Behind the Smoking Guns: Inside NYPD’s 21st Century Arsenal

In the early morning hours of last Sept. 25, a stocky young man bolted the Bora Bora Lounge in Highbridge, the Bronx, with a gun in his hand and squeezed off seven shots.

His target fell dead on the street as the shooter fled into the darkness, leaving little behind for police save a nearly useless description: “Unknown male Hispanic in 20s.”

Enter Big Brother — with a badge.

With the aid of surveillance video at the club and facial recognition technology, cops tracked down a suspect and made an arrest.

To solve a Bronx street shooting in 21st century New York — and most other crimes committed citywide — the NYPD now employs a wide variety of high-tech tools and massive databases of information culled from an incredible array of sources.

The NYPD recently provided the Daily News with an unprecedented look at its 21st century arsenal, which includes:

• Thousands of security cameras scattered throughout the city linked together in a network called the Domain Awareness System (DAS).

• Records of hundreds of thousands of license plate numbers scanned and pinned to specific locations at specific times.

• Social media posts bragging about criminal behavior.

• Facial recognition technology that matches facial characteristics of potential suspects to images in a massive NYPD database.

• Improved ballistics capability that allows cops to quickly identify the source of a bullet.

• Prosecutors in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Staten Island have created crime strategies units, using data to identify ties between crimes. Authorities can also map the crime to spot trends, quality of life issues or gang activity.

• A system of sensors the NYPD plans to install that would detect gunshots — even when residents don’t report the shootings. Cops can then sync the sensors with cameras to capture footage of the crime.

• Last week, a select group of cops answered calls with Microsoft tablet computers in hand that can instantly tap into the criminal history at an address — including residents with outstanding warrants.

“There’s nothing that technology doesn’t play a huge role in today,” NYPD Deputy Commissioner John Miller told The News.

The long arm of the law now spends a good amount of time with its fingers on a keyboard, downloading and Web-scraping.

The trend accelerated after the Sept. 11 attacks, with new anti-terrorist tech advances morphing into all-purpose crimefighting tools used to track down miscreants from car thieves to killers.

“So much of what has been acquired for terrorism purposes day to day, informs our crimes — with license plate scanners, the pinging capabilities we have on the phones,” Police Commissioner Bill Bratton said. “And that’s one of the great benefits New York gets out of being the most likely terrorist target in the world today is that the funds that come in help us on our more prevalent, consistent issue of day-to-day crime.”

Of course, the nation’s biggest police department continues to rely on the usual methods to crack cases — canvassing for witnesses, working informants, relying on analysis of ballistics, fingerprints and autopsy reports.

But year by year, the NYPD has embraced the latest technology, starting perhaps most notably in 1994 with the advent of CompStat — precinct-by-precinct computerized analysis of nitty-gritty crime stats used to strategically target police activity. Bratton — who first introduced CompStat with the late Jack Maple — said current technology augments traditional police work in ways that he wouldn’t have thought possible in the ’90s.

“Every shell case and every piece of ballistic evidence we get, we’re going to have the ability to analyze that in a very quick, timely fashion,” Bratton said.

He recounted a recent CompStat session where bullet cartridges found at several crime scenes over the prior two months were matched to one gun. Surveillance cameras at multiple crime scenes revealed the same vehicle present at each scene. From there they tied the vehicle to an owner, and soon enough to a suspect.

All types of technology are now in play. In the last few years, the NYPD has discussed the introduction of infrared technology that can detect weapons on a person. They also bought two pairs of Google glasses — as yet unused.

The department also has set aside $1.5 million for a sound sensor system called Shotspot that captures gunshots at specific locations. That allows police to respond to shots even if no one calls 911.

The gunshot system has been used in Milwaukee, Oakland, Calif., and Yonkers. In 2011, the department launched a pilot program in Brownsville, Brooklyn, that was never expanded. The technology has since improved and is now considered much more reliable.

The age of social media provided police with another crimefighting tool — tracking criminals as they brag about their misdeeds on Facebook or Twitter.

“You do a keyword search on ‘capped him,’ ‘shot him,’ ‘popped him’ and you bring up those pages that refer to those things that are . . . the slang words for a shooting,” said Miller, the NYPD’s counterterrorism chief.

Cameras, in particular, now play a huge crime-solving role. The number of NYPD and private cameras has multiplied radically over the years. Detectives now routinely track down tapes from cameras around a crime scene, and can also tap into a new $30 million network created two years ago with Microsoft and dubbed the Domain Awareness System.

