When Batman isn’t available: Crowd-fund | Hacker News Reader

When Batman isn’t available: Crowd-fund

salon.com

83 pointsajaymehta41 comments

Of interest is how circular it all is. At various points in history police forces were funded in this way, affluent people paying for security in their neighborhoods. (cynically thought to be intended to "keep the riffraff out")

Over time we moved towards a taxpayer funded police force which theoretically applies equal protection to everyone and forced all the wealthy people to pay in. (taxes) Then we gradually expanded tax burdens downwards so people with lower incomes (at least the middle and working classes) increasingly bear the burden of funding of this police force (radical viewpoint: forcing the poor to pay the salaries of their oppressors)

Leading us to a profession of law enforcement whose implementation is unsatisfactory to many people for ideological reasons (being "forced" to pay for it) and pragmatically unsuitable for others. (because in many cases the practices of law enforcement do not directly reflect community values, i.e. war on drugs)

It is a cool thought experiment to imagine a system where it comes full circle, all local law enforcement is directly answerable to the community, as its employer, and to federal agencies, in cases of alleged civil rights violations, or to help with larger crime networks.

Which is IN THEORY what we currently have, but, clearly if a community feels the need to crowdfund neighborhood security, the government isn't adequately responding to the community's concerns, for structural reasons.

The two other services rah should give pause are education and fire fighting. In many cases insurance companies pay for fire services only for their buyers. One could see this going towards crowd funding. Private school is also crowd funded. The teachers unions seem ok with this since it doesn't pull resources away. (The private garbage model). They do raise hell for charter schools though.

The same encouraged privatization and evaporating public support has been happening for years, especially in my city (Philadelphia).

Last week a young girl died because the city's budget only allows for a nurse at her school two days a week. No one on duty had enough medical knowledge to recognize her asthma attack required professional attention.[1]

A supplement to the devestating education budget (this year began with roughly half the number of operating schools as the last) comes from city-encouraged philanthropic donations.[2] There are already nation-wide crowdfunding efforts, such as Donors Choose.[3] Some schools in Philly need to go this route to get supplies like paper and pencils.[4]

  [1]: http://citypaper.net/article.php?16461
  [2]: http://thenotebook.org/blog/136439/mayor-seeking-donations-school-supplies
  [3]: http://www.donorschoose.org/
  [4]: http://www.theawl.com/2013/09/first-they-fired-the-nurses-and-librarians-then-they-fired-the-guidance-counselors

There is a lot of documented experience on how private fire services work and where they fail - for example, New York experience with private firefighting companies is not that old and very interesting.

Hey HN, since my comment below the article was buried beneath a bunch of ads, and a discussion is developing, here is the original comment I made on salon.com after reading the article:

---

(Co-founder/CEO of Crowdtilt here) I just wanted to follow up on the article above and clarify a few things. My replies in the article seem to come across as dismissive of the potential downsides to civic crowdfunding. That couldn't be further from the truth - As team members here at Crowdtilt would tell you, I have actually been quite introspective about how our tools are being used within the realm of community fundraising in the last few days (and as this use case for private security has begun to spread to other cities).

Our tools and platform are built with democratization in mind, not built to further tech elitism or affluent disparity. Like any tool built to connect people (from ships, to the automobile, to the internet itself) the early adoption may be through a more affluent class, but that is not where the impact stays and remains - and its introduction is an undeniable net positive for society. Additionally, knowing that many (more affluent) neighborhoods have been doing things like this for years with homeowners associations to hire private security, we hope this tool continues to lower the barriers for such solutions to problems as dire as security or as aspirational as something like free public wifi for a city (http://tilt.tc/TP07) that we've seen on the other end of the spectrum of civic crowdfunding.

My view is that communities will benefit from the tools we're building, but again, I want it to be clear that we take the potential downsides of civic crowdfunding seriously and think about ways to mitigate those downsides - we/I am not dismissive of these arguments whatsoever.

Please feel free to reach me at jamesb@crowdtilt.com if you have any suggestions or thoughts - would be happy to have a dialogue on the topic with anyone (...I would learn more from that than a one-sided internal monologue with myself or our team). Thanks, James.

I can't see any negative here. Nobody's complaining that private security firms exist. They're already used by rich people and businesses anyway. How is a group of residents in a suburb different from a group of residents in an apartment block or workers in a company? Next, the internet commenters will be telling us we aren't allowed to buy a computer because it disenfranchises the poor who go without.

