Homelessness is a growing crisis in New York City. In response to this crisis the NYC Mayors Office and Police Department recently declared they are increasing efforts to help the growing homeless population.
Living on the streets is dangerous for the homeless, and it is dangerous for people encountering a homeless person who may perform an act of violence out of desperation or because of mental illness. Currently it is impossible to locate and help the homeless in a timely manner.
We built a free tool to help:
The NYC Map the Homeless (NYC-MTH) app is a simple and easy volunteer crowd-sourcing solution. It gathers data and produces answers. Tap one button to take a picture and tag it. It only takes a few seconds. The pins are automatically displayed and clustered on a detailed map of NYC. When a mapped pin is selected, it shows a precise location, time, and description.
Authorities can quickly identify locations of concern and act in a timely manner. In the future, this tool will give authorities and the public the ability to run advanced data queries on the data we compile, which will allow us to form detailed insights into the homeless crisis.
Key Features:
- One button activation
- Full camera control
- Tag criticality and type of event
- Automatically assigns location
- Automatically pins data and location to detailed NYC map.
- Visualize color-coded clustered areas of concern that can be zoomed for detailed info
Decades ago former and current NYPD Commissioner William J. Bratton developed the most technologically advanced police department in the world. He taught us to listen to the data. Commissioner Bratton used data, paper maps, and push-pins to derive intelligence that significantly reduced crime rates in NYC. In Commissioner Brattons book, "Collaborate or Perish!", he spoke of collaborating and innovating in a networked world. All we are doing is leveraging our networked world, app technology, graph and relational databases, pinning and mapping in a way not possible even a few years ago.
NYC-MTH was released only days ago. Already we have heard from concerned citizens with ideas and opinions for further improvement and integration. We hope to collaborate with the NYPD and homeless services in order to help our city to ultimately find possible solutions to this crisis.