Evidence is crucial to any type of case — sexual assault, domestic violence, hate crimes, sexual harassment, online bullying, stalking and more.
Without strong evidence, cases don’t move forward, and justice isn’t served.
An Austin startup has launched PRESERVED, an app that helps people capture and preserve evidence.
Founder and CEO Christine Townsend, who has an extensive law enforcement background and a family history of police work in England, is raising $150,000 through a GoFundMe campaign to provide the app free to 100,000 users.
Her brother, a digital forensics investigator, provided feedback about the app.
“I’m really proud of it,” she said. “Everyone has the right to be believed.”
PRESERVED provides tools for users to log photo evidence, scan documents, upload screenshots, record audio and more, all while verifying information such as time, date, location and even weather conditions.
The app provides a journal for users to take notes. That information can be shared with a trusted source who can access the information if the user is unable to do so.
“The entire log can be exported as one simple file and be helpful in the pursuit of justice for survivors of sexual assault, harassment and more,” Kaitlin Zimmerman, a digital marketing and communication strategy intern at PRESERVED, explained in an email.
For Townsend, the app is personal.
“As someone who experienced sexual harassment in the workplace, I wanted to create something that gives people the tools to collect evidence and be believed. There’s no room in any workplace for sexual harassment to be tolerated,” she said.
In response to the murder of Vanessa Guillen at Fort Hood, PRESERVED is offering the app free to all military personnel to show support.
“For those in the military who work to protect us, we want to help protect them,” Townsend said.
According to Protect Our Defenders, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit organization, 24% of active-duty women and 6% of active-duty men experienced sexual harassment in the military in 2018. Of those active-duty women, one in five were also sexually assaulted, Protect Our Defenders said. The organization also said that 64% of women who reported their sexual assault faced retaliation, and one in three women were discharged within seven months of reporting.
Townsend has been working on the app in earnest since the beginning of the year.
The idea was in the back of her mind for a couple of years, she said.
“I took all the money I had in the bank, which wasn’t a lot,” to develop the app, she said.
Money raised from the GoFundMe will enable PRESERVED to provide the app free to all survivors of domestic violence through nonprofit organizations in their home states.
PRESERVED will charge private investigators to use the app, and that revenue will help offset expenses.
The app’s functionalities are numerous, and developing it was “quite a challenge,” Townsend said.
She’d love nothing else than to provide it free to anyone.
“If I were fabulously wealthy, I would,” she said.
PRESERVED is not seeking venture capital, instead planning — for now at least — to bootstrap.
“We’re looking for a runway for a year,” she said.
