If Citizen tanks that strikes me as a beneficial outcome. One of the other commenters here described this app as “snitching-as-a-service” but I think it’s more insidious than that. Citizen is very much in the same pattern as listening to the police scanner continuously: it’s a panic fetish tool. Were actual crimes committed? Citizen doesn’t know. Can you, personally, do anything about the “danger” all around you? Sure! Whittle down your trust in your neighbors more, don’t advocate for different outcomes from your city, hire Citizen’s private security force! It’s “if it bleeds, it leads” masquerading as a public good, only incidentally trying to make a profit on the side.
It's certainly not healthy to be perusing Citizen throughout the day, but it's also certainly not "panic fetish".
I live in a neighborhood that has a certain amount of crime, and Citizen is super valuable to know what's going on, purely from a safety perspective. You ask if I can personally do anything about the "danger" all around me? Yes, I can make sure as hell to avoid certain blocks for a couple hours. And I can find out whether the sirens right now are because of a fire (fine to go for a walk) or because of exchanged gunfire (not).
I just looked it up according to official stats -- 568 shootings in my neighborhood since 2015, resulting in 102 deaths. Maybe you live somewhere where you consider this "panic fetish", but people in some areas don't have that luxury.
It's just basic neighborhood safety awareness of where not to walk.
> It's just basic neighborhood safety awareness of where not to walk.
Sure, I disagree with none of this particularly. My fundamental contention here is that Citizen with its sloppy text-to-speech of the police scanner plus no real follow-up on reports drives users to perceive their environment as more hazardous than it really is, their basic motivation being to push for pumping money out of people. Having awareness of your neighborhood is great but it strikes me that the better way of getting that awareness is through your community, not someone trying to pull cash out of your pocket. I'd have no problem at all with an app like to Citizen that plugged directly into community emergency services, run by the community as a public good.
> no real follow-up on reports... drives users to perceive their environment as more hazardous than it really is
I don't know about your neighborhood, but when I check Citizen real events get filled with hundreds of verifications, comments, and videos. It's not a case of Citizen trying to invent things that aren't there, sowing some fake sense of hazard.
> the better way of getting that awareness is through your community
I don't know what the mechanism of community awareness is supposed to be, except Citizen? That is the community awareness, as people are posting and verifying there.
> I'd have no problem at all with an app like to Citizen that plugged directly into community emergency services, run by the community as a public good
Citizen is plugged directly into community emergency services -- that's the police. And I just don't see how any app is going to be "run by the community as a public good". That makes as much sense to me as saying people shouldn't use Gmail, but an email app run by the community as a public good. It's not scalable or viable.
> I don't know about your neighborhood, but when I check Citizen real events get filled with hundreds of verifications, comments, and videos. It's not a case of Citizen trying to invent things that aren't there, sowing some fake sense of hazard.
Hey, so they do manage to fulfill their stated aims in your neighborhood. Pretty cool. Looking in my own I still see multiple weeks old "shots fired" that my city determined were kids letting off firecrackers. Judging by other comments on this post the, uh, flexible understanding of truth Citizen has is the default, absent a very active-on-Citizen neighborhood.
> I don't know what the mechanism of community awareness is supposed to be, except Citizen? That is the community awareness, as people are posting and verifying there.
For me, personally, I'm on friendly terms with neighbors I meet on walks, plus the ones that live in proximity to me. The news gets shared as it always has done. I don't live in a small town either.
> Citizen is plugged directly into community emergency services -- that's the police. And I just don't see how any app is going to be "run by the community as a public good". That makes as much sense to me as saying people shouldn't use Gmail, but an email app run by the community as a public good. It's not scalable or viable.
Why not? If Citizen is working in your community, as you say, then it's already piggy-backing off a considerable amount of free effort that you all do to augment the data it gets for free from your community. What's the point of a for-profit middleman here? I sure can't go to a public meeting and complain to the city council that Citizen is misfiling firecrackers, although I can do that for any misfiled data in my PD/FD's transparency website. And have done.
Government services generally aren't 'viable' in the sense of turning a profit anyway, we just all agree to pay into the kitty to fund stuff we more or less get utility out of. (Ignoring that Citizen itself doesn't seem to be viable.) I'm not really sure what your concern about scaling is, but I will note that governments all over, small and large, manage to provide digital services to their constituencies.
> For me, personally, I'm on friendly terms with neighbors I meet on walks, plus the ones that live in proximity to me. The news gets shared as it always has done.
