In the wake of the Boston Marathon bombings last year, eyewitnesses deluged authorities with uploaded videos and photos, sometimes clogging up servers and perhaps prolonging and hindering the police investigation.

Now Amazon Web Services has come to the rescue with virtually endless bandwidth. The Los Angeles Sheriff's Department has teamed with AWS and others, resulting in an Android and iOS app allowing eyewitnesses to upload footage to the authorities during emergencies. The system, known as the Large Emergency Event Digital Information Repository (LEEDIR), is a police tip line on steroids.

"When the public really wants to catch these bad guys as badly as we do, this is the mechanism," Scott Edson, a Los Angeles Sheriff's commander who was among those who helped develop the system, told The Associated Press. "They can help us by sending us pictures and video."

Civil rights groups suggest that innocent people captured on film using the LEEDIR app could become the subject of investigations themselves. Still, the app is a switch of sorts from those made by the ACLU and others that urge the public to record the police in action.

At the moment, Santa Barbara, CA authorities are the first to use the system and are calling on the public to upload images taken of a riot last month at the Isla Vista community near the University of California at Santa Barbara. About 50 people were hospitalized during the melee.

"Did you witness the civil unrest during the Deltopia in Isla Vista? Please send us any photos or videos you may have captured to help us in our investigation and disaster response," the LEEDIR website reads. "You can submit photos and videos anonymously or provide additional information along with your submission. We are seeking to identify several subjects wanted for violent felonies that occurred during the evening."

Because the program is so new, Santa Barbara authorities said they have received few submissions so far.

The technology allows for the uploading of content from computers, as well as from Facebook, Google+, Instagram, and YouTube.

The platform, which was released in November, was designed by CitizenGlobal of Culver City, CA. It allows police agencies across the United States to access the database and to call for citizen submissions. The service is free of charge to local, state, and federal authorities during major emergency events.

"With tens of millions of smartphones in use in the US, it's a virtual certainty that citizens will be taking videos and photos at any terrorist attack, large-scale emergency, or natural disaster," George D. Crowley Jr., a CitizenGlobal co-CEO, said in a statement when the product was unveiled.