Police in Ukraine’s capital city of Kiev (Kyiv) are testing a new innovation that allows residents to track queries made to the police through an online platform. As reported by Ukrainian online publication AIN.UA, the initiative is part of a growing state strategy to liberalize and digitalize the relationship and interactions between citizens and government apparatus.
The police requests tracking system, currently running in test mode, functions thus: when a city resident calls the police number 102 from a mobile phone, an SMS with the number of the query is then registered and made available to the caller. The caller can then use the tracking number to locate their query on the police website and oversee progress.
In Lviv (Lvov), too, the police has begun to interact with the inhabitants via the Internet. This past June, all officers in the city were required to create Facebook accounts (example) for this purpose.
As Dmitriy Zagariya, head of the Lviv police department and the man who launched this initiative explained, “a personal page on the network will allow for rapid responses by officers to the appeals of citizens. It will enable local residents to pose any questions and receive rapid responses regarding the work of law-enforcement officials or learn how to act in a given situation.”