Except by the time it gets to neighbors on a walk it's yesterday's news. What I'm talking about is up-to-the-minute safety for events that have happened in the past 15 minutes. Only online communication and instant phone alerts are fast enough for that.
To be honest, I find SnapMap, Twitter & a Facebook account made only to follow {neighborhood} Facebook pages much better for conveying information than a 3rd party app trying to break into the space those fill already.
Those services have much broader market capture than Citizen will probably be able to achieve so I find the information exchange on them much better equipped to handle population dense areas of the city with an overall younger demographic that is more likely to use them as the preferred method.
In my case, it's Milwaukee's East Side; some would call it "dangerous" because of gun violence, car theft, robberies in the areas surrounding it but my personal anecdote is that those are isolated enough where I'm not going to avoid going around and getting things done as they happen.
I guess I could add another anecdote; when I lived on the deeper south side of Milwaukee off of Cleveland avenue and 15th street there was much more "danger" happening around the house with my neighbors being drug dealers and one such incident had a man in the bed of the truck shooting his rifle between the houses on the block in the neighborhood when intoxicated around 11pm as examples; but I genuinely mean it when I say I never felt safer in that neighborhood when walking around.
It could be (and probably is) hubris; but this all goes to say that the community surrounding an area is much more powerful than people reporting incidents to an app. Not that it doesn't meet some specific need in the market and isn't valuable to some; but I digress.
There is a place where a tool like Citizen can be useful - however a company with VC funding needs to generate returns quickly, which incentivizes growing engagement, which "panic fetishism" is a pretty attractive way of achieving that.
Citizen has a pretty solid and valid value proposition, however I don't think the VC model incentivizes a healthy way of building the engagement. You may engage with it healthily but I've seen a personal friend go down a spiral of anxiety and had to delete the app to feel better.
It is about the same level as Nextdoor, which is littered with posts that makes you question when your neighbors have time to engage in that level of vigilance. I am comfortable with assigning 'fetish' qualifier to it. It genuinely is that bad.
As much I as do not like people losing their jobs in general ( as it tends to have a lot of downstream effects ), I am starting to believe, a good chunk of current internet must go down in flames for society to survive. I am not exaggerating. My personal belief at the beginning of 2023 ( without coffee kicking in yet ) is that, social media is a pox upon this earth that must be eradicated.
<< It's just basic neighborhood safety awareness of where not to walk.
Wait. I thought pointing out facts about stuff like that is racist.
I had this app installed for a short time. I removed it when it said "shots fired" on an affluent block nearby. It was teenagers playing with firecrackers. As happens in the neighborhood quite regularly.
I couldn't believe it. Uninstalled immediately.
That was years before the "tough on crime" rhetoric/scare/moral panic that's only amplified since then.
Edit: people are replying that the data source is 911 calls, as if that leaves them off the hook. Maybe this is evidence that 911 calls should not be sent unfiltered as push notifications. That is on Citizen.
The app will take every dumb 911 complaint at face value. Most 911 complaints simply aren't accurate. For every one real gunshot called in, there's many more that end up being a car backfiring, fireworks, etc. And this is true for nearly every category of call 911 gets. Putting the unfiltered feed on a map and sending proximity alerts to app users is less than useless.
You're more likely to click on a clickbait article, you're more likely to open an app to see "naked man with knife seen running around 14st"(something I've seen on Citizen in NYC)
I’ve seen it post about a police helicopter overhead, but then I look out with my own eyes and its one of the private ones people rent for sightseeing, not the black and white flying pig.
Yeah its very dystopian. I suspect many of the hard core users have some form of generalised anxiety and are in fact the type of people who shouldn't be using this app at all.
They even had a dramatized commercial with the founders’ wet dream of some girl getting mugged by her car, triggering the app, and a bunch of men showing up at the coordinates to pummel the mugger and save the girl.
These specific founder types are so painfully unaware. I’m sure it’s the same idiot who put out a push notification with a $30K bounty on the wrong guy.
They also never follow up on any of the reports, nor can they really. The anonymous comment section is less than useless. The exaggerated camera-shake (maybe due to frame rate reduction in post processing) videos of police lights or a fire in the distance are mildly interesting.
Their business model appears to be some sort of call-for-help button. Idk if buttnugs47 will come running to your aid. Gl with that
Is HN sort of the same phenomenon but for tech? As I was reading your comment I found myself realizing the same description (as a "panic fetish tool") applies to a type of HN thread that's fairly typical.
