During a 24-hour hackathon, four computer science students from Endicott College developed a mobile application to increase police accountability in public spaces.
The app, ALive, allows users to record police actions and safely store the video. The recordings are automatically uploaded to a cloud file, which users can later access even if their phone is destroyed or confiscated.
“The idea around it is kind of just protecting your rights in relation to police. When you get pulled over, you take out the app, you start recording in the app,” said team member Matthew Cruz. “There’s gonna be a secondary copy out there so you can go back into the app in another device and retrieve those videos.”
The group won best hack for social good at the hackathon, which was hosted virtually by Wellesley College in November. Now the team is working on launching ALive this spring.
The hackathon team included Cruz, a senior from Easton, Connecticut; Jamyang “Z” Tamang, a senior from Gangtok Sikkim, India; Greg Hosking, a junior from Salem; and Luke Jodice, a junior from Chatham.
Cruz proposed the idea for ALive to the group, and they quickly jumped on it. One day while consuming several orders from McDonald’s, the group developed the skeleton of the application, including the login screen, camera connection, and an interface to flip between the recording screen and saved videos screen.
The team said they intended for this application to be used for investigations into police misconduct.
“You always hear about police misconduct, police wrongfully shooting people. I feel like there needs to be more accountability on their end,” Cruz said. “Any citizen with a phone can hold them accountable just by recording when you’re in public, and it’s perfectly legal.”
However, Tamang said the application could have other uses, including for people to record themselves walking alone if they felt unsafe.
Computer science professor Henry Feild said he hopes this experience encourages more students to participate in hackathons. Endicott has about 40 students in its computer science program, he said. In Feild's nine years at Endicott, this was the first time a student team entered a major hackathon.
“[Hackathons] are really about the idea and not so much about exactly how you get to the end,” Feild said. “It’s a really nice compliment to the academic side of things.”
Now that the spring semester has begun, the students are picking up where they left off. Hosking said they’re refining the application they created during the hackathon and finishing the cloud storage feature.
Ideally, they’d like to secure funding to launch ALive on the app store, but with or without it, the team is planning to finish the application by the end of the semester and continue building out its features in the future.
“I can honestly see us working on this for years to come. I just think it’s such a great idea,” Cruz said. “It’s something that anyone can use. Everyone has the right to use it.”
