App helping regional police find lost people quicker

A digital app is making it easier for emergency responders to locate people who get lost.

The Waterloo Regional Police Service (WRPS) has been using the ‘what3words’ app since 2020.

It shows various three-metre blocks throughout the world, assigning a three-word combination to each location. It allows people to readily provide their exact location to police if they get desperately lost and are in need of aid from emergency services.

“We do say it’s the easiest way to find and share exact locations of where people are,” said Jon Chessum, a 911 dispatcher with WRPS.

“An example of this would be if they were at an LRT station in Kitchener and they were not sure which one they were at, if they called in on 911 and told me that they were at one of these stops and their three words of where they are are ‘Folders, Detail, and Glory,’ I can then type that in into our system and it will tell me they’re at the Fairway LRT station,” said Chessum. “So it’s a really, really easy way to pinpoint exactly where they are.”

He said the system has been used a dozen times over the past couple of months in the region, a trend he hopes will continue moving forward, given the tedious and potentially dire nature of the previous systems used.

“Back in the day, typically if it was really large property and we knew that somebody was somewhere on this property, could be hundreds of acres, usually we would keep them on the line and we would say, ‘do you hear the officers yelling for you,’ or, ‘do you hear the police car siren in the background?'”

He said one recent example involved someone jogging along a trail late at night, rolling their ankle, and needing some emergency attention.

“They could no longer walk out by themselves, and it was getting dark,” Chessum mentioned. “We knew the generic area where they were, but it was such a large property for us to check that it could have taken hours to find them.”

He said the app allowed them to get to the scene before further damage or other issues could have arisen, a situation that can become especially drastic in the first few hours.

Chessum noted people don’t even need to have the app installed on their phones to be found with the technology.

“As long as we have your cellphone number, we can actually text a link and it will open it up on whatever web browser you have on your phone, and then it will provide those three words instantly without having to go through downloading the application to get those three words.”

He added many police services across Canada and the U.S. are now using using the app. It’s currently available for Apple and Android devices, as well as through the ‘what3words’ website.