"The Citizen [app] CEO apparently wants to reframe their company as some sort of vigilante justice machine"
The app was literally called Vigilante until they were forced to rename it.
The app was literally called Vigilante until they were forced to rename it.
> “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.
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.
Big difference between an individual defending his property/family with his own property vs funneling that defense through a corporate crowd-sourced surveillance system.
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.
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...
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.