Citizen is nightmarish. All the “it’s a dystopian surveillance app built to exploit our worst fears” concerns about other social media products with only the most superficial veneer trying to hide it. I had it on my phone for months and it contributed absolutely nothing but anxiety.
A friend had the app and did nothing but post local incidents to a group chat on a daily basis. We told him to stop or get the boot which he did. It illustrated just how uptight this app makes people. He wound up deleting it after a few months because it made him afraid to go outside as if he was surrounded by crime when in fact nothing had changed. (This is in south-west Queens NYC)
Bad things happen on a daily basis. These apps wont stop or deter crime. The best you can do is stay alert and aware of your surroundings.
I'm in LIC/Astoria, I had a similar experience. My wife rolled her eyes at me for ages when I told her about "local" (literally never anywhere close to us) incidents and felt very smug when I finally punted the app forever.
Yes it's anxiety inducing but doesn't it just tell us the truth of who we are?
If you can't handle the anxiety, nobody is forcing you to have it on your phone nor are they forcing you to be part of it.
In other countries, the government has cameras everywhere and use the footage to find and prosecute. Apparently America prefers to have individuals take on that role.
>nobody is forcing you to have it on your phone nor are they forcing you to be part of it.
are you so sure about that? You might happen to be the 'wrong guy' who accidentally gets into the crossfire of the citizen app mob one day.
""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." He was growing impatient. He increased the bounty to $20,000. Thousands of people were watching Citizen's livestream, but the man still hadn't been caught. Frame asked his staff to send out another notification, one that would hit all Citizen users in Los Angeles. The bounty had to go higher. "Close in on him. 30k Let's get him. No escape. Let's increase. 30k," Frame said. "Notify all of la. Blast to all of la.[...]"
"Well after midnight, Los Angeles police made an arrest. In a separate Slack room, employees cautiously began to celebrate: "cop said its an ongoing investigation, this looks like our guy!!!" one employee wrote. It wasn't Citizen's guy. Frame and the entirety of the Citizen apparatus had spent a whole night putting a bounty on the head of an innocent man."
Yeah their whole mentality of vigilantism is weird but we should be encouraging citizens to take out their phones and document things. Otherwise George Floyd would be another statistic and nobody would know his name.
The encouragement of cell phone footage works both ways - it can document more crime that induces anxiety from the right or it can document more police abuses. Citizen's agenda is off but their tool of choice is right.
Is "nobody is forcing you to have it on your phone nor are they forcing you to be part of it" really the standard that we want when judging whether to share our revulsion about a company or product? You're not wrong about that part, I'm just not sure what your point is.
It's no secret that social media in general stokes many of our worst impulses. Citizen strikes me as somewhat unique because it starts from such a negative place and then encourages us to feel worse. Facebook benefited from engagement resulting in political chaos but that's only one of the ways individuals can interact. Citizen can't even claim that weak defense. It's like the social media version of for-profit prisons: it claims to want safety but it benefits the most when we think we are unsafe.
Hate to break it to you but "nobody is forcing you" is kinda the standard in the US from vaccines to social media to guns.
Everything is a choice here. There are plenty of countries out there which would have chosen to ban Citizen along with a whole long list of other even more idiotic things but this country is about freedom of choice even if that choice is bad for the greater community.
If it's anything like the Ring "neighborhood alert" notifications I briefly had on after getting a doorbell: no, not really.
A filtered (only the worst things get reported) dubiously-accurate (lots of "heard something that sounded like gunshots") view of a large geographic area (they sent me stuff covering a much larger area than I would've been concerned of) isn't "the truth of who we are," it's just a window into how some people are feeling, presented by a company that stands to make more money if they can make you feel more concerned.
Oh totally agree that they are bating you into being a frightened animal holed up in your house. So i turn off the notifications and only go on the app if i am bored or if there's something happening locally i want to know more about.
The citizen app is especially egregious but it's not the only app that does this. Unfortunately all social apps that rely on engagement have to create a false perception of the world in order to maximize engagement. The government is not going to regulate the UX design here. It's up to the individual to learn of their dystopian reality.
I personally don't really want to know about every single crime but if I had the choice I would choose for every single crime to be captured on video. You can call it a police state or vigilante state but I'm fine with that.
I don’t like Citizen, but is it inherently a bad thing if there’s more accountability in the form of distributed filming of the government and its agents?
My issue with citizen is more how it fear mongers and the general sentiment around what it’s doing.
I also think it’s a terrible idea to encourage people to put themselves in potentially dangerous situations.
To put even a slightly finer point on it -- isn't this, in a sense, journalism without a filter? Video can lie, but it's probably a bit harder to make a live streamed video lie than an article that recapitulates the content of such a stream.
