New Software Offers Community-Focused Features

Cities and counties that want to quickly adopt on-line public safety tools for citizens now have a new option, conceived by a group of Alpharetta (Geo.) police officers and developed by a local technology company. Interactive Defense System (IDS) is a set of on-line applications that provide community alerting, crime mapping, home watch scheduling and other features that are easily accessible by anyone with an Internet connection. The APD officers conceived the set of applications in their off-duty time, incorporated as Noble Heroes Inc. and then took software developer F3 Technologies Inc. as a joint partner to market IDS. Customers pay a monthly fee to use IDS, based on the jurisdiction’s population, and have the option to include advertising on their pages to help cover the fee. The IDS public safety features can be expanded to include other municipal tasks, including parks and recreation calendars, public works scheduling, on-line voting and polling, and facility reservations. The Dunwoody (Geo.) police department was an early adopter of IDS, and officials there say a wide range of city residents are using the IDS features. DPD officials credit IDS with the recent capture of three suspects after they were profiled on the Web site. Read more about Dunwood PD’s experience here, and find more information about IDS here.