Emails Show The LAPD Cut Ties With The Citizen App After Its Started A Vigilante Manhunt Targeting An Innocent Person

from the well-thank-fuck-for-that dept

It didn't take long for Citizen -- the app that once wanted to be a cop -- to wear out its law enforcement welcome. The crime reporting app has made several missteps since its inception, beginning with its original branding as "Vigilante."

Having been booted from app stores for encouraging (unsurprisingly) vigilantism, the company rebranded as "Citizen," hooking um… citizens up with live feeds of crime reports from city residents as well as transcriptions of police scanner output. It also paid citizens to show up uninvited at crime scenes to report on developing situations.

But it never forgot its vigilante origins. When wildfires swept across Southern California last year, Citizen's principals decided it was time to put the "crime" back in "crime reporting app." The problem went all the way to the top, with Citizen CEO Andrew Frame dropping into Slack conversations and live streams, imploring employees and app users to "FIND THIS FUCK."

The problem was Citizen had identified the wrong "FUCK." The person the app claimed was responsible for the wildfire wasn't actually the culprit. Law enforcement later tracked down a better suspect, one who had actually generated some evidence implicating them.

After calling an innocent person a "FUCK" and a "devil" in need of finding, Citizen was forced to walk back its vigilantism and rehabilitate its image. Unfortunately for Citizen, this act managed to burn bridges with local law enforcement just as competently as the wildfire it had used to start a vastly ill-conceived manhunt.

As Joseph Cox reports for Motherboard, this act ignited the last straw that acted as a bridge between Citizen and one of the nation's largest law enforcement agencies, the Los Angeles Police Department. Internal communications obtained by Vice show the LAPD decided to cut ties with the app after the company decided its internal Slack channel was capable of taking the law into its own hands.

On May 21, several days after the misguided manhunt, Sergeant II Hector Guzman, a member of the LAPD Public Communications Group, emailed colleagues with a link to some of the coverage around the incident.

“I know the meeting with West LA regarding Citizen was rescheduled (TBD), but here’s a recent article you might want to look at in advance of the meeting, which again highlights some of the serious concerns with Citizen, and the user actions they promote and condone,” Guzman wrote. Motherboard obtained the LAPD emails through a public records request.

Lieutenant Raul Jovel from the LAPD’s Media Relations Division replied “given what is going on with this App, we will not be working with them from our shop.”

Guzman then replied “Copy. I concur.”

Whatever lucrative possibilities Citizen might have envisioned after making early inroads towards law enforcement acceptance were apparently burnt to a crisp by this misapprehension that nearly led to a calamitous misapprehension. Rather than entertain Citizen's mastubatorial fantasies about being the thin app line between good and evil, the LAPD (wisely) chose to kick the upstart to the curb.

The stiff arm continues to this day. The LAPD cut ties and has continued to swipe left on Citizen's extremely online advances. The same Sgt. Guzman referenced in earlier emails has ensured the LAPD operates independently of Citizen. When Citizen asked the LAPD if it would be ok to eavesdrop on radio chatter to send out push notifications to users about possible criminal activity, Guzman made it clear this would probably be a bad idea.

“It’s come up before. Always turned down for several reasons,” Guzman wrote in another email.

And now Citizen goes it alone in Los Angeles. In response to Motherboard's reporting, Citizen offered up word salad about good intentions and adjusting to "real world operational experiences." I guess that's good, in a certain sense. From the statement, it appears Citizen is willing to learn from its mistakes. The problem is its mistakes have been horrific rather than simply inconvenient, and it appears to be somewhat slow on the uptake, which only aggravates problems that may be caused by over-excited execs thinking a few minutes of police scanner copy should result in citizen arrests.

