Police violence is something 30-year-old Brandon Anderson is all too familiar with. Anderson’s mother became addicted to crack cocaine after an on-duty officer sold it to her. Months later, the same cop arrested her for possession, and she’s been in and out of prison since. As Anderson was boarding a plane home after serving in the Iraq War, he received a phone call that an Oklahoma officer shot and killed his life partner. His high-school aged sister has also been sexually harassed by a cop. Between his family history and personally watching events unfold in Ferguson, Anderson was compelled to create an app for people on the receiving end of gross police misconduct.
Indeed, new phone apps for filming cops are springing up left and right, emphasizing police misconduct and the need for more accountability. But the apps are part of a much larger trend of low-income communities of color using smartphone technology as a source of empowerment.
“[Recording police] matters because it allows us to document our stories on video. Those stories range from physical and verbal abuse to psychological violence,” he told ThinkProgress. “It’s empowering to people on the ground and influential to people not on the ground — to people who serve us as a community.” The Pew Research Center recently found that 64 percent of adults living in the U.S. own a smartphone. However, minorities and low-income people are disproportionately smartphone-dependent, meaning “they do not have broadband access at home, and also have relatively few options for getting online other than their cell phone.” Whereas 1 percent of households earning $75,000 or more per year depend on smartphones for internet, 13 percent of households earning less than $30,000 rely on phones. Moreover, 12 percent and 13 percent of African Americans and Latinos are smartphone dependent, respectively, as opposed to 4 percent of the white population. People in those groups increasingly rely on smartphones for job applications, educational tools, banking, and accessing health resources — meaning phones are becoming less of a luxury item and more of a survival technology.
Taking advantage of widespread smartphone use, Anderson is developing a complex app called Safety With Accountability and Tranparency (SWAT), to amplify the stories of people of color who are in constant contact with police. Allowing people to record and save their footage, the app will also enable them to livestream police interactions to other people in the vicinity, and mobilize people in real time. Users will be able to send videos to the appropriate authorities, after which they’ll receive a profile of the investigator on the case, including their work hours and contact information. Moreover, developers plan to use the data to create an interactive mapping system of police violence, complete with geographical information, the frequency with which incidents happen, and information about the officers involved.
A popular app created by the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) called Stop-and-Frisk serves a similar purpose, allowing bystanders to film police misconduct. Unlike using a standard phone camera to film, the app automatically sends videos to the legal organization so they stay out of law enforcement’s hands, thereby preventing officers from tampering with footage. Today, 35,000 New Yorkers have Stop-and-Frisk on their phones, and 20 ACLU affiliates have created similar apps, such as the recently launched Mobile Justice app.
“We’re constantly inundated with requests for legal assistance, people asking us for help. And we love the idea of reminding people that they have this powerful tool on themselves at all times, and it’s free,” NYCLU Director of Communications Jennifer Carnig told ThinkProgress. She also says the app was specifically created with people of color in mind.
But the growing reliance on smartphones to document cop activity puts those who depend on them in a precarious position. Developers and manufacturers rely on poor, minority communities because those groups are dependent on the phones. As the Cheatsheat puts it, “hardware needs to become both better and more affordable to prevent the digital divide from growing wider. And apps, websites, and mobile-based services will need to address the needs of low-income communities to keep them from being left behind.”
To ensure phones don’t outpace consumers who need them, marginalized communities must have a hand in their production. Those groups are also more likely than venture capitalists to know what technology can be useful moving forward. That’s why Stop-and-Frisk developers made sure to consult grassroots activists and cop watching cohorts, who beta tested the service, Carnig explained. The majority of developers behind SWAT, including Anderson, are people of color who deeply care about the cause.
“When you empower people to actually show what they see, it really can change a conversation in a city,” Carnig concluded.