OWS Inspires "I'm Getting Arrested" App
The Android app lets protesters alert contacts before getting handcuffed.
| Posted Wednesday, Oct. 26, 2011, at 9:47 AM
Photo graph by Spencer Platt/Getty Images.
Occupying Wall Street and about to get thrown in jail? Now you can tell all your friends about your impending arrest with the touch of a button.
A Brooklyn software developer who sympathizes with the protests has built an “I’m Getting Arrested” app for Android phones, the New York Daily News reports. The user writes a text message in advance and enters a recipient list, and the app creates a button so the protester can send the blast just before the cuffs get slapped on.
The developer, named Jason Van Anden, told the paper he came up with the idea when a colleague lamented that his girlfriend was about to get busted but didn’t have an easy way to inform all her contacts.
As of Monday morning, some 9,000 people had downloaded the app. The way things have been going in Chicago, Cincinnati, and Oakland—and could be headed in New York—there figures to be quite a market for it. Van Anden is working on an iPhone version next.
