SusTracker

Inspiration

January is Human Trafficking awareness month, so we wanted to create an application that would promote awareness and prevention. We came up with the idea of a suspicious activity website where users can post what they see.

What it does

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The feed displays the most recent activity that people post in your area. Users make posts and share their location to alert those around them of suspicious activity. You can also display the most recent official crime reports near you.

How we built it

Our front-end was made with HTML, CSS and JavaScript and with a bit of help from Bootstrap. The back-end was made using a MySQL database paired with PHP, and the site is hosted by AWS Lightsail. User reports are stored in our MySQL db and queried with PHP to display onto our site in real time. We also displayed the City of Sacramento's Police Dispatch data in a separate real time feed using an API function call. Locations reported by users and police reports were marked on Google map snippets for each post, a feature we implemented using Google Maps JavaScript API.

Challenges we ran into

Finding a reliable WiFi connection was our main obstacle. Aside form that, it took us some time to figure out which platform to use for hosting.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The inspiration behind this idea addresses a universal concern and we are honored to work towards alleviating it.

What we learned

SO MUCH.

What's next for SusTracker

Giving the website full function that we planned and making an app!

Built With

Submitted to

HackDavis 2018

Created by

This was my first time incorporating APIs into a web page. I helped set up the web server and implement the back-end to access the database to display suspicious reports submitted by users and displaying a Google map of radius of the area. We want to expand this to include a functionality that will allow people to search an area for recent suspicious activity to help protect people from dangerous situations, especially in the spirit of human trafficking awareness month. I also helped pull data from the Sacramento police report database, the largest city for human trafficking incidents.

Kelly Su
I worked on backend and interacting with the various APIs. This was my first time building a website and it was very challenging to learn new languages, but really fun and rewarding!

jmac7789
I developed the front-end and helped in the decision process regarding which frameworks we used for this platform. I would have liked to create a sleeker and more efficient UI/UX design for the website, so I will probably work toward this goal in my future free time. Overall, this was a humbling and fruitful experience!!

Rose-Marie Eter
Helped with the front-end HTML/CSS

Stephanie Giori