14 ms·

Citizen pays New Yorkers to livestream crime scenes

58 points by tareqak 5y ago

MattGaiser 5y ago
Surprised that they need to pay. Plenty do it just for the views.
tofuahdude 5y ago
Citizen seems to be taking the uber/airbnb "do it until we are big enough to make it legal" approach to... crime. Weird combo. I bet their legal war chest is bulky.
- MattGaiser 5y ago
  Does Citizen break regulations in some way? I thought that filming crime and police was solidly legal.
  - SerLava 5y ago
    I mean, sharing your car is legal but that's not really what Uber ever was.
    - MattGaiser 5y ago
      Uber was trying to scale a personal exemption from the law. What law is it that makes doing this at scale vs doing it individually a grey area?
  - cronix 5y ago
    > I thought that filming crime and police was solidly legal. Filming anything from a public space (street, sidewalk, etc) is legal, even if it's of a private space that is visible from public space. For example, if I'm on a public sidewalk next to your private residence, and you have the blinds open walking around naked - you have no reasonable expectation of privacy and can be filmed even though you're on your private property. Just like if you're driving on the public street and I have a ring doorbell camera, you have no reasonable expectation of privacy driving down the street, or walking on the sidewalk, and I can record you.
    - Shmebulock 5y ago
      Is this generally how it works in most countries?
      - gruez 5y ago
        Common law countries? Yes.
      - tablespoon 5y ago
        > Is this generally how it works in most countries? There's a lot of variation: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Country_specific_consent_requirements https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Country_specific_...
  - busterarm 5y ago
    They just haven't been sued yet by the family of a user who has been killed while filming a violent crime. When they do their insurance costs will become astronomical. This pay structure encourages users to put themselves in harm's way.
    - dwater 5y ago
      Yes, the thing that is most likely to bite them is not legality, it's liability as a result of them paying people to do things.
    - MattGaiser 5y ago
      How does this work for freelance journalists? Their risk is astronomical too.
      - busterarm 5y ago
        Any competent freelance journalist will tell you they pay for liability insurance and the annual premium is at least $1000/year. Said journalists are generally educated and have some training, especially around ethics. At least they're supposed to. This keeps them from shoving a camera in everyone's face while a crime is unfolding. Citizen is taking contributions from whoever the fuck...
- xxpor 5y ago
  It's so much worse than that. It's, quite literally, a right wing psyop. It's well established that people's fears about crime are much more correlated with news coverage than actual levels of crime. I'm having trouble finding it right now, but there was a recent survey that showed something like ~55% of Americans think crime is higher than it was in the early 90s. It's not even remotely close. We're back up to... 2012 levels. Meanwhile, Citizen is Nextdoor but even more extreme. You can see all this crime happening all the time, increasing the perception of it being extremely common. What happens when crime becomes a major political issue? Reactionaries get elected. Who's funding Citizen? Oh look, Peter Thiel. How surprising.
  - BitwiseFool 5y ago
    This is one of those things that I just can't reconcile with my own experience. Studies say that crime is actually down but I'm witnessing more and more general lawlessness. A few weeks ago I saw someone take a case of beer out of a supermarket without paying. They caught him on camera and no one tried to stop him. The manager told me it was pointless to call the police. Public urination is way more common than it used to be and I think NYC decriminalized it a while ago. So if a bunch of previously criminal acts are no longer being reported, can we truly have confidence that crime has actually gone down? This reminds me of all those news articles confidently declaring inflation wasn't a threat, and that, no, we are actually experiencing some deflation. But when I go to the grocery store I end up paying more for things like milk and meat. A strip steak went from about $9.99 a pound to $14.99 a pound.
    - danShumway 5y ago
      Crime is definitely up, but even if we assume it's under-reported or the numbers are being fudged, it's still nowhere near the level of the 90s. It's up from a historic low. I think a lot of people either aren't really aware of or were sheltered growing up from how bad crime used to be. People's real-world experience is based on their recent memory, not on 90's levels of violence. There were a little less than 2,000 shootings in New York City in 2020. That's very bad, given that for a few years the city had managed to dip under 1,000 shootings. An extremely noticeable spike. But as a point of comparison, in 1991 there were over 5,000 shootings in NYC. And those numbers aren't taking into account three decades of population growth. Even when you look at crime overall and not just violent crimes, we were coming off of a ~5% national crime rate in 1991. From what I can see, GP is correct that we are mostly