Last updated April 12, 2019
A new cell phone application could save lives during home burglaries. With almost four million home burglaries occurring every year in the United States, a new cell phone app could be a vital tool for helping prevent a possibly fatal encounter with an intruder. This number equates to around one home burglary every 8.5 seconds, judging from statistics compiled across 2008 and 2009 – and in over two million of those burglaries a household member was home at the time, experiencing violent victimization in more than half a million of those occurrences.
The WIIA 2.1 Home Security Camera App, which works with Google Android camera phones, can help warn household members that there is an intruder inside their home. The device operates as though there were “someone inside the home texting pictures to the resident that a burglar has broken in”, according to Carl Robinson, a spokesman for crimestopperapps.com. “It’s high tech prevention for family members’ risk of being injured or murdered by accidental encounter with a burglar surprise in one’s own home.” Robinson goes on to say that the alarm pictures offered by the app offer the ability to get the quickest police interceptor response for as little as a few cents every day, and also sends them directly to the user’s own cell phone.
Android camera phones come free with some carrier contracts or are available for less than $150 for a prepaid purchase minus a contract. The 2.1 app itself costs less than $10.