Police Chief Edrick Hall and Sgt. Irish Johnson, the newly appointed public information officer for the department, have fired off a geofencing program aimed at curtailing crime in the city, using a recently developed smartphone app.
“That’s one of the things we really are happy with, to allow the citizens to help us get criminals off of the street,” Hall said.
According to Wikipedia, a geo-fence is defined as a virtual perimeter for a real-world geographic area that can be dynamically generated or predefined.
Hall said as part of Johnson’s promotion he will spearhead the “See Something, Send Something” program, which will work in conjunction with the Crimestoppers program already active in the county.
He said the combination will allow Johnson to be “More vigilant in pushing Crimestoppers.”
He wants everyone countywide to download the app to their smartphone.
The way it works is that when a crime is committed, investigators will gather descriptions and other pertinent information from witnesses such as height, weight, race, color of clothing or type of automobile and enter that information into the app, much like an amber alert.
The investigator will then be able to enter a geographical perimeter for the alert whether it is a specific neighborhood or a three-mile radius and any citizen within that circle with the app will automatically receive a push notice, as will anyone who enters the designated area while the alarm is active.
“So, if you’re outside, if you’re walking your dog or you’re just riding by, then you’ll already know what’s going on and you can help us try to get the people off of the street,” Hall said.
Hall said citizens can also be proactive and notify Johnson of current suspicious activity they may happen upon or things they feel just don’t look right. The app has a feature that will allow you to send encrypted photos and messages.
“You can send it anonymously. You can say I don’t want to be seen, it’s totally up to the user to how they want to push that information through,” said Hall.
He said they are going to work with the information through Crimestoppers so if a person’s tip leads to an arrest they are still eligible for a reward. Johnson added that the new program is a way for people to give information to law enforcement without fear of retaliation or the police ever having to come to their house.
It will also be of benefit to other area law enforcement agencies if criminals from other cities flee to Indianola to hide out with relatives. Johnson said he can be alerted so he can assist those agencies.
Hall said in addition to those advantages, Johnson will go into the neighborhoods and enter sex offender data since criminals are required to register with local officials. That way people with the app will be notified when a sex offender has moved into their communities. “A lot of the times citizens don’t know that,” Hall said.
Based on his research, Hall said 78 percent of Americans have smartphones and the first thing 85 percent do in the morning is grab their phones to see what happened overnight.
“So, we feel like this will be really successful for the citizens here in Indianola,” he said.
However, he cautions that the app will only be as good as the people who download and use it.
The app’s developer Kevin Angell, CEO/Founder, Crowd Sourced Geofencing Solutions said he is a retired law enforcement officer and a governmental consultant and came up with the idea after noticing a difficulty in communication between everyday citizens and law enforcement.
He created the app to “Increase that communication” especially after witnessing the large amount of video footage from the Las Vegas shooting.
“They had 25,000 hours of video and a quarter of a million images, so when they left it was very difficult for them to get all of that evidence back to the police department,” he said.
Angell said his app has been in beta testing since the beginning of January but just went live on the Apple IOS platform on Jan. 30. He already has agencies in his home state of Florida plus California, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Alabama, Texas and Louisiana and a few other states.
Hall said that to the best of his knowledge his department is the first in Mississippi to use the app. He and Johnson have been working with and learning the app over the past few weeks and said the department will be working with it on a trial basis for the next year.
He cautions the public not to get so caught up in the app that they neglect to call 911.
“There are two options on the app. Safety is first. We don’t want the citizens to try to go up and approach anybody or do anything like that to put themselves in any harm or danger,” Hall said.
However, if there is a situation that just doesn’t look right, the app allows the person to communicate with Johnson via text message either known or anonymously.
The app is available for free download from the IPhone store and was inspired by the “See something, Say something” movement. He advises that there are multiple apps, so be sure to get the one created by Kevin Angell. If you have any additional questions contact Sgt. Johnson at 887-1811.
