Citizen’s dangerous effort to cash in on vigilantism
vice.com
vice.com
"The whole idea behind Protect is that you could convince people to pay for the product once you’ve gotten them to the highest point of anxiety you can possibly get them to," one former employee said, referring to Citizen's subscription service. "Citizen can’t make money unless it makes its users believe there are constant, urgent threats around them at all times,"
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Citizen incentivizes both its employees and the public to create incidents because they are the core currency of the app and what drives user engagement, user retention, and a sense of reliance on the app itself.
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"It’s basically an anxiety sweatshop," a Citizen source said. "On days when things are 'slow,' they relax the standards around incidents because a dip in incident count is really bad," they added. The company sends congratulatory emails announcing which analysts reported the highest number of incidents, another source added.
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A former employee added, "They don’t much care about the accuracy or the usefulness of the information they put out, they just want to push as many notifications to create that feeling of vulnerability that leads people to the subscription services."
So by all means, use an anti-government stance to trust a stream of completely unverified claims.
My local paper does the service of publishing 911/police reports. Some would make it to a crime map but a lot of this merits a shrug. Example: "A caller from Rollins View Drive, near Bear Springs Road, reported a heated verbal altercation with a neighbor that ended when they spat in the caller’s face." - avoid heated arguments with neighbor. The only way this realistically gets into a crime report is if a cop/DA really doesn't like the spitter, etc.
Overall: Of course, police reports aren't fully accurate but the reports of "Citizen", being completely unfiltered, allow wingnuts and busybodies put out their narrative in an unfettered fashion.
https://www.theunion.com/news/nevada-county-police-blotter-c...
Crime statistics are somewhat arbitrary and pointless. A large amount of things considered crimes, including things that are sometimes prosecuted, are "in the eye of the beholder". A significant portion of prosecutions involve interpersonal conflicts that slowly escalated. It's very to say when the threshold of crime starts given that American laws are quite flexible. The crime of "riot" is a group of people wandering around in a fashion that makes other people feel unsafe. Disorderly conduct includes being at a place of business without intending to make a purpose. People sometimes good to jail for such.
But given you also have, in this fine nation, a population of people ready to scream and call the cops about just about anything, if you record every single thing that these people report, you'll have a certified stream of garbage.
The thing is, while crime statistics are indeed somewhat arbitrary, they are sort of intended to be "how unsafe does the average person actually feel" which is different than "how unsafe does the occasional angry wingnut feel?"
Moreover, this nation counts among it's citizen
For a while some years back one of the newspapers had a tool that showed police calls (there are many more calls than actual prosecuted crimes) - now that was much more realistic as to what's really going on - but it's still not the complete picture. (I don't think that tool is available any longer)
Once the citizens run into enough situations where calling the cops results in zero things happening - many decide to stop calling the cops.. yet the crimes are continuing, so less are being reported... and often times the reported crimes that show up on main map are lesser charges than what the witnesses felt or whatever.
Anyhow I figure it's good for property values and tourism and all that.
I have seen several situations in which cops did not make reports, would not further investigate things )even some some physical evidence in front of us and eye witnesses providing more details)
I have witnessed cops on multiple occasions try to talk stores out of pressing charges for 'petty' crimes..
Hey they have good reason sometimes I know - but this must be happening many times every day - so crime maps in general I take with a grain of salt knowing there are more that are not being shown for sure.
There are a lot of businesses built on this model. The news outlets spring immediately to mind.
Fox news does the same thing... Find crime anywhere in the country, bonus points if it involves sex or a minority and make it a headline if it involves an immigrant.
Well, yeah. The Weather Channel is nationwide. ???
Newspapers were published several times a day when I was a child, so the late edition would have things that happened in the afternoon.
If something very big happened, they would put out an “extra” edition and trucks would race to get the extras out to the newsstands, newspaper boxes, and corner stores.
A news agent shouting “Extra! Extra!” was originally informing people that something had happened and the news was in the freshly printed “extra” edition, so even if they’d already bought a paper that day, they’d be motivated to buy another.
https://www.barrypopik.com/index.php/new_york_city/entry/ext...
