iOS 12 Shortcut uses iPhone to record police during traffic stop

Dallas
Police Department via Twitter

• A big new feature for iPhones this year is called
  Shortcuts, which is an app that lets you write scripts for the
  iPhone.
• One Shortcut that has been widely shared is called
  Police. It records police interactions and texts a
  predetermined contact that you’ve been pulled
  over. 
• It also sends video of the encounter to your
  contact.
• The creator says that the shortcut can be adapted for
  other situations. 

There’s a big new feature for iPhone experts this year: It’s
called
Shortcuts, and with a little bit of logic and know-how, you
can stitch several apps together and create a script that can be
activated by pressing a button or Siri.

Some of the early uses are predictable:
Saving Instagram photos, sharing the song you’re listening
to, or creating a morning routine that activates your lights and
plays a song.

But Robert Petersen of
Arizona has developed a more serious shortcut: It’s called
Police, and it monitors police interactions so you have a record
of what’s happened. 

Once it’s installed, you just have to say: Hey Siri, I’m
getting pulled over. 

Then the program,
available on Reddit, pauses music you may be playing, turns
down brightness on the iPhone, and turns on Do Not Disturb.

But it also sends a quick text to a pre-determined contact to
tell them you’ve been pulled over, and it starts recording using
the iPhone’s front-facing camera. Once you’ve stopped recording,
it can text or email the video to a different pre-determined
contact and save it to Dropbox. 

“It seemed to me that if you’re getting pulled over it couldn’t
hurt to have a recording of the incident,” Petersen said in DMs
on Tuesday. “The police these days in many places have body cams,
so this could be the civilian equivalent.”

The idea of a hands-free mobile app for fraught interactions
isn’t new: the American Civil Liberties Union has developed
apps since 2012 that records and livestreams encounters with
the police. While he didn’t base the Shortcut on existing apps,
Petersen said he’s been inspired by projects by digital rights
groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

While it’s difficult to tell how many people have downloaded the
Shortcut, it’s the third most popular post of all time on the
burgeoning
subreddit dedicated to sharing Shortcut recipes, and it’s
been widely
covered in the Apple enthusiast press. It’s on version 1.4
and changes so far have focused on bug fixes and additional
service support, like iCloud Drive.

Most of the responses he’s received since the original post in
September have been positive, and some people want to adapt the
Shortcut to different potentially dangerous situations.

“Some [people] say they’ve had issues in the past with the
police, and one woman planned on using the Shortcut to help with
a stalker issue she was having with an ex-boyfriend so that she
could send her location to family quickly should anything
occur,” Petersen said. 

“That’s one of the great things about Shortcuts, anyone can edit
a Shortcut someone else has made to suit their specific needs,”
he continued. 

You don’t need to be a programmer to create your own Shortcut

Screenshot

You can examine all the steps a Shortcut takes and all the apps
and services it uses — so you can be sure that the script isn’t,
say, uploading your data to a random server when you use a
Shortcut you didn’t write. The entire recipe for Police can be
accessed in the Shortcuts app. 

Peterson says he doesn’t have a background in programming, but he
knows enough to get around, and has written scripts for MacOS in
the past. He says he’s an Apple fan, and that he’s surprised that
Apple has introduced this kind of feature for power users given
the company’s tendency to keep things simple and locked
down. 

If you’re interested in making your own Shortcuts, Peterson has
some advice:

“The platform has a lot of potential, and if you read the
Apple user guides and consult with others on forums, or just look
at how other people’s shortcuts work and ‘reverse engineer’ them
to your own needs you can learn a lot quickly.”

You can download the Police shortcut
here. Make sure you have the Shortcuts
app installed.