Police 2.0
February 12, 2009 – 12:09
Last week a person with (undoubtedly) very bad karma entered my front yard and took my Red and Black Mongoose Rockadile LE bike. Yes, Yes, I know. It’s not such an expensive bike. I have yet to meet my 40K weekly milestone before I really make it spiffy, but it already had the baby chair adapter and the water bottle holder (sans the bottle itself). This really pissed me off. I really liked my bike and the financial burden of getting a new one is also considerable.
2006 Mongoose Rockadile AL; Complete specs
Luckily enough, the bike was insured. However, in order to get the money from the insurance company, one has to show a police report that the bike was actually stolen. Maybe this is different in other countries, but in Israel, filing a complaint for a stolen bike is a mere formality. The police force is so overloaded, undermanned and under budgeted that the chance to get a police officer investigate a 2000 NIS (500$, at current rates) bike theft is less than zero. However, one must file a complaint.
So I went to the police station. One overwrought officer (a very nice one) was in charge of all ‘community service’ which basically means – all the complaints which we are not going to do anything about. Petty thefts, neighbor disputes etc. It took me 4 hours to get to my turn. It took the guy 30 minutes to register my complaint (including typing my verbal testimony – “I came back home and found that my bike is gone”) and then 3 phone calls to the insurance company to fax them the printed complaint form. Such a waste of time. I started thinking about “Police 2.0”. Imagine an external facing portal for these petty issues. You log in, go to the online forms page (already existing!) and fill out such a complaint. Someone then goes over all the filed complaints and handles the ones which are suspicious or problematic. For the rest – you should just be able to forward the filled form to your insurance company. That should take you all in all about 5 minutes.
Of course, there is no such form. But wouldn’t it be cool?
And no, this has no relation to SAP announcing its new Law enforcement solution…
