Background
Providing public safety information for Miamians.
Freeze was a winning hackathon idea in 2018 based on using technology and design to help people understand what public safety officers have to go through in their daily lives. The original vision was to use virtual reality or augmented reality to immerse users in real life, high-stake scenarios that cop face every day. The hypothesis of this idea was that an application like this could subliminally build trust through experience.
The American Bar Association Racial & Ethical Coalition gave a grant to build out working prototypes for these ideas and bringing on technical leaders to support with volunteers getting these apps proposed to Public Safety in Miami to test.
Approach
Using research and interaction to inform design.
Through User Experience Research we identified a way to leverage open data in efforts to streamline helping others understand the daily life of police force. We decided to focus on addressing the problem while making the solution accessible to anyone. We removed the virtual reality and augmented reality barrier in opting for using video content to demonstrate decisions law enforcement have to make in their daily lives. Users are presented with data to make a decision in a game scenario where the result is shown alongside data about public safety activity at the local, state, and national level.
The solution
Choose Your Own Adventure for Public Safety.
Freeze is an application that allows users to select scenarios of daily police interactions with specific results shown in video supported by data. We advocate for building an open data census of public safety interactions across municipalities leveraging this data to build apps that inform and engage citizens through applications built to increase awareness of the daily decisions made by Public Safety.
Open data & API strategy
Scale the use of public interest technology.
Freeze is built to enable municipalities to further their open data policies to:
Provide a single place for a City to publish & present APIs cleanly
Create a consistent namespace under one central domain, regardless of vendor or hosting system to build applications for civic engagement.
Build a bridge of accountability for how data is used in the public sector and is open-source to encourage further development by others on the concept of open policing data.
We are looking for testers? Is this you? Then register here.