Crime App 'Citizen' Lays Off Dozens of Employees
vice.com
vice.com
Their business model appears to be some sort of call-for-help button. Idk if buttnugs47 will come running to your aid. Gl with that
Take this exact response to the tech that you had: I don't know anything about Citizen, nor anyone who uses it, but based on the article title and your comment I find myself getting anxious, my pulse is elevating slightly, I'm now more worried about the world and what tech is doing to it. All this despite the fact that I have no hard info other than a suspicion based on my biases and can do absolutely nothing about it. Perhaps some users do use it in the unhealthy way you mentioned, but perhaps the vast majority don't. In any case the article and exchange are fueling a need that HNers obviously have for reading about dystopian tech, and clearly it goes beyond what is materially useful to them and into what is perversely entertaining.
On some level, I might agree with you. If Citizen was a crowdsourced non-profit, maybe it would be a healthy relationship. As a business, they directly profit from your fear and insecurity.
I couldn't believe it. Uninstalled immediately.
That was years before the "tough on crime" rhetoric/scare/moral panic that's only amplified since then.
Edit: people are replying that the data source is 911 calls, as if that leaves them off the hook. Maybe this is evidence that 911 calls should not be sent unfiltered as push notifications. That is on Citizen.
You're more likely to click on a clickbait article, you're more likely to open an app to see "naked man with knife seen running around 14st"(something I've seen on Citizen in NYC)
As someone that lives in Baltimore, this happens ALL the time.
I live in a neighborhood that has a certain amount of crime, and Citizen is super valuable to know what's going on, purely from a safety perspective. You ask if I can personally do anything about the "danger" all around me? Yes, I can make sure as hell to avoid certain blocks for a couple hours. And I can find out whether the sirens right now are because of a fire (fine to go for a walk) or because of exchanged gunfire (not).
I just looked it up according to official stats -- 568 shootings in my neighborhood since 2015, resulting in 102 deaths. Maybe you live somewhere where you consider this "panic fetish", but people in some areas don't have that luxury.
It's just basic neighborhood safety awareness of where not to walk.
Sure, I disagree with none of this particularly. My fundamental contention here is that Citizen with its sloppy text-to-speech of the police scanner plus no real follow-up on reports drives users to perceive their environment as more hazardous than it really is, their basic motivation being to push for pumping money out of people. Having awareness of your neighborhood is great but it strikes me that the better way of getting that awareness is through your community, not someone trying to pull cash out of your pocket. I'd have no problem at all with an app like to Citizen that plugged directly into community emergency services, run by the community as a public good.
I don't know about your neighborhood, but when I check Citizen real events get filled with hundreds of verifications, comments, and videos. It's not a case of Citizen trying to invent things that aren't there, sowing some fake sense of hazard.
> the better way of getting that awareness is through your community
I don't know what the mechanism of community awareness is supposed to be, except Citizen? That is the community awareness, as people are posting and verifying there.
> I'd have no problem at all with an app like to Citizen that plugged directly into community emergency services, run by the community as a public good
Citizen is plugged directly into community emergency services -- that's the police. And I just don't see how any app is going to be "run by the community as a public good". That makes as much sense to me as saying people shouldn't use Gmail, but an email app run by the community as a public good. It's not scalable or viable.
Hey, so they do manage to fulfill their stated aims in your neighborhood. Pretty cool. Looking in my own I still see multiple weeks old "shots fired" that my city determined were kids letting off firecrackers. Judging by other comments on this post the, uh, flexible understanding of truth Citizen has is the default, absent a very active-on-Citizen neighborhood.
> I don't know what the mechanism of community awareness is supposed to be, except Citizen? That is the community awareness, as people are posting and verifying there.
For me, personally, I'm on friendly terms with neighbors I meet on walks, plus the ones that live in proximity to me. The news gets shared as it always has done. I don't live in a small town either.
> Citizen is plugged directly into community emergency services -- that's the police. And I just don't see how any app is going to be "run by the community as a public good". That makes as much sense to me as saying people shouldn't use Gmail, but an email app run by the community as a public good. It's not scalable or viable.
Why not? If Citizen is working in your community, as you say, then it's already piggy-backing off a considerable amount of free effort that you all do to augment the data it gets for free from your community. What's the point of a for-profit middleman here? I sure can't go to a public meeting and complain to the city council that Citizen is misfiling firecrackers, although I can do that for any misfiled data in my PD/FD's transparency website. And have done.