Filed Under: citizen, lapd, vigilantes
Companies: citizen

Citizen Is Paying Users To Run The App And Their Mouths At Crime Scenes And Medical Emergencies

from the patron-of-the-arts-I-guess dept

The app formerly known as "Vigilante" is surreptitiously redefining the term "citizen journalist." The new definition will probably be capitalized and trademarked. The crime reporting app that once entertained plans to become part of the law enforcement community by partnering with private security companies is paying users to head out to crime scenes and annoy civil servants.

Want to make $200 a day in New York City? Rush to the scene of a murder, a three-alarm fire or a traffic accident — then pull out your phone and start filming.

That’s the pitch from Citizen, a controversial neighborhood watch app that’s quietly hiring New Yorkers to livestream crime scenes and other public emergencies in an apparent effort to encourage more ordinary citizens to do the same, The Post has learned.

This seems like a bad idea. It's one thing for people to happen upon one of these incidents and start livestreaming. It's quite another to pay people to put themselves at risk in service of an app hoping to increase its user base and repair its reputation. And it's yet another thing to be dishonest about what's happening, as both Citizen and its paid contributors are doing.

In June, the Daily Dot uncovered a Los Angeles Citizen app user who appeared to be a paid content contributor. The user known as Landon1129 just happened to be at the scene of eight separate incidents spanning 30 miles in a single day -- a day that also featured "Landon1129" being interviewed twice by Citizen's own live show. Eight incidents covered by the same user -- a user who frequently reminded viewers that he was "live on the Citizen app." What was probably supposed to look organic looked fake as fuck.

Now, there's some confirmation, albeit obliquely. Citizen claims it has always used "street teams" to expand coverage, generate content, and, I assume, increase brand awareness. But it has never made this explicit and its ads seeking contributors make no mention of the app.

Citizen says that it doesn’t hide its use of paid field team members.

But:

The company also doesn’t post the jobs on its own Web site. And Citizen’s name was not included in a since-deleted job posting Thursday on career board JournalismJobs.com seeking “field team members” to work for an unnamed “tech company with user-generated content.”

It's probably not a good idea for a company with both a literal and figurative background in vigilantism to pay people to head to crime scenes and other emergencies. There are plenty of people who get paid to do that already, and they're better at doing their jobs and not getting in the way of others trying to do theirs than the average respondent to a vague Craigslist ad. Stringers may be interlopers seeking sellable content but at least they have some idea of what to expect when they arrive on the scene and (usually) have cultivated good relationships with the public servants they'll be working with (and around).

To be sure, journalistic efforts shouldn't be restricted by gatekeepers who only believe certain people can perform journalism. But Citizen's history, along with its blatant desire to capitalize on people's fears, makes it a particularly questionable patron of the journalistic arts. If Citizen really wanted to put its resources behind expanding journalistic coverage of newsworthy incidents, it would do it without the use of a third-party contractor bound by an NDA that forbids telling journalists, who hired the contractor to place ads looking for journalists, who may ultimately not be pleased they're now working for an app with a terrible reputation.

Filed Under: citizen journalist, crime scenes, private security, vigilante
Companies: citizen

Citizen Drops Its Plan To Become Private Cops, Claims It Was Never Interested In Forming A Private Security Force

from the that's-not-a-squad-car,-it's-just-a-promo-for-a-nonexistent-service dept

Crime reporting app Citizen has had a pretty wild run in the past couple of weeks. Debuting rather inauspiciously as Vigilante back in 2016, the app was removed from Apple's store less than 48 hours after its first appearance. It relaunched the following spring as Citizen and remained just another competitor in the virtual Neighborhood Watch scene.

That all changed late last month. Citizen users and employees -- urged on by Citizen CEO Andrew Frame -- started a manhunt (with a $30,000 bounty) for an innocent homeless person Frame had decided was an arsonist. As the public was still digesting this news, Los Angeles residents spotted a Citizen-branded patrol car making the rounds. Shortly thereafter, current and former employees confirmed the company was interested in getting into the private security business with an eye on becoming more like cops and less like an informational app.

