On the Leaders Council podcast, Simon Franc, the founder of Kulpa, discussed the launch of the new Kulpa app. He expressed his hope that the app will empower victims of abuse, sexual assault, and violent crime globally by providing them and their associates with the ability to record and report incidents.
The free-to-use app allows legally admissible forensic imagery and other associated evidence to be gathered and safely stored to support police investigations and prosecutions. To make this possible, the app was developed in consultation with police forces, victims’ support organizations and criminal justice experts, is fully compliant with data protection and privacy laws, and caches evidence privately and securely so that it can never be maliciously deleted.
Franc said on the podcast: “Kulpa is focused on assisting victims of violent crime. By that, we are talking about assault, domestic abuse, and sexual offences. Essentially, what the app does is it allows anyone to capture and store all the evidence related to these offences in a format which ensures that it is immediately legally admissible. This means when the victim does choose to submit it to the police, then the authorities hopefully have all the evidence they need to safeguard the victim and succesufully prosecute the offender.”
For Franc, it is Kulpa’s ability to make any evidence captured scalable and admissible as forensic evidence that truly makes the app a gamechanger in victim empowerment.
He explained: “We are asked a lot about why people simply cannot take these images on their phones. The first reason is that it is not scaled in any way and for an image to be considered a forensic image and forensic evidence, it must have a scale applied to it. Therefore, sometimes you see CSIs going around with a large camera and ruler and taking images at a crime scene or images of a victim’s injuries.
“With Kulpa, the machine learning and artificial intelligence that we have designed allows the app to accurately scale any image taken through the app. So, this empowers anybody to be able to submit images as evidence as a forensic scientist would.
“Furthermore, if you simply capture something on your mobile device, it must then be taken to the police if or when you choose to report it, and this can often result in the police needing to download a person’s entire device to verify the evidence. Anything taken through Kulpa is already verified because the app captures all the metadata associated with the upload. We also must remember that it may not be safe to hold such evidence just on our mobiles, especially in domestic violence scenarios. So, by uploading evidence to the app it is safely stored so that even if somebody maliciously deletes evidence from the device or the device becomes lost or destroyed, evidence is securely stored in the cloud.”
Franc went on to discuss his background as the founder and CEO of another business, the leading forensic science service provider Forensic Equity, and how his experiences at the helm made him feel compelled to change the landscape for violent crime victims having seen first-hand that 77 per cent of reported incidents are unable to proceed to prosecution owing to evidential difficulties [as of September 2021].
“Evidential difficulties are one of several issues we currently face that Kulpa seeks to address,” Franc said.
“50 per cent of people that are victims of any crime will never report it. When we look at sexual assault crimes specifically, that drops down to just 16 per cent. There is a significant issue of confidence in reporting crimes, therefore, and we have to look at how we can encourage people to report them.
“If someone doesn’t want to report a crime immediately because of trauma, embarrassment or other reasons, we need to enable them to report in a manner that will not be detrimental with regards to evidence. So, we capture the evidence using the app and it can be submitted to the authorities at any time. This gives the victim the freedom to report when they feel ready and in a safe environment, while also ensuring that the evidence remains intact and admissible in court.”
Kulpa is a powerful tool for victims of abuse, sexual assault, and violent crime, providing a secure and private way to gather and store forensic evidence. The app's ability to scale and verify images as forensic evidence empowers victims to take control of the situation and report crimes in a safe and effective manner. The app's development in consultation with police forces, victims' support organizations, and criminal justice experts, ensures that it is fully compliant with data protection and privacy laws, giving victims the peace of mind that their evidence will be handled securely and confidentially.
Photo provided by Anatomap
