Citizen CEO offered to personally fund LA arson manhunt for the wrong person
theverge.com
theverge.com
> However Frame first saw the false identification, the Slack messages show he saw it as an “opportunity” for Citizen to fulfill its “true mission.”
> “We know the guy is out there,” said one host, according to Castle. “We need our users to get out there and bring this guy to justice.”
> And while Citizen said it plans to get it right next time, Frame suggested in a Slack message that it won’t be the last time Citizen offers a cash reward. “We need to build this into the product and we will,” he wrote.
These are scary quotes. The Citizen [app] CEO apparently wants to reframe their company as some sort of vigilante justice machine instead of a simple crime alert app. And he's willing to throw money at it. Of course their first push for vigilante justice is against the wrong person.
Given that The Verge has obtained company Slack transcripts, I assume some of the employees are pushing back from the inside. Let's hope the employees continue fighting against this.
That is illegal, and I feel this company is setting itself up for lawsuits.
> 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.
"Released for lack of evidence" sounds like he was arrested which can show up on arrest records in background checks. IANAL but if this individual gets a job offer that's later rescinded after a background check due to that arrest, that sounds like grounds for a libel lawsuit. The CEO also put up the money himself, so whatever safe harbor exception Citizen could have claimed is probably unworkable (again, IANAL in bold letters).
(variously attributed to Himmler, Beria, Mao or Stalin; th verb is variously "kill" or "arrest")
The app was literally called Vigilante until they were forced to rename it.
Big difference between an individual defending his property/family with his own property vs funneling that defense through a corporate crowd-sourced surveillance system.
Citizen and all other private security firms operate under the same laws as any other individual or company. It’s not like these guys went out and started committing violent felonies...
I think the vigilantism implicitly endorsed by Citizen is entirely typical of the historical American attitude towards how one should defend their property. Moreover, it speaks to the breakdown of law and order in California that an app that organizes a modernized form of "frontier justus" can find enough traction to get off the ground.
For example, in my neighborhood a few people freaked out over a guy going through people's trash cans (trash cans are located in the alley, so not on anyone's property). This involved lots of internet sturm und drang, with people arguing whether or not it's legal to shoot someone going through your trash.
Instead of SFPD, I could have my neighborhood served by high end local security that’s more responsive to local needs. We’ll just cut our spend if they’re douches instead of having some Dianne Feinstein sitting on Billionaire’s Row telling me that I need to accept some amount of robberies.
Fuck yeah! I’m rooting for you, Frame. Democratize access to police.
Pay to play policing seems... the opposite of what you're asking for? Can you elaborate on this?
Examples of this that I am hugely a fan of:
* California's stance on non-competes
* California's stance on not treating HIV-positive people differently from other people with STDs
* San Francisco's stance on AI-based policing
* Portola's (a neighbourhood in SF) stance on cars on sidewalks (otherwise illegal in SF) and the Dolores St median parking
At each layer, the group of people collectively decide what makes sense for their society, and then put it into practice.
In my ideal world, this is easy to do at each layer. My least ideal world has an all powerful Commander in (say) Washington DC who decides how people park in Portola.
For most things this is fine, devolution works. For policing, my neighbourhood is subject to the judgment of some person in City Hall who lives in a very affluent neighbourhood. They take my tax money, my payroll taxes, my sales taxes and eat it all. The policing there is far superior to that in my neighbourhood because they use the second currency: power.
I would prefer to just use the first currency: money¹. Every avenue where the first currency is prohibited for outcomes, the second currency takes over. As an immigrant to this country, I don't have the long relations that allow a normal person to have access to the second currency. I am also not Elon Musk or Ron Conway successful and so don't have that avenue to the second currency.
But I do have the first currency. So I would prefer to use the first currency (and the goodwill and first currency of my neighbours) to provide services to the devolved local admin region of my choice.
Policing is currently out of reach but I think it is possible eventually. It just needs some tech and organizational skillwork to get there. After all we already have the Patrol Special Police. It won't take too much work, unless they're too tightly enmeshed.
¹ To be clear, they can continue to eat my taxes. They're the predator, I'm the prey. So be it. I just want to also have some additional services to pay for. They can keep eating my flesh if they want.
² Unfortunately, heavy downvoting will trigger the flamebait filter and I won't be able to respond soon. I'm not complaining about the votes. It's okay to express displeasure that way. But if you happen to want a discussion, I'm afraid you're going to have to email me because I will likely be unable to respond to you soon. That's just how this platform works. I am saying what I am in good faith, definitely not trolling. Also, this comment will have to serve as response to everyone else too for the same reason.
EDIT: Apologies to responders, but I don't want to receive a site ban because I also like to talk about tech. Email me if you want to continue the conversation, or if you want some other public place, go ahead and pick it and we can chat there. Besides, if people are saying "Stop saying what you're saying" then I should be polite and either stop saying it or accept further censure. I'm going to choose the former.
