Future of LA: Crime reported by cellphone
Victims of crime in Los Angeles will soon be able to send pictures and text messages from their mobile phones to the police emergency number. The Los Angeles Police Department hopes the new system will enable witnesses to transmit evidence rapidly and call for help even in situations where they are afraid of speaking for fear of alerting an attacker. The city’s police commission approved a proposal to buy the software to enable its 911 operators to accept text and picture messages. “Sometimes a person calls 911 and says they just saw a robbery and they’ve snapped an image or video of the getaway car,” police Sgt Lee Sands told the Los Angeles Times.
Even though receiving text messages, photos, and videos is simple for an individual like you and your neighbors, the LAPD call center is barraged with more than 2 million calls a year. They only just started being able to take cell phone calls. Representatives from PowerPhone Inc., a Connecticut-based crisis communication company that specializes in 911 operators, said such systems run into the “hundreds of thousands of dollars.” In January, New York’s mayor, Michael Bloomberg, announced that the city would implement a similar system. Chicago legislators have also called for the upgrade to the new software. One would think it may be way easier to implement something as common as text messages…
Source: LA Daily, TelegraphÂ
Comments(6)
hmm is that pic showing a german police officer?
In The Netherlands people can send videos recorded by cellphones to the police so it can be used as evidence whenever a serious crime takes place.
@moki: Yes, thats a german police officer
@moki: Yes, thats a german police officer.
“They only just started being able to take cell phone calls.” what? seriously? they werent able to take calls..made form a cell phone before? lol
They only just started being able to take cell phone calls?
Ummm, guess again. Unless, of course, by “just started” you mean “for the last several decades”.
I expect what the poster read was that they only just started (as in, in the last several years) being able to easily trace the location cell phone calls are made from via triangulation (something the US has been behind on, but then the US has roughly 100X the landmass and 1/100th of the population density of most first world countries, that complicates matters more than a tad), and in the typical style of this site that fact, it apparently being too difficult to grasp, was wholly misunderstood and twisted into something completely nonsensical — the obvious idiocy of the result entirely missed (hint : To someone receiving a call it matters not if it originated from a cell or landline).