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> 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 C

> 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.

crazygringo 4y ago
> 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.
- troutwine 4y ago
  > 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.
  - crazygringo 4y ago
    > 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.
- dannyphantom 4y ago
  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.

crazygringo 4y ago

> 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.

troutwine 4y ago
> 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.
- crazygringo 4y ago
  > 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.
dannyphantom 4y ago
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.