They don't seem related.
I actually agree with you that decentralization and federalism are critical to a functioning democracy, especially in a pluralistic/heterogenous republic, but there are so many questions I have on how pay-for-policing can reliably work.
* What happens when a private police patroller is within proximity of a victim of violent crime that doesn't have the "first currency" and is not a paid subscriber?
* Are the private police authorized to use force? If so, who anoints this power?
There is a fundemental need to trust that non-locals will be treated fairly alongside locals. A lack of fair treatment is already a problem for outsiders and out-groups in this country.
Policing devolution can happen, but it has to be structured in a way to maintain accountability. The concern is that as private security moves into policing, this creates incentives to make our existing policing problems worse.
That's not what's happening here, for a few reasons. The first being that these are mercenaries (or "security contractors" if you want to use euphemisms), not police. Furthermore, nothing is being "democratized" here. They only work for you if you pay them. This has nothing to do with democracy.
> “Subscription law enforcement service” [0]
If their vest said police or had a police badge, or if they claimed to be police, they'd be guilty of impersonating police.
Dressing up in a generic tacticool uniform isn't impersonating police.
I don’t see how people can build companies like this or work such jobs. It really stretches the limits of human decency.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizen_(app)
https://www.businessinsider.com/citizen-vigilante-app-crime-...
This quote could not be any clearer:
> “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.”
If this company/CEO isn't stopped, I fear it's only a matter of time before someone (or many someones) gets hurt. Most likely because they "fit the description".
Public safety departments everywhere are in denial how absolutely, utterly, batshit pissed off people are about property crime.
If police never investigate or arrest a single person or do one preventative thing against people breaking into your car, your house, stealing your bike, scamming you on the phone or on the web, taking random crap, no matter how big or small, you're going to prefer vigilante justice.
Someone from SV assumes the whole world is like SV. Water is wet. More news at 11.
Rampant property crime is basically only a feature of the urban west coast and a maybe handful of cities in the mid-west and east.
I live in an city most SV techies would sneer at and things don't go missing from my porch or the neighbor's porch.
> Rampant property crime is basically only a feature of the urban west coast and a maybe handful of cities in the mid-west and east.
Surprise when you live near more people, there's more chance you live near a criminal.
It's all anecdata. I lived in a remote rural area that had like no property crime for over a decade, then a spate of break-ins.
The police do absolutely nothing there too. They supposedly dusted our whole house for fingerprints after the break in and couldn't find a single one, including our fingerprints.
Entire house. not a single fingerprint. After receiving federally-sponsored forensics training they publicly boasted about.
Not quite: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...
> Rampant property crime is basically only a feature of the urban west coast and a maybe handful of cities in the mid-west and east.
> I live in an city most SV techies would sneer at and things don't go missing from my porch or the neighbor's porch.
Ironically, this reads like someone in a well-off neighborhood with no idea what happens in other neighborhoods in their non-SV city.
Everyone "knew" growing up in middle-of-TX town which parts of town you didn't want to park overnight on the street in, or where you didn't want to leave a bike. Even beyond just reputation, you could often tell by the houses - people didn't put chain link around the front yard and bars over the window just for fun.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/191208/reported-cases-of...
We can definitely do better -- I'd particularly love to see them start taking death threats on the Internet seriously -- but if people are becoming increasingly incensed despite the fall in the crime rate, it's because their perceptions are for some reason driven by something other than actual facts on the ground. And in particular, there is less of a need for vigilantism, not more.
Anecdotally I had my bike stolen a few months ago and last year my car was broken into and my laptop/dashcam/wallet stolen, and didn't call the cops because as you said I know exactly how useless they are for that kind of stuff.
I don't understand this; the King County Prosecuting Attorney was elected, just as the mayor and city council were. Why should any of them be able to pressure the others when they're all 'hired' by the people, not each other? And if the people of King County elect ideologically compromised mayors and city councils, isn't it likely they elect politically compromised DAs too?
I do believe crime is under-reported in this city because it goes unpunished. But I'm just not buying this "DAs as victims" narrative. I think they're as much to blame as the other elected officials.
Next step: Hard to tell if people gave up on reporting stuff because they don't think the police will try or because the police are unable to solve most of the incidents even if they did try.
Seriously though, how are the police supposed to solve most random break-in smash-and-grabs or stolen bike cases? What's the ask here? Constant surveillance of everywhere? Something close-to but less than that? Batman?
I’m simply making the point that property crime may not be going down.
Perhaps people have a valid concern about crime independent of trends that Spurs a desire for these types of services.
