BlackBerry has joined the Vulnerable Persons Project, a tech initiative that plans to create a database to prevent or help solve missing persons cases in partnership with the Mohawk Council of Kahnawa:ke.
“It is good business to align ourselves with Indigenous peoples,” wrote JP Beaupre, senior development manager for global partnerships in a blog post on Inside Blackberry. “It is also the right thing to do to help stop violence against Indigenous women and children.”
The company is joining to fight what it calls a “quiet plague of violence” that saw Canada’s aboriginal women and girls account for at least 16 percent of the country’s murder victims over the last three decades, despite being just four percent of its total female population.
The plan, says BlackBerry, will enable community-run data collection and system management, emergency notification and crisis communications (powered by its existing technology AtHoc). It will also allow families to securely share sensitive records with law enforcement agencies and healthcare providers.
Other partners in the project are Forrest Green, a Canadian consulting and professional services firm and analytics firm SAS Canada.
Source: BlackBerry