looking at a return to 2012-level crime stats, and in some areas maybe a return to 2000-2010 levels. I'm convinced that people just can't remember any earlier than that. The 90s were really bad, if ~55% of Americans think we're at those levels already, then ~55% of Americans are just wrong. They don't have an accurate grasp of what crime used to look like. When you look at >2015 rates, then you do see crime going up. That's a real thing, and it's worth paying attention to. But that doesn't really change anything about the overall trajectory of crime over the past decade. It especially doesn't change anything about the overall trajectory of crime over the past >1 decade. > But when I go to the grocery store I end up paying more for things like milk and meat. There's a much simpler explanation here, which is that food categories like milk and meat are completely excluded from many inflation calculations, specifically because their prices are highly volatile. An increase in the price of food won't be directly reflected in any reported inflation numbers, at least as far as I know. Like many high-level economy measures, inflation is not always a useful way to talk about how costs are changing and what regular people are experiencing. It's purposefully disconnected from many "on-the-ground" prices of goods that are important to consumers.
kevinventullo 5y ago
So, Uber-for-Nightcrawlers? Reference: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nightcrawler_(film) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nightcrawler_(film)
- s09dfhks 5y ago
  One of my all time favorite films. As soon as I read this headline I thought of it immediately. Could this lead to a new breed of ambulance chasers seeking a different kind of pay-day?
  - rabuse 5y ago
    Tbh, I love this kind of content. I've been watching live stream happenings/disasters for quite some time now through a multitude of apps, so the more the merrier.
sickcodebruh 5y ago
Two related threads on Citizen in the last few months: * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27237520 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27237520 * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27236660 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27236660 They reference each other, too. Citizen is nightmarish. All the “it’s a dystopian surveillance app built to exploit our worst fears” concerns about other social media products with only the most superficial veneer trying to hide it. I had it on my phone for months and it contributed absolutely nothing but anxiety.
- aiisahik 5y ago
  Yes it's anxiety inducing but doesn't it just tell us the truth of who we are? If you can't handle the anxiety, nobody is forcing you to have it on your phone nor are they forcing you to be part of it. In other countries, the government has cameras everywhere and use the footage to find and prosecute. Apparently America prefers to have individuals take on that role.
  - sickcodebruh 5y ago
    Is "nobody is forcing you to have it on your phone nor are they forcing you to be part of it" really the standard that we want when judging whether to share our revulsion about a company or product? You're not wrong about that part, I'm just not sure what your point is. It's no secret that social media in general stokes many of our worst impulses. Citizen strikes me as somewhat unique because it starts from such a negative place and then encourages us to feel worse. Facebook benefited from engagement resulting in political chaos but that's only one of the ways individuals can interact. Citizen can't even claim that weak defense. It's like the social media version of for-profit prisons: it claims to want safety but it benefits the most when we think we are unsafe.
    - aiisahik 5y ago
      Hate to break it to you but "nobody is forcing you" is kinda the standard in the US from vaccines to social media to guns. Everything is a choice here. There are plenty of countries out there which would have chosen to ban Citizen along with a whole long list of other even more idiotic things but this country is about freedom of choice even if that choice is bad for the greater community.
paxys 5y ago
What is Citizen's endgame here? Do they want to be some vigilante justice group? A private army? Protection racket?
- ucm_edge 5y ago
  They partner with police. The revenue play is charging governments access to a feed of events happening just in their jurisdiction (with some cleaning up/grouping of similar reports). Citizen gets the police to pay them for access, then gets the police to advertise the app to them as an alternative to calling non emergency dispatch. In turn more people down Citizen and Citizen can probably monetize that. In LA they even have Citizen branded patrol vehicles rather than community service officers as a pilot program. So rather than having like an unarmed (and normally unsworn) employee of LAPD in a Prius with a little orange light on the top, you get a private contractor in a citizen branded vehicle doing the patrol. The big question is if Citizen gets into E911 systems, which have a lot more liability than non emergency type things. Is Citizen going to make a play to become the standard way of contacting 911 via text based communication at some point and attempt to generate revenue via running that infrastructure.
  - systemvoltage 5y ago