Take this exact response to the tech that you had: I don't know anything about Citizen, nor anyone who uses it, but based on the article title and your comment I find myself getting anxious, my pulse is elevating slightly, I'm now more worried about the world and what tech is doing to it. All this despite the fact that I have no hard info other than a suspicion based on my biases and can do absolutely nothing about it. Perhaps some users do use it in the unhealthy way you mentioned, but perhaps the vast majority don't. In any case the article and exchange are fueling a need that HNers obviously have for reading about dystopian tech, and clearly it goes beyond what is materially useful to them and into what is perversely entertaining.
Part of it comes down to the fact that Citizen has a pretty comically bad track record. It hasn't even been a week since they texted Billie Eilish's home address to a few hundred thousand people, and many haven't forgotten about their previous app "Vigilante" (most well-known for falsely accusing random strangers of various crimes).
On some level, I might agree with you. If Citizen was a crowdsourced non-profit, maybe it would be a healthy relationship. As a business, they directly profit from your fear and insecurity.
By panic fetish tool I mean something of marginal utility — not no utility, mind — that panics the afflicted into a mailable state. So, for Citizen, that’s meant to make you pay them money. For, say, fascist politics that’s meant to make you rely on the comfort provided by Dear Leader. I don’t think it’s clear at all that HN follows the same model. For one the website is free and if they’re trying to make anything happen it’s promote their VC fund, which strikes me as benign. Oh, maybe lisp too in the old days. Additionally, being aware that the utopian vaguely libertarian mindset around tech — everything is better with computers, especially if you can make money at it — is false is not a bad thing. Personally I don’t feel at all powerless to counter that trend, that mindless Utopianism, or to play my part with my neighbors and community in countering it, I should say, since I’m just one person.
> Were actual crimes committed? Citizen doesn’t know.
Often enough in my area, there is an actual video from the scene and/or police response (e.g., "police confirmed that the suspect is on the run" or "12 shells were found on the scene by the firefighters"). In those cases, it is clear that the crimes were actually committed.
And sure, there are plenty of instances of incidents on Citizen where those confirmations and videos from the scene might not be available. I just simply filter those out mentally. But let's not make absolutist claims like "everything you see there is unconfirmed and is just spreading panic", because there are more than plenty easily verifiable incidents reported on Citizen.
I mean, I don't live in any state of perpetual fear or anything, and I haven't changed my habits based on it at all (aside from avoiding areas that actively have like 5+ cop cars on the scene at the moment, because traffic there is going to be awful).
I filter it out mentally the same way I filter out restaurants I don't like when searching for a place to eat nearby on google maps. That doesn't make google maps a useless or bad tool. Same idea here.
And no, I don't think that advertising doesn't affect me. It sometimes can give me options I wasn't aware of (e.g., a new subaru car being prominently featured in a good movie, almost definitely as a product placement), which I would potentially filter out as well when the time to purchase a new car comes (which means doing my research on that car, doing a test drive, etc.). Except with Citizen, filtering out is an effort that takes only a few seconds (does the post have video of the actual incident? does the post have confirmed and verified info, such as a number of bullet shells being recovered? or is it just "report filed" or "people on the scene claim"?).
> One of the other commenters here described this app as “snitching-as-a-service” but I think it’s more insidious than that.
It isn't "snitching as a service"; it's fear as a service. The implicit premise of the app is that the world is a dangerous, terrifying place, and they're more than happy to validate that belief by (as another commenter mentioned) drip-feeding users with irrelevant notifications about emergency service dispatches in their area.
Not everyone has the privilege of living in safe places like Mountain View. Please don’t diminish others concern for public safety as a “panic fetish tool”, especially for those of us who’ve been the victims of violent crimes.
> Whittle down your trust in your neighbors
Interestingly, being aware of the crime in my neighborhood (thanks to Citizen and NextDoor) has made me engage more with my neighbors.
> don’t advocate for different outcomes from your city
> Not everyone has the privilege of living in safe places like Mountain View.
I don't live, nor have I ever, in Mountain View.
> Please don’t diminish others concern for public safety as a “panic fetish tool”, especially for those of us who’ve been the victims of violent crimes.
My implication here is that Citizen as a 'panic fetish tool' does not improve public safety outcomes. I am very pro improving public safety. I don't doubt that Citizen can be comforting. In fact, that's fundamental to its pitch.
