We here at KOVA are excited to be able to say that our groundbreaking new public safety app, SilentPartner, has been chosen to move on to the next level of competition in the National Institute of Justice’s 2014 Ultra High Speed App Challenge: Using Current Technology to Improve Criminal Justice Operations. For more information about this competition and KOVA’s participation in it, check out our previous blog post.
The SilentPartner app is an all-in-one tool that allows emergency responders to capture, organize, and transmit data securely from the scene of a crime using their smart phones, as well as giving law enforcement officers the ability to play the Miranda rights to a subject in any language, while recording the subject’s response.
As the proud creators of this app, we were thrilled to receive a glowing review from the panel of distinguished judges responsible for making the decision that allowed us to advance, and we’d love to share with you what they felt to be its strongest features. A panel of judges evaluated entries based on the following categories:
• Contribution of the application towards improving the effectiveness and/or efficiency of criminal justice services (60%).
• Ease of implementing the application by state and local criminal justice agencies, including considerations of platform, and time and cost requirements (15%).
• Practicality of data set selection in terms of relevance, ease of acquisition, and ongoing access (15%).
• Feasibility of evaluation methodology and impact measurement (10%).
Here’s how SilentPartner did!
The judges recognized the fact that SilentPartner is helpful in multi-lingual situations, as well as in situations where data needs to be recorded for future court proceedings. They declared truly “worthwhile” our app’s ability to drastically decrease the amount of time an officer must devote to collecting crime scene data from disparate sources and then manually uploading it all into a database. They also stated, “The integration of photos, voice recordings, and cases number on a single platform has significant value,” and repeatedly described each aspect of the app as a “good idea” or a “good concept.”
The judges noted SilentPartner’s ability to be quickly implemented by local agencies, and stated that it would “provide immediate benefit to law enforcement” once in place. It also stated how the application considered factors such as platform, time, and cost requirements.
Here is what the judges had to say about SilentPartner in this category: “This is a practical solution and promotes managed data at the user level without the data having to be managed by the user. The information that is to be managed exists today, and this solution provides a mechanism to better document the activities that the law enforcement officer experiences. It may also allow for better use of the law enforcement officer’s time as the documentation of the audio and video data may remove the need for the officer to appear in court and testify to his experience in the field. The documented data from this solution may lead to more patrol time for the law enforcement officer and less time in the courts.”
According to the judges, “this proposal is feasible and can be implemented with direct benefit to the law enforcement officer.”
The judges had an overwhelmingly positive view of KOVA’s SilentPartner app. If you would like more information on the ways in which this exciting new app can help your law enforcement agency, read our SilentPartner FAQ sheet!
