The city of Boston just released an iPhone app called Citizen Connect. As NPR put it:
The new app allows anyone to make a one-touch kvetch about anything from potholes to broken streetlights in Boston.
Probably the most used feature is the ability to take a picture of some type of municipal damage and send it to City Hall. Once you’ve logged a complaint a little red dot appears on a map of Boston until the problem is fixed, then it turns green—so you know when the problem has been dealt with, be it a broken streetlight, graffiti, potholes, or other public eyesore.
I think these types of apps show a great deal of confidence in the public’s ability to assist local government in civic matters. However, Greg Whisenant, of the blog Big Public and founder of CrimeReports, called the app a “YAGSNA = Yet Another Government Social Networking App.”
Isolation in Gov 2.0
His view is that these types of apps are great, but they mainly serve to further “muddy the conversation” about gov 2.0, the principle of government as a facilitator and technological platform for citizen participation.
First of all, every time an agency builds a city-based application, it drives that agency into further isolation from other agencies. If I am a resident of Boston and never leave, there’s no problem. But most people commute. When I lived in Somerville, I commuted into Cambridge, but went to Boston all the time. Do I need to download separate apps for that? Three apps, with different processes, different nav, different capabilities? What if I go to New York? New Haven? New Jersey? And now, how do we get to the metadata?
Secondly, it’s really expensive. Is every municipality in the country really going to develop the software expertise or ask a private vendor to build [individual applications]? Let’s look at the costs: dev time, licenses, integrators, personnel, benefits….the list goes on. That’s why the LAPD spent more than $350,000 on a crime map, and why Oakland PD, Boston, LA County, San Francisco, Salt Lake City and more than 700 other law enforcement agencies throughout the country spend between $99-$199/month by working with CrimeReports.com and get far superior results.
The combination of what I will call these government “social silos” gives the absolute worst result: a more expensive, less featured, less integrated app.
Comprehensive Integrated Platforms
I think Whisenant makes a good point about government innovation in general that can be extrapolated to law enforcement. I recently wrote an article about how “Twitter is NOT the Holy Grail of Emergency Notification,” in which I argued that police departments need to leverage all the web 2.0 and social media tools available in order to create a truly comprehensive notification tool. However, since managing the myriad number of social media sites is both tedious and cumbersome, I argued for the creation of comprehensively integrated platforms, where a police department can use one simple interface to send out messages through as many social media sites as possible at the same time. (In fact, New York has already begun to explore ways to reach citizens through their gaming devices.)
Every Department Should NOT Become a Software Developer
As law enforcement begins to explore technological tools to keep citizens engaged through social media, as well as departmental crime data websites, iPhone apps, etc., they need to be careful to not isolate themselves from other departments through the creation of single-department applications. That is, every police department should not become a software developer.
As Whisenant points out, if local governments—in this case, law enforcement agencies—try to do all the technological innovation themselves, they will spend massive amounts of money on applications that will only limit citizens’ crime prevention and community policing efforts to a specified geographic area. To be truly helpful to the public, new law enforcement 2.0 applications need to be (potentially) comprehensive, allowing citizens the ability to interact with multiple law enforcement agencies through a single interface no matter where they live, work, or happen to be at any given moment.
Get on the crime map at CrimeReports.com
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