Central grad’s app for police encounters sees download ‘spike’

Business has been picking up for Mbye Njie this week, but it’s not for reasons he’d like to celebrate.

A graduate of Central High School and Davidson College, Njie helped launch the Legal Equalizer mobile application last November with the intent of assisting people in interactions with police officers. Over those eight months, about 40,000 people have downloaded the free app.

While that number has “steadily increased,” violent exchanges in Louisiana and Minnesota have had an impact.

“Unfortunately, we had a bigger spike this week,” Njie said.

The app allows a user to select three contacts to receive a message letting them know the user has been pulled over by police, complete with the user’s current location. It also lets them know that the user is “currently ok.” Then, the user can video-record the interaction, and the video will be stored on the device, within the app itself and on a server managed my Legal Equalizer LLC.

That way, if the phone itself is damaged or confiscated, the user will still have access to the video.

“You can literally re-log onto the app, and the video stays on the app as well,” Njie said.

The American Civil Liberties Union launched a similar app called Mobile Justice while Legal Equalizer was still in beta testing, but Njie said his team’s app has some additional functions. One is the contact button that allows friends and family to know your location, and the other is the video storage.

Mobile Justice’s videos go to an ACLU server and are not readily available to the user the way Legal Equalizer’s are.

“You don’t have access to those videos,” Njie said.

The app has remained free to users, and Njie, 35, said the team, also consisting of programmer Martin Davis, attorney Thomas Headen and social media manager Jacquin Milhouse-Headen, was in the process of signing on attorneys for advertisements to help fund the project.

Njie added that videos would be the property of the user unless they became part of a legal investigation.

“If we got subpoenaed for a video or something like that, we’re going to have to give it up,” he said.

That cooperation with law enforcement was key to the development of the app. In addition to the recording and contact functions, Legal Equalizer includes pages about protocol and rights involved in an encounter with the police, which came about after conversations with the Bibb County Sheriff’s Office.

Njie also said he’s been in conversation with agencies in other states about potential additions to the app and said he’d provide video even if it showed that the officer was in the right or was wrongfully accused of improper action.

“We fully want to work with police officers,” he said.

Unfortunately, Njie noted that Legal Equalizer wouldn’t have helped in the widely-publicized situations that led to the deaths of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile. In both of those instances, videos from witnesses were available.

He added that those incidents, coupled with the deaths of five police officers in Dallas on Thursday, have led to a tear-filled 72 hours.

“Police should not kill innocent people, and people should not kill innocent police officers,” he said.

This story was originally published July 8, 2016 at 1:54 PM with the headline "Central grad’s app for police encounters sees download ‘spike’."