> This is a ridiculous belief. Police scanners (and likely this app) alert people to real crimes being committed and under certain conditions can save lives. My uncle constantly had a police scanner on when I was young and it alerted us to a man in our neighborhood being pursued after shooting his roommate in the head.
I'm going to be pedantic about this, because it matters in a civil society: police scanners relay police knowledge about suspected crimes. They aren't judge, jury, and executioner, and the fact that people uncritically regurgitate them is exactly how we end up in the situations like the Citizen CEO's own mob justice[1].
Nobody wants you to get hurt, and there are cases where listening to the scanner may very well have saved lives. But the overwhelming public interest is against treating them as solemn truth, much less turning them into a Fear App on your phone.
> police scanners relay police knowledge about suspected crimes.
If I'm physically stabbed during the commission of a suspected crime, the material reality of my bleeding out is more relevant to me than whether or not a judge and jury will decide whether it was a crime or not.
It's good that government maximizes false negatives in exchange for fewer false positives. But when it comes to determining my day to day life, it's everyone's prerogative to choose a different tradeoff.
Yet, even if I accept the thrust of your argument here, which I do not, I would still point out that there is a wide gulf between one of your kin keeping watch and a company attempting to promote enough general anxiety in their users to drive them into the profit funnel.
> a company attempting to promote enough general anxiety in their users to drive them into the profit funnel
Would you apply the same level of scrutiny to the media?
Their modern day business model seems to be overwhelming people with fear/anger porn to keep them agitated and coming back as often as possible for more.
> Would you apply the same level of scrutiny to the media?
Yes, a hundred times over. Everything from Fox News blowing petty crime out of proportion to copaganda shows like Law&Order normalizing torture as an effective interrogation technique.
> Their modern day business model seems to be overwhelming people with fear/anger porn to keep them agitated and coming back as often as possible for more.
This is the single most common critique levied against mass media, especially 24h media. You can probably safely assume that everybody in this conversation recognizes it as a problem, rather than using it as cover for another bad thing.
Thanks to our broken incentive systems for mass media, public trust in strangers and society is at record lows, and most people think violent crime has gone up when in reality it is at multi-decade record lows (the spike the last 24 months from covid notwithstanding).
Gun violence, for example, has been decreasing for decades. Watch the news and you'd think there's a "gun violence epidemic".
It's more profitable to peddle panic than the true framing of our reality.
> Their modern day business model seems to be overwhelming people with fear/anger porn to keep them agitated and coming back as often as possible for more.
Not the GP, but I agree that this is a huge problem. One of the reasons for which I've stopped watching TV a long time ago.
I know people won't like to hear this, but I don't think Citizen is attempting to promote general anxiety as a means to get a profit. I think that, coincidentally, promoting general anxiety works (whether or not they even recognize this, which perhaps a laid off insider could speak to), and therefore the organization performs actions that take advantage of this.
It's like the adage, "If it bleeds, it leads." Granted, I think news organizations recognized at some point that these types of stories get more eyeballs (hence the adage), therefore they do it intentionally for more advertising revenue. But I don't see any type of organization specifically viewing "general anxiety" as the goal. It so happens that people enjoy gawking at this kind of thing, regardless of what emotion it causes.
That said, I'm not actually a fan of Citizen nor a fan of my local police force. I would prefer having unbiased and effective police who can be held accountable when they overstep their boundaries, and it seems like this is an impossible ask through both the public and private sector.
I'm sorry, I'm not sure what point you're trying to make, except maybe to say that Citizen is not acting cynically? If that's so, it doesn't change my opinion that we'd be generally better off it Citizen tanks.
Who has the time to listen to police scanners every waking moment on the minuscule chance that they may yield useful information?? This is not a healthy way to live.
Also, your story is not very compelling. There's a small chance something bad may have happened to you, but probably not. Near miss stories aren't very useful as the miss is almost invariably not as close as it appears to the person experiencing it.
This is red herring/strawman argument. It’s irrelevant and only meant to change the discussion into one you can “win.”
No one mentioned you have to listen 24/7 (in my case it was on when we were home) but it’s definitely a useful tool regardless and only people who’ve never lived near high crime areas or been a victim of a crime have the privilege of thinking this way.
You told a story that began "My uncle constantly had a police scanner on when I was young..." The story ends with the supposition that the uncle's obsession with the police scanner saved his nephew's life.
