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PhillyDeals: Call-a-cop with Philly's Text-a-Tip

You see something. You hear something. You want to tell the cops. But you don't want to be seen, heard, or traced calling 911?

You see something. You hear something.

You want to tell the cops.

But you don't want to be seen, heard, or traced calling 911?

In Philadelphia, you can use your phone keyboard to text PPDTIP, then a message. Anonymously.

That's at least one fewer step than in, say, New York, where people are asked to type both a text code (TIP577) and a destination code (CRIMES), then answer questions. Other towns have smartphone apps you have to download. You don't need that in Philly.

With Philly's Text-a-Tip, "you can provide info without putting a face to it," Lt. John Stanford, head of public affairs and social media at the Philadelphia Police Department, told me. "You can communicate with us via text, and we're not forcing you to call 911 from a place where maybe you can't call 911."

The department has logged more than 2,600 text tips since the service went up last year. "It's been extremely helpful," especially in narcotics and neighbor disputes, Stanford said.

"Philadelphia is the leader in this," said Kay Kinton, a spokeswoman for Twilio, the San Francisco company that makes the remote-server (cloud) communications platform the Philly service is built on.

"They realize the cultural norms about how you report things have been changing," said Patrick Malatack, the Narberth native who serves as Twilio's product director. "If you're in a group of people and something's disruptive, you can message without anyone knowing who you are texting."

Twilio, a supporter of PennApps and other area "hackathons" where computer-science scholars compete to build quickie applications, credited a Northern Liberties software firm, Hyaline Creative, with linking Twilio's platform to the Philadelphia police.

Hyaline cofounder Daniel Steinberg told me how that hooked up: As a Drexel graphic-design freshman in 2002, he built a website for his dad's orthopedics practice at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. Karima Zedan, then an officer with Penn's police, asked Steinberg's nascent firm to build a student tip line.

Steinberg graduated Drexel in 2009 with a master's in info tech. He started Hyaline with partner Lloyd Emelle and other Drexel programmers. When Zedan moved to the city police department, she asked Hyaline to build a website for it, too. The tip line and Text-a-Tip were part of the deal. (Zedan has since moved to Comcast.)

"Doing their public website has led to a lot of other opportunities," Steinberg added. "We've put together packages they found compelling. We have some cool programs we're developing." Text-a-Tip has grown quickly, spreading by word of mouth, "even without a huge public- awareness campaign."

What's Hyaline mean? It's based on the Greek for clear, Steinberg said. "We simplify."

215-313-3124 @PhillyJoeD

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