As all of this was going on, some hackers scraped Citizen's database of recordings and reports, providing a single source for nearly everything uploaded to Citizen, including recordings moderators had hidden from public view. It was also revealed Citizen's foray into public health had resulted in a leak of users' COVID status as well as other personal information.

Following a tumultuous half-week, Citizen announced it was abandoning its plan to move into the law enforcement business, something it had always supposedly planned to do and certainly completely unrelated to the steady stream of bad press.

The company began offering the service in Los Angeles last month as a pilot program. During the trial, the service, which included a company-branded squad car, was only available to company employees. For the service, Citizen partnered with a private firm called Los Angeles Professional Security, which describes itself as a provider of "subscription law enforcement."

But on Tuesday, Citizen ended the program, stating it has no plans to launch a similar service elsewhere.

"This was a small 30-day test that is now complete," a Citizen spokesperson told CBS MoneyWatch. "We have no plans to launch our own private security force and no ongoing relationship with LAPS."

But Citizen did have plans, at least according to sources Motherboard spoke to.

"The broad master plan was to create a privatized secondary emergency response network," one former Citizen employee told Motherboard. Motherboard granted multiple sources anonymity to protect them from retaliation from the company.

"It's been something discussed for a while but I personally never expected it to make it this far," another Citizen source told Motherboard.

So, this reversal seems to be a reversal, not simply the end of a test run. And if the company has no plans to launch a private security force, why waste the time and money equipping a squad car and sending personnel out to "patrol" Los Angeles? This sounds more like a plan being abandoned because the Overton Window didn't open quite as far as expected.

Filed Under: crime reporting, private cops, private security, vigilante
Companies: citizen

Citizen Continues Its Push To Become Cops-For-Hire By Leaking Sensitive Data... Twice

from the another-confidence-boosting-PR-debacle dept

The bad news keeps coming for Citizen, the app that really wants to be a cop.

Not only is its desire to become some sort of private party/law enforcement hybrid generating it some bad press, but its prior incarnation as "Vigilante" suggests it has always wanted to be in the business of taking down bad guys, with or without the requisite lawfulness.

The former "Vigilante" proved true to its past moniker following a wildfire in California, promising a $30,000 bounty to any user or employee who took down the bad guy identified by Citizen. Well… misidentified. After calls from CEO Andrew Frame to "GET THE FUCKER," Citizen had to offer up a bunch of apologies for turning an innocent person into a prime suspect.

Coming on the heels of all of this bad news is even more bad news. First off, as Joseph Cox reported late last week, Citizen leaked a bunch of users' COVID-related data following its expansion into contact tracing late year under the name "SafePass."

Crime and neighborhood watch app Citizen, which also launched a COVID-19 contact-tracing feature and broader citywide COVID surveillance program, exposed users' COVID-related data to the public internet, allowing anyone to view specific users' recent self-reported symptoms, test results, and whether their device had recorded any close contacts with other people using the feature. The information is directly linked to a person's username, which often is the person's full name.

Hacker collective Anonymous was able to access the data and pointed Motherboard in its direction. The exposure of this data runs contrary to Citizen's security claims.

The feature's privacy policy says that "We have specific systems to control data access, and all access is logged and regularly audited." The SafePass website says "Data is private and encrypted" and that contact tracing data is deleted after 30 days (some of the data in the exposed cache dates from earlier than 30 days ago).

Citizen fixed its leak shortly thereafter, claiming the exposure only affected a limited number of users. But that set the stage for a larger breach and another successful hacking of Citizen's databases.

A hacktivist has scraped a wealth of data from the crime and neighborhood watch app Citizen and posted it on a dark web site, Motherboard has learned. The data includes a huge amount of data related to 1.7 million "incidents"—events that Citizen informs users about concerning crime or perceived crime in their area—such as the GPS coordinates of where the incident took place, its update history, a clip of the police radio that the incident relates to, and associated images.

