Crime reporting online

One Liner: offer a service to streamline the reporting of crimes online and also offer rewards for doing so.

Okay, even though I only use this blog to write down ideas, here's something personal: I live in Taiwan; and here's something political: the government sucks at managing the police. For those who have not visited an Asian country, you do not know the frustration at being stuck on the road because someone double parked on both sides of a narrow street, just because the driver didn't want to parallel park just a few meters away. Bad drivers, crazy motorists really drive me crazy, because they make it dangerous for so many other people to gain just a little bit of convenience for themselves.

But now that almost all cell phones have camera on them, and it is really easy to connect to websites, people should be able to report crimes easily. A streamlined service would accept pictures and other relevant information (speed, time, date, location) and try to automatically process the infraction (read the license plate) and send it to a police officer for review before sending the ticket. Reporters should be able to get a portion of the ticket as reward to encourage people reporting crimes. The tools that are used to report crimes should probably be certified for the obvious reasons, which the crime reporters would probably willingly pay as an investment for the reward money.

Chances are though, no matter how well it is thought out, this will probably not happen, since governments don't really try new things, and business that want to do this would need to jump through bureaucratic hoops.