    Curious - what can this private Citizen branded patrol actually do? Isn't it just a camera on wheels? It can't make arrests, it can't handcuff people, it can't do much legally.
    - genericone 5y ago
      Observe and report, and verbally harass if necessary, in an "acceptable" manner. Using robots apparently is not yet in vogue, so citizen branded patrol might be the current local-minima for this type of function: https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/13/16771148/robot-security-guard-scares-homeless-san-francisco https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/13/16771148/robot-security-... I knew someone that worked at the SFSPCA and they said the robot absolutely put a dent in car-break-ins, needling, and encampments in the animal-shelter parking lot, but advocates won in the end. What worked in Knightscopes case is the feeling of "presence" that security cams, even the panning ones with a built-in speaker, are unable to give off. So Citizen branded patrols fill that "presence" role.
tolbish 5y ago
Someone is going to try livestreaming a fleeing suspect and end up getting riddled with bullets.
- INTPenis 5y ago
  Or just stage it with some friends in masks.
endisneigh 5y ago
I don’t like Citizen, but is it inherently a bad thing if there’s more accountability in the form of distributed filming of the government and its agents? My issue with citizen is more how it fear mongers and the general sentiment around what it’s doing. I also think it’s a terrible idea to encourage people to put themselves in potentially dangerous situations.
- asdfasgasdgasdg 5y ago
  To put even a slightly finer point on it -- isn't this, in a sense, journalism without a filter? Video can lie, but it's probably a bit harder to make a live streamed video lie than an article that recapitulates the content of such a stream. One thing I do seem to see over and over is a pattern where journalists are a little annoyed when companies encroach on the role of journalists but do so for less money. I'm sure this doesn't rise to a level of conscious bias, but it does sometimes feel that anything that threatens their gatekeeping is going to get a lot of flak in the opinion section.
  - danpalmer 5y ago
    > One thing I do seem to see over and over is a pattern where journalists are a little annoyed when companies encroach on the role of journalists but do so for less money. While there will be some bias from being challenged, I think there's also plenty of good reasons for journalists to challenge these sorts of companies. Journalism is a profession and brings with it a lot of ethical considerations. Teaching of journalism goes into depth on why the ethics are important, how to report on sensitive topics, and all sorts that makes journalists far better qualified to report on things. There's absolutely a place for self-taught/hobbyist writing, but it's not journalism, and if we depend on it for the "important" or hard topics we'll lose out on the benefits that well trained journalists bring to the table.
    - asdfasgasdgasdg 5y ago
      I do understand that journalists aspire to ethical behavior in aggregate. What's ultimately not entirely clear to me is whether that aspiration is generally met to the degree that the profession is materially better at truth-telling than any other. I sure hope so. Then again, you can often read reporting on the same subject by journalists at CNN and Fox News, and the one inescapable conclusion is that someone is not telling the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
notjustanymike 5y ago
How could this possibly go wrong? Offering a monetary reward for streaming crimes would bias our perceptions of poorer communities, where individuals would most benefit from the money. A poor community is incentivized with this plan to reinforce the message that they are crime-ridden, while rich neighborhoods won't receive the same level of coverage because fewer individuals care about the payoff. What's the phrase? "Fair and Balanced".
s1artibartfast 5y ago
I'm probably an outlier, but I love the concept of Citizen and dislike the implementation. I don't have public safety anxiety, but want current data and public safety updates where I live and travel. Decentralized, unfiltered, and non editorialized news reporting is also a huge perk. When there is a lot of police activity in my neighborhood, I want to know the cause and act accordingly. For example, if there is a gunman on the run (as has happened in the past), I would want to make sure my doors are locked. My city and state does a terrible job of providing this information in real time and their retrospective data has been filtered extensively by law enforcement and politicians. Areas where I wish Citizen was better are data presentation and selection. Incidents they present seem arbitrary and are a subset of the actual events. I would be more interested in average data over time and all current events plus filter options. Opt in notifications by incident type and proximity would make it a true public safety app.
sunshineforever 5y ago
I hate to say it but I'd much rather do this than deliver groceries.
whywhywhywhy 5y ago
Doesn't seem particularly different from regular journalism/news companies. Sidebar of NYPost as I'm on this article has one truck crash with 5 dead and one bridge collapse, or is it just journalists who are allowed to profit of this?

