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Crime App 'Citizen' Lays Off Dozens of Employees
- aliqot 4y agoHow 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.
- Vt71fcAqt7 4y agoCan you explain what you mean by this? Are you saying crime is actually good or something else?
- Nextgrid 4y agoI don't think he's making an argument either way? He's just commenting that given the current situation, it seems that the snitching app has too many employees? I'd argue the title is wrong - it's not a "Crime app" as much as a "Crime reporting & monitoring" app.
- Vt71fcAqt7 4y agoUsing the word "snitch" is itself an argument. It is used to paint someone who reports crimes as bad. Now, some laws are perhaps bad, but that would of course be on a case by case basis. Describing the app and it's users as a whole as "snitching" is certainly an argument. All this said, I just wanted GP to explain what exactly they meant.
- RC_ITR 4y agoThe criticism against Citizen (and vigilantism in general) is that average citizens aren't actually that good at detecting crime and instead rely stereotypes and hunches. 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).
- lovecg 4y agoThankfully we have a professional police force to avoid all these problems.
- Nextgrid 4y agoI'd rather have one idiot on the case than that idiot + a bunch of other, self-selected idiots prompted to show up by an app. At worst they will actually hinder police response and/or get themselves or others hurt. 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.
- Vt71fcAqt7 4y agoThat's a valid critisism. So the issue is bias and not "snitching."
- Nextgrid 4y agoThis applies not just to snitching but a lot of other "marketplace"-type apps where the bulk of the value is provided by third-party participants. Think ridesharing, food delivery, marketplaces, etc. 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.
- fabianhjr 4y agoA good book on why those capitalist Platforms are hiring and investing a lot on becoming "the most perfect platform" is Nick Srnicek's Pltaform Capitalism ( https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Platform+Capitalism-p-9781509504862 https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Platform+Capitalism-p-9781509504... ) 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.
- boomboomsubban 4y agoThey're apparently having people listen to police scanners and input the data from them. Covering 50 cities 24 hours a day, that'd take hundreds of employees.
- kjkjadksj 4y agoThey often just crowdsource the labor for free with paranoid local people who listen to those scanners all day anyhow
- xeromal 4y agoI'm curious how their on-call private security force is doing.
- sergiotapia 4y agoCan't think of a more vile Robocop-esque company. Really sickening.
- aliasxneo 4y ago> In May 2021, Citizen CEO Andrew Frame used the app to place a $30,000 bounty on information leading to the capture of a suspected arsonist in the Los Angeles area. Citizen staff broadcast the photo and name of a specific person, encouraging users to hunt them down. It was the wrong person. Well, that's embarrassing.
- eh9 4y agoHe should be held personally liable
- pnemonic 4y ago[flagged]
- eh9 4y agoCompanies are people until you want to press charges.
- ss108 4y ago? Companies are held criminally liable for stuff sometimes, but what above posters seem to want is for the CEO to be held personally liable.
- eh9 4y agoWell, he did personally misuse the platform, but go for the company. Idk. I’m not a lawyer and I don’t know how 230 plays into this, but his actions could have led to an innocent person getting hurt.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- ss108 4y agoMy b, I didn't realize he did it in his personal capacity.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- subroutine 4y agoAs the old adage goes: crime doesn't pay.
- woodruffw 4y agoLinked in the TFA, but Citizen is perhaps most notable not for tracking crime, but for having its CEO attempt to incite crime against a homeless person[1]. [1]: https://www.vice.com/en/article/y3dpyw/inside-crime-app-citizen-vigilante https://www.vice.com/en/article/y3dpyw/inside-crime-app-citi...
- frakt0x90 4y agoJust as a reminder, this is the same company that oversaw this fiasco. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9629695/Citizen-CEO-demanded-f-company-launched-frenzied-manhunt-wrong-man.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9629695/Citizen-CEO...
- Beaver117 4y agoBack in the day this kind of app/site would have one employee
- 1270018080 4y agoWho had a few undiagnosed mental illnesses
- SketchySeaBeast 4y agoAnd their own radio show.
- mc32 4y agoDozens! 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.
- woodruffw 4y agoI suspect the notability here comes less from the volume of employees, and more from Citizen's notoriety. (Blackrock is perhaps equally deserving of notoriety, but as a practical matter lacks it in this context.)
- noer 4y agoLinkedin says 172 employees. There are also 14 job postings for mostly senior roles.
- troutwine 4y agoIf 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.
- looseyesterday 4y agoYeah 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.
- eh9 4y agoIt’s nimby catnip.
- cobaltoxide 4y agoApparently the app was originally called "Vigilante" before being renamed to Citizen.
