Three teenagers from a Decatur, Georgia high school may have just created the next most useful app on the market. According to The Atlantic CityLab, Caleb, Ima and Asha Christian, three siblings who learned coding through Codecademy and MIT programs such as +K12, Scratch and AppInventor, have put together a new police monitoring app they call Five-O. They are supported, also, by their 10-year-old younger brother, Joshua.
From Eric Garner in NYC to Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO, police brutality is nothing new in the Corporate States of America. In fact, it appears to be escalating at a violent rate, especially against people of color, and even more so against young black males. Sick of the helplessness of the general population, the Christians developed Five-O as a means of monitoring and sharing information about particular officers and police departments.
Five-O empowers the public by allowing them to rate, review and save details of police interactions virtually anywhere. The savvy app also compiles all scores input by users for particular geographical areas, by city, county, state, etc. and thereby assigns grades to each area for professionalism and courtesy.
But the Five-O app’s handiness doesn’t stop there, either.
People are also able to search Five-O’s database for incident comments from other users by geographical location, as well as by officer identification numbers. This feature allows a means for the public to identify both good and bad police departments, as well as their locations. Once enough data is compiled, citizens can then see individual statements and reports on both officers and departments, which can be a handy tool in helping to know which departments to put pressure on for departmental reviews and investigations. In short, Five-O can truly help enact positive change and hold police and their departments accountable. Whether or not such a tool will be held up in court is yet to be seen.
The Christian siblings said they wanted to program an app that would allow community members to come together and input details of their interactions with law enforcement.
Ima Christian stated:
?We’d like to know which regions in the US provide horrible law enforcement services as well as highlight the agencies that are highly rated by their citizens. In addition to putting more power into the hands of citizens when interacting with law enforcement, we believe that highly rated police departments should be used as models for those that fail at providing quality law enforcement services.?
One more feature of the Five-O app is GPS tracking, which stores and allows users to access geographic locations where interactions with law enforcement occurred. All details of such interactions are then stored in a ?My Account? feature that keeps inputted information safe until it is needed for future reference.
One final, wonderful addition to the app is a simple ?Know Your Rights? section of the app, which helps inform users of just what it says by supplying useful, factual information from the American Civil Liberties Union.
This entire, incredibly useful tool, brought to you by three high school kids from Georgia. Marvelous.
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H/T tech.co / (Featured image courtesy of islam21c.com)
Dylan Hock is a poet, novelist, professor and social activist. He is published in a number of little magazines and has an essay on the muzzling of Ezra Pound included in the anthology ?Star Power: The Impact of Branded Celebrity?. Currently, he also writes and edits for If You Only News, Addicting Info, Green Action News, and Take 10. Follow him on Ello, Google+, LinkedIn, RebelMouse and Goodreads. Hire him for freelance writing and editing work on Elance.