Posted with the accompanying slogan of "Fuck snitches, fuck Citizen, fuck Andrew Frame and remember, kids: Cops are not your friends.", the data appears to contain plenty of what's already publicly-available through Citizen's online portal. The difference here is it's all in one place, which makes it much easier for researchers and journalists to parse the data for patterns and analyze user behavior.

And there's also some stuff Citizen doesn't make available to users and site visitors in this data dump.

The list appears to include videos that have been marked for removal from public consumption on the app by Citizen's content moderation team, with some including the tag "Moderator Blocked Stream," according to the hacker and Motherboard's viewing of the files. These videos are still accessible if visited with the direct link included in the scrape.

Not exactly a confidence booster, especially when the app's founder wants Citizen to become a crucial part of the law enforcement experience, if not actually law enforcement itself. But a combination of PR blunders and data breaches sounds about par for the (government) course, so maybe this is just Citizen inadvertently laying the groundwork for its move into the public sector.

Filed Under: data breach, leaks, private law enforcement, snitching, vigilante
Companies: citizen

Citizen -- The App That Wants To Be A Cop -- Offered A $30,000 Bounty For The Apprehension Of An Innocent Person

from the nice-going,-fuckos dept

Citizen -- an app for reporting crime and other suspicious events -- wants to be in the police business. The app developers have purchased at least one faux patrol vehicle -- co-branded with Los Angeles Professional Security -- and have been driving it around Los Angeles, California.

But should private companies be in the business of enforcing the law? Most people would say no. We have enough problems with our actual cops -- ones who are supposed to remain on the right side of the Constitution. Private companies don't have these obligations. That's why they don't have the power (or the ability) to take other people's rights away. But the effort to cloud the lines between public and private is continuous, and it's going to do additional damage to citizens who are already subjected to the violations perpetrated by government employees.

Let's not forget that Citizen has always been willing to blur these lines. It debuted as "Vigilante" before its booting from Apple's app store forced a more friendly rebrand. But Citizen hasn't abandoned its vigilante principals. The people at the top of the organizational chart are aggressively pursuing private expansion into public law enforcement space and courting some of the nation's largest police departments.

They're also living up to the "vigilante" moniker. Prior to the leaks to Joseph Cox and Motherboard, Citizen was publicly and privately urging the public to take justice into their own hands, as Scott Morris reports for The Verge.

As wildfires raged through Southern California last weekend, an app called Citizen offered an unorthodox bounty over livestream and in push alerts to local residents: “hunt down” the alleged arsonist, and we’ll give you $30,000 cash.

This effort was pushed by none other than CEO Andrew Frame. Internal messages from Citizen's Slack channel show Frame wanted to put Citizen on the law enforcement map by turning users and employees into bounty hunters. Literally.

On Saturday afternoon, before the livestream was broadcast, Frame wrote in a company Slack thread that he would pay a $10,000 reward personally to catch an arsonist still in the area “as a test.”

“Let’s find this guy, activate safety network completely,” Frame wrote, according to screenshots of internal Slack messages obtained by The Verge. “This is a great transition of Citizen back to active safety. We are not a news company. We are safety and we make this sort of heinous crime impossible to escape from. That needs to be our mindset.” The bounty was later raised to $30,000.

LOL. "Safety network." Whatever. Frame saw this as a chance to turn Citizen from a news receptacle to a newsmaker, despite his mild protestations otherwise. If Citizen could catch a criminal, it would convert it from a receptacle for user videos and police scanner readouts into something that could actually combat crime. Employees were urged on by Frame, who made it clear he had a fever. And the only cure was "MORE VIGILANTISM!" Joseph Cox has obtained even more internal communications about this dangerous farce.

"first name? What is it?! publish ALL info," Frame told employees working in a Citizen Slack room who were working on the case.

"FIND THIS FUCK," he told them. "LETS GET THIS GUY BEFORE MIDNIGHT HES GOING DOWN."

