HealComm

Gun violences wreaks havoc on communities, destroys lives, and instills constant fear. HealComm seeks to address gun violence by providing trackable procedures for police and municipal authorities to follow after a shooting. The data generated from the process is fed into a crime diagnostic algorithm to determine the factors that contributed to the shooting and help police prevent future shootings. Victims and families of those involved are followed up with to provide support for dealing with trauma and are invited to participate in online support groups. HealComm will generate anonymized, public reports on the fidelity of the procedures allowing the communities to hold the cities accountable for preventing and following up on shootings. If every major city in the world implemented HealComm, millions of people would feel safer, experience less violence in their communities, and less lives would be destroyed by guns and the aftermath and trauma of shootings.

Guns kill 40,000 people a year in the US alone. X% of those killed are in major cities. Exponentially more people’s lives are affected by the aftermath and trauma of shootings. Millions of lives would be improved by decreasing the number of gun shootings around the world. Many are already some of the most vulnerable and marginalized populations who need support. Gun violence requires an end-to-end intervention approach because it creates feedback loops that lead to more gun violence. The victims and their families may feel they need revenge. Children with murdered family members may not have the support they need for the trauma and end up involved in circles that promise comradely while perpetuating the violence. It is a cycle that can not be broken in one place. Shootings have to be prevented and victims of shootings that still occur need to be thoroughly supported. The police, civil governments, and communities don’t have the tools to collaborate and implement fixes for these problems in a trackable way that provides public accountability. Police don’t know what to do with their data. The public doesn't know if the police are doing anything. It doesn’t need to be that way.

We are working to improve the lives of people living in large cities were gun crime is rampant and outpaces what the police are able to handle with a reactive approach alone. Think Philadelphia and Baltimore. To meaningfully address these populations, a preventative intervention approach is required -- a process that needs to include the community to understand their issues and needs when it comes to dealing with the trauma and aftermath of gun violence.

Our team has worked on gun violence intervention in Newark, NJ and works with a community business coalition aimed at reducing crime through community engagement. We have developed an app for tracking community initiatives and measuring their effect on crime. HealComm is an evolution of that project with a focus on gun violence. We run regular meetings talking to community members in Newark, NJ about their issues and would setup processes to expand these conversations to other cities.

We will facilitate a process of communication and assistance between the cities and the people that feel aggrieved and forgotten after their lives are uprooted by gun violence. We'll track this process to allow the public to hold the police and cities accountable.

Our solution combines intervention and reactive measures to tackle the gun violence problem from both ends.

From the preventative side, our software is based on 10 years of Risk Terrain Modeling research on identifying the risks involved in crime and developing intervention plans to address it without over-policing. Our algorithms focus on environmental factors (ex. proximity to liquor stores or locations of banks) instead of simply analyzing police dat alone. Over time this weeds our implicit bias that is inherent in police-recorded incident data.

Additionally, our solution provides a trackable plan for the police and city government officials to follow with the victims and their families. When people's lives are uprooted by gun violence and then they are forgotten and ignored by the people that are supposed to protect them, a poor dynamic forms that stops either side from understanding the other. And it leads to more people being forced into positions that lead to further gun violence.

There is no data on how often authorities follow up with victims and ensure that they are doing okay -- that the trauma they are dealing with isn't destroying their lives or that the lack of income from a lost family member isn't forcing them into poverty.

HealComm is designed to facilitate a process between city officials and these victims in such a way that they feel heard and helped, and if they aren't at least have a way to contact and seek assistance.

Making this a trackable, consistent procedure allows us to capture the effectiveness of these procedures and iterate on them and change as needed in different cities. It also provides the public a way to hold them accountable when they are falling short on their goals.

HealComm's innovation comes in two parts:

- It provides crime analytics that can help prevent gun violence from happening without relying solely on police-recorded incident data and suffering from problems of bias. Our algorithms analyze crime by detecting the influence of environmental factors on crime. We focus on places, not people.

- We will go farther than other solutions by focusing on the victims and the communities affected by gun violence, helping the city communicate and provide support for the issues that arise in the aftermath of a shooting. We'll make this process trackable so that the officials can be held accountable to actually follow through.

- The core algorithms used to analyze the risk involved in crime (Risk Terrain Modeling) is a form of machine learning, using regression models to determine the environmental factors that influence crime to varying degrees.

- Because we don't rely just on police-recorded incident data, our algorithms are able to break the cycle of bias in algorithmic policing over time.

The people most affected by gun violence are often the most vulnerable and least listened to constituents in major cities. They don't have a voice and are ignored by the people in charge. Our goal is make the connection between the victims of gun violence and the city officials more trackable so the public can be sure that the cities are actually following through with helping the most vulnerable populations.

When people feel heard and supported they are less likely to feel aggrieved and jaded by the system as a whole. That support is not being provided now. There is no accountability for city's to actually follow through and help the communities heal after these traumatic events. This leads to more violence.

We can break the cycle by introducing new ideas before shootings occur and after they do to help the police prevent future shootings and to help the communities heal and take back their lives.

Our current technology is used by several major cities covering populations of around 250k people.

HealComm is an extension of our current technology and has not been developed yet. In one year it could be rolled out with our existing partners and serve up to 250k people. In five years our goal is to be used in every major city in America. 

Our goal is to change the way cities think about gun violence and help them realize that preventing future crime has more to do with supporting the victims and their communities than it does about increased police presence.

We want to see HealComm in every major city in America -- but first these cities need to come around to the idea that opting into accountability leads to better progress and increased safety for everyone -- the community and the police force.

We can't force cities and/or police departments to buy our product, but we need to find a way to convince them that they should because it truly will make a difference.

We need to create more public dialogue on the use of data in policing and how it positively and negatively affects different demographics.

Four people -- we are a CEO, CTO, and two university researchers that have spent 10 years working on analyzing crime data without introducing bias.

We are uniquely positioned to address gun violence because we understand that it is an empathy problem more than a data problem and our algorithms are designed to reduce the effect of inherent bias in data-based policing.

We will operate as a Software-as-a-Service selling our product to city governments that want to increase the safety of their community and prevent gun violence. 

Long term we believe we will want to raise money from like-minded investors that understand the unique issues in working on crime and won't push us to make decisions we believe are not aligned with our goals and morals.

Because we believe there is an alignment in the core goal of what Simsi is trying to achieve and what Solve is trying to facilitate in providing funding to community-centric solutions that can be run as sustainable businesses while helping people.

We want to dedicate more time to our efforts and the $100k will allow us to do that.

We would want to partner with District Attorney offices in major cities as well as non-profits working on reducing crime, specifically ones that are focused on issues like bias in data.

We will use the money to develop the HealComm application, which is an extension of community engagement work we are doing in Newark, NJ and crime analytics we are doing with police departments and research universities around the world.

We understand that police incident data is problematic when used as the only data source in analytics. Our solutions combine this data with places-focused environmental data to detect the influence of different environmental factors on the presence of crime. Places, not people. We then use this information to develop intervention strategies that are not rooted in the bias of the incident data, and over time, as new incident data is collected from these more neutral interventions, we aim to remove the bias as much as possible from the equation.

Data collected on the follow up procedures for victims will always be securely stored and private to the individuals. We will only use aggregate, anonymized information from these processes to understand how well cities are following through with the processes as a whole. We want to support victims and their privacy is our #1 priority.