If we wanna go deep we can talk about the evolutionary origins of gossip. I'm sure being a social animal with complex signs and individual identities demands communication about one's neighbours and peers.
What I mean is a constantly televised high bandwidth audio visual stream. That's only 40 years old.
This was 48 hours after it happened.
Breaking is when things are changing rapidly and an event is currently Happening.
"breaking news" is supposed to refer to news that's currently ongoing or developing. Whether or not it means much now, when practically all news is live, is debatable.
The app, or rather the "community" behind it, is worthless for any "news" or public safety alerts. If it wasn't integrated with the app to view my own camera's feeds, it would be gone from my phone. Any time there is anything of note, it's filled with garbage nonsense comments that are at best terrible attempts at humor, or vile and repugnant at worst.
-10/10, would not recommend.
"Suspicious person on Elm Street, lock your cars!" is usually thinly veiled "I saw someone black walking their dog".
It's horrific at times.
It's strange, but I suspect that all the various business models that revolve around "Turn every single person in society into a policeman in a panopticon" might just be fundamentally bad, and not capable of reform or realignment.
Our city’s Nextdoor is pretty great, the biggest annoyance are the people focused on cats and their various woes.
Recently Nextdoor decided to mix it up and started making changes allowing some limited visibility of surrounding suburbs. Oh boy.
The mix of superiority and fear in the suburbanites are incredible. They are angry about a county bike trail because “undesirables” may bike into their town. There’s petitions in opposition to turn lanes on a roadway for some batshit reasons, racist comments about players on a city high school baseball team, etc.
Bikes and bike lanes are particularly contentious, which is weird because kids out there bike everywhere. (Worried about undesirable people again)
It’s a really aspect of society that I honestly never witnessed in person.
I remember being both appalled at the deep immorality of exploiting this, and scared of how true this is.
In this instance, we have a company that went with the "induce fear" approach.
A different, really strong example of selling on fear is the whole cottage industry of products and services for parents. People who are expecting or just had their first child are probably the easiest group to sell to. I say that as a relatively fresh parent myself. All you have to do is to hint that there's a non-zero probability of some danger to life or health of a newborn, and say that your product mitigates it, and you can sell us absolutely anything at almost any price.
Maybe I need to get over my reluctance, or find a better line of work.
•Nuclear bunkers to keep your family safe. •Big guns because they will come for you. •All sorts of tracking devices for kids. •Surveillance systems for homes
So the latest seems to be a modern day witch-hunting for masses.
- I've already mentioned parents upthread. You can sell them any kind of crap if you even hint at some obscure danger to health or life of a newborn. Half of the market of products for parents/small children is based on that. The other half runs on a combination of FOMO, fear of being a bad parent (or being seen as one), and fear of your kid falling behind someone else's kid.
- Wedding market runs on insecurity. If you don't buy this or rent that, your wedding will not be perfect. It's once-in-a-lifetime thing, you can't settle for anything less than ideal. Don't mind the loan you'll have to take, paying back which will define the first few years of your marriage.
- Fear of cancer and cardiovascular diseases is what makes people shut down critical thinking and buy all kinds of bullshit. Organic food and fitness businesses are based mostly on that.
I could go on.
We welcomed our daughter a few years ago and the amount of stuff that has been invented over the last decade is breathtaking. Monitors, special pillows, all sorts of foods, supplements, and what not. You look at it all and think wtf...
FOMO is huge too, especially with social media nowadays. I can't count the number of times people look at me with puzzled expressions thinking how on earth I don't use x,y,or z service/product. Want to lose weight? Of course you can't just go for a walk. You need a subscription to 5 celebrity weight loss programs, an indoor bike for a couple grand, super 24/7 gym membership, running club, neighborhood calorie watch, lifting buddy,etc.
Belated congratulations!
> You look at it all and think wtf...
