Wary of call? Just text 911
NYPD tech, but not for emergency
A 51-year-old South Bronx man was torn about what to do when he saw an angry young man with a pistol in his backpack fighting with another person at a crowded neighborhood deli.
He was worried about gunshots — but was wary about calling 911.
“I used to be a knucklehead myself,” said the witness, a professional cook who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “I’m from the hood and we don’t call 911. We take care of things our way.
“But . . . I saw the guy reach for the gun and I had to do something in case people got hurt.”
Fortunately, he had an alternative to phoning it in. Since June 2, New Yorkers can send a text message to 911 for the first time.
The grandfather’s message came over at 4:12 p.m. to veteran NYPD dispatcher Kathyann Peters on Sept. 10: “Male 6’ tall red shirt gun in fanny pack in front of deli.”
The texter added: “399 3rd Avenue and 149.”
Less than 20 minutes later, 25year-old Mustafa Anderson was arrested nearby after throwing out what turned out to be an imitation pistol, police said.
For Peters, handling a 911 text is sometimes easier than fielding a call — because people tend to get right to the point, she said.
Texting is ideal for the roughly 208,000 hearing-impaired city residents, those with speech difficulties and young people who prefer it to phoning — but Peters said many 911 texts are coming from victims of domestic violence.
“A lot of times the perpetrator is someone right in the house with them and they’re much safer texting us than they would be calling,” she said.
The cook whose call led to Anderson’s arrest felt safer, too.
“If I’d phoned it in, people could have heard me and I might have gotten into an altercation myself,” he told The Post. “This way I went and had a sandwich and continued about on my business.
“The bottom line is, where I come from, the cops are not always on our side,” he said. “But I had to make a choice to contact them. I’m glad I did, and I’m glad I could do it via text.”
The city urges citizens to text 911 only if they cannot call.
City data show that most response times for texts lag well behind the response times for voice calls. In July, the average NYPD response time to a 911 call for a serious crime in progress was 11.8 minutes. For texts, it was 16.5 minutes.
For medical emergencies, FDNY’s response time to calls was 10.5 minutes, but 15.9 minutes to texts.
The NYPD’s launch of text-to911 comes after more than six years of infighting, stalled initiatives and cost overruns. Officials initially promised to have the system online by early 2018.
The program is part of a larger $28 million contract awarded to Motorola subsidiary Vesta Solutions in 2017, which has ballooned to $41 million.
“The department’s gone from the Stone Age to Renaissance to the dot-com era just since 2014,” said Deputy Commissioner Matthew Fraser, head of Information Technology for the NYPD. “Cops have tablets and smartphones with them that help them see jobs in real time. Texting to 911 is part of precision policing. We can’t afford to let the technology get ahead of us.”
Fraser conceded the text-to-911 tech can sometimes invite what he termed “inappropriate pictures.” He declined to elaborate, but said it wasn’t a serious problem.