Bouncing off the plan to create a modern-day Green Book, a guide for African Americans who were seeking places they could safely reside during the Jim Crow period, ANJEL Tech was bloomed. Designed by James A. Samuel, Jr. alongside his wife Evelyn Samuel in October of 2020, the powerful body camera is designed to turn one’s smartphone into a lifeline.
As a Black woman, when ANJEL Tech was brought to my attention, I was automatically intrigued. Every day, when I scroll through social media, another Black woman is missing and there appear to be no traces of her whereabouts. According to reports, last year alone nearly 183,000 Black individuals went missing and of those nearly 100,000 Black women vanished. These statistics are frightening when you consider the cries of these individuals are often met with silence and their families left with unanswered questions.
ANJEL Tech puts the power back into the hands of victims and their families by storing live streams of the incident into a cloud that cannot be altered or deleted. While the application is active, chosen loved ones will have continuous access to the location of the user on the ANJEL Tech application. If a victim is harmed, now families will have a fair chance to seek justice. Even in the circumstance that the phone loses connection from the server or is discarded, the audio and footage of the stream will end and automatically go to the cloud.
“The problem is for 400 years in our country African Americans have not known where their loved ones were in their greatest times of need. We have not had a cloud-based secure repository for our own body camera, our own story, our own voice, or of the actions we took,” James said exclusively to AfroTech. “When the police report comes out and it says this happened, our narrative, our version of that story, our account, our actions, our words, and our deeds aren’t recorded. Or they’re misreported or misstated. Now with ANJEL Tech, we have our account first.”
ANJEL Tech Alleviates Fear For Black Families
The need for the app only heightened in the passing moments of George Floyd, Trayvon Martin, Mike Brown, and Elijah McClain, affirming the world needed a dire solution.
These tragedies serve as a harsh reminder that during imminent dangers or unprecedented circumstances, protection should not be an option for the Black community but a right. As children venture into the world to experience the normalities of living, parents can have peace of mind knowing ANJEL Tech can place the power of surveillance back into the hands of the Black community. The application can even provide parents with an updated geographic location of their child, which is updated every ten seconds.
“As parents of two African-American boys, with all the things that are going on in the world right now, we have a heightened sense of concern,” Evelyn revealed exclusively to AfroTech. “I worry about what the world will tell them or how the world will see them or how the world will perceive them just based on what they look like.”
She continued: “So having something like this gives us a little more reassurance that we can know where they are and we can feel better about their safety when they’re out and about because that concern is real.”
Alongside ANJEL Tech’s advanced integrations, they plan to expand their software by providing more discrete methods to enhance the safety of its users. One of these methods will be through wearable technologies, which will allow users to have an alternate action plan in the event they do not have access to their cell phones.
Currently, ANJEL Tech is available on any iOS or Android device and offers plans as low as $4.99.