If you don't have the police scanner on right now, it seems you forgot to tell us the end of the story, the part where you realized your uncle's obsession with the police scanner was not healthy?
People who actually live in high crime areas know how useless 911 and the police are, and don't rely on them for their safety. Gunshots don't get called in in these areas; they're just background noise.
Life's way too short to have the police scanner on as constant chatter in your home. I've also literally never met anyone in my life who's done this. You really think everyone should live like this?
My friend lived in the apt building in Turtle Bay that caught fire a few months back, and she was one of the first ones out of the building because she saw an alert on the Citizen app. Additionally, the fire alarm system wasn't working properly, and the alarm didn't go off until much later (leading to 38 injuries).
Agreed. I have a friend who lives in a quiet suburb of Dallas who feels like he needs to have a gun in the house to protect his family. I live in an urban neighborhood in Philadelphia. By comparison my neighborhood has WAY more crime of all types. But if I take a walk around the neighborhood I can wave to ~10 people I know by name. I'm not afraid in my "high crime" neighborhood. We've both lived in our neighborhoods for more than 10 years.
> But if I take a walk around the neighborhood I can wave to ~10 people I know by name.
that's great, and I'm sure it makes the neighborhood a lot more pleasant to live in. but aside from maybe hiding your amazon packages for you, this doesn't contribute much to safety/security in my experience.
one of my friends used to live on a slightly sketchy block where she knew a lot of neighbors. they all ducked for cover when her roommate got robbed at gunpoint on her own front porch. my other friend was friendly with his neighbors. his house got cleaned out by a couple kids who lived three doors down. neither the police, the neighbors, nor even the mother did shit about it.
your neighbors might warn you about a "sketchy" person they've seen on the block a few times, but when push comes to shove, people overwhelmingly choose to stay in their lane. they might come to check on you after the dust settles, I guess.
Probably nothing. If he's on the run, "and also stop for some reason to kill or injure a random person, as a treat" can't be high on his priority list.
Yes and no. You may not have a perfect information and your police call may result in unpleasant results overall and most of us rarely have enough information to determine what is a 'real crime' short of obvious stuff like arson, mugging and so on. There are just so many variables and random encounters like that can easily get volatile.
But the time guy cut stuff from the bush I planted over the fall? I did not call cops, but he did get a very simple 'get off my property'. Unless the guy did not leave, I would not consider it a real crime.. just something you should not do.
And I say all this with while I tend to err on the side of caution for a variety of reasons.
> In May 2021, Citizen CEO Andrew Frame used the app to place a $30,000 bounty on information leading to the capture of a suspected arsonist in the Los Angeles area. Citizen staff broadcast the photo and name of a specific person, encouraging users to hunt them down. It was the wrong person.
Reminiscent of the Boston Bomber "manhunt" on Reddit, where they named a suicide victim as the bomber. IRC, the family harassed while they were in mourning as a result.
Criminal investigations are not something you want to crowd-source.
I cannot overstate how important this is. There are is a real reason why we tried to move away from mob justice as society. The conclusion however is that since mob justice is being demanded more and more often, something is wrong going on with how justice is being dispensed and there is a clear lack of balance in the distribution thereof. Hence the mobs.
Frankly, we should all be terrified. I talked with busy-bodies before. My neighbor was one too. They have uses, but that behavior should remain an oddity and not a permanent feature of society.
Absolutely. The reason we use a judiciary system is to avoid a major problem of the mob: the most convincing voice is the one that the crowd listens to. You don't need proof, you just need to be compelling. That's the standard of evidence in mod justice.
Now, I'm not blind to the fact that the justice system in any country is flawed. That said, it's far less flawed than a group of people with metaphorical torches listening to the guy on the largest soapbox.
Generally, if there is no harm, then there is no liability.
In this case, there may be a case for defamation, but if the company only reported that the police were looking for a particular suspect, which was true, then maybe not.
Well, he did personally misuse the platform, but go for the company. Idk. I’m not a lawyer and I don’t know how 230 plays into this, but his actions could have led to an innocent person getting hurt.
Linked in the TFA, but Citizen is perhaps most notable not for tracking crime, but for having its CEO attempt to incite crime against a homeless person[1].
