CM Cumbo Proposes New Bill To Allow Texts To 911 For Public Safety

Last spring, Councilmember Laurie Cumbo introduced a bill known as Int 762 that would “require all taxicabs, hail vehicles, liveries, black cars, and luxury limousines to have a panic button installed that would allow a passenger to send a distress signal to law enforcement.”

Now, she and other advocates of women’s issues and public safety are pushing a second bill, Intro 868, to require the city to create a system that would enable New Yorkers to send texts, videos, and photographs to 911 — rather than requiring people to make voice phone calls, which are not always the safest or most viable option for a person in distress.

A third bill, Int 869, would be a companion bill requiring the NYPD to add sex offenses to its crime status report, listed both as a total and by type of sex offense separately.

“When women are faced with real threats against their safety, a buddy system is not enough to protect them from harm,” Cumbo said at a Monday morning (January 11) press conference outside City Hall, referring to NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton’s call for women to travel in groups in order to avoid sexual assault.

“The NYPD must do more to keep our communities safe and as a city we must do more to increase their capacity to patrol our streets and enforce the law through sound legislation and additional resources,” she added. “No one deserves to be victimized, because of their gender or whereabouts at any given time. Violence of any kind, against any New Yorker is unjustifiable, will not be tolerated, and should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”

Cumbo is chairperson of the City Council’s Committee on Women’s Issues. Her latest bill is co-sponsored by Councilmembers Mark Levine and Vanessa Gibson, and focuses on the city Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications (“DoITT”), which they want to create the new system “within 6 months of the effective date of the local law,” and enforce it “within one year.”

Both pieces of legislation seek to address the NYPD statistic that:

14 out of 166 rapes that were committed by strangers in the City of New York occurred in a taxi, livery cab, or for-hire vehicle last year. The police investigated 1,439 reports of rape in 2015, a 6.3 percent increase from the 1,354 rapes reported in 2014. One week into the new year, there have been two reported rapes by cab drivers.

In February, 2015, a 33-year-old woman was sexually assaulted by a green taxi driver — all drivers of whom must undergo a fingerprint-based background check before receiving a license from the Taxi and Limousine Commission.

“If the top message of the NYPD in the face of increasing sexual assaults on women in cabs is to use the ‘buddy system,’ how can we have confidence that reducing rape and catching rapists is a top priority,” asked SOnia Ossorio, president of NOW-NYC. “The NYPD needs to do better than freshmen orientation 101.”