Yeah, you do now. I remember us thinking differently around the time our daughter was born. Even though we both should've known better, we got the fear and anxiety to control us for a while. It was only at the point we found ourselves agonizing over choosing a breath monitor that we suddenly realized we're being played - we don't need it, our child isn't in the risk group, and we should stop letting our random worrying drive our purchasing decisions.
That one is well justifued, most of us die from something like that
The lie is often just conveniently forgetting to account for base rate when evaluating research papers about correlation between food/behavior and aforementioned disease classes.
Unfortunately, there is quite a bit of lower level crime like package theft, car break-ins, etc. The cops are pretty much too busy to help and don't care unless there are multiple felonies and real harm. Having a deterrent like a camera system can be helpful - making yourself a less convenient target really helps.
Sounds like they adopted the business model of the AV industry.
I'm sorry, is this describing real life or an episode of Black Mirror? It's so blatantly dystopian that I'm at a loss for words.
I have been finding that much more useful than before for a variety of reasons. Did my Walgreens get looted again? Where is the protest right now? Gunshots or fireworks? R0 is increasing, ICU capacity is getting closer to full, alrighty then. What's the name of that local politician again, let me check the comments to see who everyone is blaming in this area.
I don't have notifications on for it to tell me about mostly irrelevant things that were always happening, and thats the main difference. I never noticed they were also selling a paid paranoia product.
I don't check the app unless I see something like smoke in the distance or hear many emergency vehicles. Things I used to check twitter or snapmaps about.
Developers and entrepreneurs are actively chasing dystopia. We've become increasingly numb and blasé about the encroachment of the internet and smartphones into our lives. Eventually we'll have The Running Man with live streaming. The end result of our social isolation and filter/engagement bubbles due to technology is moral apathy and rot. To speak the VC speak, the past few years have validated a market for cruelty, hate, and mob justice. The only question left is, how do I buy in today? Citizen seems like an early answer to this.
[1] https://app.slidebean.com/p/s15UZQkE7T/Facebooks-original-pi...
There is a large market for morbidity.
I thought it was a fairly straightforward story about the military industrial complex abusing civil rights and losing in the end "because human brains are special", but I was a kid when it came out so I surely missed what source material it was a parody of.
I took it for a movie intended to be serious that was making not-especially-original commentary on policing and both government and corporate malfeasance, but not that it was parodying anything in particular, I thought the story was as original as most.
See also: Starship Troopers.
One take was in "The Circle". Still not sure why people hate that movie, it's pretty much a documentary on Google and Facebook, and about the only fictional element in it are the advanced video cameras. That, and this vigilante crime tracking, which until now I thought nobody was insane enough to try and make a startup of.
See also: intrusive mass spying using cell phones in the Dark Knight
It doesn't seem like there is even a place to start. A first step could be making a website that documents and tracks all these things then forming a pac. But how long will the take before and if it starts effecting change
We feel powerless - I feel it too at times - but we're not. Who would have thought the world could change this much? We can change it also for the better. The social world we envision is very deeply ingrained in humans, probably through evolution. We are social creatures, not sociopathic.
I think a start is standing up for our human values (honesty, respect, fairness, justice, compassion, humanitarianism, reason, knowledge, etc. etc.- doing the right thing). The Internet has been seen as a different place, an experimental place, where those values don't matter or don't apply - we could try something different; it has been like a virutal game world where we can act out being someone different. The experiment is over. It turns out the values do matter (of course, there's reasons they survive human history) - and they matter more than in the physical world, due to the power of communication on the Internet.
It's time to stop accepting what we wouldn't accept at a dinner table or in a professional social situation (or choose your analogy). The Internet is part of IRL, no different than a restaurant. HN, for example, has much improved; I hope it will go further and adopt that concept.
It's never going to change. Society is doped up on Uber Eats and Instagram Live and The Nightly 30 Minutes of Fear and Hate. People don't want to think about how their society is fucked, they want to think about who's going to win The Bachelor, or why The Other (Political Party, Nation, Ethnicity) is evil and must be destroyed. People much smarter than me have been pointing this out for a century, too.