This app was infuriating. Tried it for a few weeks living in a less than ideal neighborhood. Day one I get a notification of a fire or something 5 miles away. Hardly useful, but I get it. Day two there's a robbery! Scary, but when you click the notification you see that it happened in a city about 40 miles away. After a week or so it becomes clear that the app will notify you every night with anything it can, stretching the distance as it sees fit to be able to justify the notification. Live in a decently sized metro area? Prepare to get hundreds of notifications all for stuff not happening anywhere actually near you.
I interviewed in-person for this company early 2019 and they were very rude. The interview was going fine from my perspective, but they decided to cut the interview short and pass on me mid-interview. This is the only time this has ever happened to me over the course of dozens of interviews in my career.
You must have wasted a lot of your time and the companys you interviewed at if they went all the way through after they realized you weren't going to be hired.
One of the interviewers was augmentative and combative in their line of questioning as if they were playing "bad cop". I won't go into details, but I was given a hypothetical engineering situation that just wasn't realistic in my experience and tried to explain why, but they would not take no for an answer.
I've been on the other side of it, and your approach can come across as childish, like arguing with your math teacher that billy couldn't have eaten 4/6 or 2/3 of the pizza because he'd get sick.
It's a _hypothetical_. The problem needs to be constrained because realistic problems often either 1) have standard answers that don't require real thought or 2) are too hard to solve in an interview. Asking how you'd solve some problem on a CPU that doesn't support multiplication or something shows whether you have skills that could transfer to solving real problems but can be asked more quickly.
You don't know the specifics, but I can assure you that this JS developer did not know the specifics of the iOS development question at hand.
It's easy to purport a sense of theoretical superiority from your side of the table, and answering an unrealistic question doesn't mean that employee will deliver you real value over time. In fact, they may hold you up and waste more of your time because this "yes man" will spend extra time determining what's clearly a waste of time is in fact a waste of time.
I may be an outlier but I really liked the idea of citizen, but just wish it had a better implementation (UI and filters) .
People often complain that it led to fear-mongering, but I thought it was a valuable tool for Environmental awareness and community policing.
The people can't reconcile the reality of the world around them with their and irrational fears, that strikes me as a personal problem. I for one just wanted the real time data and could take it from there.
Example of times where it would have been helpful was when there was a an arm suspect hiding out in my neighborhood and another time where I went to a shopping center where there was a armed standoff. More mundane examples are understanding why the Bay Bridge is closed or roads are blocked.
Twitter and local news are the next best alternative, but the time delay and poor geolocation make them unsuitable alternatives.
Hopefully another company comes along with a better business model for aggregating police radio data and eyewitness reports
If you live in the Bay Area and you think it's a widely useful tool, I'd say you're not doing as great a job reconciling your fear with the reality of things as you think you are.
I moved to SF from NYC, and it went from barely useful to the most useless thing I've ever seen.
Here Citizen shows extremely stale data and seems to truly struggle with surfacing widely relevant news, because widely relevant things rarely happen here.
You described finding out there was an armed suspect hiding out in your neighborhood, but there is no way on earth Citizen should be how you find that out: I had that happen in another city and it didn't take 5 minutes for the area to be swarmed with officers putting the area in lockdown by blocking all entrances and issuing warnings over loudspeaker.
Same deal with an armed stand off in a shopping center... you're telling me there was an armed standoff and an app was what was keeping people from entering? Or you mean an armed standoff happened where you weren't and Citizen went out of its way to ping you?
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Citizen isn't fear mongering because raising crime issues is fear mongering. Citizen is fear mongering because:
> The people can't reconcile the reality of the world around them with their and irrational fears, that strikes me as a personal problem.
Is such a widespread "personal problem" that people will say that, then claim they need a personal real-time crime feed.
>You described finding out there was an armed suspect hiding out in your neighborhood, but there is no way on earth Citizen should be how you find that out:
Im not a fearful person, so I am looking for utility and data. I am also the worlds foremost expert on my opinions and experiences, so I can tell you what happened, not the other way around.
In the case of the suspect hiding in our neighborhood, our block was swarmed by cops but nobody notified us what was going on. We checked citizen and other scanners to find out what was happening and found out. This let us take practical precautions like locking the front, back, and side doors to the house- which we normally keep open.
In the case of the shopping center, I didnt use the app and was driving around the parking lot. Saw about 20 cops and asked a bystander what was going on and I got the fuck out of there. I got the full details 24 hours later from searching the news- a high speed chase had led to the shopping center and the suspect fled inside. In this case, a notification would have been really helpful.
