A Siri Shortcut activated by the phrase “Hey, Siri, I’m being pulled over” could prove valuable in the event of a police traffic stop. The shortcut triggers your iPhone to start recording video from its front-facing camera, pauses any music, sends your location to a trusted contact, and uploads the video to iCloud or another cloud server of your choice.
The shortcut is designed to help protect users during interactions with law enforcement.
‘Siri, I’m being pulled over’
Siri Shortcuts are easy-to-use but powerful tools that can automate strings of actions on iOS devices. They essentially create step-by-step recipes, which allow your Apple device to carry out multiple functions without you needing to manually activate each one in turn. People can create their own, or create and then share them with other users.
The “I’m getting pulled over” shortcut was developed by Arizona-based Robert Petersen. Originally published in 2018, the shortcut is receiving renewed press attention as protesters demonstrate against police misconduct.
Petersen updated the shortcut after its debut. As he notes on Reddit, the current version:
“pauses any music that may be playing, turns down your brightness and volume, turns on Do Not Disturb, and sends a message to the contact of your choosing letting them know you’re being pulled over and what your current location is. It then opens your front camera and starts a video recording so you have a video record of being pulled over. Once you stop the recording it sends a copy of the video to a contact you specify, puts volume and brightness back to where they were, turns off Do Not Disturb, and gives you the option to send to iCloud Drive or Dropbox.”
Petersen says the shortcut works best with dash-mounted iPhones, which should provide the best possible vantage point for your recording.
There are, as Petersen notes, a couple of limitations. For one thing, you’ll need to unlock your iPhone manually, since shortcuts cannot work from the lockscreen. You also must manually hit “send” to upload the video.
However, this is a free shortcut that will likely be of a lot of interest to people right now. You can download “I’m getting pulled over” here.