I call this phenomenon: Getting Fucked By Scale. It's the idea that a scaled algorithm (take, for example, YouTube automated copyright filters) have some percentage of false positives. Maybe that percent is only 0.05%. At a scale of millions and billions of people, that's a lot of people getting fucked.
And today, any one of us could end up as Sam Lowry. A fly gets stuck in the Google machine and your life is suddenly going sideways.
But another scene that really sticks with me is the one where Sam Lowry has the desk in his room, but some person in the room next to him keeps stealing it from him. The fact that 1 desk is shared by 2 rooms is this nonsensical optimization that really just inconveniences him, but highlights how powerless everyone in this world is. For a real world example, there was a time when I was trying to block Facebook and other sites on my phone by editing my phone's hosts file, but couldn't find a way to do it that didn't involve rooting my phone. While trying to find how to do it, I found some people who wanted to do the same thing but all were met with the response "it's locked down to protect you, why would you want to block a website?" It's a very helpless feeling to not have control over something you own.
The worst part is, most people I know see issues like this situation with Citizen's and think we need more centralization of power in order to prevent it.
You are only powerless so long as you decide to stay within the comfortable confines of the law.
The crowd of Hacker News alone certainly has enough ability to cause serious problems for Citizen, whether through activism within their own megacorporations or independent ability.
Hacker News and the software engineering industry has a decent influence in the world, as we can't (yet) be automated away and it takes years to become proficient.
If we as an industry collectively agree that X is bad and refuse to work on it, X will be significantly disrupted, as their only option might to be offering more money (to get someone to defect and renege on the promise) than they can afford or that makes sense with their economics.
Creepy adtech could die tomorrow if people refuse to work on it. The same applies to this Citizen crap.
All it takes is a few thousand such people (a small fraction of a percent), and it doesn't matter what "the industry" agrees not to work on.
I feel like you might have the misconception that "tech people" are some homogenous bloc that believes in the same things and would stand behind a single policy platform. The reality is nothing at all like that.
Kodak was the name in photography, with few viable competitors. When I heard (internally) their 5-year plan to address the onset of digital photography, I knew they were doomed. Individual purchases of film cameras plummeted, favoring digital cameras, and thus individual choices ended chemical photography within months.
Likewise hundreds of other corporate examples. Market-dominating businesses falter and fail, time and again, because individuals choose another option - LOTS of individuals. Every purchase & interaction is an individual choice. Comes a point when the juggernauts are no longer chosen by enough.
I've been on social media since the days of dial-up BBSes. I watched AOL and CompuServe rise, seemingly steamrolling the digital world to dominance; then ... they vanished almost overnight. Likewise other media juggernauts (usenet, MySpace, Second Life, etc), unstoppable until individual users cumulatively decided to go elsewhere. "But Facebook/Twitter/etc are different!" No they're not. They're showing the same life cycle others did, albeit with a couple more digits in user count. They're showing the same cracks (over-moderation, boredom, "nobody goes there 'cuz it's too packed") as others have done. We're due for a new platform populated by mass migration of cumulative individuals.
Ultimately, it's your choice. What life do you want to live? Sure it's easy to go with the crowd, and deviation may be difficult ... but the choice is yours. And theirs. Live the life you want, be true to yourself - and you may be surprised how many make the same choice, in part because you did.
One of the worst things I've seen was posted here on HN[1] almost a year ago. It's an in-depth report on a similar program to Chicago's, but in Florida.
There was a companion article[2] with videos from the program, and it's just horrifying. It shows several videos taken from body cameras of police officers harassing, assaulting and abducting people, some of them children, because they showed up in their system as being related to, or knowing, people who are suspected, and not convicted, of crimes.
Here's a summary of the program[3], and law enforcement's own comments about its purpose:
> The motivation of the program is more sinister than merely “fighting crime”: The Sheriff’s Office acknowledged that they want these “problem people” gone. Pasco County Sheriff Chris Nocco, the architect of the program, boasted that the goal was to predict which residents are likely to commit crimes and then “take them out.” In the words of a former Pasco County deputy, they were under orders to “[m]ake their lives miserable until they move or sue.”