Those are the most extreme examples. Much more common is seeing something like the bay bridge being stopped and being able to pull up pictures from the people stuck in traffic. I have used that to determine if it is something like a semi on its side or a flat tire and plan my day accordingly.
I haven't used the app in a while, because like I said, the UI is crappy. I do live near a higher crime area and frequently hear gunshots. I'm thinking about going back to the app because I would like to know how often these are real incidents requiring medical response versus people just "having fun".
I have read the city crime reports and used their crime database, but it is very delayed and has a terrible UI itself.
I guess my comment assumes a certain level of awareness
Like if I see my block swarmed by cops, I'll lock my door.
If I see 20 cops outside the mall, I'll take it as a sign to not even approach bystanders.
If traffic is blocked, even Google Maps will show the trip time taking into account if a semi flipped across 3 lanes or a stranded vehicle is blocking 1 lane.
If you hear gunshots so close you start thinking "I wish I knew why those just happened" instead I prefer staying indoors and away from windows since bullets don't care if they were shot for fun.
If you have the awareness to respond to the plainly available context, then you don't benefit from having a police scanner in your pocket.
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No one is saying you're not allowed to find things out about crime, the problem at its root is a live crime feed precludes any sort of meaningful deep information.
Police act on so little info because it's their job, and as a result they end up being jumpy and trigger happy.
Willingly opting into that experience yourself in anything short of a warzone is not hard to chalk up to fear...
It seems that you are proposing being even more fearful and taking a more conservative approach due to lack of information. If I followed your advice, I would never leave the house for fear bullets.
If I want more detailed information on a bridge shutdown (which is available), your recommendation is to suck it and just go by whatever erroneous prediction google gives.
It seems like you providing contradictory advice:
1) Always take the most cautious approach to your environment. (if you see cops:hide, hear shots: hide)
2) Don't pay attention to the live crime feed for more information.
The problem is that the live crime feed adds meaningful information to the environmental data for me.
I guess we disagree on what information I find useful: Whether that is the nature of a traffic jam so I can plan my drive, or how often people get shot in my neighborhood.
This strikes me as a position hostile to information, knowledge, and learning.
Again, there I go making crazy assumptions like "You don't have a constant barrage of bullets outside so you can go outside most of the time, just not right after hearing gunshots, regardless of what a crowd sourced app tells you" and "it's not every day you see 20 cops milling outside your door" (pro tip: lock your doors if either is true)
> It seems like you providing contradictory advice:
There's nothing contradictory: I'm advocating for common sense telling you when to be fearful, rather than relying on an app to tell you when to not be fearful.
Because when said app is literally a police scanner, your default is fearful and you'll essentially be asking for an app to tell you when everything is ok. That's no way to live.
>Because when said app is literally a police scanner, your default is fearful and you'll essentially be asking for an app to tell you when everything is ok. That's no way to live.
I probably shouldn't respond, but I can't help it. Do you just go through life telling people how they feel and contradicting them when they say they feel otherwise? I said I wasn't fearful, and gave numerous examples of not being fearful, yet you still assert that I am.
If you can't wrap your head around the idea that someone might want to collect information and make informed decisions without being some kind of paranoid, there's nothing that I can do to change your mind. If you can't see the simple value in knowing which streets people frequently are shot at, then I can't help you.
Hopefully, people stop profiting off this information in the first place. A for-profit company is possibly the worst arbiter of criminal information, as-evidenced by their CEO putting out warrants for homeless people. They simply can't side-step due process like that.
If you need a subscription service to stop yourself from being a victim in a mall shooting, maybe we should reflect on how that effects the greater population.
I dont have a problem with a for profit solution based on anecdotal evidence. You could level the same criticism at anything. What the CEO did wasn't good, but there are tons of examples of public servants, news outlets, and even non-profits grandstanding and fearmongering too.
The ideal application would strip away the BS and just provide data access. I dont care if it is non-profit or for profit.
What I really don't agree with is the sentiment expressed in this thread and others that individuals shouldn't have access to this data because they are too fragile or stupid to handle reality.
It's not "reality" though. As you said, it's entirely based on anecdotal evidence, which leads to things like the CEO making false accusations.
There might be a version of this system that works, but currently Citizen is not it. I suspect that nobody will be able to get it right until they remove the money and focus on credible reporting.
The meat of the data is police scanner dispatches and individual photography.
