The NYPD is replacing officers' handwritten patrol memo books, a fixture since the 1800s, with an iPhone app starting February 17
Officers' most-used item since the 1800s isn't the gun or handcuffs, but the handwritten activity log. Now an iPhone app is replacing it. Tweets: @chillmage and @caseynewton Tweets: @chillmage : makes sense considering most cops I see are on their phone looking at instagram all day https://twitter.com/... Casey Newton / @caseynewton : Excited to check out the latest app from Shadow Inc. https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
This closes out a decade-long hardware arc: the NYPD scrapped some 36,000 Nokia-made Windows phones in 2017 as part of a $160M program and standardized on iPhones, so the force's most-used daily tool — the handwritten patrol memo book, a fixture since the 1800s — now moves onto devices officers already carry. The app arrives February 17, built by Shadow Inc.
Why it matters: the memo book is the raw record of patrol activity, and the NYPD has been building systems that consume exactly this kind of data — its Patternizr tool has mined police data for crime patterns since late 2016, and the department earlier experimented with digital tip collection via IdeaScale. Digitizing the log turns a century-old paper habit into structured, searchable input.
First-order effects
- Officers' daily activity logs become structured, timestamped entries on the same iPhones issued after the 2017 Windows-phone swap, making any given patrol shift queryable by supervisors instead of buried in a pocket notebook.
- Shadow Inc. becomes the vendor of record for the NYPD's highest-frequency workflow, with every officer's usage starting February 17.
Second-order effects
- Structured memo data creates a natural feedstock for analytics like Patternizr, extending pattern detection from formal incident reports down to patrol-level observations.
- Other departments get a procurement template: a commercial app on commodity smartphones replacing bespoke paper process, which pressures vendors selling legacy records or CAD add-ons to offer equivalent mobile logging.
Third-order effects
- If patrol logs become centralized databases, the boundary between routine record-keeping and cross-agency sharing narrows — Minnesota's Intrepid Response app showed how quickly police mobile tools end up collecting photos and data on journalists at protests and distributing them across agencies, so retention rules and access controls become the battleground.
- The longer-term structure points toward policing run on vendor-built mobile platforms rather than department-owned paper processes, raising accountability questions in both directions: easier oversight of officers, but also easier aggregation of citizen-contact data.
The trend: Police departments are migrating field workflows onto smartphone platforms, converting century-old paper records into structured data that feeds internal analytics and, potentially, interagency sharing.