Government services generally aren't 'viable' in the sense of turning a profit anyway, we just all agree to pay into the kitty to fund stuff we more or less get utility out of. (Ignoring that Citizen itself doesn't seem to be viable.) I'm not really sure what your concern about scaling is, but I will note that governments all over, small and large, manage to provide digital services to their constituencies.
Except by the time it gets to neighbors on a walk it's yesterday's news. What I'm talking about is up-to-the-minute safety for events that have happened in the past 15 minutes. Only online communication and instant phone alerts are fast enough for that.
Those services have much broader market capture than Citizen will probably be able to achieve so I find the information exchange on them much better equipped to handle population dense areas of the city with an overall younger demographic that is more likely to use them as the preferred method.
In my case, it's Milwaukee's East Side; some would call it "dangerous" because of gun violence, car theft, robberies in the areas surrounding it but my personal anecdote is that those are isolated enough where I'm not going to avoid going around and getting things done as they happen.
I guess I could add another anecdote; when I lived on the deeper south side of Milwaukee off of Cleveland avenue and 15th street there was much more "danger" happening around the house with my neighbors being drug dealers and one such incident had a man in the bed of the truck shooting his rifle between the houses on the block in the neighborhood when intoxicated around 11pm as examples; but I genuinely mean it when I say I never felt safer in that neighborhood when walking around.
It could be (and probably is) hubris; but this all goes to say that the community surrounding an area is much more powerful than people reporting incidents to an app. Not that it doesn't meet some specific need in the market and isn't valuable to some; but I digress.
As much I as do not like people losing their jobs in general ( as it tends to have a lot of downstream effects ), I am starting to believe, a good chunk of current internet must go down in flames for society to survive. I am not exaggerating. My personal belief at the beginning of 2023 ( without coffee kicking in yet ) is that, social media is a pox upon this earth that must be eradicated.
<< It's just basic neighborhood safety awareness of where not to walk.
Wait. I thought pointing out facts about stuff like that is racist.
Citizen has a pretty solid and valid value proposition, however I don't think the VC model incentivizes a healthy way of building the engagement. You may engage with it healthily but I've seen a personal friend go down a spiral of anxiety and had to delete the app to feel better.
1.5 shootings per week for 7 years straight is not okay.
Please, move.
Often enough in my area, there is an actual video from the scene and/or police response (e.g., "police confirmed that the suspect is on the run" or "12 shells were found on the scene by the firefighters"). In those cases, it is clear that the crimes were actually committed.
And sure, there are plenty of instances of incidents on Citizen where those confirmations and videos from the scene might not be available. I just simply filter those out mentally. But let's not make absolutist claims like "everything you see there is unconfirmed and is just spreading panic", because there are more than plenty easily verifiable incidents reported on Citizen.
Incredibly naive to think you can "just" do anything of the sort. Do you also think advertising doesn't affect you, by any chance?
I filter it out mentally the same way I filter out restaurants I don't like when searching for a place to eat nearby on google maps. That doesn't make google maps a useless or bad tool. Same idea here.
And no, I don't think that advertising doesn't affect me. It sometimes can give me options I wasn't aware of (e.g., a new subaru car being prominently featured in a good movie, almost definitely as a product placement), which I would potentially filter out as well when the time to purchase a new car comes (which means doing my research on that car, doing a test drive, etc.). Except with Citizen, filtering out is an effort that takes only a few seconds (does the post have video of the actual incident? does the post have confirmed and verified info, such as a number of bullet shells being recovered? or is it just "report filed" or "people on the scene claim"?).
> Whittle down your trust in your neighbors
Interestingly, being aware of the crime in my neighborhood (thanks to Citizen and NextDoor) has made me engage more with my neighbors.
> don’t advocate for different outcomes from your city
Where are you getting this from?
I don't live, nor have I ever, in Mountain View.
> Please don’t diminish others concern for public safety as a “panic fetish tool”, especially for those of us who’ve been the victims of violent crimes.
My implication here is that Citizen as a 'panic fetish tool' does not improve public safety outcomes. I am very pro improving public safety. I don't doubt that Citizen can be comforting. In fact, that's fundamental to its pitch.
It isn't "snitching as a service"; it's fear as a service. The implicit premise of the app is that the world is a dangerous, terrifying place, and they're more than happy to validate that belief by (as another commenter mentioned) drip-feeding users with irrelevant notifications about emergency service dispatches in their area.
Well, that's embarrassing.
Generally, if there is no harm, then there is no liability.
In this case, there may be a case for defamation, but if the company only reported that the police were looking for a particular suspect, which was true, then maybe not.
