In Delhi, India – one of the world’s biggest cities with more than 22 million people, where violent crime is on the rise – residents can submit threat or crime information from their phones using Microsoft’s pilot Know Your Police Station mobile app.
The app has been available for a year now, and law enforcement agencies in Delhi “have begun to see more value than ever in the collaboration tools available through the big data and the cloud,” writes Arthur Thomas Ball, Microsoft’s managing director of Public Safety and National Security in Asia. People can send information via text message, email or Twitter.
Using a cloud-based geographical information system via Bing Maps and Google Maps, the app “has the capability to send the alert to the nearest police station to provide officers with a real-time snapshot of criminal activity and crime-prone areas in the capital” of New Delhi, which is a part of the city of Delhi, says Ball.
“The advanced technology comes as an important time in the city, which has experienced a recent surge in violent crime,” he writes.
With the Know Your Police Station app, police officers “have increased visibility into unit operations, jurisdiction, and local crime data at the colony level, while utilizing a flexible software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform from Microsoft to keep the system extremely cost effective,” he writes on the Microsoft on Safety and Defense Blog.
For residents, the app has been a means of quickly identifying the Delhi Police Station jurisdiction a particular location falls within, as well as providing the contact data for the police station house “if the citizen wishes to alert them of potential threats in their respective districts,” he writes.
Right now, filing a complaint or an initial information report can be tedious for Delhi residents, who must visit their local precinct in person to do so. That’s not an efficient process for crime-fighting, either.
The Know Your Police Station app removes that step for citizens, and can hasten action by the police. The app includes “several flexible and intuitive features designed to enhance the usability for citizens, such as the ability to give location-tagged feedback for a nearby police station, to route feedback to individual police stations by email and SMS, and to attach and photos for quick and easy identification wherever they are.”
The result, Ball writes, is an “open, device-agnostic communication channel that allows Delhi residents to become collaborative partners in policing and supports safer communities for all.”
With more than half of the world's population now living in urban areas, he writes, "the demands on city law enforcement agencies are higher than ever. Tools like Know Your Police Station can help empower citizens to get involved in their own community safety at the same time that they support better policing."
To read Ball’s entire post, head over to the Microsoft on Safety and Defense Blog.
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Suzanne Choney
Microsoft News Center Staff