POSTACRIME.COM has launched our beta for the world to see today! You may be asking yourself what many people do when I first tell them about our idea, what is PostaCrime?
David, Greg, and I (Ben) started POSTACRIME.COM, a free service that allows business owners with CCTV (closed circuit television) systems to post photos and videos of people who rip them off on the internet. David and Greg have been in the security industry for 15 years, and they have seen all to many times where they help a business owner who just had $10,000 worth of merchandise stolen turn over the video of the criminals to the police.
Often times the police get a crystal clear photo of the criminal, and more often then not the criminals are not caught. Which makes sense, unless someone actually recognizes the criminal in the photo, or he or she is a repeat offender, it is next to impossible to identify them.
This is where POSTACRIME comes in. Now the police or the business owner can post the photo online for the public to help identify, they can even offer rewards to further encourage people to submit tips and help identify criminals. Our goal was to make a clean, intuitive user interface that allows the public to easily search for crimes by their zipcode. Users can submit tips online to the "Poster" and they in turn give that information to the police.
We think that posting people online who have committed crimes will not only help police bust criminals, but more importantly will serve as a formidable deterant for would be criminals. Business owners can display decals (available in our store) at their front and back entrances, cash registers, dressing rooms, or anywhere else to tell people that if they commit a crime, their face will be posted online.
I found an article recently which discusses how the West Yorkshire Police are sharing photos and videos of criminals on their Intranet website. The article explains that in the past 12 months, over 350 criminals have been identified and prosecuted. Can you imagine how many more would be caught if the general public were able to also view the content? POSTACRIME will allow them to share this content online with the general public for free.
We welcome any feedback about our website or any ideas that you may have about how to best make use of this powerful tool. We will keep you updated via this blog on our progress launching our "Internet Startup" and look forward to sharing our experiences with you in the future.
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So far, so good. We have been spreading the word about our launch to all our friends and family so we can get a real beta test to make sure the website works like a charm. Next, we are focusing on letting business owners and the police know what POSTACRIME.COM is so we can begin to have our google map populated with more crimes from all over the country.
Help us in forming the largest public crime prevention database in the country!!
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