
When Batman isn’t available: Crowd-fund - ajaymehta
http://www.salon.com/2013/10/11/when_batman_isnt_available_crowd_fund/#comments
======
whiddershins
Of interest is how circular it all is. At various points in history police
forces were funded in this way, affluent people paying for security in their
neighborhoods. (cynically thought to be intended to "keep the riffraff out")

Over time we moved towards a taxpayer funded police force which theoretically
applies equal protection to everyone and forced all the wealthy people to pay
in. (taxes) Then we gradually expanded tax burdens downwards so people with
lower incomes (at least the middle and working classes) increasingly bear the
burden of funding of this police force (radical viewpoint: forcing the poor to
pay the salaries of their oppressors)

Leading us to a profession of law enforcement whose implementation is
unsatisfactory to many people for ideological reasons (being "forced" to pay
for it) and pragmatically unsuitable for others. (because in many cases the
practices of law enforcement do not directly reflect community values, i.e.
war on drugs)

It is a cool thought experiment to imagine a system where it comes full
circle, all local law enforcement is directly answerable to the community, as
its employer, and to federal agencies, in cases of alleged civil rights
violations, or to help with larger crime networks.

Which is IN THEORY what we currently have, but, clearly if a community feels
the need to crowdfund neighborhood security, the government isn't adequately
responding to the community's concerns, for structural reasons.

~~~
mathattack
The two other services rah should give pause are education and fire fighting.
In many cases insurance companies pay for fire services only for their buyers.
One could see this going towards crowd funding. Private school is also crowd
funded. The teachers unions seem ok with this since it doesn't pull resources
away. (The private garbage model). They do raise hell for charter schools
though.

~~~
tammer
The same encouraged privatization and evaporating public support has been
happening for years, especially in my city (Philadelphia).

Last week a young girl died because the city's budget only allows for a nurse
at her school two days a week. No one on duty had enough medical knowledge to
recognize her asthma attack required professional attention.[1]

A supplement to the devestating education budget (this year began with roughly
half the number of operating schools as the last) comes from city-encouraged
philanthropic donations.[2] There are already nation-wide crowdfunding
efforts, such as Donors Choose.[3] Some schools in Philly need to go this
route to get supplies like paper and pencils.[4]

    
    
      [1]: http://citypaper.net/article.php?16461
      [2]: http://thenotebook.org/blog/136439/mayor-seeking-donations-school-supplies
      [3]: http://www.donorschoose.org/
      [4]: http://www.theawl.com/2013/09/first-they-fired-the-nurses-and-librarians-then-they-fired-the-guidance-counselors

------
jjb123
Hey HN, since my comment below the article was buried beneath a bunch of ads,
and a discussion is developing, here is the original comment I made on
salon.com after reading the article:

\---

(Co-founder/CEO of Crowdtilt here) I just wanted to follow up on the article
above and clarify a few things. My replies in the article seem to come across
as dismissive of the potential downsides to civic crowdfunding. That couldn't
be further from the truth - As team members here at Crowdtilt would tell you,
I have actually been quite introspective about how our tools are being used
within the realm of community fundraising in the last few days (and as this
use case for private security has begun to spread to other cities).

Our tools and platform are built with democratization in mind, not built to
further tech elitism or affluent disparity. Like any tool built to connect
people (from ships, to the automobile, to the internet itself) the early
adoption may be through a more affluent class, but that is not where the
impact stays and remains - and its introduction is an undeniable net positive
for society. Additionally, knowing that many (more affluent) neighborhoods
have been doing things like this for years with homeowners associations to
hire private security, we hope this tool continues to lower the barriers for
such solutions to problems as dire as security or as aspirational as something
like free public wifi for a city ([http://tilt.tc/TP07](http://tilt.tc/TP07))
that we've seen on the other end of the spectrum of civic crowdfunding.

My view is that communities will benefit from the tools we're building, but
again, I want it to be clear that we take the potential downsides of civic
crowdfunding seriously and think about ways to mitigate those downsides - we/I
am not dismissive of these arguments whatsoever.

Please feel free to reach me at jamesb@crowdtilt.com if you have any
suggestions or thoughts - would be happy to have a dialogue on the topic with
anyone (...I would learn more from that than a one-sided internal monologue
with myself or our team). Thanks, James.

------
itchitawa
I can't see any negative here. Nobody's complaining that private security
firms exist. They're already used by rich people and businesses anyway. How is
a group of residents in a suburb different from a group of residents in an
apartment block or workers in a company? Next, the internet commenters will be
telling us we aren't allowed to buy a computer because it disenfranchises the
poor who go without.

I used to live in a low-middle class neighborhood with a group of volunteer
security guards. They'd drive around at night looking out for burglaries. Is
that wrong?

