Cue the Minority Report comparisons.
A group of San Francisco police cadets, a handful of app developers, venture capitalist Ron Conway, SF Mayor Ed Lee and various police leaders gathered in an auditorium to announce a program that would put SF policing at the cutting edge of technology-assisted crime data collection is not a place where you would be expect to be shocked.
But Police Chief Greg Suhr revealed that until last year, the San Francisco Police Department — located, obviously, in the heart of all things tech — did not have a department-wide email system. Other speakers dropped that the SFPD also lacked internet inside their district stations or, until a new database was launched this June, had no way to file police reports that didn’t involve dropping off paper copies to a clerk’s office.
“You would have thought that we would have been able to do that before now,” said Suhr.
But now, thanks to the work of ArcTouch, an SF-based app developer and a Ron Conway-led partnership, SF.Citi, which kicked in $100,000, officers will able to file reports that are searchable in real-time with barely the need to touch a keyboard.
A demo of the app showed a striking future for police technology. Officers can upload images, dictate notes (transcribed with speech-to-words capabilities), capture audio interviews with witnesses and drop map pins to other locations of note while still at the crime scene — and all of that information is uploaded to the case file in real time. So when one officer flags a crime — say, a stolen car — an officer with the tablet nearby would be able to see what’s happening and get there.
“This is the bat computer,” said Suhr.
Perhaps the most impressive single feature was the license plate recognition software. Snapping a photo of a plate instantly pulls all of the relevant information into a case file.