"BREAKING NEWS. this guy is the devil. get him," Frame said. "by midnight!@#! we hate this guy. GET HIM."

Huh. Looks kind of like threats in interstate commerce or whatnot. But what do I know. I'm not a cop. Nor do I desire to be one. The plan of action was to fire up the home team. And then let it all burn. In the end, Citizen was just another Reddit, sending amped-up internet vigilantes in search of the wrong person.

In the hours that followed, it became clear the app was mistaken. The man pictured had no connection to the fires, and once he was located by law enforcement, he was quickly released for lack of evidence.

No harm? No foul? Wrong. A person was wrongfully detained as the result of an app's overzealous CEO and his promise of a $30,000 payout. Citizen apologized soon after, calling it a "mistake" it was "taking very seriously." It also promised to overhaul its "internal processes." It seems like the first overhaul should be to prevent its CEO from weaponizing his app and offering bounties for the information leading to arrests. That's not the business Citizen is in. Yet.

Clearly, Citizen wants more. Andrew Frame got his taste for blood. The blood may have been tainted but it hasn't deterred Frame and his app from pushing for its addition to law enforcement's arsenal. But this wielding of its power doesn't bode well for its intrusion into this space. Sure, cops arrest the wrong people all the time. But that doesn't mean private companies should get in on this racket. We need less of this, not more. And when apps like these encourage people to act on their impulses, they not only encourage physical manifestations of users' underlying biases, they place innocent people in harm's way.

Filed Under: bounties, crime reporting app, private law enforcement, vigilant
Companies: citizen

Private Security Company Thinks It Should Be Able To Take People To Jail Just Like Real Cops

from the Uber-but-for-vigilantes dept

A snitch app called Citizen is angling for the position of Local Law Enforcement®. Going a step further than hotbeds of bigotry like Ring's Neighbors or Facebook-but-for-racism Nextdoor, Citizen is actually trying to create a private law enforcement agency that provides "security" and other services for app users.

A marauding cop-like patrol vehicle emblazoned with the Citizen logo (and some branding for another private security company) was spotted roaming Los Angeles last week. The desire to create a private cutout in public law enforcement space was confirmed by current and former Citizen employees, as well as documents shared with Motherboard and Joseph Cox.

It's not just theoretical. It appears some employees of this private company really want to convert Citizen into a law enforcement agency. (Supporters of this move may also contain members of the Los Angeles Police Department, which called Citizen's move towards patrolling the streets a "game changer.") Then there's this new twist, which indicates Citizen's partner in patrolling -- Los Angeles Professional Security Services -- really would prefer to be an actual law enforcement agency, rather than the private security company it actually is.

In a self-described “documentary” on the Los Angeles Professional Security YouTube, the company's CEO and founder James Caspari explains after detaining two tresspassers that the company wants the power to make arrests and take people to jail.

“We’re going to waste police resources because we can’t drive them to the police station,” he said. “The security guard manual says we have to wait and a peace officer has to take them. That’s just a waste. If we’ve already cleared it... why can’t we just take ‘em to jail?”

Flow my tears, the fake policeman said. Why? WHY?? Because you're a goddamn rent-a-cop. You're not the real thing. You don't get to start depriving people of freedom just because you're dressed in black cop-adjacent garb and employed by a private security firm. No one has granted you the right to arrest people because that's limited to publicly-funded government agencies that are (in theory) more accountable to taxpayers than a private company that only answers to paying customers.

"Private security has zero authority on a public space," he later laments.

Go be a cop then. If it's killing you that you can't violate rights as a private citizen, go get an actual cop job where you can violate rights on the taxpayers' dime. Sure, this seems a bit backwards but that's how it works. The government gets to do certain things with the implicit consent of the governed. Los Angeles citizens have not agreed to allowing private citizens to start throwing other private citizens into faux cop cars in order to take them to jail. What standard is LAPS applying to itself when it affects an arrest? There are rules in place, backed by the Constitution. And, while these rules may be violated with alarming frequency by government agencies, they're still rules. Private companies don't have to adhere to the Constitution. And that's why they shouldn't be getting into the business of violating the rights of others. (And, before certain commenters start trying to turn this statement into something about social media, no one's rights are violated when a company refuses to provide you a platform for expressing yourself.)

