Blockchain services company VX Technologies has partnered with the Philadelphia Police Department to improve transparency and accountability by documenting vital police records on the BSV blockchain.
This includes essential evidentiary information which will go a long way in improving public trust with policing, explains Zachary Weiner, President of VX Technologies. VX Technologies builds applications which provide verifiable and secure certificates on the BSV blockchain, easily accessible around the world.
Weiner explained that one of the biggest issues facing local governments is an inability to make records immutable. ‘For example, we have seen police forces in the United States get sued because the department had changed records or rewritten reports to be more favourable to their case,’ he said.
Weiner added that in at least one instance in the United States, this led to a judgement against the police department for tens of millions of dollars.
‘It shouldn’t be possible to make amendments to records. But even in a case where you are making updates and addendums should tell a story over time – but nobody should be able to go back to change their story and make it look consistent over time.’
A chance meeting at the BSV blockchain Citadel
Weiner said that the partnership with the Philadelphia Police Department came about after a chance meeting at the BSV blockchain’s South Florida Citadel with a team which is managing some of its records.
‘There are a number of records for the police department in Philadelphia that are being kept in a database that really should be on the blockchain. We met up and created an integration so that an admin for the Philly PD website can upload their spreadsheets on an ongoing basis and have new cases recorded on the blockchain.’
Weiner noted that this system was built using VX Technlogies’ Magic Dapp. Magic Dapp harnesses the power of blockchain technology to provide an immutable and tamper-resistant environment for a user’s data records.
Currently, two types of police datasets are being recorded on the blockchain:
- Officer-involved shootings – which includes any incident where an officer discharges their weapon;
- All homicide reports.
Establishing Facts in a post-truth World
Weiner noted that these are two incredibly important datasets being placed in an immutable data structure that can be audited directly by the public. While it may be impossible to stop officials from lying outright, the blockchain does act as a vital source of transparency and accountability.
‘If we look at the blockchain as storing data points rather than opinions, then we can focus on what the actual data points are to form our opinions and use the chain as the source of truth in the technical sense,’ he said.
‘The beneficiary of this technology is the public. And I think there are a bunch of other use cases for government data, just like keeping the police more honest. I think there’s more within the police department that we can do besides homicide reports of officer involved shootings. There are other types of misconduct, just other types of data.’
Weiner indicated that the technology could also be used to track everything from water quality, distributing payments and even paying for utilities.
‘If we can take steps to remove the emotion from the policies that we create, to deal with the facts, it will set a standard for how other areas of government should work as well as how accountable they are.’
Only possible on the BSV blockchain
Weiner noted that Magic Dapp and the partnership between VX technologies and the Philadelphia Police is only possible by using the BSV blockchain as the underlying technology.
‘I think the single most important thing is that from a business perspective, we have fixed pricing for the number of Satoshis that it’s going to take us to put a record on the chain. The ability for us to determine how much we’re going to charge a client is an incredible advantage over the variability of all of the other blockchains.’
Another key factor is the inherent scalability of the BSV blockchain, he said. While the number of police incidents should hopefully decrease in an ideal world, there are other datasets which could increase exponentially and still be recorded on-chain.
‘If we’re talking about water data, or temperature information, or the contracts that governments execute among themselves – the volume of information is not going to slow. So the capacity of the (block)chain is very important to us.’
