Citizen is a dystopian app. It's like the worst elements of the boston bombing reddit fiasco packaged into a for profit application. The CEO offered a $30k bounty for a random homeless person just a few days ago:
>My prediction is someone will go all viligante and beat/maim/kill someone, probably who is innocent. Then the app will get pulled.
That's always been their intention. Well, not to kill anyone, but to track people down. The app was originally called vigilante and Apple pulled it from the app store, so they rebranded and now we have Citizen. Maybe Apple will do it again before anything even worse happens than the recent $30k bounty on an innocent person.
I tried using “Citizen” a few years back. You can only use it if you’re willing to share location data either whenever you’re using the app or all the time.
No. Maybe that’s fine by others but any app I can’t put a zip code into is deleted now.
It’s creepy and weird to ask for location data. Where are the apps that default to zip code and offer me the option to have myself tracked everywhere I go for more personalized output?
Is it easier now? Last time I tried (years) app could see location was spoofed so I had to root to spoof better and then many apps could see I was rooted and refused to run.
It's useful for governments to have access (via supeana of course) to history of their citizens location. In case they start getting uppity. Just makes it easier to intimidate, suppress, and oppress.
Westworld has taken a huge downturn (hey, people like the sex and killing of robots that don’t know they’re robots in a Wild West theme park... let’s remove that entirely from our show!)... but this is entirely a central plot device in that show.
An app where people accept contracts for quick cash. It’s supposed to be a dystopian element of their society, not a blueprint.
> My prediction is someone will go all viligante and beat/maim/kill someone, probably who is innocent. Then the app will get pulled.
I think it's more likely the first time this happens the person is actually guilty, and there will be a huge debate as to whether or not it's a good thing.
That's correct. Notice, however, that I mentioned the actual crimes first, and added "jail time" as an afterthought. There are plenty of criminals who commit real crimes and don't get jail time, or even much punishment. See e.g. Brock Turner, Shane M. Piche, Zoe Reardon, George Zimmerman, Isaac Turnbaugh, etc.
> I think it's more likely the first time this happens the person is actually guilty, and there will be a huge debate as to whether or not it's a good thing.
No there won't. There have been serial killers who used common apps to find their victims, along with people who rob, assault, harass and stalk people they find on apps. People don't really care. Even the justice system doesn't care because the companies are able to argue that Section 230 means that they aren't liable for what users do with their products[1].
Right but there is a difference between people posting on a social media app and the app targeting someone itself. Citizen is encouraging others to find this person. So they would be held liable.
I'd imagine that they'd argue that they are not responsible for what users do in response to a bounty being posted on their interactive computer service, and courts would agree.
I actually don't understand their business model.
$20 per month will in no way cover the cost to send security guards your way, or maybe I'm misunderstanding something here.
It sounds like the current $20 offering is to have a remote employee monitoring you when you walk home alone, or the like. The contemplated new service, Protect, is not currently available to the public, and there's nothing indicating it would be $20/mo.
My guess is there will be tiers based on anticipated usage, like AAA. Want X number of monthly reports? That costs $Y. If you want 2X the reports and expedited response time, it costs $2Y.
A friend startup-pitched exactly this idea (remote monitoring by request, e.g. late-night walks home) to me 6 years ago and found me less enthusiastic than he had perhaps hoped, it's strange to think about how many people might converge on similar ideas at the roughly same time
Not particularly surprised to see it realized in this way
The same poor employee will be sitting there making shit pay, monitoring 30 people simultaneously. Then they will get bored and fall asleep and miss when something really happens.
>$20 per month will in no way cover the cost to send security guards your way
it will more than cover a drone. Especially AI based one instead of being remotely controlled. You can imagine that they can park a lot of drones around the city so the reaction time will be in seconds. While real people sometimes [think that they] have to use deadly force to protect themselves, a drone has no-self-preservation concerns (i hope it will be that way at least for some near future :) and thus can just blanketly use a lot of non-deadly force - acoustic, electric shock, 96GHz beamed power, etc.
You're going for a walk late at night - just a click in the app would get you a drone or a robot dog to accompany you for a walk. The drone or the dog is already imprinted with your voice from the app for the duration of the walk, so you can command it at any moment.
So if I don't like your face at the corner, I'd order a drone equipped with a taser as a backup? An AI-controlled drone that listens to my voice?
Now what if you also order one? Did you make sure to get the premium subscription which includes DAD Drone Area Denial to keep other drones out? Because I did...
it is just like today - i may have a knife and you have a gun, only those robotic "knife" and the "gun" will be "smart", more powerful than a knife and probably than a gun, at least the robot would shoot much better than an average person, and come with subscription fee.
Also, while people in many places can't get a license to carry various weapons, a large cash flush corporation can push through the regulations Uber-style and get the regulations to allow their robots to carry and use those weapons.
Almost everywhere in USA is safe. Even more so W. Europe. Need civilwar or live in place rules by warlords to be dangerous.
The chance of you suffering crime (unless u look for it like join gang) is vanishingly small. Media just constantly reports and massive amplifies fear generation on the most dramatic BS happening anywhere cause fear sells.
For instance more or almost the same number if people die by 2nd Hand Smoke as die if gunshots in USA. About half of gunshots deaths all self inflicted suicides. But every thinks there is some huge issue with gun violence. Wed save tens of thousands of lives every year outlawing smoking. But smoking isn't scary like "assault weapon". Doesn't sell ads and first get you reelected
you underestimate the power of marketing and societal mass self-delusion :) Just look around - there is no children and Ring cameras everywhere. 30 years ago the children were playing outside unsupervised.
I remember getting trapped by bullies inside a cone made of concrete at an industrial site along the railroad tracks 50 years ago. They were threatening to kill me and given the remoteness of the site and the fact that these kids often killed animals it was plausible. I climbed up, hung from the edge, and let myself fall, hurt my ankle, and then ran. Is that what you want for your kids?
I don’t get it, is that anecdotal experience supposed to provide guidance for all children?
I’ve been jumped several times in my life. And yes, I’d much prefer my child walks outside alone just like I still enjoy walking outside unsurveiled. The world sucks, I’ve yet to find the place were continuous surveillance makes that better.
YMMV, people have different views, I was never harmed beyond a two week long headache in any of my incidents, otherwise I just lost personal belongings like phones and wallets.
Kind of awesome that Apple hasn't pulled an app that is literally used for committing violence against innocent people but anything pornographic gets banned pretty fast.
It's uniquely American. Most of Western Civilization is not like this. We're like this because this country was full of puritans and other religious people at the founding.
But it very much is, at least in a "Western world" context which usually also includes Europe, were attitudes to violence and nudity can be completely reversed to the US.
For one of the most prominent examples, just compare the US to Germany: For decades Germany censored very mundane video games, like Counter Strike or Doom, for their depiction of violence.
In games like Command&Conquer, Half-Life and others, whole enemy units and models were replaced to appease the German rating boards. The original DOS Doom game was only "unbanned" in 2011.
A lot of violent movies and TV shows are only aired in censored versions in Germany, yet on these very same channels, during late night, there regularly is completely barrier free soft-core erotica content that for many Americans would qualify as "porn".
Another example is the naturism/nudist culture that very much has a old and somewhat popular tradition in Germany as FKK. It's also a thing in the US, yes, but it never was on a comparable mainstream level like in Germany.
These differences exist because there simply isn't this one unified "Western culture" that some people stipulate to be a thing.