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24363871
[2] https://projects.tampabay.com/projects/2020/investigations/p...
And, no doubt, has lead to absolutely nothing changing there.
LOL, my publicist does this on linkedin and other places for us because people are gullible.
Source article: Executive of <Company> does a thing
0 engagement, nobody knows
Social Media version: [First] <Race> Executive of <Company> does a thing
15,000 comments, 2 million reach, supporters and detractors argue with each other on the headline creating more engagement. Messages role in. Its perfect and yes we think you are all dumb. Always remember who is shaking the bottle that you’re inside of.
I don’t know what you think this comment accomplishes, but it certainly didn’t accomplish that. Who’s shaking your bottle, enlightened one?
Manipulating people for personal gain doesn't make you smart. It just makes you a psychopath.
Go ahead, walk back the psychopathy because you couldn’t stick to it. We all totally buy the assignment of liability to a third party and respect your commitment to the troll. The only thing more amusing than a troll is a troll that collapses like a limp noodle under sustained fire from more experienced trolls.
It was probably 4 years ago when our publicist first told us about double spaced motivational nonsense going viral consistently. We were amused, bemused really, because we didn't care for it but were fine with the low effort involved.
Now with the aforementioned tactic, LinkedIn does consistently surface "[First] <Race> [Female] <Accomplishment>" posts, and I like to look at the source article to see if it was actually published that way, because if it wasn't I have a good chuckle because I know exactly what's going on. The people in the comments only react.
The game is supported by the players willing to play. If you play, you're culpable.
Ethics become a bit more complex when you are employing people. Would you rather your business fail, so that all the people working for you become unemployed overnight, despite a lot of them having their livelihoods depend on that?
To be clear, I don't think that "i have people working for me, whose livelihoods depend on my business surviving" is a great excuse for all kinds of immoral behavior, but it definitely adds to the nuance. And given what specific scenario we are dealing with here, I don't think it is as clear-cut as you try to make it seem.
It is the other people that don’t understand that and are also triggered by it that boost the engagement by orders of magnitude
Publicists do more representation posts because of the engagement
Publicists are aware why the engagement is so high
Is it unethical manipulation if the publicists aren’t aware?
Is it unethical manipulation if people weren’t triggered by representation posts?
Is it unethical manipulation if the platforms themselves didn’t rely on and enable commenter controversy?
But go ahead, gnaw at the messenger who hired a publicist and is telling you how the whole network of publicists operate right now
I'm a hypocrite for commenting, but it would be nice if we didn't let engagement bait like this stay on the front page this long.
your "publicist" would probably not like that :^)
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Citizen's culture seems fundamentally rotten and I think I understand why with this CEO.
I'm serious. Their business is proving to be a direct assault on the right to a fair trial before punishment is dispensed. This is literally taking the crazy Twitter cancel mobs from digital space to meatspace.
Given they couldn't/wouldn't ask basic questions about safety, I'm not at all surprised this is happening.
Applying contemporary growth hacking and engagement techniques to making people feel afraid and seek private security is just abominable. LA county is 10 million people - there are going to be all kinds of criminal activities on any given day, but rarely anywhere close to you. The app though will make sure even a minor thing a few miles from you gets you revved up. Just a recipe for more social disfunction.
The worst part is that LA county and city decided to use Citizen for contract tracing during the pandemic, which drove up downloads in the LA: https://covid19.lacounty.gov/covid19-news/la-county-city-lea... - they really need to push back on this vigilante stuff now.
This sums up my experience with diverse opinions and observations in tech companies
It's trivial to screenshot a Slack channel. Or pretty much any other form of communication a business might use.
It’s usually benign stuff, it’s just that you can’t risk having to explain why you ever screenshotted to your friends
When "The Circle" (minor spoiler alert) demonstrated just how such "crowdsourced chase" scenario can rack up a body count, the target wasn't attacked - he died because some excited rando fucked up and caused a traffic accident with a camera drone.
It's not the wingnuts I'd be afraid of. It's the overexcited normies.
Perception is, generally, very divorced from reality, and people don't have the fundamental skills to recognize that or cross-check their information.