------
angersock
So, here's an interesting quote from the article:

 _" An affluent neighborhood that privatizes trash pickup doesn’t marginalize
the trash pickup in poorer neighborhoods — it increases the resources that are
available for those neighborhoods."_

The trick is this: justice is not trash. Police is not trash, security is not
trash. There is a very important moral calculus and contract that goes into
voluntarily submitting to society's laws.

We need to address the fact that we've lost faith in our governments, and that
we don't depend on our .gov to provide for our needs, and that we don't
believe in the contract anymore. This is a short-sighted sort of fix, and one
that is only going to lay the groundwork for a much, much messier attempt at
resolution. We need to fix the .gov.

There's always been a kind of wink and nod that yes, the .gov can do better,
and yes, we can't all be astronauts, but allowing such direct coupling of
personal wealth and policy is quite tacky.

EDIT: Removed ranty bit.

~~~
dnautics
>"If people are crowdfunding law enforcement, if people are allowed to spend
money on security to effectively make being a poor homeless dude wandering
around on their street a crime, we've failed as a civilization. We've given up
any aspiration that hey, justice is something that matters, morals are
something that matters: if I can pay for it, I can inflict my will on others
to increase my own convenience."

If people are voting for the leaders of the law enforcement, if people are
allowed to vote for security to effectively make being a poor homeless dude
wandering around on their street a crime, we've failed as a civilization.
We've given up any aspiration that hey, justice is something that matters,
morals are something that matters: if I can vote for it, I can inflict my will
on others to increase my own convenience.

Lest you think that is a silly thing to say, THAT IS HAPPENING NOW. The City
of Berkeley gets a DHS-sponsored Armored Personell Carrier. Cops in New York
stop and fisk people of color. In no less than 10 cities in america, it is
illegal to feed the homeless (I've broken this law in my own city, many
times). What makes the group of people known as the "wealthy" any more or less
suspicious or despicable than the group of people known as the "popular"?

~~~
notahacker
> What makes the group of people known as the "wealthy" any more or less
> suspicious or despicable than the group of people known as the "popular"?

The group of people known as the "popular" is much larger and generally more
diverse, and therefore it takes a bit more power of persuasion (or widespread
bigotry) to convince them that harassing a particular social group is a good
use of their tax dollars. If the "popular" backs that harassment, society has
bigger problems than the legal mechanisms that permit them to do so.

A situation where people wanting "security" to target a minority or behaviour
they dislike need electoral and legislative support may not be perfect, but
it's still preferable to a situation where they simply need sufficient funds.

~~~
dnautics
> The group of people known as the "popular" is much larger and generally more
> diverse.

Yeah, no, that's really not true, by "popular", I'm functionally referring to
people "popular enough to get elected". This specific subset may also be
restricted to the intersection of the common definition of "popular" and
"narcissistic enough to try".

We may choose to really examine those individuals who have a day-to-day
operational control over the work of the state. Here there are also
complicating factors like bureaucrats and mid- and high- level managers in the
state apparatus not only are unelected (so that to properly describe this
group we should re-qualify popular as "favorable to the elected") but these
people also tend to be less accountable - "qualified immunity", not often do
you hear of government officials going to jail - though I suppose that's true
of wall street, too...

------
Jamurai
Fascinating. For one thing I'm amazed that $8,000 gets your neighborhood 60
hours a week of private security patrol for 4 months. Sounds way too
economical.

Also, in the article, the CEO of Crowdtilt implies that this is a net-positive
because Oakland PD will be able spend more time patrolling other areas--
implying that Rockridge will now get less police attention. If that's true, I
wouldn't want to pay money for my neighborhood to get less real police patrol.

~~~
bjterry
It's hard to imagine a scenario where this would result in worse overall law
enforcement. They are going to get 60 hours of patrol per week. Police don't
really drive around upper middle class neighborhoods _at all_ much less 35% of
every hour of the week. I live in a fairly nice area in San Francisco and I go
weeks without seeing a police car, and this is a denser area than Rockridge
(obviously parking enforcement doesn't count, and if they do count I don't see
any reason they would be displaced by security officers since they have to
continue doing their jobs there no matter what the crime rate is).

It doesn't really make sense to pay for expensive personnel that are
authorized to write tickets, perform searches, and use deadly force to patrol
your streets when the main benefit is mostly (a) the possibility of witnessing
illegal activity while it's going on, and (b) a visible presence that
dissuades potential criminals from their activities. Neither of these requires
nearly the level of training or expertise.

