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During his time as an officer for the LA county police department, Rahul Sidhu noticed inefficient trends in the day-to-day operations of law enforcement.
With no in-depth tracking systems, most American police departments are only able to rely on quantifiable data like tickets written or arrests to determine a police officer’s activity and success.
“It really is — pardon my french — a shitty way to go about doing this,” explained Sidhu. “I remember riding around with a partner of mine and we were discussing how great it would be if we had software that would allow us to directly integrate with the community. When I left the department, I hit the ground running and started building.”
Sidhu enrolled in classes at LA’s General Assembly where he met the head instructor and future CTO of his company, SPIDR Tech.
The company began creating a police intelligence platform to house officer-to-officer information, but in order to connect more efficiently with the community, Sidhu began building out a public-facing database called SPIDR Web.
If a citizen was to call the police department and ask them to drive through their neighborhood or their street, the current dispatch system has no way of tracking or reporting if an officer did or did not survey the area on a given night.
With SPIDR Web, GPS data and dispatch data are used to track which officers patrolled the area, what activity they saw, and how many times they drove by. The information is then available to the public so they can see quantifiable action in the neighborhood and respond directly to the department.
SPIDR has opened talks with LA and Tucson law enforcement and is currently participating in Techstars in New York, where they were selected from more than 1,700 companies. They are also one of three LA companies selected by the Kairos Society for their 2015 K50, recognizing the world’s best startups led by entrepreneurs 25 years and younger.
With more than 1.2 million local police officers in the U.S. and more than 300,000 on the federal side, SPIDR has climbed its way into an industry in need of major disruption.
“Law enforcement is conquered, in terms of technology, by old bloated software companies that have outdated tech and are basically bullying departments with licensing agreements,” Sidhu said.
After Techstars, the company will move back to LA and focus on expanding on a local level before launching a national campaign. Their intelligence platform and community network are available to law enforcement agencies at a lower cost than current software and SPIDR plans to expand its platform's services as the company continues to grow.
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