Maybe this isn’t the solution, but I think it is unfair to call people batshit because they are tired or scared of having their property broken into, even if it is less than the 90’s
> some reason driven by something other than actual facts on the ground
Maybe Citizen and NextDoor's adoption is made up. I don't think it is. People are responding to something. It's not racism.
It's stuff like the state of Venice Beach in Los Angeles, people getting stabbed to death by homeless people, in their own homes. It's the absolutely insane number of bike thefts in Cambridge. It's the constant scam phone calls to your parents and grandparents. What do you want me to say, that the experience and trauma of getting shit stolen from you can't be reduced to a number? It's a fucking arson. The property crime is ultimately going to be connected to violence.
We are spoiled today by an environment where, if your LTV exceeds the cost of Amazon just replacing your stolen package, sure, it doesn't matter. It is truly a profound awakening for rich people, when they realize that whether or not the credit card company gives you money in a dispute has nothing to do with the merits of what you're saying and everything to do with whether you'll be LTV positive after they pay you back. We are relying on being rich to solve problems rather than solving the crime.
Property crime is a regressive tax on society! Amazon can't afford to replace poor people's packages, because a poor person will never make the money back. Credit cards can't service poor people fairly in disputes. Don't you see that property crime reduction serves poor communities much more than rich ones? They are the ones who can't park their cars in garages, who can't replace the $20 in a stolen wallet. They have more to lose!
Boredom, I'd venture.
It is racism, and it's been amplified by news media which selectively report on crimes ("if it bleeds, it leads") and fear-based social media like Nextdoor and local Facebook groups which give a megaphone to every overly suspicious neighbor and self-appointed "neighborhood watch" member.
What's changed isn't the amount of crime. It's the amount of it you get told about.
Real people are having real crimes committed against them. Wanting a society where that doesn't happen is as far from racist as you can get. The people who stole $9k of my former startup's equipment were just as likely white, anyway.
Its a pattern depressingly similar to Artificial Intelligence (after all, Elon Musk has made the compelling argument that companies are just AIs of a different form). If you train an AI to predict future possibility of committing a crime based on someone's face, using data of past crimes/arrests/etc, the output will likely, unfortunately, disproportionately rate Black individuals as likely to commit. When deployed improperly, this would lead to increased surveillance and enforcement, more crimes are noticed, more confrontations, accidents happen, and the prediction is suddenly true.
The past does not predict the future; it writes it, and humanity is the pen. The outcomes these predictions promise aren't intrinsically true; they become true because they become recursive inputs into some networked intelligence system, whether that be a computerized artificial intelligence, a company, a government, a market economy, or even humanity as a whole, which then, in adversarial situations, optimizes for self-preservation.
This app, Ring, and a good portion of the media are fear mongers looking to make a buck.
I do believe that it's quite likely that people are angry "everywhere". And much of that has to do with people focusing on being mad about places where the do not live -- not because they're angry on their behalf but because they've been seeking out things to be mad about.
They're attempting to explain people's mindset, and you've quoted general statistics in response.
When someone has their car stolen, they do not take solace in the fact that, in aggregate, less people in America overall are getting their cars stolen. There is no comfort in this issue generally improving and that they were just unlucky.
Instead, they are responding to the widely apparent increase in police apathy towards enforcing the law against these criminals for these property crimes.
Policing criminals is not just about decreasing statistical crime. It is also about holding together the contract of society where people should not seek their own justice independently. Why? Because historically, people seeking their own justice (aka vigilantism) often do it in an unbalanced and usually cruel manner.
We trust in the state to act fairly and justly when we are wronged by another. Otherwise why should we not seek to harm those who have harmed us? This is the balance that is upset by the perception that the state is not performing its duty to enact justice on all wrongdoings, no matter how they less often they are happening.
But people aren't responding to their car being stolen, are they? They (we?) are usually responding to a story about someone else's car being stolen. Or a story about violent crime against someone we've never met. And that's what the statistics do show - there are disproportionately far more angry people than actual victims.
We're getting outraged because we hear regular stories about unfair things happening to people we've never met.
And I'm not suggesting these events don't matter just because they're happening to others. But it is incorrect to conflate what are effectively random and unlikely events happening to strangers as some sort of unacceptable level of threat to ourselves.
This is a challenge rooted in human nature that I don't pretend to have any solution to. Nevertheless, I think it's fair to reject any of this as an excuse for outrage or the vigilantism that Citizen promotes.
If that provokes an increase in vigilantism, then the police will have something to be less apathetic about. Arrest the vigilantes.
https://sfgov.org/scorecards//public-safety/violent-crime-ra...
The upward trend is apparent in linear statistics despite a large drop during the COVID-19 pandemic. That said, I do find it hard to believe that people being angry about crime could conceivably coincide with a decrease in the probability an individual crime is reported. Among other cities I checked, Portland also shows an increase, while NYC, Seattle, LA, Chicago, Miami, Atlanta and Boston show declines.
