065: SafeEncounter 101: An Introduction To Our Community Safety Database System

Steve Glisky

Welcome to the Paperless Productivity Podcast, where we have experts give you the insights, know-how and resources to help you transform your workplace from paper to digital while making your work life better at the same time. 

Scott Bade:

Welcome to the introductory podcast on SafeEncounter. My name is Scott Bade. I’m here with my friend, Julian Vataj. Julian’s the key developer the visionary behind this product. He’s been working on it for some time. We will leave our contact information at the end of the podcast along with the website so that you can get more information or request a demo.

Let’s get started. So why don’t you give me a quick overview Julian of SafeEncounter and after that, we’ll go into a little bit more detail.

Julian Vataj:

Yeah, sure. So SafeEncounter is a web application currently where people can basically create profiles for their loved one that have intellectual disabilities. The idea behind this is to help law enforcement that would be granted access to this data and then if they find a person wandering on the street, they are able to identify them and basically return them home safely to their family. We’ve built the entire application with with security in mind. And we’re really proud ourselves to giving the parents and legal guardians a hundred percent control over their data.

Scott Bade:

So, you mentioned parents, are there other maybe groups of users that also would be using?

Julian Vataj:

Absolutely. So, we can see this, for example, in a retirement home where they can create more dependence and the system, and they can also manage multiple people in the same system. So, the, the usage is, is, is very wide.

But the focus is basically for the law enforcement to be able to search this data and identify the people that they might encounter on the street.

Scott Bade:

Got it. So, this is a bit different than other ImageSoft products, can you kind of give us a little background, kind of the inspiration?

Julian Vataj:

So as a matter of fact, my grandma had Alzheimer’s so I am very familiar with the struggles that families encounter with this disease.

When I heard at ImageSoft about a specific custom solution, that was being built for, for a particular customer. I could not stop thinking about how I can make this more extensive and scale it up so we can help more and more people basically to, to we can help more and more people to find their loves, want loved ones if they are a wandering on the street.

Scott Bade:

So, you mentioned scalability, and can you talk just briefly about the platform, a little bit of the technology behind it?

Julian Vataj:

And the system is able to go in and match little pieces of information and pull data from, from what’s available to, to get the best score, the best hit to identify the person that they’re looking for.

Scott Bade:

What kind of people is SafeEncounter? You mentioned Alzheimer’s any, any other kind of use cases or types of folks that it’s meant for?

Julian Vataj:

Yeah. So we are, we are targeting mainly people that have intellectual disabilities. So that would include anything to Alzheimer’s, dementia, schizophrenia, down syndrome, autism and, and other spectrums basically. But it’s mainly for people that are not able to communicate. So, whenever law enforcement is trying to communicate with them, they are unable to tell them who they are.

And so, law enforcement has to use only certain points of information to basically figure out who these people are.

Scott Bade:

So, you started talking about some of the features there, can you go into a little bit more detail on some of the features and benefit?

Julian Vataj:

So, one of the great benefits I think for the application is that a law enforcement can access this this application from any device.

So, they can be on their car. They can access the, the information will be on their laptops via their cell phones, or even the dispatcher connects the same information from, from their office. Once the law enforcement has signed into, into the application. I mentioned before we use elastic search technology that allows the law enforcement to, to just have partial information about a particular individual. For example, their hair color, or eye color, their gender. And then we are able to go in and find the individuals that match those, those points. However, we also have a different way of searching, which is map-based searching where we pinpoint each address of the [00:05:00] individual that has been registered in the system. And then we use the officer’s location to try and, and have a radius of individuals. For example, that have registered in the application in, in 15-mile radius to help the officer kind of drill down on, on the search results. We also have the ability for law enforcement officers to exchange notes for a particular individual between the colleagues.

So, they can inform them of, of a certain encounter before or other information that they need. But also, the law enforcement admins, certain they can manage the entire agency. They can manage, who’s going to be an officer who has access to what data and all of that is based on, on a very detailed history trail.

Scott Bade:

So, it sounds like you must have gotten some feedback or some involvement from law enforcement. Can you talk a little bit about some of the, the early customers that influenced this?

Julian Vataj:

Yeah. So, one of the first customers that we based, a lot of our research from and try to understand the business process behind this is a Fort Bend County, in Texas.

They have been very helpful to kind of understand the whole you know process that they currently have, which was like, you know, a paper-based system. And then we had to bring in all of their knowledge and build the system, but also based on, on our standards and based on, on our personal experience also.

Scott Bade:

So, I understand the long long-term goal is to get this product in the hands of as many agencies as possible. Is there some advantages to having kind of a broader network for law enforcement?

Julian Vataj:

Yeah, absolutely. The entire goal of, of SafeEncounter is the ability to have, interdistrict connections between law enforcement.

Because unfortunately the reality is that a person does not wander just inside a particular police agencies jurisdiction. So, for example, they can wander off in a neighboring agency or, or other even longer than that. So, the idea is that the parents’ legal guardians and other entities that are adding this information, the system will be able to choose and, and allow other agencies, neighboring agencies, to be able to search information about the dependents that they have registered.

This way agencies can exchange notes for a particular individual, but they can also access information for these individuals that are also from a different agency. And so, the more agencies we have in the system, more people we have in the system, it makes it easier for these officers to return somebody home safely.

Scott Bade:

And I know we’ve talked to some other police agencies. Can you, can you just talk briefly about what SafeEncounter is not for? I know police do a lot of different things, but this is not intended for everything?

Julian Vataj:

So, this system is, is particularly built for, again, for people that [00:08:00] have an intellectual disability. And our whole idea is to, to help these people go home safely. So, we don’t want to use it as a search tool where you register anybody. We don’t wanna use it as a data collection tool and, and again, the parents and, and legal guardians have a hundred percent access to their data.

Scott Bade:

So, it’s not meant for storing criminal data and things like that.

Julian Vataj:

Absolutely not.

Scott Bade:

Okay. So, what’s the future of the technology from your perspective? Do you think it will be useful beyond law enforcement?

Julian Vataj:

Yeah, definitely. I can see it where mental health organizations or mental health institutions, even inside a county for example, can, can use the system for, for different purposes.

We also can see it in a school system to be able to, to add a student specific information and manage it from, from the school’s perspective. So, the, the usage is wide and we’re also focusing on increasing the technologies that we use to search for, for these dependents. Because at the end of the day, when the officers encountered somebody on the street that not able to tell them who they are, they only have so many points of information to search for them that we would like to make that as easy as possible and as accurate as possible.

Scott Bade:

Well, thank you, Julian. I appreciate your input. So, I guess we’ll end it there. So, thank you very much and stay tuned for other SafeEncounter podcast s following this one.

Thank you.

Steve Glisky

Thanks again for joining us on this podcast. To learn more about ImageSoft, please visit imagesoftinc.com that’s ImageSoft I-N-C .com if you haven’t already done so, be sure to subscribe to Paperless Productivity, where we tackle some of the biggest paper-based pain points facing organizations today. We’ll see you next time.