Nomen est omen. Normative determinism strikes again. Frame is gonna frame.
Criminal investigations are not something you want to crowd-source.
Frankly, we should all be terrified. I talked with busy-bodies before. My neighbor was one too. They have uses, but that behavior should remain an oddity and not a permanent feature of society.
It is asking for real trouble.
Now, I'm not blind to the fact that the justice system in any country is flawed. That said, it's far less flawed than a group of people with metaphorical torches listening to the guy on the largest soapbox.
[1]: https://www.vice.com/en/article/y3dpyw/inside-crime-app-citi...
You must have wasted a lot of your time and the companys you interviewed at if they went all the way through after they realized you weren't going to be hired.
It's a _hypothetical_. The problem needs to be constrained because realistic problems often either 1) have standard answers that don't require real thought or 2) are too hard to solve in an interview. Asking how you'd solve some problem on a CPU that doesn't support multiplication or something shows whether you have skills that could transfer to solving real problems but can be asked more quickly.
It's easy to purport a sense of theoretical superiority from your side of the table, and answering an unrealistic question doesn't mean that employee will deliver you real value over time. In fact, they may hold you up and waste more of your time because this "yes man" will spend extra time determining what's clearly a waste of time is in fact a waste of time.
People often complain that it led to fear-mongering, but I thought it was a valuable tool for Environmental awareness and community policing.
The people can't reconcile the reality of the world around them with their and irrational fears, that strikes me as a personal problem. I for one just wanted the real time data and could take it from there.
Example of times where it would have been helpful was when there was a an arm suspect hiding out in my neighborhood and another time where I went to a shopping center where there was a armed standoff. More mundane examples are understanding why the Bay Bridge is closed or roads are blocked.
Twitter and local news are the next best alternative, but the time delay and poor geolocation make them unsuitable alternatives.
Hopefully another company comes along with a better business model for aggregating police radio data and eyewitness reports
If you need a subscription service to stop yourself from being a victim in a mall shooting, maybe we should reflect on how that effects the greater population.
The ideal application would strip away the BS and just provide data access. I dont care if it is non-profit or for profit.
What I really don't agree with is the sentiment expressed in this thread and others that individuals shouldn't have access to this data because they are too fragile or stupid to handle reality.
There might be a version of this system that works, but currently Citizen is not it. I suspect that nobody will be able to get it right until they remove the money and focus on credible reporting.
These are "real" unless you think they a faking police calls and doctoring images.
User posts should be given the same credibility as a stranger on facebook or twitter. Even user posts are "real", unless you think they are psyops/bots.
There are many many many instances of assholes and busybodies calling 911 to report a crime when the reality was that they were irrationally upset a black person was in the park. We have videos of these exact people pulling guns on someone with no justification.
I moved to SF from NYC, and it went from barely useful to the most useless thing I've ever seen.
Here Citizen shows extremely stale data and seems to truly struggle with surfacing widely relevant news, because widely relevant things rarely happen here.
You described finding out there was an armed suspect hiding out in your neighborhood, but there is no way on earth Citizen should be how you find that out: I had that happen in another city and it didn't take 5 minutes for the area to be swarmed with officers putting the area in lockdown by blocking all entrances and issuing warnings over loudspeaker.
Same deal with an armed stand off in a shopping center... you're telling me there was an armed standoff and an app was what was keeping people from entering? Or you mean an armed standoff happened where you weren't and Citizen went out of its way to ping you?
-
Citizen isn't fear mongering because raising crime issues is fear mongering. Citizen is fear mongering because:
> The people can't reconcile the reality of the world around them with their and irrational fears, that strikes me as a personal problem.
Is such a widespread "personal problem" that people will say that, then claim they need a personal real-time crime feed.
Im not a fearful person, so I am looking for utility and data. I am also the worlds foremost expert on my opinions and experiences, so I can tell you what happened, not the other way around.
In the case of the suspect hiding in our neighborhood, our block was swarmed by cops but nobody notified us what was going on. We checked citizen and other scanners to find out what was happening and found out. This let us take practical precautions like locking the front, back, and side doors to the house- which we normally keep open.
In the case of the shopping center, I didnt use the app and was driving around the parking lot. Saw about 20 cops and asked a bystander what was going on and I got the fuck out of there. I got the full details 24 hours later from searching the news- a high speed chase had led to the shopping center and the suspect fled inside. In this case, a notification would have been really helpful.
