Police are counting on the public to use smartphones to help reduce crime and alert them of anything needing their attention with a new app that makes them the eyes and ears of the force.

As part of an initiative codenamed the Volunteer Smartphone Patrol (VSP), the app will be launched on Police Day tomorrow, allowing a potential 11 million smartphone users in the country to send real-time photos or videos of criminal acts, accidents and natural disasters.

The new app promises to make it easier and faster to communicate such incidents than current call-based methods, besides adding more accuracy to the process since the location information is transmitted and users are pre-registered.

For example, if a user saw a road accident, he could take a photo and send it along with the GPS coordinates in his smartphone to police. The information sent can also be on other issues like natural disasters that require action, such as landslides or fallen trees. The system would generate a serial number for every alert sent by a user to identify the complaint.

Source: The Star