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posted by Fnord666 on Thursday March 14 2019, @05:38PM   Printer-friendly
from the 1984-all-over-again dept.

Citizen, the real-time crime alerting app, is growing in big cities

At 8:07 p.m. on Monday evening in San Francisco, a man was spotted shooting a gun at streetlights. Twenty minutes later, an outdoor trash fire broke out in another part of the city. A few miles south, a KFC employee allegedly assaulted a co-worker with a chair, and then 20 bikers were reportedly involved in a brawl.

It's a typical hour in the San Francisco Bay Area as seen through Citizen, the real-time crime and fire alerting app that uses a smartphone's location to share updates about incidents happening nearby. Its alerts ping mobile devices daily in New York City, San Francisco, Baltimore and starting Tuesday, Los Angeles.

Using a combination of human employees and technology, Citizen scans hundreds of public-safety radio bands 24-hours a day in the major cities where it's deployed, sometimes by playing audio at three times the speed. It filters out what it deems non-essential and sends the information as short, factual alerts to everyone within a quarter mile of the incident. The app updates with a list of details as they roll in and lets people nearby take live video or comment with information.

Some local governments and police departments have their own alerting apps, and sites like Nextdoor are filled with user reports of incidents. But what makes Citizen different are its sources, the volume and speed of its text updates. It's closer in spirit to police scanner apps.


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  • (Score: 0, Troll) by linkdude64 on Thursday March 14 2019, @11:31PM (6 children)

    by linkdude64 (5482) on Thursday March 14 2019, @11:31PM (#814533)

    "ALERT! ALERT! Fascist PIG who is RACIST and a NAZI just gave me a speeding ticket and WOULDNT USE MY PRONOUNS"

    Please, please, please, let anyone reporting police activity as crime be banned from the platform for a month. I understand the issues with police brutality, but if you really want rioting, then mob-judge/jury/executioning of police officers is all you need to start it. This is seemingly supposed to be practical, not political. Person is on the run from police - police see that people are reporting someone rummaging through their backyard in the relevant neighborhood, etc. etc.

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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Friday March 15 2019, @12:09AM (5 children)

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Friday March 15 2019, @12:09AM (#814544) Journal

    Would you demand that an open, real-time map of all law enforcement officer locations be banned/blocked/eradicated? (That's something that could be done by combining data from many public* street-facing webcams.)

    *Publicly accessible or homeowners participating in such a project.

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    [SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
    • (Score: 2) by linkdude64 on Friday March 15 2019, @01:02AM (1 child)

      by linkdude64 (5482) on Friday March 15 2019, @01:02AM (#814571)

      No, because that is simply information about their location, not that same information paired with an accusation. Much like gun control, that will be an urban vs rural issue, as cops WILL be getting targeted by gangs for initiation purposes when such an app comes online. However, information alone is practical, information with accusations are political. "THIS COP JUST LAID THIS GUY OUT ON THE FLOOR FOR NOTHING!" gets posted to Citizen by the suspect's friends and a mob shows up, the only thing they're going to see is the guy laid out on the ground, not what actually happened. Someone's going to throw a bottle because of mob mentality, then somebody is going to get shot. It's a horrible idea. Sure, twitter could probably do the same thing with a GPS marker, but again, this app appears to be intended as practical, not political. "Someone just stole my purse!" is political in a way, but it's a different category of crime - this isn't the app for overthrowing the government, it sounds like this is supposed to be an app that makes a community more tightly knit. I don't really know though, because I haven't read TFA

      • (Score: 2) by takyon on Friday March 15 2019, @02:56AM

        by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Friday March 15 2019, @02:56AM (#814615) Journal

        I don't get the sense that the Citizen app is overrun by anti-police sentiment. But if there were such a noise, it could be enabled by any other avenue for anonymously disseminating opinions in a local area. Yik Yak [wikipedia.org] (RIP) comes to mind. Although these could be shut down for one reason or another, it should not be too difficult to create a decentralized version, particularly if only text (including URLs) is being shared. Something like that could be used to accomplish some of the same things as Citizen, e.g. sharing information about recent crimes, and could be found to be very valuable by you even if it had allegations and spam flying around.

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    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 15 2019, @01:15PM (2 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 15 2019, @01:15PM (#814741)

      Some twits decided to map a map in Australia of the location of cattle farms.
      Guess what happened next.

      No. Putting information online is not always helpful.

      • (Score: 2) by takyon on Friday March 15 2019, @01:26PM (1 child)

        by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Friday March 15 2019, @01:26PM (#814745) Journal

        It sounds like it was very helpful. Just not to the cattle farmers.

        So what's your next move, Aussies? Ban maps?

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        • (Score: 2) by AssCork on Thursday March 21 2019, @06:19PM

          by AssCork (6255) on Thursday March 21 2019, @06:19PM (#818095) Journal

          So what's your next move, Aussies? Ban maps?

          Not all maps, just the semi- and full-auto maps.

          Bolt-action maps are just fine.

          --
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