I'm not sure what the exchange rate in terms of hours is where I'd rather have
the police officer patrolling rather than a security dude, but we can get a
handle on the relative cost. Indeed.com says security officers in San
Francisco have an average salary of $35,000, and the starting pay for police
in San Francisco is $89K-$112K. If you fully burden the security officer with
benefits, and fully burden the police officer with their dramatically higher
level of benefits and pension, it's not difficult to imagine that the security
officer is 5-6x as cost effective. So would you rather have 12 hours of police
patrols or 60 hours of security officer patrols?

I suspect there is a tipping point in terms of presence past which a
neighborhood gets known by thoughtful criminals as being well-patrolled, which
causes a significant decrease in crimes committed there.

~~~
allochthon
Although it is true that you can probably wring savings out of using private
security personnel over unionized police, I personally don't think the higher
costs for the police are a problem -- it's hard to live on wages less than
what the police in San Francisco are being paid, even in Oakland. A real
problem with the legal and law enforcement systems is that they're
bureaucratic and unresponsive. I do not mind more money going to them, but I
also want to see them enter the Internet age and do things like answer emails.

------
charliepinto
This is interesting timing given the shutdown of the Federal government. With
crowd-funding, citizens can be infinitely resourceful in solving their own
problems, faster, and without the long, bureaucratic process that plagues
governments. There is a real role for government to play here in securing the
safety of their citizens.

------
stickhandle
Here's the problem - who watches the watchmen? There is a large, complex,
troubled, oft-comprised, well-meaning bureaucracy in place to vet police,
police training and police actions. Security guards ... not so much. Civic
crowd-funding is an interesting concept, but I'm almost certain those that
engage in it, over time, will find it deeply flawed.

~~~
allochthon
I think these kinds of questions should be handled on a case-by-case basis.
There's an incident with private security personnel, and this gives rise to an
oversight board, etc. I am not at all convinced that the large, complex,
troubled, oft-compromised, well-meaning bureaucracy that you mention is
directing its resources towards the right things. Just as likely to my mind,
it is engaging in a thousand small acts of self-preservation and defense of
turf, because of all of the overlapping jurisdictions and poorly delineated
lines of authority.

~~~
stickhandle
_> >engaging in a thousand small acts of self-preservation and defense of
turf, because of all of the overlapping jurisdictions and poorly delineated
lines of authority._ Agreed - troubled, oft-compromised. I think you may be
overestimating the power of an oversight board ... in the end, I guess I
seriously question the training and motivation held by those in the security
guard profession.

~~~
dnautics
I'm not going to defend security guards, as we can see in the case of George
Zimmermann, things can get unhinged, but, is there any reason why you don't
seriously question the training and motivation of those who wear a police
badge? Because there's a lot of police abuse out there. As bad as it gets, no
private security has ever bombed a neighborhood it was supposed to protect.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOVE#1985_bombing](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOVE#1985_bombing)

Sure, that's an outlier, but then there's also the Jose Guerena case. Or the
Cheye Calvo case. These are more well known ones. In "The Rise of the Warrior
Cop" Radley Balko lists literally hundreds of cases piling up over the past
decade where egregious abuse of force occurred because of lack of police
oversight.

------
phaer
I thought we already had crowd-funding for public services and it was called
"taxes", no?

~~~
spanishcow
100% agree. This is not more than another hint of a failing government. If
people wants and needs more police and are willing to pay for it it's the
government duty to put it in place. Using taxes as a political weapon and
demonizing them as something inherently bad causes irrational decisions that
costs more money and could cost lifes.

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logn
"Our tax dollars end up channeled to special interests or spent on useless
wars or utterly wasted."

Not only tax dollars. All the new money we print too, which is a tax in
effect, devaluing dollars and favoring those who can grow their wealth with
the inflation (either those receiving newly printed money, businesses with
pricing power, investors, or workers who can demand raises).

------
fstrube
I'm curious how diligent the neighborhood citizens were in soliciting their
local government to increase police presence. Did they write to the police
chief? Attend council meetings? Voice their concerns to elected officials?

I believe people are inherently lazy. More often than not people will take the
path of least resistance. What would happen if the volume of support for the
crowd-funding were directed at the local government? It seems like people
would rather "one-click checkout" (tm) than make the effort to fix their own
government.

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PaperclipTaken
I definately disagree with the idea that adding private security won't remove
funding from public security. If the vasy majority of wealthy townships start
funding their own private security, it will be much harder to justify
expensive policing budgets, and potentially even cheap police budgets.

Short term there are only upsides, but in the long run this will weaken the
local governments.

------
ck2
Until someone shows me independent statistics otherwise, I am going to assume
"private security" is a false sense of security theater.

------
Freeboots
Whose read Snow Crash?

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dw5ight
Crushing it as usual!