Op was about religious ideas from the 1600s that were far from uniquely American. They’re an ingredient! But let’s not get carried away with the 7th grade social studies stuff.
Australia and the UK have porn filters on their internet. Australia also has weirdly strict child porn law that can turn an innocent recording from broadcast TV into illegal porn by simple editing. Simpsons porn is illegal too, despite the characters having the wrong number of fingers to be human.
What kind of editing would cause that? I'll be shocked if this is true.
Im curious if thats some interpretation of a law or someone have been convicted because of things like that?
The one thing I do like about it is knowing why random helicopters are flying above my apartment (in NYC) at various times of day. Like this past Wednesday, around 6 AM. Helicopters hovered overhead keeping me up for an hour. Turns out there was a huge fire a few blocks down. I wouldn't have known otherwise.
Shouldn’t this be the responsibility of police? How hard would it be for the precinct that sent the chopper to also take a minute to update their website (if they have one) or send out a tweet? “Working on putting out a fire on E 71st” ...
Ideally yes, but is it a hard-enough responsibility to mandate? If not, it seems like there is a financial opportunity for a company to fill that request. Especially in the case of time-sensitive emergencies, it seems like "informing the public as things happen" isn't the number one priority.
CIP: Living in downtown Portland, I have way better luck searching recent "#portlandprotests" tweets than I do checking the PPB Twitter feed. The latter usually shows up within 24 hours, but doesn't really solve the immediate curiosity of "why is there a helicopter hovering above my house right now".
It happens in the DC area too. We get a mix of civilian and military helicopters at random times every day, the military ones annoy me the most because they often make the windows shake.
This is exactly how gangs and mob enforcement happens. Organization of people whom are more than willing to create their own physical enforcement outside of the restrictions of the law go out and "protect" for money. And then organize to become both the perpetrator and the defender.
Private citizens are not under the same legal scrutiny officers are - evidence obtained in violation of the constitution cannot be admitted in court if an officer is the one that does it. But if a private citizens does it can be acceptable.
If people want rule of law, and not rule of force, then they should become officers not 'security force'. But I have a feeling that the reason they want to be 'securoty force' is to avoid the responsibility.
I can’t believe you are writing this not in jest. Just a week or two ago we saw a video of an officer planting evidence in broad daylight. He was caught because of the video, how many officers have not been caught? What about yesterday when the police office ran up and kicked a handcuffed man in the head? Was that the rule of law or the rule of force?
This is partly confirmation bias. Millions of officers, we’re gonna have bad ones. Obviously we need to improve, but to think that officers who have at least some amount of vetting are going to do worse than a security force is utter denial of the human condition.
Look at South Africa, they have security forces. Or look at India, they too have a police force. But in South Africa, their security force is only available for the wealthy, while in India, they’re actually corrupt police are paid off daily. You don’t want to leave your house without cash to bribe a cop. And if you don’t, you get beat.
I’d rather be in the US with their policing than have a citizens army of security, or almost any police force.
Yes, we're gonna have bad officers. What happens next? Are they shunned? Forced out of the profession?
This isn't some abstract hypothetical. We have generations of police who "washed out" of training because they weren't bad enough. It's important to have an accurate diagnosis when proposing a course of treatment.
It is.. But at the same time, its a completely decentralized system and there are MANY that do a very good job at washing out the bad ones. There are plenty that deserve criticism, and even federal investigation/intervention. But by and large the system works.
There are millions of police, and hundreds of millions of encounters daily across a huge range of investigations and issues. boiling it down to twitter levels of context is bad and applying such broad strokes is also equally bad. Its certainly not going to encourage good ones to sign up.
I know with the way this type of stuff is being portrayed, its a no win for most police, they could quadruple the salaries overnight and some would still balk, because no matter what it a loss.
Shunning is crap. Instead of resorting to such dark-age extralegal tactics, how about we get some prosecutors who do their damn jobs and prosecute criminal police? Unfortunately prosecutors are generally elected and many people don't want to admit the root of the problem is with the electorate who choose to elect and re-elect prosecutors who don't want to do their jobs.
Depends on the severity of the act. Shunning is excellent punishment for low-level misbehavior. If you allow misbehavior to accrue and expand, eventually you'll get to a case where you need a prosecutor.
That prosecutor's job would be easier if the criminal officer's colleagues would testify against them, which goes back (again) to social mores.
Prosecutors rely on cops to get their prosecutions, and if the prosecutor is the only one who faces repercussions for charging a cop, then obviously they're going to be loathe to charge any cops.
Honestly, though, the system isn't recoverable in most regions. American police, the ideological successors to slave catchers, suffer a rot that is too deep. Many are literally white supremacist gangs. It isn't a system that can be reformed.
Just a few bad apples? The fact that they feel comfortable doing stuff like the head kicking shows there is a organisational cultural issue in the police. If the citizens didn’t film it they’d be on their merry way and not a word would be said.
Inndian here, just like someone was saying upthread, there are millions of police offices in India. Lets not get carried away and say all are corrupt annd people are not getting beat left and right as you seem to inisinuate.
There are around 700,000 police officers in the US. If one of them is caught doing something bad every day, that's 0.00014%.
US police in general have a lot of issues and need to improve dramatically, but the stories about cases of bad behavior are not representative samples, even if you factor in the amount of bad behavior that goes undiscovered.
But every one of those officers doing something bad every day has an entire department and union behind them that are very aware that that officer is bad. What do they do? They protect him. Every time. They are just as culpable. This is why the saying a few bad apples spoils the bunch exists.
On-duty cops shoot a thousand people a year. In the last several decades, three have been convicted of murder. How can we trust the system that produced such ridiculous numbers?
> There are around 700,000 police officers in the US. If one of them is caught doing something bad every day, that's 0.00014%.
I take your point, but not exactly. First, an officer that's planting evidence or attacking unarmed handcuffed civilians has been known to be a bad officer by say the other 50 officers in their department. Second, they're not caught on their first day. Third, the high profile ones are high profile because they're left on the force and continue being bad even after being caught.
So the 0.00014% of people being caught every day is _additive_ over time, this isn't a random sampling. It doesn't mean that 0.00014% of officers are bad, it means that we increase the pool of bad officers by that much every day.
The number was just intended to indicate what a small fraction any individual instance is. Even being additive, and even with undiscovered bad cases, these cases are still not representative samples of US police in general. In other words, as an earlier commenter said, this is partly confirmation bias.
That's not to say these incidents aren't indicative of systemic problems, but that's not the same as saying saying all or most police are like this. What "confirmation bias" means here is that people are looking at the exceptional cases to confirm their opinion of police as a whole, which is objectively a mistake.
That's sort of a biased source you link. It lists deaths, but often times these deaths come as a result of someone threatening a cop with a deadly weapon. There's been like two dozen shootings from the LAPD so far this year, and most were due to someone charging an armed cop with a knife or a similar suicidal incident. I think just looking at use of force without context will give you a pretty biased view. Certainly it's been overused, but a lot of times, especially with the mental health crisis going on where people who are insane and a danger to others are allowed to refuse treatment, it is justified when another life is at stake.
> It lists deaths, but often times these deaths come as a result of someone threatening a cop with a deadly weapon.
Other countries also have people who threaten cops with deadly weapons, and their numbers are far far lower. Hell, suicide-by-cop is a very real and common thing here in the USA.