58 points by tareqak 5y ago

Surprised that they need to pay. Plenty do it just for the views.

Citizen seems to be taking the uber/airbnb "do it until we are big enough to make it legal" approach to... crime. Weird combo. I bet their legal war chest is bulky.

MattGaiser 5y ago
Does Citizen break regulations in some way? I thought that filming crime and police was solidly legal.
- SerLava 5y ago
  I mean, sharing your car is legal but that's not really what Uber ever was.
  - MattGaiser 5y ago
    Uber was trying to scale a personal exemption from the law. What law is it that makes doing this at scale vs doing it individually a grey area?
- cronix 5y ago
  > I thought that filming crime and police was solidly legal. Filming anything from a public space (street, sidewalk, etc) is legal, even if it's of a private space that is visible from public space. For example, if I'm on a public sidewalk next to your private residence, and you have the blinds open walking around naked - you have no reasonable expectation of privacy and can be filmed even though you're on your private property. Just like if you're driving on the public street and I have a ring doorbell camera, you have no reasonable expectation of privacy driving down the street, or walking on the sidewalk, and I can record you.
  - Shmebulock 5y ago
    Is this generally how it works in most countries?
    - gruez 5y ago
      Common law countries? Yes.
    - tablespoon 5y ago
      > Is this generally how it works in most countries? There's a lot of variation: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Country_specific_consent_requirements https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Country_specific_...
- busterarm 5y ago
  They just haven't been sued yet by the family of a user who has been killed while filming a violent crime. When they do their insurance costs will become astronomical. This pay structure encourages users to put themselves in harm's way.
  - dwater 5y ago
    Yes, the thing that is most likely to bite them is not legality, it's liability as a result of them paying people to do things.
  - MattGaiser 5y ago
    How does this work for freelance journalists? Their risk is astronomical too.
    - busterarm 5y ago
      Any competent freelance journalist will tell you they pay for liability insurance and the annual premium is at least $1000/year. Said journalists are generally educated and have some training, especially around ethics. At least they're supposed to. This keeps them from shoving a camera in everyone's face while a crime is unfolding. Citizen is taking contributions from whoever the fuck...
xxpor 5y ago
It's so much worse than that. It's, quite literally, a right wing psyop. It's well established that people's fears about crime are much more correlated with news coverage than actual levels of crime. I'm having trouble finding it right now, but there was a recent survey that showed something like ~55% of Americans think crime is higher than it was in the early 90s. It's not even remotely close. We're back up to... 2012 levels. Meanwhile, Citizen is Nextdoor but even more extreme. You can see all this crime happening all the time, increasing the perception of it being extremely common. What happens when crime becomes a major political issue? Reactionaries get elected. Who's funding Citizen? Oh look, Peter Thiel. How surprising.
- BitwiseFool 5y ago
  This is one of those things that I just can't reconcile with my own experience. Studies say that crime is actually down but I'm witnessing more and more general lawlessness. A few weeks ago I saw someone take a case of beer out of a supermarket without paying. They caught him on camera and no one tried to stop him. The manager told me it was pointless to call the police. Public urination is way more common than it used to be and I think NYC decriminalized it a while ago. So if a bunch of previously criminal acts are no longer being reported, can we truly have confidence that crime has actually gone down? This reminds me of all those news articles confidently declaring inflation wasn't a threat, and that, no, we are actually experiencing some deflation. But when I go to the grocery store I end up paying more for things like milk and meat. A strip steak went from about $9.99 a pound to $14.99 a pound.
  - danShumway 5y ago
    Crime is definitely up, but even if we assume it's under-reported or the numbers are being fudged, it's still nowhere near the level of the 90s. It's up from a historic low. I think a lot of people either aren't really aware of or were sheltered growing up from how bad crime used to be. People's real-world experience is based on their recent memory, not on 90's levels of violence. There were a little less than 2,000 shootings in New York City in 2020. That's very bad, given that for a few years the city had managed to dip under 1,000 shootings. An extremely noticeable spike. But as a point of comparison, in 1991 there were over 5,000 shootings in NYC. And those numbers aren't taking into account three decades of population growth. Even when you look at crime overall and not just violent crimes, we were coming off of a ~5% national crime rate in 1991. From what I can see, GP is correct that we are mostly looking at a return to 2012-level crime stats, and in some areas maybe a return to 2000-2010 levels. I'm convinced that people just can't remember any earlier than that. The 90s were really bad, if ~55% of Americans think we're at those levels already, then ~55% of Americans are just wrong. They don't have an accurate grasp of what crime used to look like. When you look at >2015 rates, then you do see crime going up. That's a real thing, and it's worth paying attention to. But that doesn't really change anything about the overall trajectory of crime over the past decade. It especially doesn't change anything about the overall trajectory of crime over the past >1 decade. > But when I go to the grocery store I end up paying more for things like milk and meat. There's a much simpler explanation here, which is that food categories like milk and meat are completely excluded from many inflation calculations, specifically because their prices are highly volatile. An increase in the price of food won't be directly reflected in any reported inflation numbers, at least as far as I know. Like many high-level economy measures, inflation is not always a useful way to talk about how costs are changing and what regular people are experiencing. It's purposefully disconnected from many "on-the-ground" prices of goods that are important to consumers.

