Police in Baltimore County reportedly attempted to warn the NYPD about Ismaaiyl Brinsley's potential danger through fax and teletype, officials say. Brinsley shot and killed NYPD Officers Rafael Ramons and Wenjian Liu as they sat in their police cruiser on Saturday before taking his own life. Prior to that, police say he shot and wounded an ex-girlfriend at her home outside of Baltimore.
According to Slate, NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton said that he received a wanted poster of the 28-year-old via fax from police in Baltimore County around the time of the shooting:
New York City Police Commissioner Bill Bratton said in a press conference Saturday that the NYPD received a faxed wanted poster from Baltimore County Police at 2:45 p.m. Baltimore County Police said in a statement Saturday that they called the 70th Precinct in New York at 2:10 p.m. and also faxed the wanted poster at that time. The officers who were killed were from the 84th Precinct, but had been dispatched to the area the 79th precinct patrols to assist in a community violence reduction initiative.
The Baltimore County police also said that at 2:50 p.m., right as the two police officers were being murdered, they sent the information from the wanted posted to the NYPD's "real-time crime center—essentially, a data warehouse" in the form of a teletype. Teletypes, also known as teleprinters, are typewriters that can independently type out messages sent over non-switched telephone circuits, the public telephone network, radio, or microwave links. They were popular for remote communication before fax machines and the rise of the Internet, and their use has declined since the 1980s. For example, the Teletype Corp. made its last teleprinter unit, the Teletype Dataspeed 40, which included a CRT monitor and a high-speed printer terminal, in 1979.
Slate notes that a source close to the Baltimore County Police said the department uses fax machines because they're "reliable." Perhaps this is why, despite using modern technology to trace Brinsley's Instagram posts to Brooklyn on Saturday, they reverted to the dated methods when communicating with the NYPD.
[via Slate]
