Comment by incongruity | Hacker News Reader

Comment by incongruity | Hacker News Reader

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Additionally, the focus on murder rates is flawed for a few reasons:

1) Murders are not evenly distributed in most (all?) cities. In Chicago, for example, violence is heavily concentrated in certain areas. That means it's not a generalized problem yet this app doesn't address that clustering in a meaningful way.

2) Murders are not the crime that most people will feel comfortable intervening in – and, arguably, not one that is most high-value to report in the moment – unless you're focusing on armed, trained responders – who are likely going to be Police (unless we're getting into militia here and that's a whole different discussion). Instead, less violent offenses seem more manageable as a starting point. What if a purse snatching was reported?

To be honest, I'm still not sure what value the app provides – generally speaking, this looks to encourage mob justice which is fraught with risk of mistaken identity and violations of individual rights.

For the creators – what, specifically, are you looking for members of the public to do?

This strikes me as another one of the AWARENESS!! "solutions" – assuming that awareness is the problem – honestly, especially in crime solving, I don't think that's the issue. Awareness of identifiable precursors to crime? That'd be really useful (what they are, I have no clue). Awareness of active shooter situations? Also useful – but much more rare and less about fixing an more about avoiding for the general user...

I consider this app as an extension of my senses. I get a push message when an emergency is happening nearby. Maybe I can help, maybe its none of my business, maybe I'll completely avoid that block. But I get a choice, where my earlier ignorance is no choice at all.

It's the technological equivalent of someone shouting for help. You can assist or not.

Disclaimer: I helped build the backend so I'm biased.

But how often is something like that even happening? I doubt many of Vigilante's users live in a place like Mogadishu, or Cape Town, or some stereotypical violent city where "avoiding an area" is necessary. And if you do, I'm not sure how the app really makes a difference.

Great question.

When I was a kid (11-12) I injured my neck and was pretty worried, stuck lying down, and my pop called 911 to ask for help. A neighbor two houses down was a volunteer fireman so he heard the call over the radio. He headed over and helped make my family and I much more calm while we waited for emergency professionals to show up.

Caring about the safety of people in your neighborhood is a great start. Technology playing a role feels like less of a gamble and more of an inevitability.

Was your neck injured due to a crime? Maybe target this app as a public safety tool, not a vigilante crimestopper system.

Edit: A really great angle is allowing groups of people to get notified together. Works best with phone integration. At my last company I created a 9-1-1 product that does exactly that. A user could load neighbours or relatives to be alerted and listen in to their 9-1-1 calls. That way if, say, an elderly relative called 9-1-1, nearby family could perhaps intervene (for minor stuff or cases where the caller is suffering from a mental lapse) or at least know what's going on immediately.

This is also a great value add to businesses or campuses that want to know about emergencies in real time for coordinated response. Or just to know when paramedics come in the front door, who is having the incident so they can efficiently direct them.

That is an excellent example, but it's contrary to the examples in the blog post & video.

I'm a trained medical first responder (lapsed cert.), so I definitely can appreciate what you've stated. In fact, I'd probably react the same way as your neighbour. I'd pop out and help my fellow neighbours too.

When you present it that way, I like the idea. I'm not sure about the way Vigilante is presented though.

Can you provide several examples of where this would help? I've lived in a high-crime city (Guatemala) for a while. I imagine like other places, you develop a sense of the more dangerous areas.

Outside of that, I'm not sure what intelligence can help. Real attacks are quick, sudden. One minute I'm in traffic, next minute guy's shooting the car in front of me. And a minute later, they're gone. There's basically no value in "yelling" about these things. At best, report them on Waze so people can avoid the possible traffic.

For more drawn-out situations like domestic abuse, what's your expectation? Nearby won't intervene, but someone a few floors away is going to get an alert and what, jump in? Sure, you can invent scenarios where this might help (or even save a life) but I'd be surprised if this doesn't backfire.

People responding to crime are going to be self-selecting to be vigilantes. A vigilante guy responding to a domestic abuse situation sounds like the start of a tragic story.

Which scenarios do you see with positive outcomes? What is your team doing to mitigate the downsides?

First, sensory overload is a real thing (to extend the analogy). Second, there's the presumption that "more information" = better but that's not clear in this case. 911 calls are often themselves reports of past events (recent past, but still past) so, again, I ask – what are you hoping people will do? What will they do? How do you bridge those or help people do what they want to/need to do? Awareness is rarely the real need (ala the idea that I'm not really buying a drill because I want a power tool – I'm buying a drill because I need a hole made here, here and here).

If you don't actually have a clear answer to that, then this is a half-baked idea because it's not clear what problem you're really solving – and it falls back to the idea of "ZOMG! AWARENESS!!!!1" which is really a sign of insufficient thinking, IMHO.

I'd challenge you all to step back, articulate a clear problem frame and goal and maybe then look at the way crime unfolds – map out before, during after and look at what awareness does at each of those points (and what signals you can meaningfully find). How, then, can you build an app to do those things/support those aims and activities that you've identified as your goals? If you've done that, then articulate that in your description/writing.

Out of curiosity, what is the tech stack behind this application? I can see some interesting problems wrt real time push notifications and a streaming data pipeline potentially.

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