Going from bad to arguably worse, the CEO of a private security firm actually believes it's capable of responding to mental health calls with its staff of people who apparently couldn't cut it as real cops or first responders.

Caspari explains in the video that LAPS believes it can remove trespassers and respond to mental health calls. “We are in a position to respond in force to effectively anywhere in the city to remove any negative element that a client of ours is threatened with,” Caspari said in the video.

And even in its own video, which it had the chance to edit before publishing it, the private security company's employees are given the "what even the fuck" treatment by the partners Citizen and LAPS really want to have on board: the Los Angeles Police Department.

After searching an abandoned building, LAPS employees cuff the two people they find there and wait for the LAPD to arrive. Caspari explains this is all cool and legal: a "private person arrest" supported by California law. After lamenting the "waste of time" that is waiting for actual law enforcement to show up, he's greeted with LAPD officers wondering why the private security firm is patrolling abandoned buildings that appear to be outside of its contractual obligations with its customers.

At one point, the LAPD does turn up. A seemingly surprised LAPD officer asks Caspari, "Is that your normal protocol, you guys just go search the building?"

"On your own, or? Just curious, I've never dealt with you guys before," the LAPD officer continues.

It's a legitimate question. If the private security company wasn't asked by the owners (and "abandoned" suggests no real owner exits) to patrol the building, why the hell are they entering it? At that point, the security personnel are just as guilty of trespassing as the people they detained.

Since there are no good answers to that question, the CEO moves on to complain the LAPD doesn't have enough resources to harass the homeless, leaving people "pushing two shopping carts down the road" free to annoy Caspari.

If nothing else, Caspari has the right mindset for law enforcement. The people who should be rounded up first are hanging out in abandoned buildings or irritating the locals with their homelessness. Nothing in the video suggests the security firm is stumbling across serious or violent criminal activity that's not being handled by the LAPD. Instead, the CEO complains his company has its hands tied, unable to remove homeless people, trespassers, and the mentally ill from the street without having to bring the LAPD into it.

If the LAPD has to use its resources to handle more serious crime and leave this sort of "crime" unaddressed, good. But that's not an invitation for private companies to fill this perceived void. Providing security for paying clients is fine, but wanting to be a cop just so you can round up a bunch of non-threatening, non-violent people makes you worse than the actual cops. This is just a bunch of people cosplaying and wishing their cardboard props were real. And it's going to do serious damage to Los Angeles residents if companies like this continue to believe they should have the right to violate the rights of others.

Filed Under: arrests, law enforcement, private cops, snitching, vigilante
Companies: citizen, la professional security services

Crime-Reporting App Citizen Apparently Attempting To Get Into The Law Enforcement Business

from the bad-ideas-from-worse-people dept

It looks like app developers want to be cops. Late last week, a Los Angeles resident spotted a Citizen-app branded patrol car roaming the city. Citizen is yet another app that allows residents to send crime alerts and other news to each other, following in the steps of Ring's Neighbors app and Nextdoor, a hyperlocal social media service that only lets actual neighbors connect with each other.

The only thing missing here is the replicant hunters.

"Few things make you feel like you live in a bleak dystopian reality like a Citizen App patrol car that looks like a cop car," Brandon Wenerd tweeted, along with a photo of the vehicle, on Wednesday.

The all black vehicle with tinted windows has the Citizen logo emblazoned across its side, as well as Citizen's tagline "Making your world a safer place" and the phrase "Private Patrol."

Also emblazoned on the dystopiamobile was the logo for Los Angeles Professional Security, a private security firm with its own fleet of vehicles. That only added to the list of raised questions about the app and its plans for the future.

