NYPD distributes 400 police-specific Android phones to its officers

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http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/12/nyregion/new-tool-for-police-officers-quick-access-to-information.html?_r=0

As the officers walked up to the entrance of a Harlem housing project, a loose knot of people out front scattered into the damp, dark night and a few lingerers cast cold stares at the officers.

One of the officers reached into his pocket and pulled out the newest tool in the Police Department’s crime-fighting arsenal: a smartphone.

Officer Tom Donaldson typed in the building’s street address, and with a few taps of the screen, an astounding array of information bloomed in his palm.

The officers suddenly had access to the names of every resident with an open warrant, arrest record or previous police summons; each apartment with a prior domestic incident report; all residents with orders of protection against them; registered gun owners; and the arrest photographs of every parolee in the building. The officers could even find every video surveillance camera, whether mounted at the corner deli or on housing property, that was directed at the building.

“If I see that in the last month, there have been six arrests on the seventh floor for drug trafficking, maybe I want to hang out on the seventh floor for a while,” Officer Donaldson said.

The Police Department has distributed about 400 dedicated Android smartphones to its officers, part of a pilot program begun quietly last summer. The phones, which cannot make or receive calls, enable officers on foot patrol, for the first time, to look up a person’s criminal history and verify their identification by quickly gaining access to computerized arrest files, police photographs, and state Department of Motor Vehicles databases.

The technology offers extraordinary levels of detail about an individual, including whether the person has ever been “a passenger in a motor vehicle accident,” a victim of a crime or in one instance, a drug suspect who has been known by the police to hide crack cocaine “in his left sock,” according to Officer Donaldson.

The phone application is significantly different from the computers currently installed in roughly 2,500 patrol cars. With the laptops, the Internet connection can be slow and spotty in some of areas of the city, and officers have to log in to separate databases with multiple passwords to retrieve information.

“With one entry point, you can get to a lot of different databases — quickly,” Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said in an interview on Wednesday.

Without the phone, officers who stop a person for a violation, for example, can sometimes get bare-bones information by radioing in a name to a police dispatcher, police said.

“Our dispatcher will tell us if they have a warrant or not but it’s a simple yes or no answer,” said Officer Donaldson, who is assigned to the Housing Bureau. “I don’t know if the guy is wanted for murder or for not paying a parking summons. We rarely know. Now we know.”

The phone is particularly helpful when officers respond to a call of a domestic dispute. It allows officers to know how many times police have been previously summoned to the residence, providing details on those incidents. Typically, officers do not have this information, Commissioner Kelly said.

What NYPD's police-specific Android phones do:

1. access to the names of Persons of Interest with an open warrant
2. access to the names of Persons of Interest with an arrest record 
3. access to the names of Persons of Interest with a previous police summons
4. access to the names of Persons of Interest in each apartment with a prior domestic incident report
5. access to the names of Persons of Interest with orders of protection against them
6. access to the names of Persons of Interest who are registered gun owners
7. access to the arrest photographs of Persons of Interest
8. find every video surveillance camera, whether mounted or on housing property

What NYPD's police-specific Android phones cannot do:

1. make or receive calls