Self Evident app to cut crime

BC Senior assuages his early-retirement-baby-boomer guilt by doing voluntary work for various good causes, the latest of which is a charity called Witness Confident, which aims to make reporting crime easier.

This week, the charity launched an app called Self Evident (full disclosure: BC provided a very small amount of help with the launch), which allows people to report crime quickly and reliably via their smartphone - including tagging the report with the date, time, location and even photos of the incident.

Similar in principle to the Love Lewisham app (developed by Lewisham Council to make reporting graffiti and flytipping easier and improve clean-up response rates) it's an initiative which should address two big problems:

Firstly, 1,000 crimes go unreported every day because the public think the process of reporting crime is too much hassle.

Secondly, it delivers the report to the police in a format that’s quick and easy for the police to deal with: the police are overwhelmed with the volume of reported crime with 500,000 calls to the police on the 101 service going unanswered each year.

It's a simple, free, smart way to reduce crime and police paperwork - hopefully everyone will support it.

You can download the app for IOS and Android here.