On Friday, November 13, citizens in 17 states and the District of Columbia will have one more tool in their inventory for keeping police accountable. The American Civil Liberties Union’s Mobile Justice app, which has already rolled out in California, Colorado, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, North Carolina, and Oregon, will expand to 10 other states including Arizona, the District of Columbia, Georgia, Maryland, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, and Virginia.
According to Ben Bowens of the ACLU of Pennsylvania, the app will be released in the 10 additional states on both iOS and Android—with the exception of Oregon, which was already running an Android version of the app and will receive an iOS version in addition. Each of these apps is designed after New York’s highly successful Stop & Frisk app, which also allows users to document and record police interactions.
In addition to a feature that informs users of state-specific rights in police interactions, the Mobile Justice app has three main functions for documenting police encounters. The first is a video recording feature that saves local copies of video and sends a copy in real time to ACLU offices, which prevents police tampering. The second feature is ACLU-backed incident reporting. Both reports and videos can also be geo-located to provide geographic documentation. The third feature is called “Witness,” and allows users facing police encounters to broadcast their location to other nearby users, who can then come to record and report the incident independently.
Apps and programs like these help expand and protect individual rights in the traditionally murky black boxes of police-citizen interactions. They should also provide accountability and evidence in cases of tragedy or brutality.