Once again, you mention nothing about the rate or all the latent variables at play here. For example, other first world countries generally have stronger social safety nets, which means mentally ill people and aged out foster youth in those places are less likely to end up on the street in the first place compared to the U.S. We also have an issue at least in CA where jails are at capacity, and people are being turned out when they would have been held for bail, and often go on to commit more crimes while waiting to be charged for the first one.
> someone charging an armed cop with a knife or a similar suicidal incident
It's weird reading that when I was a kid I was constantly told cops are heroes because they put their lives on the line where most wouldn't or couldn't. Like I'm an untrained bumpkin, unfortunately if someone had a knife and I had a gun, I can't really think of much more than shooting them.
But somewhere along the line the standard for police dropped down to the standard for me? The untrained bumpkin?
Since pretty much every time I hear cop by suicide it's apparent, and people still say "well what would *you* do" like that's the smoking gun...
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It even extends to more casual cases, the other day there was a video of a lady mooning an officer. The thing is the lady was clearly let go before that fairly stupid act, and last I checked mooning someone doesn't imply you've suddenly become a lethal threat.. but the cop was just so out of shape that shortly after realizing they couldn't keep up with this not very fast person they ended up tasering this person on asphalt.
A fully grown adult out cold at running pace straight into asphalt because a cop is so out of shape they can't chase a person who mooned them
That's not the picture I grew up with...
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I honestly don't have a problem with that though! I don't think we have to force people to gamble their lives for others. There's a certain sense of, "if I can't do it, I can't make someone else do it".
But if that's the case then we need to drop a lot of the pretence to traditional policing cops have right now.
Like the pay and pensions are all based around the hazard, but it's safer than being a cab driver. Maybe because now fearing for your life is an out to kill people reaching for wallets.
And a lot of interactions they have with people, like speed enforcement should probably be dropped, if we're just admitting lethal force has moved up a few notches.
And maybe they need to have attachments with them for certain calls. If someone is showing signs of mental instability, someone experienced with dealing with that vs applying lethal force should be directly involved.
The fact that cops are trained is precisely why they shoot people who try and charge them or others with knives. The correct first-line strategy for dealing with a knife attack is not allowing the attacker to close enough distance with you to use the knife, because once they do, regardless of how well trained you are how untrained they are there's still a high chance you'll end up seriously injured or dead. It's that imminent danger that justifies the use of deadly force. As I understand it, every self defence course worth its salt teaches this - even the ones focused on bare-handed fighting. Any tactics for dealing with attackers who do close that gap are just a high-risk last resort for situations where that fails.
Humans are entitled to use deadly force in response to credible threats to life. Someone waving a knife around, or even running while waving a knife around, is not that. The fact that knives exist is the reason that police carry billy clubs. A normal who citizen shot and killed someone of his own race because they were waving around a knife, would be charged with murder. Police officers should be better trained and better able to deal with knives than the average person. Those few departments who have mandated effective training have seen significant results from that training. [0] Well-trained ninjas with swords are actually quite rare in the modern policing environment.
This is missing the forest for the trees so badly it hurts.
Why do you think I said I'd be forced to shoot? Because even without training common sense tells you "not allowing the attacker to close enough distance with you to use the knife" is a pretty good course of action
By your logic the moment a person calls 911, the people who are supposed to help, the person has been sentenced to death. Think about that for a second.
1. The cops will arrive
2. "avoid knife getting close to me"
3. Less than lethal is not reliable, hell even lethal force isn't instant, I feared for my life, they're shot very dead.
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It's not an easy problem, but how is that ok? There's not many ways to fix it other than trying something other than lethal force.
Like the stuff in those videos is not easy, I'm not trying to pretend I could do it, or most people could. It requires cops being able to put the most efficient response for self-preservation behind trying to save someone, which again, I'm not saying we require of anyone...
But let's call a spade a spade at that point. That's not the concept of policing I see paraded. That's not the "thin blue line", it sounds more like a cell of civilians that are deployed to bad situations where they then "apply self-defense"...
Thanks for making my point that the standard for officers is now people who are too scared to put the public before themselves... which is pretty much all of us. The opposite of a thin blue line.
> Like the stuff in those videos is not easy, I'm not trying to pretend I could do it, or most people could.
I'm not a police officer because I'm not brave enough. I'd fear for my life, and I shoot. So instead of putting myself in a profession that should ideally require more of me, I don't.
If everyone felt that way, and did it your way, the only ones left would betge criminally insane/psychopathic unfazed by the utilization of violence. Without those who are willing to counter that wanton tendency to violence with a principled, controlled application of protocol driven escalation of force, civilization devolves even further into barbarism and might makes right than the arguable state in which it is already in.
If the people who were police were better able to keep cool instead of jumping to shoot people in the face in fear... all that would be left would be the criminally insane?
And somehow we'd have less controlled application of protocol?
There really would be a line that separates them from the "rest of us", and anti-police sentiment would be a hell of a lot weaker. I mean, how often do we have national anti-firefighter sentiment? Maybe when police use them to mow down humans?
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If being a police officer is just about carrying a gun and looking out for number one, all we're looking for is people who don't hesitate to pull a trigger.
Just realize, lowering the bar to "willing to shoot to protect self the moment anything threatens me" is a hell of a lot lower than "willing to put other's lives at similar value to mine, even if it risks my own".
Ironically the lower bar sounds like how attract to the "criminally insane/psychopathic unfazed by the utilization of violence"... to become police.
Considering some states have already removed this immunity and others are considering it, I don't think it is required. That is to say that the state can and does bring charges for violations done while performing work for the state.
> it was decided they’re necessary to keep the state from being stuck
It wasn't necessarily decided by elected representatives, most of these protections have be put in place by courts and are based purely on legal precedent rather than legislation.
> It’s legal to sue government agents as private citizens for violation of rights.
It is legal to sue anyone for anything. The standards of proof required to win such a lawsuit make it generally ineffective at rectifing most cases where rights are violated.
The people who pay got vigilante private security don't do it to avoid police planting evidence in them.
They do it to have someome to attack the others, someone under their control. They have zero incentive to prevent private security from planting evidence on others.
Gangs in fact did not ended up to be fair non corrupt equivalent of police either.
I'm much less concerned with them planting evidence on me than I am with them shooting a friend or family member who is experiencing a mental health crisis.
That is the same category. People who will call private security in your friend or family don't mind violence that much.
And in case you are the one calling, you don't need private security as much as private mental health professional. Because that knowledge and exlerience of mental health crisis comes with being mental health professional - not with security.
> People who will call private security in your friend or family don't mind violence that much.
If private security shoots someone having a mental health crisis, they have far fewer legal protections to help them avoid consequences. This is precisely the point I have been making.
Yes, and just imagine how bad the situation will be when the police is privatized and accountable only to their shareholders.
The current situation is not good, but I have hope that in the past year we've hit a turning point where we'll actually start seeing some improvements (they will be slow and incomplete improvements, but they will be progress in the right direction).
Privatized police, on the other hand, is about as dystopian as it gets.
I see this news as a loss of faith in the police. If the police are not trusted or not helping or making things worse then of course people will form their own gangs for protection. Citizen is trying to profit off that. Businesses and rich people do this all the time, this sounds like a service for less wealthy people of the same nature. It could help tame the police if independent observers with the power to intervene and wearing body cameras streaming to a remote server show up at incidents. In fact some people may specifically want protection from the police in situations where they think the police may react badly (e.g., trying to get help for someone with mental health problems). Goons for rent would be a bad way to implement this service. Observers and defenders and negotiators and de-escalators for hire would make more sense and have less liability for the company offering the service. This is the basic idea behind lawyers, you can not trust government to watch out for your interests so you hire an advocate to represent you and protect you. In fact, temporary legal representation during a sudden crisis is another service Citizen could offer. Calling a lawyer to be present during a crisis is something anyone can already do if they can afford it. Privatized police already exist (campus police, corporate police, security guards, even military mercenaries who do policing work). Hiring an observer/witness for cheap seems like a great new business model!