kevinventullo 5y ago

So, Uber-for-Nightcrawlers? Reference: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nightcrawler_(film) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nightcrawler_(film)

s09dfhks 5y ago
One of my all time favorite films. As soon as I read this headline I thought of it immediately. Could this lead to a new breed of ambulance chasers seeking a different kind of pay-day?
- rabuse 5y ago
  Tbh, I love this kind of content. I've been watching live stream happenings/disasters for quite some time now through a multitude of apps, so the more the merrier.

sickcodebruh 5y ago

Two related threads on Citizen in the last few months: * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27237520 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27237520 * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27236660 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27236660 They reference each other, too. Citizen is nightmarish. All the “it’s a dystopian surveillance app built to exploit our worst fears” concerns about other social media products with only the most superficial veneer trying to hide it. I had it on my phone for months and it contributed absolutely nothing but anxiety.

aiisahik 5y ago
Yes it's anxiety inducing but doesn't it just tell us the truth of who we are? If you can't handle the anxiety, nobody is forcing you to have it on your phone nor are they forcing you to be part of it. In other countries, the government has cameras everywhere and use the footage to find and prosecute. Apparently America prefers to have individuals take on that role.
- sickcodebruh 5y ago
  Is "nobody is forcing you to have it on your phone nor are they forcing you to be part of it" really the standard that we want when judging whether to share our revulsion about a company or product? You're not wrong about that part, I'm just not sure what your point is. It's no secret that social media in general stokes many of our worst impulses. Citizen strikes me as somewhat unique because it starts from such a negative place and then encourages us to feel worse. Facebook benefited from engagement resulting in political chaos but that's only one of the ways individuals can interact. Citizen can't even claim that weak defense. It's like the social media version of for-profit prisons: it claims to want safety but it benefits the most when we think we are unsafe.
  - aiisahik 5y ago
    Hate to break it to you but "nobody is forcing you" is kinda the standard in the US from vaccines to social media to guns. Everything is a choice here. There are plenty of countries out there which would have chosen to ban Citizen along with a whole long list of other even more idiotic things but this country is about freedom of choice even if that choice is bad for the greater community.

paxys 5y ago

What is Citizen's endgame here? Do they want to be some vigilante justice group? A private army? Protection racket?

ucm_edge 5y ago
They partner with police. The revenue play is charging governments access to a feed of events happening just in their jurisdiction (with some cleaning up/grouping of similar reports). Citizen gets the police to pay them for access, then gets the police to advertise the app to them as an alternative to calling non emergency dispatch. In turn more people down Citizen and Citizen can probably monetize that. In LA they even have Citizen branded patrol vehicles rather than community service officers as a pilot program. So rather than having like an unarmed (and normally unsworn) employee of LAPD in a Prius with a little orange light on the top, you get a private contractor in a citizen branded vehicle doing the patrol. The big question is if Citizen gets into E911 systems, which have a lot more liability than non emergency type things. Is Citizen going to make a play to become the standard way of contacting 911 via text based communication at some point and attempt to generate revenue via running that infrastructure.
- systemvoltage 5y ago
  Curious - what can this private Citizen branded patrol actually do? Isn't it just a camera on wheels? It can't make arrests, it can't handcuff people, it can't do much legally.
  - genericone 5y ago
    Observe and report, and verbally harass if necessary, in an "acceptable" manner. Using robots apparently is not yet in vogue, so citizen branded patrol might be the current local-minima for this type of function: https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/13/16771148/robot-security-guard-scares-homeless-san-francisco https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/13/16771148/robot-security-... I knew someone that worked at the SFSPCA and they said the robot absolutely put a dent in car-break-ins, needling, and encampments in the animal-shelter parking lot, but advocates won in the end. What worked in Knightscopes case is the feeling of "presence" that security cams, even the panning ones with a built-in speaker, are unable to give off. So Citizen branded patrols fill that "presence" role.

