Innovating the police
By: Dries Augustyns
Tags: Innovation, Hackathons, Police

Innovation is a big concept so this term got split up into 4 sub-challenges. Me and my team participated in the “Smart Interaction” challenge. This part of the hackathon surrounded everything related to communication and relations between civilians and the police. Questions like “How can we bring the police closer to civilians?” or “How can technology make it easier for citizens to contact the police?” were on the table and ready to be solved.

Our team had a rough start. We weren’t sure which direction we wanted to go in. After some brainstorming we settled on an application to report minor crimes like noise disturbance and neighbor disputes. We had already lost a significant amount of time and since we only had 30 hours to come up with a solution we decided to hop right in. Creating a value proposition canvas and a business model canvas. We were confident about our idea and worked on it all day, nothing special happened on day one. We all went to sleep and our second day started at a surprisingly early 8 AM.

Day two was a very different experience. The coaches of our challenge got in touch with us via our dedicated Teams channel. Asking if they could call with us. I managed to stay calm but inside I knew what was up. The coaches decided to call us to check up on our progress and to push us in another direction. Our current idea was to broad and didn’t feel unique enough. This moment all of us knew that we had to do something because a big victory was on the line. We got off the call and cleared our two whiteboards. Starting a new brainstorm, trying to come up with a truly innovative idea. For some of us it clicked, we are young and we needed to do something with that.

One of the members in our team is a volunteer at https://awel.be/ which is a platform for children and teenagers to talk about problems they have in their lives. Ranging from suicide and depression to love and sexual relations. At Awel.be they noticed a significant rise in posts about cyberbullying. A subject which we decided to tackle. Teenagers have a difficult time talking with the police about topics like these and this was the problem we were about to take on. We needed to find a way to lower the threshold and that is exactly what we did.

Creating a mobile application which makes it easy and almost anonymous for teenagers to talk to the police about topics like cyberbullying, nude pictures and suicide. Inside of an application like that you could report your situation and chat with a police officer that is trained to handle your situation.

The last hours of this hackathon were one of the most hectic hours of my life, but isn’t that how every hackathon ends? After working out some designs and a new business model canvas we were ready to record our pitch. Finishing it with a solid 11 minutes left to upload it to EY’s submission platform.

The four trophies that could be won

After that a lot of stressful hours followed. Later that evening the 3 finalists of each challenge were announced. In the end we were announced as the best solution in our challenge which was a surprise to all of us. We got the chance to expand our network and learn so many new skills. I want to thank my team for hacking with me because it is an experience which I will never forget. Participating in such hackathons is something that everyone should do at least once in their life. It gives you so much motivation and gratification. Apart from those it also gives you severe sleep deprivation but who needs sleep anyway!

If you want to see our winning pitch you can find it below. Maybe you can even get inspired to create a solution of your own!

Happy hacking

Dries