Private security forces are accountable to their customers before their shareholders. If I don't like how my private security company is behaving, I can cancel my contract and switch to another company. When enough contracts are cancelled, then these hypothetical shareholders get involved.
If I could cancel the "contract" with my local law enforcement agencies, I would have done that a long, long time ago.
When private citizens are allowed to do it (see e.g. Stand Your Ground states, Trayvon Martin, &c) it's also bad. Only without body cams, without even the possibility of institutional reform.
Not for the purposes of the law, nor their employment. The state has much more power in how to bring them into line than it does for private citizens (it just chooses not to use that power in the US).
Not when they're off the clock either, interestingly. An off duty officer still obeys the reasonable officer standard for use of force rather than the reasonable person standard.
What matters is that people are voting with their wallets.
People need a solution to rampant crime. Take for example SA, where private security forces are widespread.
The degree of deleriction of duty by public servants has been tremendous in the last 2 years. The NYC Major recently was on the record stating that "there is no security problem in NYC" meanwhile official City hall communication channels have implemented a buddy system where city hall employees can home in groups [1]
If public servants can't provide security for people, there should not be a surprise that the private servicers would emerge.
Law enforcement does not solve the sort of low-level citizen-brigade crime that this app would address, it only treats the symptoms. The cause is people driven to desperation; put money into social programs to address the root of their desperation.
This is a false dichotomy, but what's worse is that social programs are already heavily funded in all the major West coast cities. For example, LA spends over half a billion dollars (yes, billion with a B) on services for the homeless every year, to very little effect. It's not irrational for someone (even someone who advocates for those very programs and services) to look at the full situation and conclude that the best available option is to just throw in the towel and hire private security.
> look at the full situation and conclude that the best available option is to just throw in the towel and hire private security
Someone who is looking at the full situation would realize that hiring private security does not cause the homeless population to suddenly evaporate. An outsider might start to get the impression that the fundamental right of the upper-middle class is the right not to be reminded that people in poverty exist.
No one cares what outsiders think when they are being assaulted on their walk home from work. If you want justice you must first create order.
In addition, it's not like these people don't have sympathy for the plight of the poor: they voted to spend vast sums on tax money trying to fix the root cause of the problem. It's not their fault that these efforts are failing.
Why is ~$500,000,000 a lot of money for the homeless? The CA budget is hundreds of billions of dollars, and there’s a lot of people who live in that state.
LA city budget, not California state. The amount spent is so high that you could just give every homeless person in LA $2000 every month and it would be less expensive.
A large portion of that spending is spent on prevention - getting rental assistance and other things to people who are in danger of losing their housing. There are over 400,000 "severely cost burdened" households that are "extremely low income" which is to say making less than 30% of median income which in LA means less than $20k/year, and spending more than half their income on rent.
You're looking at the most obvious symptom - people with no home - and saying "well if we just treated that symptom with all this money there would be no problem." But the root cause is an order of magnitude larger than that.
Prevention is cheaper and results in a friendlier environment for everyone. The proliferation of expensive, reactive solutions that tend to aggravate the very problem they're ostensibly working on is great for shareholders though. Public health is boring by comparison, and no one gets rich when it works.
That's not what happening here. The money is for the "true crime" entertainment and the fun of being part of a mob, not crime reduction. That's obvious from the substance and tone of the content published in the app.
I don’t follow these things at all, but it seems we may be in a bit of a bad romance with authority figures. These total strangers act in perfectly predictable ways given the positions we’ve handed them, and we call it betrayal.
But for all of the highly visible things wrong with certain police forces, they do at least theoretically have carefully considered constraints and a duty to the public rather than just their subscribers.
You seem to be presuming that you will be the one these mercenaries are working for. When mercenaries I hired beat the crap out of you, how will you fire them?
If you hire mercenaries to beat the crap out of someone, both you and the mercenaries will go to jail.
There are already more private security officers than government police officers in the US today. This isn't new. They have co-existed for many decades.
I don't think the author ever claimed there's no value in real police. It actually, ironically, matches the recent left-wing demands to defund. Let the police with their armored cars and helicopters handle real crime, like when your mercenaries beat up my mercenaries. Let the mercenaries handle the small stuff :)
the problem is that it is not in jest. It is accurate and reviews both how weak societal oversight of police is and how important it is.
Officers are under scrutiny. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, sometimes (not often enough for me) when that scrutiny fails changes happen.
What is the oversight process, and the public input on that oversight, for Citizen?
Your example is an argument specifically for not letting go of that scrutiny, and significantly increasing that scrutiny. It, to some, is an argument of why existing state sponsored efforts at law enforcement simply need to be rebooted entirely - because they operate with scrutiny more akin to a private corporation already.
Everyone is a victim of crimes, not just upper-middle-class white folks. In fact, the UMC folks are the ones who can afford to just write off the losses caused by property crimes, and are less susceptible to fall victim to the worst crimes, like murder.
Is there some background information you're referring to? Assault makes up the vast majority of violent crimes, so it's hard to see what it could mean for them to be done "out of sheer desperation". I can see how a desperate person might feel shoplifting or burglary are their only choice to survive, but how could they expect to benefit from punching random people?
> Private citizens are not under the same legal scrutiny officers are
Government police have qualified immunity and are not subject to market oversight. As you might expect, this fundamental lack of accountability results in abuses, particularly of minorities, historically and presently.
I’m much less concerned about the Starbucks security guards becoming a gang. Unlike government police, as soon as they start bashing gay people or colored people, I can stop supporting them.
hoping that maybe enough people hear about your case and are motivated by it enough to change their spending habits even in the face of monopoly and violent threats isn't exactly "being able to do something" as a vigilante's bullet passes through your skull.
> they should become officers not 'security force’
Given the moral bankruptcy of America’s police force (note: force, not every officer), I could certainly see someone preferring private security handle their interests over the police.
If crime were less prevalent and the police more trusted, such a service wouldn’t have a niche to exist in.
I don’t like this slide into vigilante justice. But fighting the symptoms of the underlying problem is the wrong approach.
> This is exactly how gangs and mob enforcement happens. Organization of people whom are more than willing to create their own physical enforcement outside of the restrictions of the law go out and "protect" for money. And then organize to become both the perpetrator and the defender.
When the law decides it is not interested in protecting the citizens you bet this is going to happen.
My block has been invaded by the drug dealers as of last summer. Not 1. Not 2. But between a dozen and two dozen at a time. They are selling drugs openly on a street so brazen that the people who live here have to walk through the drug deals being done on a sidewalk to get to their apartments. Apartments with rents ranging from $1900 to $6000 a month. Cops don't do anything because the city management frowns upon it. We had five shootings over the past 12 months. If there was a way for us to pay for our own thugs to ensure the drug dealers moved to a different block $200-$500/mo per apartment I'm absolutely sure everyone who lives around here would sign up for it.
When these things start happening (Pinkerton) it's because there is a need that isn't being met by the state. This tells me the state is not providing the type of policing the populace wants.
