How do you know if you are in a safe place or not?  If you’re new in town or just visiting a new city, it can be hard to tell the safe neighborhoods from the unsafe.  Are You Safe? is an iPhone app that uses GPS and information about previous crimes to tell you how safe you are at your current location.  The app is currently available for Washington DC and a few other cities.

Via email, I interviewed Are You Safe’s creator, Brian Sobel, to find out more about how it works:

Q) What inspired the creation of this app?

“AreYouSafe evolved from iLive.at – an award winning application developed by a subset of the AreYouSafe team. We had the data for DC in hand along with some momentum, so we turned the machine (our energy, resources) to a new related problem: mobilizing a subset of the data, crime, to get our hands dirty with iPhone development. We aimed to “whip it together in a few hours one night”…not exactly an accurate prediction, as a little over half a year in, we’ve now got 3 cities in the app store (DC, Atlanta, Sacramento), two pending approval (Milwaukee and Indianapolis), and 1 more not far behind (Dallas).”

“We have also been pretty active in the Government Transparency / Gov2.0 movement, with a main motivation being to free up more data, so we can use such in AYS, and iLive.at, frameworks thirsty to provide utility to new cities.”

Q) How is the threat level calculated? Does the app look just at the number of crimes committed in the area, or does it also take into account their severity?

“Using the thirty-four thousand DC crime incidents reported in 2008 mixed with census data to “level the playing field”, we create a crime heat map for the entire city, broken down by two square block segments. Each crime type is weighted based on it’s severity – as a result, an area with 3 homicides might be far more dangerous than an areas with 10 car thefts. When we get a user’s location (or the location they manually enter) we determine what grid point they are in (or what grid point they would be in based on the manual entry), and that grid point’s safety level is represented on the threat meter of the app. As users move through the city, and that “closest grid point” changes, the reading on the threat meter changes accordingly.”

The heat map for DC can be seen here.

Q) You currently cover DC, Atlanta, Milwaukee, Sacramento and Indianapolis. How do you decide which cities to cover?

“We currently cover DC, Atlanta and Sacramento. Milwaukee and Indianapolis have been submitted to Apple and should be approved within the next 5-10 days. Next on our list is Dallas as they actually have excellent incident level data. ”

“The most common question we get asked is why we’ve moved forward with cities like Milwaukee and Indianapolis rather than NYC, LA, Chicago, or Boston. The answer is simple – data availability. We have the framework in place to roll out across the US and beyond; however, only a handful of cities make their incident level crime data transparent to the public. Even among those that do make their data transparent, there is no standardization.  I’m actually doing a big presentation at a Gov 2.0 conference today in DC.”

Q) What cities are next on the agenda?

“Dallas is next in queue – as data becomes available from other cities we are anxious to tackle them.”

Q) What do you recommend people do if they find themselves in an area with a “red” threat level?

“We recommend that people always be aware of their surroundings and exercise caution – whether in an area with a green, yellow, or red threat level. We would absolutely suggest a heightened sense of awareness when users are in “red” threat level areas. That being said, while AreYouSafe is based on incident level crime data from police departments and local/city governments, it cannot predict future crime.”

Are You Safe? has an excellent interface-it’s attractive, easy to navigate and the threat meter lets you see at a glance whether you are in a generally “safe” area or not.  I like that you can use GPS or enter in an address-that makes it easy to check the threat level not only for where you are now, but also for where you plan to go next. It’s also innovative-there isn’t any other app that provides  a similar service. SpotCrime is the closest, but it focuses more on providing  recent crime information and doesn’t calculate a specific threat level.

As far as usefulness is concerned, it’s a great source of information about where you are traveling-just don’t let it replace using your own eyes and ears. Oh, and it might be a good idea to put the iPhone back in your pocket if you notice you’ve wandered onto a bad street.

What do you think of Are You Safe? Let us know in the comments…oh, and if you like the app,  show the developers some love and vote for them in the TechAWARDS!

Full Disclosure: Boalt helped develop this iPhone App. Useful Tools is owned by Boalt.

Our Rating of Are You Safe?

Tags: Lifestyle

Categories:mobile