And when said criminals are such masterminds that even the police can't catch, they are then conditioned by superhero movies from Marvel, Superman, Batman, etc. that someone should rise up to catch such criminals, this is the end state.
See, every kid is taught and empowered growing up that they should stand up for what's right. And when the justice system is imperfect, everyone is trying to fix it in the best way they know how. Some are doing it politically, socially, physically, etc.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/11/16/voters-perc...
Local news Facebook comments are full of "there's so much crime! it was never like this when I was younger!" but the reality is completely in the opposite direction.
That the crime rate has gone down is meaningless when you think more things should be illegal.
However, it seems most people believe crime, particularly violent crime, has been getting worse over the same period: https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/FT_16... from this study: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/11/16/voters-perc...
Crime is also relatively easy to report, and makes for riveting television. The victims are easy to identify, and interview. There is no complexity because what matters is only the aftermath, rather than what leads up to what ends up being criminal. Perhaps the arsonist in this case was just being exceedingly careless with a campfire BBQ; who cares, when it feels good to find someone to blame them and brand them as "evil"?
The reason the US appears to be "on the edge," all the time, is that the media loves creating that narrative. If you saw broadcasts that said, "it's all sorta average here, folks, in fact some things are gradually getting better," why would you tune in the next day?
References
fte: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/many-americans-are-conv... gallup: https://news.gallup.com/poll/150464/americans-believe-crime-...
“Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world. ... But I believe that as a species, human beings define their reality through misery and suffering. The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from.” - The Matrix
We are so lost.
I don't think it's useful to say this. There's something different about these mobs, and maybe it's something amorphous like "reach" or the fact that they can feel so close while remaining so far away by invading our devices and mindspace without an opportunity for escape. Other mobs hold and espouse some high morals while acting entirely amorally, which I guess is what makes them look like the mobs of old.
The commonality I've read in survivor stories is that the victims had to "disconnect", which I think people view a bit lightly. That's a large cost in today's world. This problem is worth addressing.
I'd say the new thing is just how transient they are. They nucleate around a Tweet or a Citizen-driven manhunt in a matter of minutes or hours, ruin someone's life, and then disband. There's no stopping them, because the whole process happens so quickly that the people in the mob are all running on their initial burst of outrage and excitement. By the time they cool down enough to think things through, the deed is done.
Sound's like they have a winning formula if Facebook is any indication of successful tech.
Sounds like the fictional CTOS from the Watch_Dogs games.
Gives me watch dog vibes too. Sounds more like a CRUD app though.
Perhaps in the USA the lived experience is somewhat different? Maybe more crime? Maybe the police dont show up?
That is to say, I have not perceived a difference between the US and Canada wrt crime.
Things like this are symptom of racism, classism, and xenophobia. https://www.npr.org/2016/07/28/487560886/is-trumps-call-for-...
1. Somebody broke into my Aunt's place while nobody was home and took some jewelry and a cell phone. Police came by, handed her a form, said nice things for five minutes then took off. Never heard anything about it again.
2. My car window smashed after being parked on the street overnight. I called the police. They pointed me to a website where I could report it so that they could keep track of statistics, but said they don't investigate individual cases. Never heard anything about it again.
3. I saw someone in a car pulling the key cylinder out and doing a thing that looked like what people do when they hot wire a car in movies (I know I'm surprised this is still a thing, it was an older car). Walked to a safe distance, called the cops. I never heard anything about it again.
4. I saw a person trying to use a screwdriver to pry the lock off a neighbor's garage as I was walking to the bus. Walked a safe distance, called the police. Never heard anything about it again.
5. People broke into the parking garage at my apartment complex and broke into cars several times. Neighbors called the police. Each time, somebody comes by, hands over a form, says there's nothing they can do. Never heard anything about it again.
I hate that this app exists. Seems terrible for all the reasons. I'm also not a hard core law-and-order person, and I don't think the answer is beefing up local law enforcement. But I can also empathize with people who live here and feel unsafe, and are looking for someone who will actually provide some level of security, although I think it's misguided to turn to this kind of app/service.