Sure, but they did more than that supplementing law enforcement where it was deficient like providing "secret service" to Lincoln, pursuing "Western" outlaws, like the ones robing banks and trains, etc. Before the FBI came into existence it had some of that role because the state was not providing it. Arguably, with the strikers and such, the state was absent from the dispute when it should have been there mediating.
Point is, if the state is not providing these services, then the demand will make it profitable for someone to fill the role.
>If people want rule of law, and not rule of force, then they should become officers not 'security force'. But I have a feeling that the reason they want to be 'securoty force' is to avoid the responsibility.
The implication here is that police officers stay within the bounds of the law, and yet a cursory google search will reveal that (at least in the US and Canada) the police are entirely corrupt forces of legally-sanctioned mob violence who flout the law at will without fear of repercussions or consequences.
If there's a high-blood pressure situation and whether I call 911 or if I were to start using Citizen, I have about the same level of confidence that extralegal brutality will occur.
The neighborhood watch is often staffed by amateurs. Security forces are trained professionals. If a neighborhood watch is necessary, then an on-demand security force seems better.
What would you think happens if you abuse this service to call security on your poor neighbors? They keep showing up? I don't think so. I do think the neighborhood watch could take it personally.
Security force is a perfectly respectable and responsible job, and many ex-police and ex-military use their skill set to get into this field.
If officers always showed up, and always showed up on time, then you would not need private citizens. Rule of law is for the government to control. Citizens just want their parents to feel safe, and be able to call security to drive through their street, when they suspect gang/drug activity.
This is a horrifying equivalence. A "neighborhood watch" is at best a surveillance and reporting organization. It's literally right there in the name. "Neighborhood watches" don't go around making armed attempts to intervene in crime, and to the extent they do (c.f. the killing of Ahmaud Arbery) it's exactly as disastrous as the dystopia we're discussing with respect to "security forces", and for the same reasons.
Would you apply the same standard to self defense, which is an "armed attempt to intervene in crime"? Think of mercenaries in this case like Uber drivers, people "below the API". If I shoot a robber in my house it's ok (and already more or less legal). If I hire a full-time security guard and he does, that's also ok. Both things happen regularly all over the place, is it somehow "horrifying"?
Alas, I cannot afford a security guard any more than I can afford a private driver, hence a part-time app-based security guard (or driver). It doesn't replace the police, and is accountable to the law and police; it just a tool to solve a problem.
I do not equate them. I value unbiased professionals over amateurs "protecting their turf".
If there are crimes happening which require armed intervention, that is exactly a reason for having a professional security force. If the police does not show for such a crime, but you need to rely on security force, well good luck to you, and glad you have a backup on dial.
A security force is also going to cooperate with the police and perform surveillance. Not like they pull up in an armored van and exit with weapons drawn, because a neighbor called them for an illegal lemonade stand.
I don't think the killing of Ahmaud Arbery was by a neighborhood watch. Professionals would probably not have let it come that far. Same with Trayvon Martin: if a professional force had responded calmly, he may have been alive. So if a neighborhood watch is necessary (either for the feeling of protection or actual crime fighting) then a professional force would seem a lot better.
This is just stunningly naive, sorry. You're imagining a bunch of noble professionals, but in practice in history when you give a bunch of people weapons and tell them to police their neighborhoods, and ESPECIALLY when you make them accountable only locally (to the people paying them, in this case) and not to society in general...
You get gangs. That's how gangs form. Organized crime, almost everywhere, has its roots in this kind of "local security" of an underserved disadvantaged population. People who can't rely on the police for order end up under the thumb of whoever can provide stability.
Now, OK, sure. I get that you're thinking that somehow this startup has found a growth hack to disrupt this millenia-old industry and do it better than the Mafia. Well... maybe. Or maybe it's just another gang.
If a gang in my street, they better be on my payroll. And I expect them to provide stability better than the Mafia ever can. But if you say my payment of a private security force directly leads to the formation of criminal gangs, and I am still in an underserved population, maybe I can better pay the Mafia, to avoid the creation of new gangs? That sounds naive.
> If a gang in my street, they better be on my payroll.
Funny thing though. With this Citizen nonsense? They might be on mine instead. Bet that makes you sleep better at night knowing those woke hippies might hire "private security" of their own, right?
How about this: let's all get together and decide democratically on how to, I dunno, enforce our laws in a universally acceptable way? We can then hire a bunch of these "law enforcers" together such that they aren't beholden to any part of society, and come up with means to make them accountable to all of us, with like rules and stuff that we can, I guess, amend as we go along. Deal?
> A security force is also going to cooperate with the police and perform surveillance. Not like they pull up in an armored van and exit with weapons drawn, because a neighbor called them for an illegal lemonade stand.
I am curious as to why you believe that this scenario isn't exactly what would happen. Because I think eventually this is... exactly what would happen.
Private security has been around for what... hundreds, thousands of years?
It hasn't devolved into pulling up in an armored van and exiting with weapons drawn yet. Why would yet another company among thousands (millions?) entering the field change that?
Security forces are professionals, and professionals at dealing with such situations. They'd be very bad at their job if they armed intervened in non-violent or non-pressing crimes. It is like expecting your Uber driver to take a short-cut over a pedestrian lane: maybe they arrive a tiny bit earlier to the one that paid them, but now they lose their license.
If I do imagine this would happen, assume it would be true, then just to be clear: I do not agree with armed interventions to shut down these illegal lemonade stands, and I wished the marketing in the leaked e-mails would have made it clear, that armed interventions of all crime, is what this service is meant for.
Citizen shareholders should see a massive opportunity in a "Protect" product offering which cuts down on neighbors spuriously using the service against other customers. The addition of protection money to the revenue stream would benefit them greatly.
I agree with your opinion. I consider "Citizen" filling a usefull role of protection for those who can afford it. As/when they start becoming problematic, we will figure out how to deal with it. Until then, we have to go by the service they claim to offer in good faith.
I want my family to feel safe. It is my responsibility to do everything in my capacity as a law-abiding citizen to ensure their safety.
I doubt that will ever happen in America. America is way too organized and professional of a government to ever let things get that out of hand.
This sort of thing happens a lot in Latin America though. One situation sort of like what you're describing is Columbia in the 90s. The cartels throughly corrupted the government, so vigilante groups like Los Pepes[1] formed to attack the cartels, though they may have mostly just been fronts for other cartels. Los Pepes alumni went to form AUC, which was the semi-government endorsed death squad in Columbia at the time and became its own narcotrafficking syndicate over time[2]. AUC was eventually shut down and the leaders arrested for atrocities.
The main left-wing guerrilla movement (FARC) also eventually shut down its military activities[3]. The huge economic disaster of Venezuela right next door might have weakened the appeal of left-wing revolution. I've heard that Columbia is a pretty nice place to visit these days where in the 90s it was one of the most dangerous countries on earth.
> I doubt that will ever happen in America. America is way too organized and professional of a government to ever let things get that out of hand.
This seems written from the perspective of someone who has just come back from a six month vacation during which they had no access to news.
> I've heard that Columbia is a pretty nice place to visit these days
There is literally a country-wide revolt taking place in Colombia (correct spelling) at the moment, with some of the worst police violence the country has experienced in years.
My dad did some consulting work in Colombia in the 90s and he was provided with armed drivers and they took different routes between the plant and the hotel every day.
This is usually a sign of some perceived failure of the public option.
Public schools in NY not delivering education some folks expect -> market starts for private schools.
Existing delivery service not able to do guaranteed same or next day delivery -> merchants and others will build out their own capacity.
