In an article in The New Yorker, engineers from the OEM attributed the drop in Chicago’s crime rate, which happened during the mid-1990’s, to their reduction in paper jams.
As TECH TIMES reports, Xerox engineers have taken credit for the fall in the city’s crime rate during the mid-1990’s, claiming the decrease was caused by “their technology to resolve paper jams”, which enabled Chicago’s criminal justice system to place criminals behind bars.
The reduction of paper jams, according to the engineers, meant that “lawyers were able to get work done more efficiently and helped them meet deadlines.”
John Viavattine, head of the OEM’s Media Technology Centre, claimed that “two-thirds of offenders were being released because of paper jams in the court system.”
He then went on to relate a story about a time when he had visited Chicago’s children’s court during the 1990’s.
“What was happening was, lawyers had to deliver certain court documents to the defense attorneys within a certain amount of time” Vivattine told the journalist from The New Yorker. “Otherwise, the defendant was let go. And they were losing two out of three cases because of paper jams.”
He explained that the jams were caused by poor quality paper, saying “the problem was that they were using some off-brand, really down-in-the-dumps paper.”
However, TECH TIMES wrote that, “A decline in Chicago’s crime rate in the ‘90’s occurred when the police began going after gang leadership in the city”, causing a decrease in violent crimes, “with murder rates going down from 934 in 1993 to 599 in 2003.”
