Amazon Ring is hiring editors to push local crime news to its users

As if pushing ever more news of "crime" (much of which may be inconsequential, entirely non-criminal trivia, judging by the kind of material mentioned in the article) at the public will somehow make our society better/happier/safer.

Didn't Bowling for Columbine suggest that a key element in America's fear-driven and violent society, when compared to its northern neighbour, might be the extent to which US media already focuses on such reporting (if I remember right -- it's been a long time)? This sort of toxic, alarmist "news" is already poisoning our social fabric; so let's double down on it and focus even more on feeding people's fears. Great.

A neighbor recently got a Ring out of some security concerns (partner got deployed for a year and they have two young kids). However, I've think it's made things worse in some ways:

- Every potential interaction is viewed with suspicion

- Everybody who walks up to the door prompts an interruption wherever you are (on your smartphone)

The local neighborhood sharing aspects of Ring strongly remind me of NextDoor, whose suspicion raising and general uselessness can pretty much be summed up in this tweet:

https://twitter.com/bestofnextdoor/status/112232088963729817...

It starts to get good halfway down:

I downloaded Neighbors—you can do so without owning a Ring doorbell—and plugged in my address in boring Arlington, Massachusetts, a city of 45,000 that recorded zero murders and only seven robberies last year. It decided I needed to know that someone in the uniform of a local lawn-care service had recently knocked on someone’s door instead of using the doorbell and, when no one answered, left. Also, there was a building fire two towns away, a couple of days ago.

Also, two young people, one male, one female, wearing identical T-shirts and lanyards with name badges, carrying clipboards—likely trying to get signatures for some cause or another—rang a doorbell and then walked away when no one answered. “Anyone know who they are?” the post from a Neighbors user asked, perhaps concerned about Islamic State infiltration of the Boston suburbs. “Call the police,” one helpful commenter replied.

I hate these things and all the things that go with them (NextDoor, etc). They promote a world where we're all locked in our boxes peeking through the blinds at each other and checking Twitter to see what's wrong.

When we don't trust each other, especially the people in our local community, we move towards a slightly worse world.

This is part of the same phenomenon frequently discussed on Hacker News where children are not allowed to play outside freely anymore. We're all convinced the world is full of Bad People who need stopping.

I live in a very affluent and safe area in Central Indiana. Yet my Next Door and FB neighborhood group has lot of posts from people living in fear of “rising crime” due to the constant stream of crime reporting from various sources.

I’m fine with being “aware” of what’s happening but there needs to be sensible curation of the info.

Great, now old people are going to get even more paranoid about the ever-decreasing crime rates

Please tell me this is fake news.

I turned off Ring notifications because they were, in fact, making me fear my neighborhood. I try to be safe in my neighborhood. These notifications don't change that. They just make me scared.

I have a Ring doorbell camera and a camera in our garage, mostly to see if the garage door is closed. The "crime alerts" are annoying, so I've basically turned off all the notifications. Looks like amazon has figured out that crime sells security equipment.

We had a problem with teenagers were ringing our doorbell and screaming late at night around 1 a.m. It became a nightly ordeal, and sometimes several times a night. Sometimes they would kick the door and run away. Surprisingly, some of them were teenage girls. Since my wife is pregnant, I knew this had to stop. There is no way I wanted to deal with this with a newborn infant.

The comments on NextDoor are funny to me because it is filled with wingnuts and busy bodies. When I asked for advice on how to handle this situation, I was shouted down by social justice warriors who told me not to call the police because it was racist. I said fine, I'll just tell the registered sex offender who was recently released from prison (for abducting and raping a young woman) that there are young women harassing us, oh and by the way, all are neighbors are conditioned to ignore their screams and we won't call the police... because it is racist. Oddly enough, none of the social justice warriors replied to say I shouldn't.

I called the police and posted the videos on YouTube and sent them the link. They found them and calmly talked to them. Problem solved.

There is a new podcast called Running from Cops. It is about the TV show COPS (the "bad boys, bad boys, what you going to do" theme show)

It goes in to how the show make viewers think there is a lot more crime going on than there actually is. The show producers profit off this

https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/missing-richard-simmons/run...

This is an entirely inflammatory and baseless article.

Yes, you should care a bit about local crime. If someone in your neighborhood is stealing hubcabs, maybe it's a good idea to park in the garage. Likewise, if there's a spat of minor vehicle burglaries, it's probably wise to make sure your vehicle is locked.

Yeah, is some idiot going to theorize that the salesman who ignored their no soliciting sign a secret islamist infiltrator who is casing their house? Probably. That doesn't undo the value of the other things because silly people exist.

On the other hand, when there are bad things happening in your neighborhood like serious break-ins or joggers keep getting kidnapped, then you know, harass your local police department to step up patrols and act accordingly.

Crime as a whole lowering doesn't mean crime in your neighborhood isn't happening. Yes the world is getting more peaceful as a whole, but yes, you can still be mugged and killed.

Crime reporting is big business. Besides 'Ring', look at the opportunistic hyping of fake hate crimes, ala Jussie Smollett. The desired outcome is the same: Injecting fear into people, causing them to buy something or vote a specific way.

It's despicable. It pits people against each other.