My guess is that as police are defunded (Minneapolis is getting rid of police department entirely) folks who can pay and see a role for security will probably contract for it. In the bay area this is already happening to a small degree.
It used to be you could walk into a lot of office buildings freely, now pretty tight security in some downtown areas (ie, public security option / service options are very poor and not maintained). So we get elevator passes and lockouts, security person downstairs, turnstiles, bathrooms all got doors with RFID door locks.
At least on the West Coast of the U.S. it seems to me like there’s been a big change over the past ten years or so in what kinds of security events could happen in a given public space. These days it feels like anything is possible. We’ve had homeless people tailgate employees into the office building where I work. One tried to move into the handicapped bathroom stall. Another started grabbing things from people’s desks in an unoccupied area. After Portland began allowing overnight camping on public property under the Safe Sleep program, a small patch of land across from our office became a campsite pretty quickly, as did the sidewalks on adjacent streets. Some of the people who were camping there were pretty unstable, so you never really knew what to expect.
In that same period of time, also on the West Coast, we’ve seen a shift towards a more lenient model of policing and prosecuting. The idea is to not laden people who are already struggling with homelessness, mental illness, drug addiction, or all three with legal problems that arise from those situations. It’s a laudable effort, and a noble goal, but it has meant that people who get arrested for something like auto theft or burglary are quickly released. Sometimes you’ll read in the news about a person who’s been arrested for a serious crime like murder, and the article will mention dozens and dozens of other arrests for things like burglary, assault or theft. The police know this, so they often don’t bother following up on property crimes.
That system as a whole can really make the major West Coast cities feel pretty lawless sometimes, but people don’t really like to talk about it in social settings because it’s hard to talk about problems like that without being misconstrued as a reactionary conservative. But if you get them taking one on one, and they feel like they can trust you, the frustrations come pouring out. So I’m not that surprised that there’s a company trying to capitalize on that sentiment, horrifying as it is. I’ve been feeling for a while now that given the current trajectory of things, a vigilante backlash was likely to become inevitable.
There's definitely been a shift in enforcement that was needed. Back in 2007 I bike commuted down the east side esplanade every morning. I regularly saw the Police using an air horn (think the spray can horn people sometimes use at sporting events) directly against the side of someone's head to wake them up.
Stuff like that needed to end. But we also need to go further to address the root causes of this problem.
Most of this is perceived bullshit. As the gap between working class and affluent people widens, you have a layer of professionals with money looking for stuff to do.
Those folks have a tendency to want to separate themselves from the dirty masses. (Ie gated community) It’s what you did after you sell the family factory business in Ohio and move to Florida or wherever.
Building security theatre was accelerated driven by 9/11 paranoia and federal standards.
Security is absolutely necessary in down towns. In LA, it is out of control. You can't even go inside a 711 without being harassed until they hired guards.
Not my experience at all in the downtowns of NYC, Boston, Seattle, and SF. DTLA is a very unique downtown due to many factors specific to LA (mainly car culture taking away practical significance from the city center + the housing sprawl) and that doesn't generalize to most actual cities.
> Security is absolutely necessary in down towns. In LA, it is out of control. You can't even go inside a 711 without being harassed until they hired guards.
At which point the need was filled. No dystopic community mercenary forces were necessary.
I think the idea of the citizen security force is for communities that don't have the money to afford security guards like the large buildings that can.
Currently, Citizen offers a subscription product called 'Protect', which costs $19.99 per month. Protect sends a user's location to a Citizen employee when it's turned on, can stream video to a 'Protect agent' when activated using a safeword, and is pitched to users as a 'digital bodyguard'. Protect also advertises 'Instant emergency response to your exact location'
This seems like the idea is to supply a rent-a-thug to individuals, on-demand.
These arbitrary checkpoints also generate a steady stream of trivial "security incidents" just by existing, which for the paranoid owners is taken as evidence for their necessity, and they double down.
I'm seeing the same thing in Seattle. Private security has become MUCH more common all over the city in the past few years. I even see apartment buildings hiring 24/7 private security that patrols the building and the street around the building as an amenity.
Overseas the end results if the police are totally defunded or weak is that you tend to end up with really strong differences / ghettos around places where there is and is not security.
It's like gated communities on steroids, but starts to include office, mfg and other items like retail (which totally leave places with no security). Can result in shocking differences on both sides of the fence that usually separates these areas. Ironically the police then tend to follow along and provide better security to what are not better areas (if they have any capacity).
This is how life is in basically every Central and South American city, in my experience.
As soon as a family has some relatively small amount of wealth they will spend it on ultra-secure apartment buildings, tall walls around their house, razor-wire walls and fences, full coverage security cameras and intruder detection, etc.
I saw jarring signs of that when I visited Mexico City in 2003
- I stayed with a business partner who lived in a walled community guarded by private guards openly carrying submachine guns. Can only imagine that the security has been dialed up a few notches by now.
(The source of my confusion: I interpreted "overseas" in a quite literal way - I'm from Europe.)
For the first time in my life I've seen private security in my neighborhood. We're in one of the poorer areas of the city (ie $1-2.5m houses), so perhaps people cannot afford to leave?
I've always thought security on demand was a great idea- the real killer app in my mind is having a map online of which houses the private security company protects, so as to create an incentive for people who aren't paying to get protection as the thieves know what's ripe for the picking.
This is American techbro poor, where rampant asset inflation has been occurring ever since the government has been more or less printing money, and now buying corporate bonds (BOJ of course is the ghost of economy future here, having done this since the late triassic).
Not really a purely American problem- everybody else has this too- which is why young people are so pissed everywhere that they have no future.
how wold a private security company protect your house? If they were there in the driveway 24x7 then maybe. Once your house is robbed or being robbed if you have to call someone it's already too late.
i was a victim of a home invasion and maybe 10 years later a violent crime. In both cases only after the real danger was over did a call for help happen.
In the home invasion it ended when the gunman was forcing my roommate to the garage, my roommate opened the door, the gunman walked out, he then slammed/locked the door behind him and we hit the deck calling 911
In the second case i was jumped from behind and knocked nearly unconscious before being robbed. It took me a full 15min to get the brain fog cleared to even think what to do next.
i don't see how an app is going to offer any protection at all. Maybe it speeds up reporting crime??
I have latin american heritage and that's pretty how much it is in the old country for anyone who can afford it. I won't be surprised if in a few years barbed wire and glass shard fencing becomes more common. The sad thing is America is doing this to itself very willfully through some obvious policy failures while blaming abstract intangible forces like "capitalism."
Indeed, defunding the police means the poor will be even less protected. The rich will always have their private security. And now they'll have a larger/cheaper labor force, with ex-police officers looking for a new job?
Drug cartels are on the decline. Rise of the Warrior Cop is directly correlated with centralization of power and the influence of police unions over politics and public spending.
It's also correlated with the change from the US military Soldier's creed, to the "Warrior ethos" [0].
The differences are quite interesting: The soldier swears to always act in ways creditable to the service and the nation, recognizing it as a honored profession not to be disgraced.
While for the warrior the mission always comes first. Honor, credibility, disgrace? Not even in the vocabulary, replaced with "deploy, engage and destroy the enemies of the US, in close combat".
Are you just saying that because weed is being legalized?
Economic inequality sure isn't in decline, and there are a lot of 18-24 year old uneducated men out there with nothing to lose. The turmoil in places like Venezuela and Colombia leaves power voids that cartels step in to fill.