Seems that they really want to be a private security company that augments/replaces the police. I'm morbidly curious as to what would happen if it was allowed to do that.
Probably get sued into oblivion after screwing up. It's really easy to do when you're not the government and can't raise taxes to cover your stupidity.
It seems like that was what is known in the PR business as "a lie": https://www.vice.com/en/article/v7evbx/citizen-app-private-s...
I was on reddit and ran across a video that the submission claimed to be of someone poisoning local pets. The video showed someone pouring something on the ground from a distance. We never see what it is.
Later we get a video where the camera person is screaming at the person they are recording. The person just walks away as the camera person follows them yelling.
I was a bit horrified that when I expressed in some skepticism I was meet with a lot of arguments like.
"Why didn't they stop to talk if they're innocent?"
"They didn't deny it."
"You know people really do this."
"You don't have to defend a dog killer you know."
People just took the text claims at face value despite the video showing nothing that it claimed, because they were upset by the claim in the text.
Apps that just have text and a photo, not even an image of a crime, people will believe it whole hog.
A during riots in Minneapolis a local social media apps and sites had rumors spread fast about drive by shootings by people on pickup trucks with assault rifles. These rumor spread several nights in a row despite it never appearing in the news and it being obvious that the previous night's rumors were 100% false.
One city council member spread the rumors of a full on Klan rally in a park with robes hoods and all... a completely absurd claim, folks bought it and spread it.
So back to the app, we have an app whose audience wants to hear this kind of information. That's a scary audience.
Reddit generally not at all.
Wait until you encounter HN's incorrect hot-takes that get upvoted to top-comment in a niche field you have expertise or personal experience in - especially if it's in a non-tech field. I wouldn't bet on HNs superiority over Reddit, except for a very narrow band of fields. A comment doesn't have to be correct - it just needs to conform to audiences biases in a seemingly cogent way, right or wrong.
Seriously, maybe some of the criticism of cryptocurrencies here is over the top, but it is not even remotely comparable to what reddit has done.
As far as I am aware, crowd sourcing via social media did not assist with indentifying and catching the suspects.
Your tone is not appropriate to HN.
It seems like a lot of content on reddit is like this.
Offering a bounty is not a call to attack or harass the person in question; if you want to make that claim, you need more evidence to substantiate it. Right now there's no evidence the CEO wanted anything more than to have this person identified.
I vehemently oppose this. In fact, I am genuinely pissed off.
if they murder you, they sue on your behalf and direct proceeds to the beneficiary of your choice.
my bet is that if this thing takes off, crime will actually increase as it normalizes it.
I also can't imagine that the lawyers are unaware, so what's their angle?
https://twitter.com/bestofnextdoor
Personally, I prefer to think of my neighbors as a bit kinder than their reality. I've since deleted the app and my head is firmly buried in the sand.
Notifying people of safety issues effectively? Very admirable and wonderful.
Offering bounties to track down individuals as a private organization? It just comes off as rocky to me, perhaps unethical, and ripe for abuse and mistakes.
How about a hefty fine and payment to the person in the order of 30 million paid by CEO personally.
It is also one of the least believable statements ever made by a corporate spokesperson ever.
At least reddit seems to have learned their lesson (both the company and the users).
they BELIEVED they were getting it right this time.
As is everything that Vigilante/Citizen is doing. Having the CEO put out a cash bounty, even if it was for the right person (it wasn’t) is gross. Putting out “patrol cars” on the streets of LA when you have no authority is disgusting.
Creating a rent-a-cop as a service model, especially when buoyed by bad data, is quite literally going to get people killed.
[1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/insid...
[0] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/citizen-d7ce/company...
Lesson definitely not learned.
Despite having to recognize the immense _scientific_ progress, the _social_ progress is always touted as immense but I rather have the impression that humans remain as flawed as they were 2000 years ago.
(Your neighbor, while a member of the public, does not constitute public law enforcement)
Edit: the ostensibly good intentions are to "empower community policing".
If the FBI had wanted to detain this man, would that have made it okay? What if this app had just broadcast the FBIs own reward?
You're reading into it too much, and acting like people want mob justice.
People have been offering rewards for apprehension or 'information about' for my whole life, and no one thought it was weird. But as soon as a tech company does it, the media goes bonkers. This is another example of the ridiculous axe the nedia wants to grind against anything tech.
I suppose you can argue that it reveals a true motive that they have since wisened up to.
Although I agree it looks bad.
Are we living in the same reality?
I really don’t see the functional difference.
I don’t think they were calling for people to apprehend or take justice into their own hands.
The words and tone are different, but the request for action is the same.