Set up as an anti-terror tool, the DAS allows the department to search images in real time from 7,000 active NYPD and private cameras, along with 400 special cameras — either at fixed locations or mounted on police cruisers that patrol the streets, collecting license plate numbers as vehicles pass by.

This puts vehicles in specific locations at specific times, useful information in corroborating a suspect’s whereabouts at the time of a crime.

Cameras played a crucial role in generating an arrest in the Bora Bora shooting.

Homicide detectives started with seven bullet casings found on the street and vague witness descriptions about the shooter.

The club provided surveillance video that yielded a decent freeze frame with an image of the man witnesses believed was the shooter.

Here another crucial high-tech tool came into play — facial recognition software.

Initiated as a pilot program in Manhattan South in late 2011, the NYPD facial recognition unit works in a small windowless room at 1 Police Plaza.

Detectives there collect images of suspects and witnesses alike from Facebook, cell phones and surveillance cameras across the city.

Since its inception, city detectives have sent more than 4,400 images to the facial recognition unit, said Inspector DeLayne Hurley, commanding officer of the NYPD’s Real Time Crime Center.

Most were too blurry to be of use. But, as of last month, they’d matched more than 1,000 images to the department’s database of 9 million mug shots. In the Bora Bora shooting, the club’s cameras caught the alleged shooter at an angle.

Facial recognition technology requires a face-on image, so the unit used software to create a 3-D, computer-generated image of the shooter’s face.

With this usable image, the system brought up at least 200 mug shots deemed close matches. The unit then carefully examined each one, looking for physical similarities such as distance between the eyes, ear size, tattoos, scars and other unique body tell-tales.

At the start of the facial recognition program, the software produced results that appeared to have misidentified five individuals. None were arrested.

“These were all in the beginning when we were all learning to use the system,” Hurley said. “And people can look a lot alike.”

The system has since improved dramatically, resulting in 450 arrests and the identification of 397 individuals helpful to investigators, including eyewitnesses.

The technology helped produce arrests in 11 homicides, 124 robberies, 111 larcenies, and 89 assaults or shootings.

In the Bora Bora case, detectives picked out a single likely mug shot and showed it to witnesses in the traditional photo array of similar mug shots. Witnesses all identified the same guy — Yeltsin Beltran, 22, a 5-foot-6, 150-pound Bronx man with prior arrests including false impersonation and drug possession.

Beltran was arrested Oct. 11 for second-degree murder. His lawyer, Paul Lieber, insists his client is innocent.

“My guy had nothing to do with this murder,” he said, acknowledging that Beltran was identified by one eyewitness in an actual lineup.

A second witness, who identified Beltran in a photo array, picked a different man in a lineup.

With Oren Yaniv and Laura Dimon

The growing use of technology to solve crimes has triggered increased concerns about the erosion of privacy rights.

In the past few years, the courts have been asked to address concerns about everything from police warehousing data on law-abiding citizens to cops surveilling individuals without judicial permission.

Just last month, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled cops must first obtain a warrant before searching through a person’s smartphone.

Four years ago the New York Civil Liberties Union took issue when it learned the NYPD was storing tens of thousands of names, addresses and birth dates of everyone stopped and questioned on the street.

Given that 95% of those stopped broke no laws, the NYCLU argued the NYPD was wrongfully keeping tabs on citizens without probable cause to do so. In 2011, New York passed a law prohibiting this practice. This personal information is no longer stored.

The latest concern involves the NYPD’s increased use of license plate scanners that result in hundreds of thousands of plate numbers being stored in a massive data file.

Cops can run a plate and see where a vehicle has been in the past few months — all without a warrant. The problem, says the NYCLU’s Chris Dunn, is that 99.9% of the stored numbers belong to law-abiding citizens.

Dunn says the license plate readers allow the NYPD to “just vacuum up information about everybody regardless of suspicion. Once we’re there, that’s where the privacy concerns come in.” Privacy rights recently triumphed regarding another high-tech device — the GPS (Global Positioning System).

In New York, police now must obtain permission from a judge before slapping a GPS device on a suspect’s vehicle to track his or her whereabouts. That’s because an upstate burglar named Scott Weaver objected to police secretly attaching a GPS device to his van without obtaining a warrant.

A jury found him guilty, but in 2009 the Court of Appeals — the state’s highest court — reversed the conviction, finding police had violated his constitutional rights via warrantless surveillance.

gsmith@nydailynews.com

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