NYPD armed with iPhones that put radios to shame
AN OLD POLICE academy in Gramercy Park has become the city’s newest Apple store — one that only serves an exclusive group of customers.
There are no glass walls and brightly lit tables with the company’s latest products on display to be found. But there’s still a line out the door — of cops waiting for their department iPhones, the NYPD’s latest tool to combat crime in the digital age.
As the department switches over from Nokia phones to iPhones, the rollout has begun in Patrol Borough Manhattan South, which runs from Wall St. to 59th St.
Within the next week, cops covering these neighborhoods will be i-ready to protect and serve, according to NYPD Deputy Commissioner for Information and Technology Jessica Tisch.
“We’ve been giving out about 600 phones a day,” Tisch said during a recent visit to the rollout center at the old academy on E. 21st St.
“We’re seeing excitement.”
Citing better security and speed, the iPhones started popping up at local precincts just before Christmas.
Cops in the Bronx and Staten Island have already received the iPhone 7 or 7 Plus, depending on their screen-size preference. a lot of
Once every cop in Manhattan gets one, the rollout will go to Brooklyn, then Queens. The iPhones, much like their Nokia predecessors, mark a quantum leap in policing, where everything from 911 dispatches to criminal background checks and real-time video can be quickly accessed.
The iPhones are also being used to fill out some summonses, domestic violence and accident reports and cards recording whom the officer has aided.
“I truly feel like it’s the ultimate tool to have as a patrol cop,” said Police Officer Christopher Clampitt.
Clampitt, 29, joined the department in 2010, about four years before Mayor de Blasio and former Police Commissioner Bill Bratton announced the NYPD’s $160 million initiative to put a smartphone in every cop’s hand.
Today, 911 dispatches come over the phone before they’re heard on department radios, Clampitt said.
“We get to the location a lot quicker,” he said. “By the time the dispatcher puts out the job (on the radio), we’re already there.”
Last year, Clampitt and his partner, who are assigned to the 13th Precinct in Gramercy Park, managed to stop a robbery in progress before the dispatcher put word out on the radio, thanks to their 911 app.
“We were able to effect an arrest,” he said. “If we (had waited for the radio), our response time would have been less and the guy would have gotten away.”
With the smartphones, the NYPD has seen its response times to critical crimes in progress drop by 14%, Tisch said.
The iPhones also allow cops to get videos and surveillance pictures of wanted suspects within minutes of the crime.
“We can just blast that out so everyone on patrol knows what is going on in real time,” said Deputy Inspector Steven Hellman, commanding officer of the 13th Precinct.
The alerts can also be geofenced and sent to all cops in a