New personal safety app shows the most dangerous streets to walk

Personal safety app WalkSafe+ has launched a new ‘Follow me’ feature to share users’ journey with family and friends.

Demand for personal safety apps is rising with 69 per cent of women who reported feeling very unsafe walking home, according to Crime Survey for England and Wales.

With 183,587 sexual offences committed in 2021 in the UK, WalkSafe+ aims to provide users with the safest route to their destination.

The app allows users to plan safer journeys, with info on recent crimes around and it can notify family and friends once arrived at their destination or if in danger. 

The app has already been trusted by 600,000 users who benefits from the many features of the platform. WalkSafe+ is based on recent police crime data which makes the app more reliable.

However, users are able to update data themselves. Emma Kay, founder of WalkSafe+, said: “We only allow our users to report if they feel unsafe or if they are any rowdy groups or if there’s no street lighting.

“We monitor user reports by noting how many reports we get in one area, so if we receive five reports from five different users about one specific issue then we are confident that there is an issue there, of course it’s hard when we have one off reports, but by balancing the user reports and the police data we keep our data reliable and accurate.”

The app is based on police data on knife crimes, assaults, sexual assault and muggings that gets updated every month.

Following the audience demand, the app has now a ‘Follow me’ section in which the user can add close friends’ and family members’ with whom they can share their journeys. “Our users really wanted to have someone who could watch over their journey in real time. That is why we created the ‘Follow me’ feature,” said Kay.

In the event of a low phone battery, the close contacts are automatically notified so that they know of the low battery and can predict the average time of the journey. 

In terms of future plans, Kay explained that the company is conducting seminars for companies as “they have a duty of care towards their staff and their customer”.

“We are very aware that our app is only a minute part of the solution. We actually wish we didn’t have to exist and we wish more was being done,” she added.