Source: Lived here for 5 years and have never seen an SPD officer do anything helpful or solve any crime, but have seen them be brutal at multiple protests. My wife literally saw someone be set on fire at a local park, but I never saw a cop there until they decided to sweep a homeless encampment a year and a half later.
[1]
https://www.seattlepi.com/local/crime/article/12000-complain...
https://www.king5.com/article/news/what-the-federal-consent-...
I agree with you that the police are useless in terms of stopping or punishing most crime though.
Yes, I think the number of police and the funding police receive is definitely not the problem here. It doesn't matter how many cops you have or how many expensive toys those cops have. If the DA refuses to charge the people the police arrest, then the police will stop arresting people because they know it's a waste of their time. The root of the problem is with the priorities of the electorate and the people they choose to elect (DA is elected in Seattle.)
A. The problem is too big to just arrest and charge everybody. There aren't enough police to track all the petty crime even if you had a DA with an appetite to charge them.
B. Even if you start heavily prosecuting the few people you do have the resources to bring in, this isn't enough of a deterrent to stop other people who are committing small time property crime. People aren't doing it simply because they can get away with it, they're doing it out of desperation.
In my opinion (feel free to disagree) the problem won't go away until there is real upward mobility for the lowest end of the economic spectrum so that people have something better to do than break into people's houses, cars and garages. There's a perverse dynamic where if you have zero money it's probably easier to be in the city of Seattle than pretty much anywhere else nearby (more shelters, more services and more other people already living in tents and vans). At the same time, the city is incredibly expensive, and there aren't a lot of entry-level jobs for people trying to get out of poverty, so making the jump from zero to stable seems like it must be really really hard here. So there's a huge wealth/income gap without any real bridge to get across it which leads to a lot of desperation, and (I think) that has more to do with anything than whatever soft policies in the DA's office.
But most peoppe seem to think police = more grunts on the streets with guns. Or lets give them bigger guns. Or give them more power to harrass random passerbies.
But staying informed feels like it helps, even though it generally doesn't. And in the particular case of crime, that's a situation where the actions of individuals could at least in theory make a difference. The benefits to the community of identifying a stolen bike are trivial, and even then you're very unlikely to ever actually do it, but one can fantasize about heroically saving the day and helping your neighbor and that fantasy scratches the itch we all have to be part of something greater. And if you can find a whole bunch of people who all want to do their part and help, maybe there's hope that the bigger issues aren't so intractable after all.
Unfortunately the problem will only get worse until the nation finds a healthy way to deal with the despair. God only knows when or if that'll happen though.
"Some webshits finish The Wire and answer the question we've all been wondering since the finale aired: why didn't the Baltimore Police simply write an app to crowdsource 'juking the stats'? Citizen (Uber for Reddit's Boston Bomber Fiasco) is born, but Apple doesn't have time to review it as they are busy finishing their own dystopian surveillance nightmare-- Airtag (Uber for Stalking). Luckily, an American HN arrives to remind everyone that actual crime has been falling since the 90s. Given the low probability of anything bad ever happening in the U.S. due widespread misperception of the truth, HN moves on to a story about adtech delivery speedups on client machines."
Also: "Hackernews", not "HN".
"We would rather provide engaging info than useful info." At least they're honest.
Even Batman had the decency of asking private citizens to not engage in vigilantism.
But it's somehow not a problem when professional "journalists" do it?
And that's without even accounting for the fundamentally fear-based business model.
How is this legal? The capacity for this to go wrong and hurt people is so damn high
> Frame said at the all-hands that he is still performing a manhunt for the person Citizen falsely accused, but this time in order to apologize.
> "We need to find this person and we are actively looking to find him. We are not done when it comes to this person," notes from the all-hands say. "Andrew [Frame] said they are working on that and this has the chance to turn into a very happy moment."
Someone has a giant ego and doesn't understand they fucked up. Trying to still find this guy and put a camera in his face...
This cannot go on
I really wanna know how much he spent on drugs that night.