I used to live in a low-middle class neighborhood with a group of volunteer security guards. They'd drive around at night looking out for burglaries. Is that wrong?

So, here's an interesting quote from the article:

"An affluent neighborhood that privatizes trash pickup doesn’t marginalize the trash pickup in poorer neighborhoods — it increases the resources that are available for those neighborhoods."

The trick is this: justice is not trash. Police is not trash, security is not trash. There is a very important moral calculus and contract that goes into voluntarily submitting to society's laws.

We need to address the fact that we've lost faith in our governments, and that we don't depend on our .gov to provide for our needs, and that we don't believe in the contract anymore. This is a short-sighted sort of fix, and one that is only going to lay the groundwork for a much, much messier attempt at resolution. We need to fix the .gov.

There's always been a kind of wink and nod that yes, the .gov can do better, and yes, we can't all be astronauts, but allowing such direct coupling of personal wealth and policy is quite tacky.

EDIT: Removed ranty bit.

I live close to this neighborhood and walk through it frequently, and I have very mixed feelings about the whole thing. Besides the general principle of justice/policing not being the same as trash pickup, the article's premise is flawed; private security won't have any power to make arrests, so whenever it calls on official police resources (which I anticipate that it will) it most certainly does whisk those away from other neighborhoods.

>"If people are crowdfunding law enforcement, if people are allowed to spend money on security to effectively make being a poor homeless dude wandering around on their street a crime, we've failed as a civilization. We've given up any aspiration that hey, justice is something that matters, morals are something that matters: if I can pay for it, I can inflict my will on others to increase my own convenience."

If people are voting for the leaders of the law enforcement, if people are allowed to vote for security to effectively make being a poor homeless dude wandering around on their street a crime, we've failed as a civilization. We've given up any aspiration that hey, justice is something that matters, morals are something that matters: if I can vote for it, I can inflict my will on others to increase my own convenience.

Lest you think that is a silly thing to say, THAT IS HAPPENING NOW. The City of Berkeley gets a DHS-sponsored Armored Personell Carrier. Cops in New York stop and fisk people of color. In no less than 10 cities in america, it is illegal to feed the homeless (I've broken this law in my own city, many times). What makes the group of people known as the "wealthy" any more or less suspicious or despicable than the group of people known as the "popular"?

Just a question, how do are laws that make feeding the homeless illegal enforceable? Do they require people to provide proof of residency somewhere prior to purchasing food for others?

I don't know, I've never been arrested for it, and I hope to never, but other people have not been so lucky.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/10/orlando-food-not-bo...

http://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/article/Houston-perm...

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/28/us/28homeless.html?pagewan...

etc. etc.

This sort of thing is not just restricted to "red states" - SF made it illegal to sleep on the sidewalks...

> What makes the group of people known as the "wealthy" any more or less suspicious or despicable than the group of people known as the "popular"?

The group of people known as the "popular" is much larger and generally more diverse, and therefore it takes a bit more power of persuasion (or widespread bigotry) to convince them that harassing a particular social group is a good use of their tax dollars. If the "popular" backs that harassment, society has bigger problems than the legal mechanisms that permit them to do so.

A situation where people wanting "security" to target a minority or behaviour they dislike need electoral and legislative support may not be perfect, but it's still preferable to a situation where they simply need sufficient funds.

> The group of people known as the "popular" is much larger and generally more diverse.

Yeah, no, that's really not true, by "popular", I'm functionally referring to people "popular enough to get elected". This specific subset may also be restricted to the intersection of the common definition of "popular" and "narcissistic enough to try".

We may choose to really examine those individuals who have a day-to-day operational control over the work of the state. Here there are also complicating factors like bureaucrats and mid- and high- level managers in the state apparatus not only are unelected (so that to properly describe this group we should re-qualify popular as "favorable to the elected") but these people also tend to be less accountable - "qualified immunity", not often do you hear of government officials going to jail - though I suppose that's true of wall street, too...

Coming from a country where private security and completely private healthcare, and living in secure 24/7 guarded enclaves is how you secure for yourself the kind of lifestyle most Americans enjoy, I'm not sure dismantling government is the solution.

This kind of stratification feels very familiar.

The privileged forget the hidden costs of civilisation, the little safety nets ensuring misfortune for the few should not be a life-ruining event, forget their own massive position of safety and security, therefore, what is government but a useless edifice impeding profit and efficiency.

Are we not all self made men who raised ourselves from the cradle, catching our own food, building our own cabins, driving on roads we made, teaching ourselves from first principles?

