Accelerator | Unbundle Policing: Reimagine Public Safety Challenge

SevenStar, Inc.

Team Leader

Dimitri Roberts

Solution Name

SevenStar, Inc.

One-line solution summary:

PROTECTED is a mobile app for contactless police-citizen interactions for safer outcomes by dual-sided accountability and transparency.

What specific problem are you solving?

1. The inability to share critical information in real-time and communicate from a safe distance increases the likelihood for escalation and injury during police-citizen interactions. This leads to over 20K citizen and 5K police seriously injured per year. Most of those injuries happen during traffic stops.

2. The lack of data, transparency and basic accountability systems mean that

a) Poor service and inappropriate conduct by individual officers is not discovered by agencies and communities in the early stages. If one can rate one's interaction with an UBER driver, the same should be true for one's interaction with a police officer.

b) Law enforcement agencies cannot counter the disproportionally negative narrative despite the fact that the large majority of police-citizen interactions are positive.

Pitch your solution.

SevenStar is currently developing PROTECTED which is a first-to-market mobile application that allows police and citizens to communicate, share critical data in real-time and rate their experience after every interaction.

More specifically, citizens immediately are given a full profile about the officer, the reason for the interaction, and how the officer has been rated by other citizens. A set of interactive features includes the ability to notify friends and family and, crucially, to talk to the officer and instantly pay traffic tickets.

Police officers can see the citizen's profile, how they were rated in past police interactions, and a copy of relevant documents. Symmetrically to the citizen's view, police officers too can initiate a call with citizens.

The transparency and contactless communication enabled by PROTECTED will help build trust between the parties and reduce propensity for escalation during routine traffic stops, sometimes even allowing for completely contactless policing.

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Explain why you selected this stage of development for your solution.

We have developed a prototype of the PROTECTED app which allows citizens and officers to contactlessly connect, share critical information and rate the experience they had with each other during an interaction (as well as see receipts of prior interactions).

This prototype will allow us to test the assumption that citizens are happy to use an app during or right after a police interaction and see the value in a ratings-based accountability system.

At the time of writing, we have agreement with the City of Port Arthur, TX (150 officers and over 50k citizens) to become our first pilot site (see this news article). The pilot will commence in Q1, 2022.

We also completed a R&D pilot with University of Texas, Austin that captured over 250 student-to-police interactions.

The correct stage still is 'Prototype', but we are currently in transition to 'Pilot' stage, given the above definitions.