Those are the most extreme examples. Much more common is seeing something like the bay bridge being stopped and being able to pull up pictures from the people stuck in traffic. I have used that to determine if it is something like a semi on its side or a flat tire and plan my day accordingly.
I haven't used the app in a while, because like I said, the UI is crappy. I do live near a higher crime area and frequently hear gunshots. I'm thinking about going back to the app because I would like to know how often these are real incidents requiring medical response versus people just "having fun".
I have read the city crime reports and used their crime database, but it is very delayed and has a terrible UI itself.
Like if I see my block swarmed by cops, I'll lock my door.
If I see 20 cops outside the mall, I'll take it as a sign to not even approach bystanders.
If traffic is blocked, even Google Maps will show the trip time taking into account if a semi flipped across 3 lanes or a stranded vehicle is blocking 1 lane.
If you hear gunshots so close you start thinking "I wish I knew why those just happened" instead I prefer staying indoors and away from windows since bullets don't care if they were shot for fun.
If you have the awareness to respond to the plainly available context, then you don't benefit from having a police scanner in your pocket.
-
No one is saying you're not allowed to find things out about crime, the problem at its root is a live crime feed precludes any sort of meaningful deep information.
Police act on so little info because it's their job, and as a result they end up being jumpy and trigger happy.
Willingly opting into that experience yourself in anything short of a warzone is not hard to chalk up to fear...
If I want more detailed information on a bridge shutdown (which is available), your recommendation is to suck it and just go by whatever erroneous prediction google gives.
It seems like you providing contradictory advice:
1) Always take the most cautious approach to your environment. (if you see cops:hide, hear shots: hide)
2) Don't pay attention to the live crime feed for more information.
The problem is that the live crime feed adds meaningful information to the environmental data for me.
I guess we disagree on what information I find useful: Whether that is the nature of a traffic jam so I can plan my drive, or how often people get shot in my neighborhood.
This strikes me as a position hostile to information, knowledge, and learning.
> It seems like you providing contradictory advice:
There's nothing contradictory: I'm advocating for common sense telling you when to be fearful, rather than relying on an app to tell you when to not be fearful.
Because when said app is literally a police scanner, your default is fearful and you'll essentially be asking for an app to tell you when everything is ok. That's no way to live.
I probably shouldn't respond, but I can't help it. Do you just go through life telling people how they feel and contradicting them when they say they feel otherwise? I said I wasn't fearful, and gave numerous examples of not being fearful, yet you still assert that I am.
If you can't wrap your head around the idea that someone might want to collect information and make informed decisions without being some kind of paranoid, there's nothing that I can do to change your mind. If you can't see the simple value in knowing which streets people frequently are shot at, then I can't help you.
Good luck
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9629695/Citizen-CEO...
Is Citizen the same?
How much of the workforce is that, is it the 10. 15. 20% we're seeing among most technology companies, or is is it more?
Blackrock is laying off ~500, but that's only 3% of the workforce.
(Blackrock is perhaps equally deserving of notoriety, but as a practical matter lacks it in this context.)
To the people who live in areas with a lot of crime: If there are shootings, how many random bullet holes have you found? If it's general demeanor, how many condoms, sharps, cars without plates, cars missing wheels, cars with broken windows and does it vary with the time of day or day of week (or month)?
It's similar to the discipline I exercised when doing a lot of alpine scrambling, especially at the bottom of cliffs: Fresh scars on the rocks? Do any of the trees look "shot up"? Maybe not the place to stop for lunch.
"Apple store in North Carolina lays off one employee"
I'd argue the title is wrong - it's not a "Crime app" as much as a "Crime reporting & monitoring" app.
This is bad because it generally creates an unspoken appearance-based caste system, where 'non-sketchy looking' people can do things that others can't (like park their work van on the side of the road to take a lunch break).
Keep in mind that the user base of Citizen is not a uniform distribution of the population either - certain classes (for the lack of a better word) will self-select and are likely to have similar issues to the police itself. In fact you might have the kind of people who can't even make the cut to join the police itself, which is not a good thing when you see how low the bar for the police is to begin with.
I'm not sure it's justifiable for these companies to have just as much (if not more) engineers working on a product that's already been built and is successfully running - I'd expect there to only be a skeleton crew for maintenance and the bulk of employees being support/operations/legal once the tech stack is built and stable.
Most of their profitability comes from becoming a de facto monopoly / middle-man so they will attempt to gain as much market share as aggressively as possible. (Including sacrificing present profitability, giving away money for free rides/things, etc)
It is not a technical necessity but an economic venture capital necessity.