Panic buttons coming to about 500 NYC bodegas
NEW YORK (WABC) -- Panic buttons will soon be installed at about 500 bodegas around New York City, offering workers a long-sought safety tool.
On Sunday, Mayor Eric Adams announced $1.6 million will be set aside for Silentshield technology, which is the name of the panic buttons that will be deployed.
United Bodegas of America spokesman Fernando Mateo is elated the life-saving technology he has long championed is coming.
"The money is now being allocated, we will ask the mayor to try and find it from discretionary funds, so that we can start tomorrow. There's no reason we can't start tomorrow," Mateo says.
The new technology will go into roughly 500 bodegas, but in a strategic move, the locations will not be announced. The move comes after a series of recent violent incidents, some deadly, inside bodegas across the five boroughs.
In one incident, a gang of suspects dressed up like NYPD officers stormed into a store in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, roughed up the workers and robbed them.
Last month, two employees huddled in the corner of an Inwood, Manhattan, bodega as a knife fight broke out right in front of them. A 24-year-old was killed.
Under the new initiative, all that bodega workers have to do is press the panic button if something goes wrong, and officers in the local precinct will be alerted.
"When you do the combination, it's going to give you access to the cameras in the store to see what is taking place and how we get an immediate response," Adams said.
At Sal's Deli on the Lower East Side, Abdul Saleh welcomed the new program.
"People get shot, killed -- sometimes you get robbed an the police never respond quick, come three or four hours late," Saleh said.
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