These are "real" unless you think they a faking police calls and doctoring images.
User posts should be given the same credibility as a stranger on facebook or twitter. Even user posts are "real", unless you think they are psyops/bots.
You should understand that just because someone calls 911 and reports a crime, that doesn't mean a crime has actually been committed.
There are many many many instances of assholes and busybodies calling 911 to report a crime when the reality was that they were irrationally upset a black person was in the park. We have videos of these exact people pulling guns on someone with no justification.
In my experience, the twitter police scanner communities are dominated by racism and general hatred towards cities and city government (excluding police and other rescue).
These apps and communities will always self select for people who are predisposed to see their neighbors and strangers as threatening. Not a lot of people who aren't already scared of their community will download a tool to "monitor" their community.
I always wondered about the point of this app in the U.S. In general, emergency services here are quite good and if I call 911 in an emergency, someone is going to respond pretty rapidly. Seems like the business might actually be useful in a place with low/no emergency service infrastructure where citizens or private security may actually be the only ones to respond (also, some interesting models for e.g. very crowded/congested areas for trained first responders to give emergency help like CPR to someone while an ambulance is on the way)
I don't use apps like this, because they don't do the one thing which I want them to tell me: why were three police cars boxing in a vehicle at the end of my dead-end street at 3AM? Likewise, the City has an electrical outage map which clears the moment the power is restored. Was my power out? Should I check my freezer? Best I've got are the 12 o'clock flashers, the battery backup clocks which sync to line frequency, and the logs from the systems which aren't connected to the UPS. This is politics.
To the people who live in areas with a lot of crime: If there are shootings, how many random bullet holes have you found? If it's general demeanor, how many condoms, sharps, cars without plates, cars missing wheels, cars with broken windows and does it vary with the time of day or day of week (or month)?
It's similar to the discipline I exercised when doing a lot of alpine scrambling, especially at the bottom of cliffs: Fresh scars on the rocks? Do any of the trees look "shot up"? Maybe not the place to stop for lunch.
Love this tool. I live in a beach community and it tells me where a fight is, where there's gunshots, what areas to avoid -- especially in the summer. We get about 1 shooting a week and then it shoots up (pun intended) to about 1 every day.
How many employees does a snitching-as-a-service app require ideally? You'd think the onus would be on the snitches to be numerous, not necessarily employees for what is essentially a forum with subscriptions and push notifications.
This applies not just to snitching but a lot of other "marketplace"-type apps where the bulk of the value is provided by third-party participants. Think ridesharing, food delivery, marketplaces, etc.
I'm not sure it's justifiable for these companies to have just as much (if not more) engineers working on a product that's already been built and is successfully running - I'd expect there to only be a skeleton crew for maintenance and the bulk of employees being support/operations/legal once the tech stack is built and stable.
Most of their profitability comes from becoming a de facto monopoly / middle-man so they will attempt to gain as much market share as aggressively as possible. (Including sacrificing present profitability, giving away money for free rides/things, etc)
It is not a technical necessity but an economic venture capital necessity.
They're apparently having people listen to police scanners and input the data from them. Covering 50 cities 24 hours a day, that'd take hundreds of employees.
The criticism against Citizen (and vigilantism in general) is that average citizens aren't actually that good at detecting crime and instead rely stereotypes and hunches.
This is bad because it generally creates an unspoken appearance-based caste system, where 'non-sketchy looking' people can do things that others can't (like park their work van on the side of the road to take a lunch break).
I'd rather have one idiot on the case than that idiot + a bunch of other, self-selected idiots prompted to show up by an app. At worst they will actually hinder police response and/or get themselves or others hurt.
Keep in mind that the user base of Citizen is not a uniform distribution of the population either - certain classes (for the lack of a better word) will self-select and are likely to have similar issues to the police itself. In fact you might have the kind of people who can't even make the cut to join the police itself, which is not a good thing when you see how low the bar for the police is to begin with.
I don't think he's making an argument either way? He's just commenting that given the current situation, it seems that the snitching app has too many employees?
I'd argue the title is wrong - it's not a "Crime app" as much as a "Crime reporting & monitoring" app.
Using the word "snitch" is itself an argument. It is used to paint someone who reports crimes as bad. Now, some laws are perhaps bad, but that would of course be on a case by case basis. Describing the app and it's users as a whole as "snitching" is certainly an argument. All this said, I just wanted GP to explain what exactly they meant.