Like any other app or service that allows locals to report crime and other suspicious activity, Citizen has proven to be a handy conduit for bigots and racists to expose their biases and, unfortunately, find like-minded "citizens" in their area. This app may have been more empowering than most. It allows users to send crime alerts and Citizen encourages the livestreaming of crimes in progress. While it may not actually encourage users to don their Batsuits and start fighting crime on their own, the app did make its debut under the name "Vigilante." Its booting from Apple's app store resulted in its less-overtly-worrying rebrand.

But here's what's actually going on: Citizen wants to get into the cop business. That's according to internal documents shared with Joseph Cox and Motherboard shortly after residents began reporting the existence of this Citizen-branded mock cop car.

Crime and neighborhood watch app Citizen has ambitions to deploy private security workers to the scene of disturbances at the request of app users, according to leaked internal Citizen documents and Citizen sources.

[...]

"The broad master plan was to create a privatized secondary emergency response network," one former Citizen employee told Motherboard. Motherboard granted multiple sources anonymity to protect them from retaliation from the company.

"It's been something discussed for a while but I personally never expected it to make it this far," another Citizen source told Motherboard.

The car observed on the streets is Citizen's "security response" vehicle. Presumably, Citizen is planning to add more cars to this fleet so it can better serve users who feel they might need some additional security. Whether that includes responding to calls of crimes in progress remains to be seen, but the addition of Los Angeles Professional Security to the mix suggests that it does. This firm offers a "subscription law enforcement service" that includes a "potent combination of technology, K-9 support, and patrol personnel."

That's not the only private security firm in the mix.

Citizen has been actively testing the program, with what the company describes as quick response times and instant communication between Citizen and security partners, according to the emails.

One of those companies, according to the emails, is well-known private security contractor Securitas. The email about the tests says that Securitas average response times have improved to around 20 minutes.

It looks like Citizen believes there's a large market for private cops. Unfortunately, it looks like local law enforcement agrees. According to internal emails seen by Motherboard, Citizen approached the Los Angeles Police Department with its proposal to expand into the police business and this was (allegedly -- we are talking about a document that will probably be used to market Citizen to other cop shops) warmly received by LAPD officials, who said it would be a "game changer."

And, to be sure, it might be. Los Angeles has a property crime problem cops can't seem to fix. Adding roving bands of vigilantes would be a "game changer" too, but no one really thinks that's a solution. That's just an additional problem. Citizen's expansion may change the game, but it also encourages Citizen to embrace the ideals that saw it debut as "Vigilante."

We don't need tech companies thinking they're just an extension of the government, especially the parts of the government allowed to deploy deadly force and deprive people of their freedoms. Blurring the line between public and private tends to work out poorly for those supposedly being served by these partnerships. Members of the public will be expected to treat both as law enforcement, even though only actual cops have the power to enforce the law. Private companies can do things cops can't -- like engage in searches of property ostensibly under their control -- and cops can swoop in and directly benefit from searches they themselves cannot legally engage in. The end result will be more government power -- not derived from laws or Constitutional amendments but from app developers who see themselves as crime fighters.

Filed Under: crime reporting, law enforcement, los angeles, private law enforcement, snitch app, vigilantes
Companies: citizen

Selling Fear? There's An App For That

from the BE-A-PART-OF-PRISON-PIPELINE! dept

Fear sells.

Fear has always sold. It has sold wars to the public, both real and imagined. It has propelled the endless funding of the War on Drugs and the War on Terror. It has sold the killing of unarmed citizens by police officers to courts. It has sold the diminishment of our Constitutional rights, most notably at our borders. It has sold surveillance creep -- the steady encroachment of cameras in public areas, increasingly coupled with tech that makes anonymity a historical relic.

It has sold newspapers and brought eyeballs to newscasts. As the public has shifted its news consumption to the web, the fear salesmen have followed, ensuring what bleeds still leads, even online.

