CrimeComms

Tracking down criminals is no easy task. Criminals disappear before the police can gather basic info. Until now. Introducing CrimeComms, a real-time neighborhood crime data & alert app!

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Inspiration

With the theme of the hackathons being investigation and mystery, I wanted to build something that could assist in crime scenarios. I wanted to develop a way to increase the amount of real-time data police people (and other crime stoppers) have access to so they can have an easier time catching criminals in the act of the crime.

What it does

CrimeComms is a real-time crime data and alert app. It allows users to easily report a crime at their current location and notifies all other users near them to keep an eye out for any suspicious activity. If they see anything suspicious, they can easily send a signal from their current location to the app. All these signals and location data are then marked on a map for the police to track and predict where the criminals are headed, all in real-time.

How we built it

I built this project solo using React on the client-side (web app) and Django on the server-side, with a PostgreSQL database. I used the Mapbox API to create the map in the browser. All the code was written in Python and JavaScript.

Challenges we ran into

I mainly faced challenges around making the app fully real-time, with data updating on the frontend map. State management and component re-rendering in React was confusing. I plan on overcoming this issue as I work on this project some more. Originally I was going to handle the location data on the Django server but later decided to use the Mapbox API and its plugins.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The overall design and functionality came out as I had envisioned.

What we learned

I learned a lot about dealing with and calculating location data, and building a network of common data points. I was able to get ample practice with React and Django while learning features about the technologies that I hadn't previously known.

What's next for CrimeComms

I would like to keep expanding on CrimeComms by implementing more features and I would like to bring this app to production.

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