Apparently, the Baltimore County Police Department’s fleet of carrier pigeons was earmarked for other tasks, and the Pony Express went out of commission a century and a half ago. So the BCPD did the next slowest thing: They sent the NYPD an advisory that Ismaaiyl Abdullah Brinsley was coming to town in the form of a fax!
It gets better. Mediaite notes that the fax, a wanted poster, was sent 37 minutes before the two officers were assassinated! On top of that, the memo wasn’t even sent to the right precinct. It went to the 70th instead of the 84th. A second communication, which drew on even older technology — the teletype — did not reach the NYPD’s real-crime center at police headquarters until 2:50 p.m., three minutes after the shootings occurred.
A reader of the Mediaite article writes in the comments section that the BCPD might not have access to better equipment because of budgetary constraints. That may or may not be the case, but I’m guessing the department still has access to telephones, which predate even the fax machine.
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