Hi, another Wildfire Co-Founder here, thanks for the great questions!
> Have you considered using police databases or radios to mine incidents?
Yeah, we’re currently mining online police databases and Twitter feeds and posting (and citing) these alerts in Wildfire.
> Calling the police should be your top priority when witnessing a crime, how can you tap in to that mindshare?
In Berkeley, our beta launch site, police are monitoring Wildfire.So if an event occurred that the police hadn’t heard about (or hasn’t happened yet), they’re going to be able to reach out to the poster and collect more details.
> How will you deal with critics that say you're actually making the area less safe by redirecting attention to your app instead of the police?
What we’ve realized is that often times when an emergency situation happens those nearby aren’t aware. This is what we’re trying to solve.
> What would incentivize someone to report a crime via your app?
We’re trying to impose positive reinforcement on our app just as reddit and yik yak might do with upvotes. Additionally, through our app, we’re hoping to create a local community through which users will feel responsible to say something if they see something.
Also, because we are scraping crime and safety related information, we don’t face a network effect that most social apps face. Regardless of whether or not users nearby are posting, information is constantly being being mined from local news organizations, the police, and social media.
> Do you know if notifying everyone in the area of a crime would actually make people safer, or feel safer? I think in cities most people benefit from ignorance of the number of crimes happening around them.
Ignorance and apathy result in less informed people about situations happening around them. Our goal is to share safety related information in real-time so that anyone walking home late at night can use it to help them navigate home safely.