In the case of Oakland, where I live, I get the sense that one of the challenges is that there's no real pressure on the city government to improve things. While it is true that services such as the police are underfunded, I think this is also used as a pretext to enable unresponsive, bureaucratic behavior on the part of the legal and law enforcement systems. Perhaps crowdfunding will provide a stimulus for additional responsiveness once government agencies see the possibility of genuine competition on some level.

> We need to address the fact that we've lost faith in our governments, and that we don't depend on our .gov to provide for our needs, and that we don't believe in the contract anymore. This is a short-sighted sort of fix, and one that is only going to lay the groundwork for a much, much messier attempt at resolution. We need to fix the .gov.

I would really like to see more people taking an interest in figuring out the details of how to construct a government. Most people tend to go with the overly simplistic solutions of (1) "magically minimize" or (2) "reset back to [insert date here: 1776; 1860; 1950]", neither of which are intellectually honest answers. (They're akin to asking, "What kind of map projection do you prefer?" "A globe.")

I've done some work in the area (an HN search will turn up me talking about it), but I'm crippled by my own neuroses.

It'd be nice to see better toolsets for collaboration, for instance, or figuring out a way to wholly replace voting altogether (rather than swapping out the specific ways of casting ballots). Atwood's Discourse is nice, but it's still just a forum for talking rather than a system for making decisions.

Fascinating. For one thing I'm amazed that $8,000 gets your neighborhood 60 hours a week of private security patrol for 4 months. Sounds way too economical.

Also, in the article, the CEO of Crowdtilt implies that this is a net-positive because Oakland PD will be able spend more time patrolling other areas--implying that Rockridge will now get less police attention. If that's true, I wouldn't want to pay money for my neighborhood to get less real police patrol.

The net positive is that you obtain more security than you otherwise would with a real police patrol. Apartment and commercial office complexes have been doing this for years. I'm happy crowd-funding enables this for private residence communities too.

Is the security effective or is it theatre?

What's the research like?

Sorry, didn't mean for my comments to be misleading. The context was that if the number of robberies and muggings are reduced in that neighborhood from 60 per week to say 50 or cut in half to 30, then fewer police resources are needed for responding to calls for robberies and muggings in that neighborhood and more resources can be spent towards preventative police patrolling throughout Oakland.

I used the comments section of the article to further clarify some of my/our views on this topic if you're interested.

Works out at about $7.66 per hour - less than the Californian minimum wage of $8/hour.

And that's assuming there's no overheads to pay for like tax, health insurance, paid leave, pension contribution, social security, unemployment insurance, worker's comp, uniform, car, gun...

So I'd agree with your assessment that $8000 isn't very much.

I don't know why this is being downvoted; it's simple fact. The security firm is either offering this neighborhood a loss leader (which will be temporary) or overstating the amount of service it intends to provide. $8000 for 4 months implies $24k/year, which is considerably lower than the average salary for a security guard (which is not that much to begin with).

Something doesn't add up here.

presumably, the services that the firm provides don't necessarily have to be everywhere within the area at all times.

It's hard to imagine a scenario where this would result in worse overall law enforcement. They are going to get 60 hours of patrol per week. Police don't really drive around upper middle class neighborhoods at all much less 35% of every hour of the week. I live in a fairly nice area in San Francisco and I go weeks without seeing a police car, and this is a denser area than Rockridge (obviously parking enforcement doesn't count, and if they do count I don't see any reason they would be displaced by security officers since they have to continue doing their jobs there no matter what the crime rate is).

It doesn't really make sense to pay for expensive personnel that are authorized to write tickets, perform searches, and use deadly force to patrol your streets when the main benefit is mostly (a) the possibility of witnessing illegal activity while it's going on, and (b) a visible presence that dissuades potential criminals from their activities. Neither of these requires nearly the level of training or expertise.

I'm not sure what the exchange rate in terms of hours is where I'd rather have the police officer patrolling rather than a security dude, but we can get a handle on the relative cost. Indeed.com says security officers in San Francisco have an average salary of $35,000, and the starting pay for police in San Francisco is $89K-$112K. If you fully burden the security officer with benefits, and fully burden the police officer with their dramatically higher level of benefits and pension, it's not difficult to imagine that the security officer is 5-6x as cost effective. So would you rather have 12 hours of police patrols or 60 hours of security officer patrols?

I suspect there is a tipping point in terms of presence past which a neighborhood gets known by thoughtful criminals as being well-patrolled, which causes a significant decrease in crimes committed there.

