How many employees does a snitching-as-a-service app require ideally? You'd think the onus would be on the snitches to be numerous, not necessarily employees for what is essentially a forum with subscriptions and push notifications.
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.
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.