The NYPD will be arming cops with a new kind of weapon — a mobile app to provide instant crime-fighting data to them on handheld tablets.
The software, “Domain Awareness” is already being used by the Police Department on laptops and desktops, according to Jessica Tisch, deputy commissioner of IT for the NYPD.
“The Domain Awareness system is an app that brings together various forms of data: 911 [calls], complaints, arrests, warrants, sensor data, license plates and cameras,” Tisch said.
Over the next three months, cops will be out on patrol testing the app on the tablets and providing feedback, authorities said.
The department hopes to quickly expand it to mobile phones, too.
“We’ll get [officers’] feedback and fold it into the product and start a larger rollout. We believe [field-testing] makes them more effective,” Tisch said.
Police Commissioner Bill Bratton added that the software will provide information from “license-plate scanners with tens of thousands of license-plate information and mobile radiation detectors scattered all over the city.”
But cops on patrol aren’t as excited about the tablets.
“It’s just one more thing to worry about. How are we supposed to carry those things around?” one source griped.
Former Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly first unveiled the Microsoft software in 2012 with then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg.
“It’s just been in the last couple of months that we have started creating the mobile app so it’s accessible for [cops] to see all the time,” Bratton explained.
The tablets will be paid for with federal funds, authorities said.
When the software was first introduced, it quickly proved its worth by locating a murder suspect through an on-scene license-plate reader, Kelly said.
“We can track where a car associated with a murder suspect is currently located and where it’s been over the past several years, weeks or months,” he explained at the time.