Crystal Ball Unit's New Job

Someone was wondering a few weeks ago about where the Golden Boy's unit ended up after Rahm decided to forgo crime prediction and just go with straight-up statistical manipulation instead. They found new jobs working with the animal kingdom:

• The Chicago Police Department has used predictive analytics to determine where to position officers to prevent retaliatory shootings.
  
  Why not do the same to prevent four-legged criminals — rats — from “establishing a colony”?
  
  Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s administration is doing just that, armed with a $1 million prize from a philanthropic organization formed by retiring New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg to help cities devise new ways — through savvy use of loads of data — to deliver old services.
  
  The city’s Department of Innovation and Technology has identified 31 city service requests not directly related to rat sightings that trigger rodent control complaints.

So things have finally come full circle in a twisted sort of way:

• Goldstein invents a restaurant reservation system (Open Table or something), then joins the Police Department;
• The Golden Boy translates a year on the street into an Assistant Deputy Superintendent spot and brings Open Table to the Police Department to create the Crystal Ball Unit to predict crime (predicting exactly zero crimes in the process);
• Goldstein leaves and the Crystal Ball Unit falls into disfavor as it's just easier to lie to everyone about the crime rate - the media is too dumb and in Rahm's pocket to ask the intelligent questions anyway;
• The Open Table program finds a new home predicting rat infestations, who like to hang out at restaurants with very few Open Tables anyway, assisted by the original program.

It's a stretch to connect the dots, but it works for us. Predicting crime is pretty much impossible and the CBU people proved time and time again for over a year. Predicting a rat infestation located around a fixed place of business with less-than-sanitary conditions is a slam dunk.