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Comment by troutwine | Hacker News Reader

If Citizen tanks that strikes me as a beneficial outcome. One of the other commenters here described this app as “snitching-as-a-service” but I think it’s more insidious than that. Citizen is very much in the same pattern as listening to the police scanner continuously: it’s a panic fetish tool. Were actual crimes committed? Citizen doesn’t know. Can you, personally, do anything about the “danger” all around you? Sure! Whittle down your trust in your neighbors more, don’t advocate for different outcomes from your city, hire Citizen’s private security force! It’s “if it bleeds, it leads” masquerading as a public good, only incidentally trying to make a profit on the side.

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It's certainly not healthy to be perusing Citizen throughout the day, but it's also certainly not "panic fetish".

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.

> 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.

> no real follow-up on reports... drives users to perceive their environment as more hazardous than it really is

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.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

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.

To be honest, I find SnapMap, Twitter & a Facebook account made only to follow {neighborhood} Facebook pages much better for conveying information than a 3rd party app trying to break into the space those fill already.

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.

That's crazy, man. I can't imagine living like that. But I'm glad you have the tools to protect yourself.

It is about the same level as Nextdoor, which is littered with posts that makes you question when your neighbors have time to engage in that level of vigilance. I am comfortable with assigning 'fetish' qualifier to it. It genuinely is that bad.

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.

There is a place where a tool like Citizen can be useful - however a company with VC funding needs to generate returns quickly, which incentivizes growing engagement, which "panic fetishism" is a pretty attractive way of achieving that.

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.

So around one shooting per week in just one neighbourhood? That's crazy.

You really need to move somewhere else.

1.5 shootings per week for 7 years straight is not okay.

Please, move.

I had this app installed for a short time. I removed it when it said "shots fired" on an affluent block nearby. It was teenagers playing with firecrackers. As happens in the neighborhood quite regularly.

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.

It’s speech to texting the police scanners or dispatch. It means somebody called it in as shots fired.

The app will take every dumb 911 complaint at face value. Most 911 complaints simply aren't accurate. For every one real gunshot called in, there's many more that end up being a car backfiring, fireworks, etc. And this is true for nearly every category of call 911 gets. Putting the unfiltered feed on a map and sending proximity alerts to app users is less than useless.

Shock value is still very high!

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)

All this means is someone called 911 and reported they heard gunshots.

As someone that lives in Baltimore, this happens ALL the time.

I’ve seen it post about a police helicopter overhead, but then I look out with my own eyes and its one of the private ones people rent for sightseeing, not the black and white flying pig.

Yeah its very dystopian. I suspect many of the hard core users have some form of generalised anxiety and are in fact the type of people who shouldn't be using this app at all.

It’s nimby catnip.

Apparently the app was originally called "Vigilante" before being renamed to Citizen.

These specific founder types are so painfully unaware. I’m sure it’s the same idiot who put out a push notification with a $30K bounty on the wrong guy.

They even had a dramatized commercial with the founders’ wet dream of some girl getting mugged by her car, triggering the app, and a bunch of men showing up at the coordinates to pummel the mugger and save the girl.

https://youtu.be/fB6Sqhvm8l8

Holy crap; I genuinely thought GP was making a joke when they said it was originally called "Vigilante". Nope.

They also never follow up on any of the reports, nor can they really. The anonymous comment section is less than useless. The exaggerated camera-shake (maybe due to frame rate reduction in post processing) videos of police lights or a fire in the distance are mildly interesting.

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

Is HN sort of the same phenomenon but for tech? As I was reading your comment I found myself realizing the same description (as a "panic fetish tool") applies to a type of HN thread that's fairly typical.

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.

Part of it comes down to the fact that Citizen has a pretty comically bad track record. It hasn't even been a week since they texted Billie Eilish's home address to a few hundred thousand people, and many haven't forgotten about their previous app "Vigilante" (most well-known for falsely accusing random strangers of various crimes).

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.

By panic fetish tool I mean something of marginal utility — not no utility, mind — that panics the afflicted into a mailable state. So, for Citizen, that’s meant to make you pay them money. For, say, fascist politics that’s meant to make you rely on the comfort provided by Dear Leader. I don’t think it’s clear at all that HN follows the same model. For one the website is free and if they’re trying to make anything happen it’s promote their VC fund, which strikes me as benign. Oh, maybe lisp too in the old days. Additionally, being aware that the utopian vaguely libertarian mindset around tech — everything is better with computers, especially if you can make money at it — is false is not a bad thing. Personally I don’t feel at all powerless to counter that trend, that mindless Utopianism, or to play my part with my neighbors and community in countering it, I should say, since I’m just one person.

> Were actual crimes committed? Citizen doesn’t know.

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.

> I just simply filter those out mentally

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 mean, I don't live in any state of perpetual fear or anything, and I haven't changed my habits based on it at all (aside from avoiding areas that actively have like 5+ cop cars on the scene at the moment, because traffic there is going to be awful).

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"?).

> One of the other commenters here described this app as “snitching-as-a-service” but I think it’s more insidious than that.

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.

Not everyone has the privilege of living in safe places like 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.

> 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?

> Not everyone has the privilege of living in safe places like Mountain View.

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.

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