Helping people enjoy a safer place to live, work, and drive.
Helping people enjoy a safer place to live, work, and drive.
OUR MISSION
Darren Boyer
Founder-CEO
If you are skeptical crime can be 100% eliminated at your home or business that’s understandable!
It took me years to see how all the pieces should work together.
Below is a bit how this unfolded.
First, I was trying to help our IT company's customers stop crime.
Then one night at a technology conference in San Francisco I happened to meet two fellow Canadians.
They had this hush hush plan of allowing everyone with a phone to be able to report parking meter infractions. I had to agree, it seemed like it could save municipalities a lot of money and get parking violators off the roads much faster.
Sometime after that I realized that since everyone has a phone in their pocket they should be shown crimes nearby and then allowed to help build the criminals latest location for the police.
Soon the Lightcatch app was being developed and patents were being filed.
Tom
While the app was being built I created a successful Facebook group in my home town of Grande Prairie. We treated that group like it was the app, and had two people pretty much full time helping people who posted.
It was during that time I had a hunch about how people communicate would make a big difference.
A year after trying to get people who created posts to communicate the way I recommended, I measured the results and reported them to a local crime watch group. I was blown away. That hunch had led to being able to improve a theft victims or a suspicious activity alerts results by 500% compared to people who just did what they thought was best. Arrests were faster and sentencing also took place when our formula was followed.
About 1 year after Lightcatch was released, Tom, a 25 year veteran police officer and member of our Advisory Board, got a further insight. His suggestions again revolved around improving the way people communicate.
We could only afford to implement his suggestions in 3 cities and 8 rural areas. This time we didn't ask them to edit their post like we had done on Facebook, as that often took days to implement and hours of text messages. Those delays had watered down people's results and drained our resources.
We just went and improved things on the app on their behalf. Six months later I had data that showed the results for those were we improved communication were double what others were experiencing. Adding those two insights up, it was becoming clear we could deliver results that were an improvement of about 10 times better than what most people experience.
Easy?
Somewhere in that time I learned from Jenna, a local security system technician how security companies implemented redundancy and deterrence before a crime happened and this had a tremendous impact.
Building on the principles Jenna shared we eventually doubled, then tripled, the effectiveness of what people would normally experience.
I had been talking to Jenna because we recognized the single biggest barrier to people getting results was the slow reporting speed that took place. We felt if there could only be some way to let people get their data from a security camera system to the app it would eliminate the speed issue.
Speed was one thing, but for camera owners allowing someone access to their cameras was a deal breaker. It created all sorts of potential for bad publicity and bad feelings, if some stranger could access people's cameras.
We had spent about two years and teams of developers, lots of consulting and had gotten nowhere with the issue of how do we improve speed but still let everyone have guaranteed privacy of their cameras. Then one Sunday morning while the topic was completely off my mind, and I was taking a shower all the technology pieces needed just popped in my head for a solution to work.
I saw how both privacy and speed of reporting could be delivered in a fail safe way. I couldn't believe we had solved what seemed like the last missing piece of the puzzle! About 90 days later the engineers had built a flawless system. It was awesome.
Not So Fast
Thinking we now had a flawless system and all that people needed was to hear how perfect everything could be was probably the biggest mistake I've ever made along the way.
I've made countless others, but that one was a big one.
I thought because I now cared about this problem others would want to care. That wasn't exactly the way it worked.
After spending years of providing all the education material to groups, muncipalities, police forces, home owners and businesses all for free, I began to realize the technology was a small part of the real obstacle.
Dozens and dozens of times I would start to help people who were interested in getting their security improved. This was all for free so we could build up proof how revolutionary this system was.
Everyone at some point would get to a stage where they would say 'Oh this is good enough'. But they were just hoping it was good enough and that hope was based on what everyone else was doing.
Others would have a security company or friend talk them out of what our recommendations were.
We had plenty of data that showed people who had actually been victims were doing the similar things we wanted to do. In other words people who had suffered through some pain knew that what most people called good enough wasn't actually that good.
Despite the explosion in smartphones and great cameras the never ending pattern of complacency, theft then outrage, has barely changed.
Stand alone security leaves people vulnerable, isolated and alone.
This has become a mission to deliver what really allows people to break free.
Darren