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Citizen pays New Yorkers to livestream crime scenes

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Re: Citizen pays New Yorkers to livestream crime scenes

#11

Post by xxpor »

tofuahdude wrote: post #3

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.

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.

Re: Citizen pays New Yorkers to livestream crime scenes

#13

Post by dwater »

busterarm wrote: post #9
MattGaiser wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does Citizen break regulations in some way? I thought that filming crime and police was solidly legal.

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.

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.

Re: Citizen pays New Yorkers to livestream crime scenes

#14

Post by aiisahik »

sickcodebruh wrote: post #6

Two related threads on Citizen in the last few months: * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27237520 * 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…

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.

Re: Citizen pays New Yorkers to livestream crime scenes

#15

Post by s09dfhks »

kevinventullo wrote: post #5

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

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?

Re: Citizen pays New Yorkers to livestream crime scenes

#16

Post by endisneigh »

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.

Re: Citizen pays New Yorkers to livestream crime scenes

#17

Post by ucm_edge »

paxys wrote: post #10

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

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.

Re: Citizen pays New Yorkers to livestream crime scenes

#18

Post by kall »

paxys wrote: post #10

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

I read this somewhere and it sounds plausible to me: a private police subscription. As-a-service if you will. They would do the same things as police but only for subscribers and with better "customer service".

Maybe you could also look at the same thing as: as private security + private detectives (?) scaled and commoditized via software and gigwork.

It‘s a nightmarish idea, don‘t get me wrong, but I can see it.

Re: Citizen pays New Yorkers to livestream crime scenes

#19

Post by BitwiseFool »

xxpor wrote: post #11
tofuahdude wrote: post #3

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.

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... 20…

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.

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