CHARLOTTE -- Safety features right at your fingertips. Through a new mobile app called LiveSafe, UNC Charlotte is hoping to make its campus safer.
If someone calls 911 using the app, Campus Police Chief Jeffrey Baker said the dispatcher can virtually stay with a potential victim until help arrives, using the app’s GPS feature.
Chief Baker explained that’s one of many advatages of implementing this new technology. “If they had to run or something like that, we'd be able to follow where they are running to. Those are the limitations of your standard blue light phone. Obviously as a blue light phone, it's stationary, and if you could use it, you had to run, you had to drop it and then run. We would have no idea where someone went,” he said.
You can also ask a friend to monitor your walk home and report suspicious activities by sending a picture message.
Patrol Sergeant Angela Ortize said “A lot of the times the victim might be saying he has a black shirt, but it's really a blue shirt. It's just a dark colored shirt. So it gives us a lot of good, detailed information that we really need.”
The most recent crime statistics report found that UNCC's campus police investigated in 2013, 22 on-campus burglaries, about a dozen stalking, sexual assault and dating violence incidents and four aggravated assaults.
Now, through the LiveSafe app, police hope enhanced communication will help decrease those numbers.
The app allows students to remain anonymous if they're submitting tips.
For download instructions, click here.
Read the UNCC crime report here.