Although it is true that you can probably wring savings out of using private security personnel over unionized police, I personally don't think the higher costs for the police are a problem -- it's hard to live on wages less than what the police in San Francisco are being paid, even in Oakland. A real problem with the legal and law enforcement systems is that they're bureaucratic and unresponsive. I do not mind more money going to them, but I also want to see them enter the Internet age and do things like answer emails.

The $8000 is a teaser rate for this pilot program. On the Crowdtilt page[1], it says:

VMA Security Group will only continue the patrol beyond February 2014 if 250 households have entered into contract at $20 per month, renewable and paid at six-month intervals. If we sign up 250 households at $20 per month for the four month trial period ($82.05 per household x 250 households = $20,513), that will put us in position to have service continuing beyond February 2014.

$5000/month (250 x $20) would be the monthly fee after February. 12 hrs x 5 days x 4 weeks = 240 hr/month, so that comes out to $20.80/hr gross salary.

1: https://www.crowdtilt.com/campaigns/security-patrol-for-lowe...

This is interesting timing given the shutdown of the Federal government. With crowd-funding, citizens can be infinitely resourceful in solving their own problems, faster, and without the long, bureaucratic process that plagues governments. There is a real role for government to play here in securing the safety of their citizens.

Here's the problem - who watches the watchmen? There is a large, complex, troubled, oft-comprised, well-meaning bureaucracy in place to vet police, police training and police actions. Security guards ... not so much. Civic crowd-funding is an interesting concept, but I'm almost certain those that engage in it, over time, will find it deeply flawed.

I think these kinds of questions should be handled on a case-by-case basis. There's an incident with private security personnel, and this gives rise to an oversight board, etc. I am not at all convinced that the large, complex, troubled, oft-compromised, well-meaning bureaucracy that you mention is directing its resources towards the right things. Just as likely to my mind, it is engaging in a thousand small acts of self-preservation and defense of turf, because of all of the overlapping jurisdictions and poorly delineated lines of authority.

>>engaging in a thousand small acts of self-preservation and defense of turf, because of all of the overlapping jurisdictions and poorly delineated lines of authority. Agreed - troubled, oft-compromised. I think you may be overestimating the power of an oversight board ... in the end, I guess I seriously question the training and motivation held by those in the security guard profession.

I'm not going to defend security guards, as we can see in the case of George Zimmermann, things can get unhinged, but, is there any reason why you don't seriously question the training and motivation of those who wear a police badge? Because there's a lot of police abuse out there. As bad as it gets, no private security has ever bombed a neighborhood it was supposed to protect. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOVE#1985_bombing

Sure, that's an outlier, but then there's also the Jose Guerena case. Or the Cheye Calvo case. These are more well known ones. In "The Rise of the Warrior Cop" Radley Balko lists literally hundreds of cases piling up over the past decade where egregious abuse of force occurred because of lack of police oversight.

Don't the police watch the security guards? If they commit a crime, they'll go to jail, just like anyone else on this side of the thin blue line.

... So your backstop is the exact thing you are casting a vote of no confidence against?

I thought we already had crowd-funding for public services and it was called "taxes", no?

100% agree. This is not more than another hint of a failing government. If people wants and needs more police and are willing to pay for it it's the government duty to put it in place. Using taxes as a political weapon and demonizing them as something inherently bad causes irrational decisions that costs more money and could cost lifes.

"Our tax dollars end up channeled to special interests or spent on useless wars or utterly wasted."

Not only tax dollars. All the new money we print too, which is a tax in effect, devaluing dollars and favoring those who can grow their wealth with the inflation (either those receiving newly printed money, businesses with pricing power, investors, or workers who can demand raises).

I'm curious how diligent the neighborhood citizens were in soliciting their local government to increase police presence. Did they write to the police chief? Attend council meetings? Voice their concerns to elected officials?

I believe people are inherently lazy. More often than not people will take the path of least resistance. What would happen if the volume of support for the crowd-funding were directed at the local government? It seems like people would rather "one-click checkout" (tm) than make the effort to fix their own government.

I definately disagree with the idea that adding private security won't remove funding from public security. If the vasy majority of wealthy townships start funding their own private security, it will be much harder to justify expensive policing budgets, and potentially even cheap police budgets.

Short term there are only upsides, but in the long run this will weaken the local governments.

Until someone shows me independent statistics otherwise, I am going to assume "private security" is a false sense of security theater.

Whose read Snow Crash?

Crushing it as usual!

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