Forget the truncheon, use your cameraphone
Fighting crime with MMS-witness
By Tony Dennis: Saturday 02 June 2007, 11:39
IF, AS Waleli's Lawrence Masle claims, more than half the European population now carry a cameraphone, then a new crime busting application, MMS-witness, should catch on fast.
Waleli's idea is to harness the power of picture messaging (MMS) to catch the crooks. A witness sends a photo or video from the cameraphone using MMS-witness which then goes straight into a crime database.
Such photography could then be sent to police officers sent to investigate the crime ? hopefully increasing the chances of an arrest.
Dutch software house Waleli has been working with police in Amsterdam to test the system out. At this stage it is the police themselves who are taking the pictures and storing them in a database.
If the plan goes ahead then it should be possible to establish a Europe-wide number for MMS-witness. The general public will be provided with a memorable number ? such as 999 or 112 ? to which all witness messages can be sent.
To get people in the mood, Waleli has even shot its own video of how the system should work. View it on your PC here.
Given that Garner has estimated that there are 295 million cameraphones already out there, that's an awful lot of potential crime scene photographers. ?
My local bobby carries a camera phone and recently we were stood talking when we saw something going on that shouldn't have been. As he stepped forward to intervene he said to me "Do you have a camera phone?"
"No" I replied "Why?"
"Well if you did you could take a picture of this and I could use it as evidence"
"Use your own camera phone" said I
"Not admissible as evidence" he replied "The courts will accept a picture taken by a member of the public but not one taken by a police officer"
Apparently this is indeed the case. A picture taken under such circumstances by a police officer cannot, on its own, be used in evidence. It needs independent corroboration. So why do we equip coppers with mobile camera 'phones?
