New York’s top cop embraces smartphone revolution

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Bill Bratton

The smartphone revolution has been painful for police departments across the US. Public videos of officers in action have fuelled controversy and raised concerns about whether police can do their jobs when the whole world might be watching.

Bill Bratton, serving his second stint as New York Police Department commissioner, is one of the worriers. During an interview with the Financial Times, he said the smartphone camera has become a tool of intimidation for members of the public aiming to prevent police from making arrests or maintaining order.

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"Invariably, they are surrounded by a crowd, yelling, screaming at them, with cameras," he said. "The officer is trying to deal with the threat that he is confronting, but he is also dealing with the potential threat of the crowd around him — of the mob."

But Mr Bratton sees a way forward. He is fighting fire with fire. Helped by deep pockets — stuffed with funds that New York authorities have collected from foreign banks accused of violating US sanctions — his department has invested in technology with the gusto of a millennial brandishing a new credit card.

The NYPD this year put the final touches on a $160m "mobility initiative" aimed at arming all 36,000 officers with a smartphone and equipping patrol cars with tablet computers. It is looking to buy body cameras, sharpening its crime-predicting statistical models, installing gunshot sensors and connecting to more surveillance cameras in the city.

Mr Bratton and his team hailed the results at a gathering of US police chiefs last month in New York. They said the NYPD's better-connected officers were responding to crimes in progress more quickly — and called on others to follow their lead. Mr Bratton even offered to share New York's software and statistical models with less well-financed police departments.

"What we have engaged in the last couple of years is almost revolutionary in our embrace of, in our acquisition of, and in our creativity and use of technology," Mr Bratton told the FT. "I think it is one of the reasons why, at this point in time, in this city, unlike many other cities, we have the momentum of 25 straight years of reducing crime."

Smartphones and statistical algorithms, of course, will hardly solve all of Mr Bratton's problems. He believes police work alone is insufficient to deal with a surge of heroin use in the city. Mr Bratton also is wrestling with a corruption scandal in the NYPD involving allegations that senior members of the department accepted gifts in return for favours.

Mr Bratton's technocratic tack is best suited to the streets and the crimes that take place on them. At 68, he is an old cop from the new school, having honed his strategy of "precision policing" during a peripatetic law enforcement and business career that has seen him lead departments in his native Boston, Los Angeles and New York and work in private security.

Mr Bratton became famous for his by-the-numbers approach while heading the NYPD from 1994-1996 under Rudy Giuliani, a Republican mayor. Mr Bratton and Mr Giuliani were advocates of "broken-windows" policing, a strategy based on the idea that cracking down on minor offences such as vandalism creates an orderly environment that discourages more serious crime. To focus resources, the Bratton brains trust developed CompStat, a computer system designed to identify hotspots of disorder.

After returning to the NYPD in 2014 under Bill de Blasio, a Democratic mayor, Mr Bratton has been recalibrating his approach. Mr de Blasio campaigned against "stop and frisk" police tactics that critics say unfairly targeted people in minority areas. A federal judge agreed and ruled against the practice. While still a "broken windows" man at heart, Mr Bratton acknowledges the strategy needed to change. He has projected that New York crime will fall this year even with fewer street stops.

"Stop and frisk . . . was like a medicine applied to a patient that was getting better," he said recently. "The patient was saying to the doctor — to the New York City police department — why are you giving me so much chemo and radiation when my cancer is getting better? And we didn't have an answer."

Technology, for Mr Bratton, enables more targeted therapies. With smartphones and tablet computers, for example, officers can arrive at a crime scene better prepared than in the days when all their information came from a radio dispatch. Now, they have access to transcriptions of telephone complaints, the phone numbers of complainants and data streaming in from gunshot sensors and 10,000 city surveillance cameras, he says. Eventually, the NYPD hopes to be able to provide police on patrol with social media feeds from crime scene areas.

Another boost, he believes, could come from body cameras. The NYPD has been testing the devices and Mr Bratton predicted they would prove "very helpful" to police by enabling the public to see incidents in their entirety.

Still, finding the right body camera has been a challenge. The NYPD's search has been slowed down in part by the sheer number of potential purveyors. It had expected eight to 10 bidders. It wound up with more than 50. Mr Bratton, in other words, is hardly the only one excited about the possibilities of high-tech policing. He has plenty of company in the private sector.

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