The NYPD is catching up with the times.
New York’s Finest will be carrying new “safer” but longer-range stun guns this year — part of a slew of department upgrades announced by Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch on Tuesday.
The Big Apple’s top cop said during her annual State of the NYPD address that the department will equip officers with The Taser 10, introduced by Axon in 2023.
The upgraded stun gun has a 45-foot range, carries 10 probes and has a reduced 1,000-volt capacity — compared to the 12-foot rage, two probe and max juice of 50,000 volts for the Taser 7 that city cops are currently equipped with.
“Tasers were introduced to give officers another option in high-risk encounters – to slow situations down, to create space, and to reduce the likelihood that an encounter ends in deadly force,” said Tisch, the department’s onetime deputy commissioner of information technology.
“But in too many of those moments, the technology wasn’t effective enough to make a difference,” she added. “That’s why we’re improving our use-of-force alternatives by introducing the Taser 10. This upgraded model allows officers to operate from greater distance, with more precision, and with more opportunity to resolve situations before they turn lethal.”
The NYPD launched a test pilot program for the new Tasers in December, and are expected to begin using them sometime this spring, according to police.
They did not reveal how much the new Tasers are expected to cost taxpayers.
The stun guns are just one of several new upgrades for Tisch’s new-look NYPD, as the commissioner announced plans to beef up the 311 system to better address quality of life gripes and move to a digital system for filing police reports — which are shockingly still written by hand.
“Requests coming in through 311 were often assigned through long text chains and phone calls,” Tisch said. “Supervisors tracked jobs by hand, and officers didn’t always have a clear picture of what was assigned, what was still open, or who was responsible for follow-up.
“And then we wonder why so many 311 calls for things like blocked driveways, abandoned cars, excessive noise, and more went unanswered.”
Moving forward, a new digital dispatch system will assign relevant 311 jobs assigned to the NYPD’s Q-Teams – or quality of life teams — so that those calls are “handled with the same level of structure and accountability as 911,” she said.
That move will involve getting rid of the department’s antiquated system for keeping precinct records.
“When this department was founded in 1845, information inside a precinct was recorded by hand, in a paper logbook,” Tisch said. “Well, 181 years later, we still use that same system.”
No more — this year, the NYPD will be rolling out Domain Awareness System 2.0, a new digital command log that will save time for stationhouse sergeants and give cops on the street real-time information.
“This is about working smarter — not harder,” she said. “This is about saying better is not good enough.”
Finally, Tisch said the department is working with the Trump administration to get authority to take down weaponized drones in the Big Apple.
“We expect to receive that authority from the White House this year, which we’ve long been advocating for,” she said. “As we speak, we are investing millions of dollars in mitigation equipment and we’ve completed the necessary training.”
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