- eh9 4y agoThese 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.
- beeskneecaps 4y agoThey 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 https://youtu.be/fB6Sqhvm8l8
- mariambarouma 4y agosnitch app finding a way to get stitches
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- berkle4455 4y agoNo thanks I get enough updates from Janice on nextdoor about suspicious looking people carrying suspicious looking packages to doorsteps.
- asow92 4y agoI interviewed in-person for this company early 2019 and they were very rude. The interview was going fine from my perspective, but they decided to cut the interview short and pass on me mid-interview. This is the only time this has ever happened to me over the course of dozens of interviews in my career.
- late2part 4y agoHow were they rude? 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.
- asow92 4y agoOne of the interviewers was augmentative and combative in their line of questioning as if they were playing "bad cop". I won't go into details, but I was given a hypothetical engineering situation that just wasn't realistic in my experience and tried to explain why, but they would not take no for an answer.
- kevinpet 4y agoI've been on the other side of it, and your approach can come across as childish, like arguing with your math teacher that billy couldn't have eaten 4/6 or 2/3 of the pizza because he'd get sick. 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.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- asow92 4y agoYou don't know the specifics, but I can assure you that this JS developer did not know the specifics of the iOS development question at hand. 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.
- s1artibartfast 4y agoI may be an outlier but I really liked the idea of citizen, but just wish it had a better implementation (UI and filters) . 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
- smoldesu 4y agoHopefully, people stop profiting off this information in the first place. A for-profit company is possibly the worst arbiter of criminal information, as-evidenced by their CEO putting out warrants for homeless people. They simply can't side-step due process like that. 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.
- s1artibartfast 4y agoI dont have a problem with a for profit solution based on anecdotal evidence. You could level the same criticism at anything. What the CEO did wasn't good, but there are tons of examples of public servants, news outlets, and even non-profits grandstanding and fearmongering too. 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.
- 4y ago
- Bnichs 4y agoThis app was infuriating. Tried it for a few weeks living in a less than ideal neighborhood. Day one I get a notification of a fire or something 5 miles away. Hardly useful, but I get it. Day two there's a robbery! Scary, but when you click the notification you see that it happened in a city about 40 miles away. After a week or so it becomes clear that the app will notify you every night with anything it can, stretching the distance as it sees fit to be able to justify the notification. Live in a decently sized metro area? Prepare to get hundreds of notifications all for stuff not happening anywhere actually near you.
- sephlietz 4y agoIn my experience, the twitter police scanner communities are dominated by racism and general hatred towards cities and city government (excluding police and other rescue). Is Citizen the same?
- runlevel1 4y agoNextdoor seems to have that same problem.
- mrguyorama 4y agoThese apps and communities will always self select for people who are predisposed to see their neighbors and strangers as threatening. Not a lot of people who aren't already scared of their community will download a tool to "monitor" their community.
- grubbs 4y agoThe comments on Citizen reports can be pretty terrible. But it seems to be moderated pretty well.
- nnurmanov 4y agoOut of curiosity, what is the market size of head hunting (when people search criminals and get paid)?
- atlasunshrugged 4y agoI always wondered about the point of this app in the U.S. In general, emergency services here are quite good and if I call 911 in an emergency, someone is going to respond pretty rapidly. Seems like the business might actually be useful in a place with low/no emergency service infrastructure where citizens or private security may actually be the only ones to respond (also, some interesting models for e.g. very crowded/congested areas for trained first responders to give emergency help like CPR to someone while an ambulance is on the way)
- throwayyy479087 4y agoAustin call waiting times are ten minutes now. SFPD only responds to murder calls. Citizen seems useful to me.
- sprite 4y agoIn Atlanta 911 hold times are fairly common and police response usually takes hours.
- themitigating 4y agoTomorrow on the front page of HackerNews: "Apple store in North Carolina lays off one employee"
- trilobyte 4y agoDespite the company having a lot of problems, this is another example where an app like this does not need a huge org behind it.
- m3047 4y agoI don't use apps like this, because they don't do the one thing which I want them to tell me: why were three police cars boxing in a vehicle at the end of my dead-end street at 3AM? Likewise, the City has an electrical outage map which clears the moment the power is restored. Was my power out? Should I check my freezer? Best I've got are the 12 o'clock flashers, the battery backup clocks which sync to line frequency, and the logs from the systems which aren't connected to the UPS. This is politics. 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.
- ethics13 4y agoLove this tool. I live in a beach community and it tells me where a fight is, where there's gunshots, what areas to avoid -- especially in the summer. We get about 1 shooting a week and then it shoots up (pun intended) to about 1 every day.