tolbish 5y ago

Someone is going to try livestreaming a fleeing suspect and end up getting riddled with bullets.

INTPenis 5y ago
Or just stage it with some friends in masks.

endisneigh 5y ago

I don’t like Citizen, but is it inherently a bad thing if there’s more accountability in the form of distributed filming of the government and its agents? My issue with citizen is more how it fear mongers and the general sentiment around what it’s doing. I also think it’s a terrible idea to encourage people to put themselves in potentially dangerous situations.

asdfasgasdgasdg 5y ago
To put even a slightly finer point on it -- isn't this, in a sense, journalism without a filter? Video can lie, but it's probably a bit harder to make a live streamed video lie than an article that recapitulates the content of such a stream. One thing I do seem to see over and over is a pattern where journalists are a little annoyed when companies encroach on the role of journalists but do so for less money. I'm sure this doesn't rise to a level of conscious bias, but it does sometimes feel that anything that threatens their gatekeeping is going to get a lot of flak in the opinion section.
- danpalmer 5y ago
  > One thing I do seem to see over and over is a pattern where journalists are a little annoyed when companies encroach on the role of journalists but do so for less money. While there will be some bias from being challenged, I think there's also plenty of good reasons for journalists to challenge these sorts of companies. Journalism is a profession and brings with it a lot of ethical considerations. Teaching of journalism goes into depth on why the ethics are important, how to report on sensitive topics, and all sorts that makes journalists far better qualified to report on things. There's absolutely a place for self-taught/hobbyist writing, but it's not journalism, and if we depend on it for the "important" or hard topics we'll lose out on the benefits that well trained journalists bring to the table.
  - asdfasgasdgasdg 5y ago
    I do understand that journalists aspire to ethical behavior in aggregate. What's ultimately not entirely clear to me is whether that aspiration is generally met to the degree that the profession is materially better at truth-telling than any other. I sure hope so. Then again, you can often read reporting on the same subject by journalists at CNN and Fox News, and the one inescapable conclusion is that someone is not telling the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

notjustanymike 5y ago

How could this possibly go wrong? Offering a monetary reward for streaming crimes would bias our perceptions of poorer communities, where individuals would most benefit from the money. A poor community is incentivized with this plan to reinforce the message that they are crime-ridden, while rich neighborhoods won't receive the same level of coverage because fewer individuals care about the payoff. What's the phrase? "Fair and Balanced".

s1artibartfast 5y ago

I'm probably an outlier, but I love the concept of Citizen and dislike the implementation. I don't have public safety anxiety, but want current data and public safety updates where I live and travel. Decentralized, unfiltered, and non editorialized news reporting is also a huge perk. When there is a lot of police activity in my neighborhood, I want to know the cause and act accordingly. For example, if there is a gunman on the run (as has happened in the past), I would want to make sure my doors are locked. My city and state does a terrible job of providing this information in real time and their retrospective data has been filtered extensively by law enforcement and politicians. Areas where I wish Citizen was better are data presentation and selection. Incidents they present seem arbitrary and are a subset of the actual events. I would be more interested in average data over time and all current events plus filter options. Opt in notifications by incident type and proximity would make it a true public safety app.

sunshineforever 5y ago

I hate to say it but I'd much rather do this than deliver groceries.

whywhywhywhy 5y ago

Doesn't seem particularly different from regular journalism/news companies. Sidebar of NYPost as I'm on this article has one truck crash with 5 dead and one bridge collapse, or is it just journalists who are allowed to profit of this?