One thing I do seem to see over and over is a pattern where journalists are a little annoyed when companies encroach on the role of journalists but do so for less money. I'm sure this doesn't rise to a level of conscious bias, but it does sometimes feel that anything that threatens their gatekeeping is going to get a lot of flak in the opinion section.
> One thing I do seem to see over and over is a pattern where journalists are a little annoyed when companies encroach on the role of journalists but do so for less money.
While there will be some bias from being challenged, I think there's also plenty of good reasons for journalists to challenge these sorts of companies.
Journalism is a profession and brings with it a lot of ethical considerations. Teaching of journalism goes into depth on why the ethics are important, how to report on sensitive topics, and all sorts that makes journalists far better qualified to report on things.
There's absolutely a place for self-taught/hobbyist writing, but it's not journalism, and if we depend on it for the "important" or hard topics we'll lose out on the benefits that well trained journalists bring to the table.
I do understand that journalists aspire to ethical behavior in aggregate. What's ultimately not entirely clear to me is whether that aspiration is generally met to the degree that the profession is materially better at truth-telling than any other. I sure hope so. Then again, you can often read reporting on the same subject by journalists at CNN and Fox News, and the one inescapable conclusion is that someone is not telling the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
There's a line somewhere between political leanings in valid reporting, and pure opinion around made up topics.
I don't know much about CNN, and don't watch Fox, but from what I've heard the actual news segments on Fox aren't as bad, it's the opinion shows (most of which masquerade as news) that are the bad bit.
In the UK we have several popular news channels and each has their own leanings, and while I think it's important that viewers are mindful of those leanings, I don't think it's too far out there to say that one can assume they are not being out-right lied to, and it's rare for a news channel to ever say something actually dangerous. There are issues, there are complaints made, but then there are typically retractions and the issues are fairly rare, compared to what I've seen of US media.
Then would you willing to gatekeep people from calling themselves journalists, ala a license via something like a bar exam, where violating journalistic standards could get you "disbarred".
I'm not against the idea. Wikipedia lists around 150 professional standards organisations[0] along the lines of what could be done for journalism.
Again I think there's a place for blogging, factual videos on TikTok, people working their way into the industry more organically, and special interest groups, etc. But I do think there's a need for the bulk of mainstream news to live up to the responsibility they have to the public.
Journalism without a filter isn't journalism, it's surveillance.
a critical part of journalism is choosing what not to cover. people pay attention to the things it's easy to pay attention to, and good journalism makes sure that the news that is front-and-center and easiest for people to find is actually news. not every crime scene is newsworthy, most are incredibly personal and sensitive moments for at least one party involved, and the coverage should take that into account. pointing a livestreaming camera at the victim of every assualt or robbery is not providing any benefit to society.
I don't love a definition of journalism that includes journalists getting to decide what I am allowed to know. Analysis, interpretation, calling to attention that which is important, these are all great things. The filter part I'm less sure about.
Of course we should be sensitive to victims and I don't think sensationalizing things is beneficial, but I also think that most of what I personally use Citizen for is to figure out what is happening near me in the neighborhood in real time. Like, "why is it suddenly smoky outside," or, "why are there a lot of police helicopters flying over us right now?"
I wouldn't classify it as being allowed vs not allowed. If you want to know, there are police records to comb through.
I'd describe it more along the lines of there only being so many hours in a day, and only a subset of those that journalists are paid for. It simply isn't necessarily possible to cover every crime, political choice, special event, upcoming event, and more, with the nuance it likely deserves.
Your objection, to me at least, reads more like a complaint about journalists not putting every action in and by the city front and center. But if everything is front and center, does that mean everything is, or nothing? We get into a lack of space on the front page, lack of time to read it, and lack of places to put up notices that are essential. We essentially run into what Arthur Dent did in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy [0], with "essential news" buried because something more essential was already there.
Regarding realtime use of Citizen that you described below, that doesn't sound like a bad use-case. I know it's not for me though. Having every incident sent via push notification (which I can only assume will occur on a long enough timeline to increase engagement) doesn't sound good for anyone's mental health. We may not be there yet, but I'm not sure I want to partake in encouraging society moving in that direction.
pointing a livestreaming camera at the victim of every assualt or robbery is not providing any benefit to society
I do not agree. Assuming we provide privacy to the victim, this is absolutely a net benefit for society. To say otherwise would be to care more about the criminal than the victim.
This is especially true in the context of SF where the police/DAs are refusing to prosecute anyone. Videos keep the authorities honest.
