iPhone’s Siri Can Record Your Police Encounter When Pulled Over

1.9K Mourning the death of Geroge Floyd, along with other blows dealt with the Black community, many brands and companies have come forth with a solution on their end to help overcome police brutality. Amazon, for instance, has just recently prohibited local law enforcement from using its facial ID tech ‘Rekognition.’

Although first created by Robert Petersen back in 2018, the updated feature we are talked about is a shortcut compatible with iOS 12 onwards that lets the user fully record any interaction that’s going to take place between them and the police.

Upon saying, “Hey, Siri! I’m getting pulled over”, all operations will shut down, the brightness will decrease, and the phone will be automatically switched to the highly restricted Do Not Disturb mode. Then, the front camera will pop up, and a video will start to record.

The function also sends a text message to a pre-selected contact, which informs them about your pulling over, along with your live location. After the video has recorded, it’s simultaneously sent to the pre-selected contact as well and gives you an option to send it to iCloud and Dropbox too.

Robert Petersen said the following to CNN affiliate KCTV just last year,

“I just wanted a way for anyone to have proof of their version of events in the unlikely scenario that something unexpected happens during a police interaction, and if 1 in 10,000 people find my shortcut useful at all I’d be glad.”

As mentioned by Petersen, it isn’t every day that a police officer could end up assaulting you for no reason when you’re pulled over. However, still, a recorded video could potentially make everything crystal clear.

Downloading Steps

• First off, the feature falls under the category of a Shortcut- an app for iPhones compatible with iOS 12 and needs downloading.
• After downloading the Shortcut app, go to Settings and open Shortcuts. From there, tap on “Allow Untrusted Shortcuts.”
• Next, click on this link to go straight to get the shortcut. Tap on ”Get Shortcut” on this link to proceed further.
• After the app launches, hover over to ”Add Untrusted Shortcut” and tap on it.
• Select a contact who’ll later be sent the recorded video and your current location.

It’s highly recommended to test launch the shortcut since it’s going to ask for a few permissions at first such as asking to record a video.

For Android, there’s no similar direct feature as of yet, but multiple alternatives could always be found on the Google Play Store.