The person you replied to did make a claim with no evidence, but so did you. What about the southern border, do you have a reliable citation for something bad happening there compared to 10, 20, 30, 40 years ago?
Even for middle class people, the police are basically there to file the paperwork you need to file insurance claims.
"Oh, somebody broke into your car and stole stuff? You shouldn't leave things lying around. We'll never catch the guy. Oh, you have video of the incident and know exactly who it is? Yeah, we can't really do anything with this. Oh you need to file a report for the insurance company? Fill this out and check back with us next month."
I'm very much NOT surprised that people who've actually needed the police for something have decided to there needs to be a private alternative.
Poor people don’t want to get rid of police, they want to not be hassled by police.
In the 90s when the NYPD started firing lazy/corrupt police commanders and cracking down on street crime, evicting families of drug dealers from public housing, and putting down pit bulls.. poor communities were very much in favor of what was happening.
The tide shifted when the cops went all in on stupid metrics.
"defunding" is a loaded word and ripe for misinterpretation.
The intent behind that movement is to take money spent on policing where it fails and move it to where it might be more effective.
How many lawsuits are there for wrongful deaths where the police showed up for a mental health crisis? Since funding is finite and the police get a lion's share of it (community wise), why not shift some of that money into personnel who are better equipped to handle it?
It's going to be very interesting to watch the folks who are replacing their police. I think Minneapolis is going to be first. If they can make it work - fantastic!
There is only one interpretation for defund, and anyone saying otherwise is gaslighting or using Motte and Bailey. President Obama wisely told progressives to stop saying it.
Only in your mind. You cite an opinion piece as fact, when it's, like, an opinion, man.
You're projecting Motte and Bailey now by suggesting that is the intent of the movement, and therefore the movement is "bad".
Policing in America needs to be revisited. The word "reform" has been used in the past and has been found wanting. We could make up a brand new word but its still just a word -- the concept itself is worthy of pursuit.
> My guess is that as police are defunded (Minneapolis is getting rid of police department entirely) folks who can pay and see a role for security will probably contract for it. In the bay area this is already happening to a small degree.
I think in a lot of major metros, even funded police aren't meeting people's needs. If we aren't getting what we're paying for, we should stop paying.
Am I more likely to have a positive or negative interaction with police? I honestly don't know, and I'm white in a nice area. Crime is low and something like a burglary is extremely unlikely. I think police may be providing an unseen benefit to me by enforcing the law on others - I don't want vehicles doing 50 mph on my residential street, maybe they would without police? Or maybe they wouldn't?
I'm not taking a side on this issue, but I do empathize with those who believe they are unlikely to ever benefit from police presence, and thus don't want to pay for police.
Black Americans want to retain their current level of police presence (or rather, that of the status quo ante). This might be because in many cases they are quite likely to be the victim of a burglary:
This is a major part of the problem in these debates. People don't measure or argue from what they can't see. We often imagine issues as scalars, when more often they are a single knob on a complex machine, most of which is invisible to even the best informed people.
If the videos online are any indicator, police do a lot more than simply enforce the law: they regularly harass and intimidate anyone behaving in ways that are nonstandard (including simply existing while being a minority or poor) even if no laws are being broken, and suffer no consequences whatsoever for such illegal and often violent conduct.
This is presumably what some people want, but in general the police as protectors of the status quo is, in my view, a bad thing. The status quo sucks and changing it isn't illegal—yet the cops in the US will treat you as it it were.
Reading a lot of the comment there seems to be a recency bias towards complaining a more recent set of policies to change police funding and ignoring the more long term problem that police may not be meeting the people needs even with large budgets.
The issue might not be funding level but misuse as you point out.
Minneapolis is not getting rid of its police department.
There may be one or more options on the ballot this fall to make the department report to someone different, and/or to remove the current minimum number of officers, but even those are yet to be resolved.
> Minneapolis is getting rid of police department entirely
This is incorrect. The city council made a non-binding “pledge” to dismantle the police department. But according to the New York Times, the pledge "has been rejected by the city's mayor, a plurality of residents in recent public opinion polls, and an increasing number of community groups. Taking its place have been the types of incremental reforms that the city's progressive politicians had denounced." [1]
The ideas behind “defund the police” are simply not popular in the US. A majority of Americans want a police department - but they want a police department that protects everyone equally.
This article talks about a program designed to fix the "root" of crime and homelessness. Instead of arresting people, they'd call social workers. "Success" was measured by how many people were arrested and so the program "succeeded" because they responded to 750 calls but didn't arrest anyone. But is arrest really related to how well a program solves the root of the problem?
It seems like a better measure would be something related to their actual goal. So why didn't they measure rate of property crime? Rate of homelessness? Poverty? Drug addiction? Supposedly these are the real causes of crime and homelessness.
If they did actually measure those things, I think their evaluation of the program would be different [0] [1].
>> "Denver saw significant increases in most types of property crime in 2020. In comparison to the average of the previous four years, burglaries rose 23% in 2020, larceny rose 9%, auto theft rose 61% and theft from cars rose 39%, Denver police data shows." [0]
There's a pretty wide spectrum of how people interpret "defund x". US Republicans have agitated for "defund Planned Parenthood" for a while, and by "defund" they meant "don't give any tax dollars to it" [1]. In that context, it's not really surprising that a big chunk of the population "misunderstand[s]" the phrase. They may be inferring the wrong context, but the word has definitely been used that way.
This is sort of weirdly spun. In fact in Seattle we saw exactly what happens when a bunch of local yahoos decide to try to police themselves. How exactly do you think this is going to turn out differently than the CHAZ/CHOP fiasco, except in the clothing choices of the security people?
CHAZ folks were explicitly of the mindset of tearing down existing institutions in order to build a glorious future. Those folks seem to only be good at the first part.
Simply wanting to preserve one's life, liberty, and property and live in relative commity with one's neighbors does not generally lead to excessive violence and destruction.
This is just yarn spinning. Stuff you like is good. Stuff you don't like is bad, and you fit the adjectives to the story. I dare say those hippies in Seattle were fans of your Lockian ideal too, they just used different words. And likewise trying to replace police with this private goon squad[1] looks an awful lot like "tearing down existing institutions" to people like me who think it's a shit idea.
That's not an argument, essentially. Words don't make truth. Either this trick is going to make people safer or it's going to get someone killed.
> I dare say those hippies in Seattle were fans of your Lockian ideal too
Please don't confuse me for a student of Locke.
> And likewise trying to replace police with this private goon squad[1] looks an awful lot like "tearing down existing institutions" to people like me who think it's a shit idea.
Building UPS or Fedex is not the same thing as destroying USPS.
Minneapolis is not getting rid of the police department as a quick Google would happily show you.
Its a fallacy to assume it is a failure of a public option when it just as easily can be that we've been marketed that we are vulnerable and unsafe. Almost all stats have TODAY being just about the safest moment for violent crime in the history of humanity.
Dont confuse a change in peoples purchasing habits as a logical response to something intrinsic. Its barely ever correlated.
edit: I actually reread and saw you said "perceived value," I agree with you, I just think its a tragedy people are so scared. Although SF seems to be really having a problem.
This seems to me like it's setting a bad precedent. I totally understand the motivation behind something like this, but privatizing it and selling it to the highest bidder not only raises ethical concerns, but also ones around how this service will be used in the first place. According to citizen it seems like these forces will respond to "disturbances", which are incredibly vaguely worded. Do I need to be in danger to call them? Or do I just need to be "disturbed"?