Back in the earlier days of the Internet, one of my first web apps I created as a reporter was a local crime map (inspired by, but much less sophisticated than Adrian Holovaty's chicagocrime.org [0]). This involved contacting each police department individually and asking them to email me the data. A couple of departments were happy, because they didn't want to pay to develop their own online map. Others (small jurisdictions) didn't have the IT process in place. But there were also large departments that definitely had a data process, but declined to participate (and I didn't really have the capacity to start a legal fight for it, since this was a side project, and I was the sole developer).

What I had been told unofficially, even by departments that did agree to send data, was that publicizing the data was perceived to have possible negative consequences -- such as scaring off potential home buyers (this was during the housing bubble). My point is that crime has always been a big draw for local news organizations, and this includes data applications like crime maps. But even ignoring how it might distort public perception of crime, there was always a pretty implicit downside to a local publisher in making their own community look like a shithole. Not just the negative feelings, but the price of real estate (and those real estate advertisers).

From what I can tell, Ring's proposed news service is just for Ring customers? That is, a non-Ring user (or someone not in the local geofenced area) might not get to see the crime news for a given area, in the same way that any Web user could visit a public crime mapper like chicagocrime.org. So the Ring news service gets all the upside of the attention that crime news draws without the same downsides that would usually be part of a publisher's news equation. This, added to Ring's already inherent appeal to customers paranoid about local crime, might lead to problematic incentives in their crime coverage.

[0] http://www.holovaty.com/writing/chicagocrime.org-tribute/

I see ads on my neighborhood nextdoor literally every 4th story about how Ring stopped a robbery in <YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD HERE>

If you want just the personally important hyperlocal crime news, your local police department might have an alerts email list that they use judiciously. Cambridge, Massaschusetts, USA, does this well. The advisories seem to be prompted by exceptional events/situations that people should know about (e.g., rash of B&E following a pattern in a particular neighborhood, or a rare shooting). If your local PD doesn't do this, consider asking them. Email list is vastly better than pushing you to follow them on Twitter or Facebook.

A city-wide genuine news outlet that cherry-picks important things from the police crime log, and follows up with additional reporting, is also good. And some awareness of the gist of it is important as a voting citizen and community member (e.g., you should be aware that, in some neighborhoods of your city, people might have justifiable fears of being hit by stray bullets, or how close to home the opiod epidemic, and read some of the journalism that personalizes ordinary people who are killed).

However, following every little hyperlocal thing exhaustively, or reading/watching for sensationalism/entertainment doesn't sound like a good idea, or at least is a huge time sink. Also, the reader/community comments can be spirit-crushing.

Separately, journalism is best done without any potential conflicts of interest. Most outlets I can think of have ownership that appears questionable (e.g., a big company/person with an interest in influencing public perception, or with other business before the politicians on which it's supposed to be a Fourth Estate check), but that kind of ownership shouldn't be the norm, and we should try to move away from that.

They are already relying heavily on local police force to help them sell.

Now this.

It’s propaganda 101, destabilize regimes and states by instilling fear in the population and mistrust of institutions. The fact it’s also profitable is a happy coincidence.

At the very least, the perception of rampant crime is a problem for local politicians; they’re seen as incompetent and not doing their jobs. The worst? See fascists regimes of ww2.

I own and pay a monthly monitoring fee for a home security system, not because I value the things in my house, but out fear some nut job would try to harm my family. This is not rational, the odds are near zero, and it wouldn’t stop a determined attacker anyway, but it is a deterrent. And I don’t want to kill anyone, even if it is often “justified” (castle doctrine). There’s definitly money in fear.

They probably found that many people lose interest in their Ring if they don't see a purpose for it, so they're manufacturing a point. The more your Ring tells you about crime, the more afraid you'll be, and want your Ring around to keep you informed about crime.

This must be censored to protect the public from antisocial thoughts.

nextdoor already does a great job at that. and in realtime.

This article seems rather inflammatory and focuses on what other news stations do too much for an article centred around an Amazon product, I think.

I'm of the opinion that local crime reporting an neighbourhood watches and whatnot should be handled by the actual locals, instead of a giant corporation, but this article doesn't seem to support this view, either. I'm left to wonder what this article would suggest, because it seems to be suggesting doing nothing is better than locals handling it.

Just release a robot teddybear that threatens you if you try and leave the house already.

The "selling fear" narrative seems pretty far fetched and cherry picked. Crime happens regardless of your opinions. Reporting it might actually make a difference since it will at least help people be aware of their area safety and attempt some organized effort to address it.

Yes, the way to address it might be buying security devices and yes, Amazon could profit from this (but not necessarily).

Either way, crime will happen regardless and this has nothing to do with Amazon or Ring. It's not like they are actually putting criminals in the streets or making up stories about crime to boost sales. The article make it almost sound like that.

The dichotomy here is whether you want to know if crime is happening around you or you want to be oblivious about it for whatever reason or belief. That sounds more like a choice, not like an imposition.

If you're going to demonize reporting facts or news about crimes, and you are going to raise concerns about the potential conflicts of interest between reporting and profits, you should start first with a sound judgement of journalism as a whole. As far as I know most newspapers and media outlets are for-profit businesses, so their motivations might be as obscure. And this includes, The Atlantic, the publisher of this very article.

And that actually reminds of a wise spanish saying that seems like a good fit for this journalistic piece: "El ladrón juzga por su condición" ... That means "The thief judges by his condition"...