To put even a slightly finer point on it -- isn't this, in a sense, journalism without a filter? Video can lie, but it's probably a bit harder to make a live streamed video lie than an article that recapitulates the content of such a stream.
Video "lying" involves video distorting the entirety of a situation by only showing one and part of an overall action. The thing about such lying is it easy, effortless. A perfectly sincere person can walk into the middle of situation, film it, show an incorrect picture and not know it.
And the problem here is that many/most people operate with the assumption "either X is true or he's a liar" and videos that a bad picture of an event may have no intentional liars attached, which can give them more credibility than should have.
> To put even a slightly finer point on it -- isn't this, in a sense, journalism without a filter?
I don't think it's journalism if it doesn't have a filter. IMHO, the job of journalists is to filter through a bunch of garbage to produce something that's succinct, informative, and as truthful as possible (given the constraints). Publishing a stream of raw garbage is not that.
One of my all time favorite films. As soon as I read this headline I thought of it immediately. Could this lead to a new breed of ambulance chasers seeking a different kind of pay-day?
Tbh, I love this kind of content. I've been watching live stream happenings/disasters for quite some time now through a multitude of apps, so the more the merrier.
I'm probably an outlier, but I love the concept of Citizen and dislike the implementation.
I don't have public safety anxiety, but want current data and public safety updates where I live and travel. Decentralized, unfiltered, and non editorialized news reporting is also a huge perk.
When there is a lot of police activity in my neighborhood, I want to know the cause and act accordingly. For example, if there is a gunman on the run (as has happened in the past), I would want to make sure my doors are locked.
My city and state does a terrible job of providing this information in real time and their retrospective data has been filtered extensively by law enforcement and politicians.
Areas where I wish Citizen was better are data presentation and selection. Incidents they present seem arbitrary and are a subset of the actual events. I would be more interested in average data over time and all current events plus filter options. Opt in notifications by incident type and proximity would make it a true public safety app.
> I thought that filming crime and police was solidly legal.
Filming anything from a public space (street, sidewalk, etc) is legal, even if it's of a private space that is visible from public space. For example, if I'm on a public sidewalk next to your private residence, and you have the blinds open walking around naked - you have no reasonable expectation of privacy and can be filmed even though you're on your private property. Just like if you're driving on the public street and I have a ring doorbell camera, you have no reasonable expectation of privacy driving down the street, or walking on the sidewalk, and I can record you.
Any competent freelance journalist will tell you they pay for liability insurance and the annual premium is at least $1000/year.
Said journalists are generally educated and have some training, especially around ethics. At least they're supposed to. This keeps them from shoving a camera in everyone's face while a crime is unfolding.
Citizen is taking contributions from whoever the fuck...
It's so much worse than that. It's, quite literally, a right wing psyop. It's well established that people's fears about crime are much more correlated with news coverage than actual levels of crime.
I'm having trouble finding it right now, but there was a recent survey that showed something like ~55% of Americans think crime is higher than it was in the early 90s. It's not even remotely close. We're back up to... 2012 levels.
Meanwhile, Citizen is Nextdoor but even more extreme. You can see all this crime happening all the time, increasing the perception of it being extremely common. What happens when crime becomes a major political issue? Reactionaries get elected. Who's funding Citizen? Oh look, Peter Thiel. How surprising.
This is one of those things that I just can't reconcile with my own experience. Studies say that crime is actually down but I'm witnessing more and more general lawlessness. A few weeks ago I saw someone take a case of beer out of a supermarket without paying. They caught him on camera and no one tried to stop him. The manager told me it was pointless to call the police. Public urination is way more common than it used to be and I think NYC decriminalized it a while ago. So if a bunch of previously criminal acts are no longer being reported, can we truly have confidence that crime has actually gone down?
This reminds me of all those news articles confidently declaring inflation wasn't a threat, and that, no, we are actually experiencing some deflation. But when I go to the grocery store I end up paying more for things like milk and meat. A strip steak went from about $9.99 a pound to $14.99 a pound.
Crime is definitely up, but even if we assume it's under-reported or the numbers are being fudged, it's still nowhere near the level of the 90s. It's up from a historic low. I think a lot of people either aren't really aware of or were sheltered growing up from how bad crime used to be. People's real-world experience is based on their recent memory, not on 90's levels of violence.
There were a little less than 2,000 shootings in New York City in 2020. That's very bad, given that for a few years the city had managed to dip under 1,000 shootings. An extremely noticeable spike. But as a point of comparison, in 1991 there were over 5,000 shootings in NYC. And those numbers aren't taking into account three decades of population growth. Even when you look at crime overall and not just violent crimes, we were coming off of a ~5% national crime rate in 1991.
