NEW YORK (WCBS 880) – The NYPD is doing away with a multi-million-dollar survey that polled New Yorkers on their thoughts about police and safety in their neighborhoods.
The NYPD’s “Sentiment Meter” will be phased out by Sept. 30, according to the New York Post.
The NYPD has paid Brooklyn-based tech company that runs the survey, Elucd, more than $3 million since the program started in 2017. The department will reportedly save $3.1 million when it ends its four-year contract at the end of September.
“It was just not the right tool for us,” an NYPD spokesman told the Post. The spokesman said the department will explore other ways to gauge the views of residents.
In a statement, the NYPD said: “The department was looking to develop and analyze accurate and meaningful data at the sector level. We did not find the data Elucd was able to develop beneficial to our need to measure specific grass-roots public sentiment toward the department and its activities.”
Some 250,000 New Yorkers have been surveyed through the program. Residents were asked questions via smartphone about how much they trusted police and how safe they felt in their neighborhoods, as well as what issues they’d like to see addressed on their blocks.
“Trust is critical to neighborhood policing, to building relationships with youth and with those in underserved communities and to solving and further reducing crime. That is why this tool is so critical,” Elucd CEO Michael Simon told the Post.
The change comes amid a summer of nationwide protests over policing as well as spiking gun violence in the city.
Sources told the Post that trust ratings of the NYPD have dropped significantly in recent months. The department won't release survey results collected since March because it doesn't "have enough confidence" in the data collected by Elucd. "We think it’s completely erroneous," a department spokesman said.