‘Hey Siri, I’m stepping aside’ shortcut makes it easy to save the police

As protests against racist police brutality spread across the United States, we’ve seen how video captured on mobile devices can help detect abuse by law enforcement. But such evidence is useful not just at a protest, but during any routine interaction with the police, including at traffic stops. Therefore Siri shortcut There’s “I’m out”.

When you install this (free) shortcut on your iPhone, all you have to do is say “Hey Siri, I’m stepping aside” and it will start a chain of events. It will darken your phone, pause the playing music and start recording video from your front camera. It can also send your current location and a copy of this video to an emergency contact, although you will need to confirm a few pop-up messages to complete these steps.

The shortcut itself is its job Robert Petersenwho published first 2018. Petersen has since been updating the program, and the shortcut has gained renewed attention following protests following the police killing of George Floyd.

Obviously, recording police interactions does not, by itself, stop abuses and racial discrimination. However, it can help to name and embarrass the people involved. It’s true that not every police interaction does. needs but that’s no reason not to save it the same way.

If you want to use the program yourself, there are a few things you need to do first. More importantly, the program is not an app you can download from the App Store, but an iOS shortcut based on the functionality Apple introduced in iOS 12.

So, to get things rolling and working, you first need to make sure the iOS is updated to at least iOS 12. Next, download the Shortcuts app you can find. here on the App Store. Once this is done visit this link on your mobile device From the built-in Safari browser to set the shortcut. (Be careful: other browsers will not work!) You also need to make sure your phone can load. unverified shortcuts (Go to Settings > Shortcuts and turn on Allow Untrusted Shortcuts to allow this) and give the program access to your location, you can see how to do that here.

Once this is done you are good to go but we recommend that you dry-run the shortcut first as you will need to approve certain permissions for it to work properly. When using it, you also need to manually approve certain steps (like submitting your video).

There is also currently no direct Android equivalent of the program, but there are similar apps on the Play Store that are meant to help. secretly record video law enforcement forces.

as Petersen said Business Content in 2018, the app is essentially the same body camera that many police officers wear. “It seemed to me that if you stepped aside, it wouldn’t hurt to have a record of the event,” Petersen said. “The police have body cameras in a lot of places these days, so this could be the civilian equivalent.”