You heard it right folks. Would you like to live in a town whereby you can track your police officers’ movements? If you are a criminal I assume you would be all for it, however some of us are not so sure. The Police Department from Surrey, UK have launched an app that is supposed to instil confidence about knowing where your police officers are.
This sounds all well and good in theory, but there is an obvious downside!
As always happens with advancements in technology, criminals keep an eye on things just as much as us tech hungry geeks do. The Surrey Police must not think criminals knowing the location of Police Officers will have a negative impact on crime! Being a victim of recent riots here in Manchester I dread to think how much worse things could have been if this app was actually available here in early August.
The app is currently being tested in the town of Runnymede in Surrey for now, with the intention of being rolled out country wide.
Good or bad? You decide.
bad! crime will increase based on this app – crims will be able to see where the most police patrols are and plan their crimes accordingly – seriously what were the police thinking? surely one of their overpaid boffins would have thought about that……..what a waste of money that could have been plowed into other areas of policing and considering they recently made cutbacks and redundancies they act like they have money to spare
Wow! I would say this is good if its for internal department use only, but if the avg person is able to get this app it will be a bad thing for Law Enforcement. Criminals will have a field day with this.
You have to look at this in context. The UK has a significantly lower crime rate than the US does. In the United States, I think this app would be a bad idea. But in the UK I think it’s just good for people to know that the police are around and there make them feel safe. Here are some figures UK Crime Rate: http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20110218135832/rds.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/pdfs04/london04.pdf
US Crime Rate:
http://www2.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2009/data/table_01.html