From what I can see, GP is correct that we are mostly looking at a return to 2012-level crime stats, and in some areas maybe a return to 2000-2010 levels. I'm convinced that people just can't remember any earlier than that. The 90s were really bad, if ~55% of Americans think we're at those levels already, then ~55% of Americans are just wrong. They don't have an accurate grasp of what crime used to look like.
When you look at >2015 rates, then you do see crime going up. That's a real thing, and it's worth paying attention to. But that doesn't really change anything about the overall trajectory of crime over the past decade. It especially doesn't change anything about the overall trajectory of crime over the past >1 decade.
> But when I go to the grocery store I end up paying more for things like milk and meat.
There's a much simpler explanation here, which is that food categories like milk and meat are completely excluded from many inflation calculations, specifically because their prices are highly volatile. An increase in the price of food won't be directly reflected in any reported inflation numbers, at least as far as I know.
Like many high-level economy measures, inflation is not always a useful way to talk about how costs are changing and what regular people are experiencing. It's purposefully disconnected from many "on-the-ground" prices of goods that are important to consumers.
I read this somewhere and it sounds plausible to me: a private police subscription. As-a-service if you will. They would do the same things as police but only for subscribers and with better "customer service".
Maybe you could also look at the same thing as: as private security + private detectives (?) scaled and commoditized via software and gigwork.
It‘s a nightmarish idea, don‘t get me wrong, but I can see it.
Well if they can do anything about car break-ins and larceny in SF I think they'll get a lot of business. Bet they can
also package their service when renting a car at the airport. Almost dystopian, but I can see it.
I don’t think that they would do anything more than security guards currently do, which because of the liability and risk of prosecution, in San Francisco, is zero.
They partner with police. The revenue play is charging governments access to a feed of events happening just in their jurisdiction (with some cleaning up/grouping of similar reports).
Citizen gets the police to pay them for access, then gets the police to advertise the app to them as an alternative to calling non emergency dispatch. In turn more people down Citizen and Citizen can probably monetize that.
In LA they even have Citizen branded patrol vehicles rather than community service officers as a pilot program. So rather than having like an unarmed (and normally unsworn) employee of LAPD in a Prius with a little orange light on the top, you get a private contractor in a citizen branded vehicle doing the patrol.
The big question is if Citizen gets into E911 systems, which have a lot more liability than non emergency type things. Is Citizen going to make a play to become the standard way of contacting 911 via text based communication at some point and attempt to generate revenue via running that infrastructure.
Curious - what can this private Citizen branded patrol actually do? Isn't it just a camera on wheels? It can't make arrests, it can't handcuff people, it can't do much legally.
A majority of private security in the country works through intimidation alone. Legally they have next to no rights, at least different from you or me or any other bystander. If I ever get harassed by mall cops or anyone else of the sort my response is always to either ignore them completely or ask them to call the cops. In both cases I am immediately left alone.
Yeah I don’t know the laws of private security companies. For example, if you hire private security firm to guard a bank, are they allowed to use lethal force to protect the bank?
It’s scary how close to the real deal vehicle this Citizen patrol van looks like. I think they can even put police lights on legally if I’m not mistaken.
They're only allowed the privileges a normal person like you and me would, which depends on the state and whether they have stand your ground laws in place, or duty to retreat. The guard would have to fear for his/her life, or great bodily injury.
Observe and report, and verbally harass if necessary, in an "acceptable" manner. Using robots apparently is not yet in vogue, so citizen branded patrol might be the current local-minima for this type of function:
I knew someone that worked at the SFSPCA and they said the robot absolutely put a dent in car-break-ins, needling, and encampments in the animal-shelter parking lot, but advocates won in the end.
What worked in Knightscopes case is the feeling of "presence" that security cams, even the panning ones with a built-in speaker, are unable to give off. So Citizen branded patrols fill that "presence" role.
Doesn't seem particularly different from regular journalism/news companies.
Sidebar of NYPost as I'm on this article has one truck crash with 5 dead and one bridge collapse, or is it just journalists who are allowed to profit of this?
Offering a monetary reward for streaming crimes would bias our perceptions of poorer communities, where individuals would most benefit from the money. A poor community is incentivized with this plan to reinforce the message that they are crime-ridden, while rich neighborhoods won't receive the same level of coverage because fewer individuals care about the payoff.
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27237520
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27236660
They reference each other, too.
Citizen is nightmarish. All the “it’s a dystopian surveillance app built to exploit our worst fears” concerns about other social media products with only the most superficial veneer trying to hide it. I had it on my phone for months and it contributed absolutely nothing but anxiety.