related to him the story, and he urged me to register with him under a special research project focusing on operations research problems in urban policing. Stunned that I could do such a thing at MIT, I leapt at the opportunity. Professor Drake soon arranged a high-level meeting involving executives at Arthur D. Little, commanders of the Boston Police Department, and yours truly. Thus began my manyyear odyssey of riding in the back seats of police cars in Boston, St. Louis, Wilmington (Delaware), Worcester (Massachusetts), and elsewhere. Soon I realized that the police emergency response system was a priority-oriented tandem queueing system. At that time, in the mid-1960s, no one had studied urban policing from an operations research point of view. Wow, there was my master’s thesis topic!