UPPER WEST SIDE — The 24th Precinct is among a handful of Manhattan precincts to receive smartphones under a new pilot program to help its officers better communicate, fight crime and stay on top of paperwork, said Capt. Marlon Larin, the precinct's commanding officer.
The 119 officers and supervisors at the 24th Precinct, which runs between West 86th Street and West 110th Street from Central Park to the Hudson River, all received Nokia Lumia smartphones courtesy of the NYPD this July to help them on the job, said Larin.
In addition, all the squad cars are now equipped with tablets.
"They used to have very clunky computers," he said.
In the past, information was shared over radio, but if officers wanted to share a suspect photo they'd have to do so with their personal phones and not everyone always knew those numbers, Larin said.
Now officers on one shift can easily share suspect photos with the officers on the next shift — that's exactly what contributed to tracking down a repeat bank robber earlier this month, he said.
Police shared a photo of the suspect via their smartphones and she was spotted hours later in the vicinity of the bank.
The 33rd and 34th precincts, in Washington Heights and Inwood, also received phones and tablets, as did the 100th and 101st in Queens. The 24th Precinct is the third precinct so far in Manhattan North, which is comprised of a dozen precincts, to receive them.
While the tablets and smartphones are associated with a new community policing model that was rolled out earlier this year, the 24th Precinct isn't part of that program yet. Larin said the phones and tablets do not necessarily signal that the precinct will be in the future.
Officers have also taken the initiative of entering arrest information into the system via their phones when they're stuck at the hospital with a suspect, or on their way back to the station, as a way of getting a jump on the paperwork, said Larin. Previously, they'd have to wait until they got to the precinct's terminal on West 100th Street to start any data entry, he said.
"It’s just a nice way to get ahead of it," he said.
And the technology helps speed along the process for the suspect too. They can get fingerprinted and processed faster, said Larin.
The phones come equipped with tools that are useful for police work.
Databases on the phone can also show officers the history of complaint reports at a building, people with warrants out for their arrest, persons of interest that detectives are investigating, has a translation app, and a camera, he said.
The bottom line: "if you see [officers] on the phone, they’re not being unprofessional," he said.
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