“What Worldstar Hip Hop was for fight videos, we’re trying to become for police interactions,” says XMO’s creator, Channing Harris.
While users can review their interactions with cops and provide information including the officers’ badge numbers, officers’ names won’t be attached to reviews and badge numbers won’t be visible to other users—only to the XMO developers.
Efforts to create a “Yelp for cops” in other cities have been made before. In 2014, after the shooting of Michael Brown, a family team of teen developers in Georgia created the Five-O app, which offered a similar reviewing system. But with only a few hundred downloads in the app store, the idea doesn’t seem to have taken off. Meanwhile, the ACLU launched an app for collecting police conduct videos last month; ACLU branches in 18 states are offering the app so far, but Illinois isn’t yet one of them.
“Let a thousand flowers bloom,” Futterman says. “Innovations like this create the conditions for people locally and around the nation to advocate publicly for government to do what it’s supposed to be doing,” which is keeping police departments accountable.
“I think it increases the sense that you can participate, you can speak up, people are listening,” says Hunt. “I love this idea that [XMO is] not about scandal, it’s not about lawsuits—it’s about what everyday policing feels like in their neighborhood.”
