Ryan Grenoble of The Huffington Post is reporting that teens have created ‘Five-O’, a mobile app “that empowers citizens ‘to record and store data from every encounter with law enforcement.'” The data can then be collected and shared in an effort to hold individual police officers and police departments accountable.
Genoble writes:
‘”We’ve been hearing about the negative instances in the news, for instance most recently the Michael Brown case, and we always talk about these issues with our parents,’ 16-year-old Ima Christian — who created the app with siblings Caleb, 14, and Asha, 15 — told Business Insider, explaining the inspiration behind the program. ‘They always try to reinforce that we should focus on solutions. It’s important to talk about the issues, but they try to make us focus on finding solutions. That made us think why don’t we create an app to help us solve this problem.’ In addition to the Yelp-like police rating system, the app includes a “know your rights” section, complete with information from the American Civil Liberties Union.”
The teens, who learned to code from various online programs, also plan to use the app to highlight positive police officers and departments. They hope highlighting those officers and departments will help them model good behavior and practices for other departments.
The app is available for download for Samsung devices. The app is still awaiting approval from the Apple Store.
Read more at Huffington Post.
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