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in si de ha lto n. co m O ak vi lle B ea ve r | T hu rs da y, Ju ne 17 ,2 02 1 | 24 Halton police are now mak- ing use of a special mobile app which they say is a game chang- er when it comes to finding lost people and resolving other types of emergencies. Don't keep me in suspense. What is it? The company that offers the app is called What3words. It is a geocode system that has divided the surface of the Earth into 57 trillion squares, that are three metres by three metres, and assigned a unique three-word label to each. You've lost me. How is that going to help Halton police or anyone else? Halton police and other local emergency services regularly get calls from people who do not know exactly where they are. People who have the What3words app on their mo- bile device can access it and pro- vide the 911 operator with the three-word designation for the area they are in. Since Halton police are now utilizing What3words they can use that three-word designation to immediately determine the person's exact location. Halton police Staff Sgt. Ste- phanie Jamieson said emergen- cy services in the UK and Aus- tralia have been using this app since 2019. Halton police had their first success with it in the fall of 2020. First success? What hap- pened? Police said a woman was hik- ing in a remote area and found a firearm on the bank of a creek. She called police, but was un- able to provide them a location because she didn't know where she was. The woman had the What3words app on her phone and was able to give the three- word code to police. Officers identified the loca- tion, found the gun and seized it. I feel like police already have something like this. Can't they already track your cellphone or something? Jamieson said police can 'ping' a cellphone, but that doesn't give them an exact loca- tion, just a general area that might have a radius of hundreds of metres. The What3words app can give police a three metre by three metre location. This proved important in February 2021 when a couple from Toronto and their six-year- old son got lost while hiking at Rattlesnake Point Conservation Area in Milton. The mother called 911 at 6:15 p.m., at which point it had al- ready gotten dark. She also said the battery of her phone was about to die. "You could hear her son cry- ing in the background. It was something that we wanted to re- spond to very quickly," said Ja- mieson. "We were able to talk the woman through downloading the app and we were able to have officers at their location in un- der 25 minutes." Given the size of the conser- vation area, Jamieson noted, the family could have been stuck in the cold for hours had the app not been utilized. OK. Does it have any limi- tations? Halton Police Communica- tions Supervisor Brian Dodd said the effectiveness of the app decreases somewhat when the person using it is indoors, but even here it proved superior to pinging the cellphone. Dodd provided an example from December 2020 in which a woman called Halton police and said her sister was being held against her will by two men. The victim didn't know where she was but had been able to reach out to her sister by text- ing. She was afraid her captors would hear her speaking if she actually called anyone, Dodd said. Police tried to ping the vic- tim's cellphone, but this result- ed in a search area with a radius of 850 metres within an urban setting featuring apartment buildings and condos. Police then sent the victim a text containing the What3words app. The victim used this app and police were able to narrow the search area to a 32-metre radi- us. Officers ultimately zeroed in on an apartment within a condo, made two arrests and rescued a victim of human trafficking. How do I get more informa- tion about this? You can visit https:// what3words.com. NEW APP A GAMECHANGER FOR FINDING MISSING PEOPLE Members of the Halton Police Board discuss the What3words app, which has helped police in a number of emergency situations. Halton police photo DAVID LEA dlea@metroland.com NEWS