The public still buys it, even when the facts don't back up the narrative. A decade of historically low crime levels has made little dent in the public perception that we live in a country overrun by drug cartels, sex traffickers, and assorted lowlifes hellbent on separating us from our possessions and lives.

All of this information is a Google search away, but it's ignored in favor of what still brings viewers to websites and funding to government agencies. This would all be sad enough if it weren't for a new wave of tech companies behaving like newspapers riding the fine line between information and sensationalism.

Rani Molla's report for Vox about the rise of snitch apps and the use of "neighborhood" platforms to encourage racial stereotyping under the guise of "safety" is a depressing read. But it's a worth a read nonetheless. People apparently love to be afraid, and there's a long list of tech companies willing to indulge this urge.

Violent crime in the US is at its lowest rate in decades. But you wouldn’t know that from a crop of increasingly popular social media apps that are forming around crime.

Apps like Nextdoor, Citizen, and Amazon Ring’s Neighbors — all of which allow users to view local crime in real time and discuss it with people nearby — are some of the most downloaded social and news apps in the US, according to rankings from the App Store and Google Play.

This is just part of it. But it's an unhealthy start. Citizen, for instance, used to do business as "Vigilante," so that gives you some idea of the mindset some of these apps/tech appeal to. Amazon is upping the ante further than the rest, though. It's turning its doorbell cameras into reality TV for crime junkies.

It recently advertised an editorial position that would coordinate news coverage on crime, specifically based around its Ring video doorbell and Neighbors, its attendant social media app. Neighbors alerts users to local crime news from “unconfirmed sources” and is full of Amazon Ring videos of people stealing Amazon packages and “suspicious” brown people on porches. “Neighbors is more than an app, it’s the power of your community coming together to keep you safe and informed,” it boasts.

Apps like these turn isolated incidents that don't even amount to a rounding error in local crime stats into a narrative that users' neighborhoods are full of suspicious people doing suspicious things. This kickstarts a vicious circle where cops are called on "suspicious brown people," leading to increased profiling of brown people… which leads to arrest stats that seem to prove brown people are more dangerous. And Amazon is there to get this ball rolling by hiring an editorial team to drum up fear using doorbell camera footage. What a time to be alive.

The tech revolution has made bigotry more efficient.

A recent Motherboard article found that the majority of people posted as “suspicious” on Neighbors in a gentrified Brooklyn neighborhood were people of color.

Nextdoor has been plagued by this sort of stereotyping.

Citizen is full of comments speculating on the race of people in 9-1-1 alerts.

To be fair, these apps and tech offerings didn't create the problem. It was always there. They've just made it worse by tapping into this thick vein of fear and bigotry that is likely being underserved by local journalism. As Molla points out, small news entities have been dying off, leaving a void that's been filled by neighborhood-focused social media outlets. Like anything else, the potential of positive development was always there. It's just that those who use the services the most tend to be the type who view people of other races, creeds, etc. as inherently suspicious.

The solution, unfortunately, is better inputs. The researchers Molla spoke to suggest "better media literacy" and "more mindful consumption of news." Let's be honest: if those are the choices, it's never going to happen. The selling of a crime-filled America happened as crime rates dropped precipitously. Journalists sold it. Politicians sold it. Massive echo chambers were constructed and the apps that might have disrupted this have instead, for the most part, amplified the echoes.

The information has always been out there. It's just always ignored by those whose personal beliefs can't be swayed by stats and alternate viewpoints. Tech isn't going to fix it. It's up to us, as individuals, to try to pierce through this haze created by hundreds of entities whose existence depends on the public believing the nation is unsafe. And that's the hitch: you're not just going up against friends and neighbors. You're going up against entrenched beliefs held by government agencies and media concerns that have monetized fear successfully for decades.

Filed Under: fear, neighbors, overhype, social media
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