Survey of Smartphone-Based Police Monitoring Apps

Abstract

This study investigated several smartphone-based applications designed for citizens to record encounters with law enforcement officers. The study aimed to analyze the different applications based on their initialization speed, ease of recording, upload speed and robustness. The study also sought to provide the developers of future applications with insight into what attributes are most important to this type of applications. We found that in general, applications of this kind do not always function consistently. The design features that proved the most beneficial were uploading in a broadcast style, providing ample information regarding the status of an upload, and saving a local copies of videos recorded in the app.