It seems to me like this will be used by the upper-middle class to pester their neighbors over minor annoyances, because they can afford a Citizen subscription. Imagine the poor family across the street, who gets visited by a black SUV and a group of burly looking suited security guards, likely telling them something vague about a "disturbance" that was reported.
This already happens in some places. For example, in Houston, HOAs and other neighborhood management districts will contract with Constables to have a dedicated deputy in their neighborhood with a separate contact number. Others will contract with armed private security to patrol their neighborhoods as well.
Also, this is how people use the police already. They call them when they are annoyed with their neighbors, the infamous woman in Central Park that was covered heavily in the news this year comes to mind.
Imagine thieves calling different private forces to confront "fake" security guards. Like that guy who asked construction workers from craiglist to meet with him next to the bank, but now with guns involved.
> visited by a black SUV and a group of burly looking suited security guards
Not very different than getting visited by a burly looking neighbor. Except some people can look weaker, or be afraid to approach their neighbor because their small stature
When I had an upstairs neighbor having parties at all hours of the night, I wished there was a service where a bigger / more intimidating person would knock on their door and ask them to cut it out, instead of small and fragile looking me
And what if I'm disturbed seeing you walk around the neighborhood, and I call some big burly men to give you a talk about it? Even if most people are reasonable, this just invites the unreasonable people to power trip with private security forces.
> I wished there was a service where a bigger / more intimidating person would knock on their door and ask them to cut it out, instead of small and fragile looking me
That exists, and it's called the police. If your neighbor is violating noise ordinances, they'll get ticketed. If they're not, perhaps they're violating building rules, and can be fined by the building management. If still not, then you unfortunately just live in a shitty building, and hiring a thug to harass your neighbor (regardless of how loud they're being) sounds like a pretty disgusting (and legally risky) thing to do.
You would call in a private security force to intimidate your loud neighbors because you can't? I wonder how else that security force might be used to enforce personal preferences.
Did you talk to your neighbor ever? Or did you just dream of intimidating them while fearing them without meeting them?
(And you weren't afraid of potential fallout from escalating things to intimidation either way? What if they hire a BIGGER person to go knock on your door?)
You're being down voted for this comment, and perhaps you could have worded it differently, but the core of your message seems completely reasonable:
If you don't want to do something, you ask somebody else, if you both agree to the terms and costs you have a deal.
The world can be, how should I put this, difficult a place.
The contracted party might agree to not mention you. Something like: hey, I live across the street, would you mind letting me know if you're going to have music late at night because I'll just stay at my partner's place that evening, here's my number. No sweat, have a good night, here's a complimentary six pack.
It doesn't take a lot of imagination to assume the best possible reading of a comment like yours.
I've had problems with my (large) upstairs neighbor for the past year. The building repeatedly fined them, the police refused to come out, and I knocked on their door sometimes several times a day for about 9 months straight.
My solution was to offer to pay them $$$ for their moving fees and, when they turned that down, I just picked up and moved to another building.
> Imagine the poor family across the street, who gets visited by a black SUV and a group of burly looking suited security guards, likely telling them something vague about a "disturbance" that was reported.
In some ways I would honestly love to get my door buzzed by these people so I could tell them to get off my property lest I call the actual police to remove them.
(But such is my privilege that I would likely be pretty safe and unafraid in such an encounter.)
Citizen's implementation aside, I feel like there's a real market for something like this. I was walking down the street a few months ago and was physically attacked by somebody (as in, the man punched and attacked me until I ran out into the middle of the street into oncoming traffic for safety).
I feel like there should be some sort of service that's able to offer some kind of protection in situations like this, or at least able to track down and prevent this kind of person from recommitting after he's shown a willingness to violently attack other people.
Something that'd disincentivize or prevent him from doing it again. Ideally detain him and rehabilitate him. Barring that, track him and have people ready to physically intervene when he attacks someone.
It's unpleasant to be physically assaulted, and I'd like to avoid it in the future.
Response time isn't zero, though. Likely the attacker would be long gone before these people show up.
I agree it's unpleasant being physically assaulted on the street (happened to me 8 years ago and I still think about it often), as is the utter lack of interest from the police in helping in such situations, but I don't think a private security force is going to do much better.
And to your other point, there is already a thing for tracking someone down after the fact if the police aren't helpful: private investigators.
That might work in Somalia but for a private entity to detain a person on the say-so of another private person would obviously violate the civil rights of the 2nd party.
> Ideally everyone would be protected from random attacks on the street, not just those able to pay.
Exactly. You are advocating for a paid service, some sort of commercial company to do the enforcement. How do you think they'd generate revenue otherwise? Currently San Francisco is setup that way, you pay private security because the cops are useless. That's not like that everywhere. You should fix your police, not bandaid fix the problem for the people who can afford it while leaving the people who can't to suffer.
The article mentions a security escort service that seems like it'd have the chilling effect necessary to quell random people attacking you on the street, rather than relying on a "response".
What if the problem is groups of random people? How much does it cost for an escort with an APC and a dozen guards?
The sad thing about this is that people can’t figure out that $20 / month won’t buy you a 15 minute phone call. You’re paying $20 per month to be a surveillance endpoint so Citizen can sell the real services to the rich.
That was a huge problem in NYC subways around the 80s and the policing strategies for dealing with it were the origins of CompStat. It’s not a red herring because as soon as you make 1 on 1 mugging impractical the criminals will adapt and start using different strategies.
The value in a publicly funded police force is that they don’t have to worry about the economic viability of their countermeasures.
One thing that comes to mind here is that on-demand private security with fast response times are common-place in high crime countries and cities (such as Brazil and South Africa). I'm honestly not surprised that people in LA are turning to this and I wouldn't be surprised if this catches on pretty quickly where I live (Seattle).
From what I can tell it seem like almost complete open season on property theft and damage in Seattle.
In short, I don't really blame Citizen for doing this, I blame the politicians for not providing an adequately safe or lawful city.
It would be scary to see a country like the US fail to point where public police services are abandoned in favor of private forces.
I think it could happen too because private police forces benefit the rich at the expense of the poor and middle class. Why pay for police in the poor neighborhoods if you have walls and private police for your gated community?
What we’re seeing in western countries worries me. The progressive tax system is being attacked IMO because breaking it benefits the wealthy. It’s much cheaper for the richest 20% to fund private police forces for themselves than funding a public police force for everyone.
And IMO the reason the police can’t keep up is because we’ve had 40 years of underfunding public institutions so the wealthy can hoard more and more money. It’s not shocking to see increased levels of drug abuse and crime because those correlate with poverty.
We need to force the rich to pay there fair share of taxes. The resources being used for yachts and private jets needs to be getting put into education, healthcare, infrastructure, etc..
This is a great example of a misallocation of capital. Instead of funding an app for a private police force we’d be better off if that money had been collected via taxes and allocated to building schools.
South Africa and Brazil have a common root cause of their crime problem: a tiny but grossly engorged upper class holds the majority of the wealth and income while everyone else eats mud. As the USA edges closer to that reality, our problems will begin to mirror theirs.
> South Africa and Brazil have a common root cause of their crime problem: a tiny but grossly engorged upper class holds the majority of the wealth and income while everyone else eats mud.
Studies correlating wealth inequality with criminality are less than convincing [1].
A 2016 study, controlling for different factors than previous
studies, challenges the aforementioned findings. The study finds
"little evidence of a significant empirical link between overall
inequality and crime", and that "the previously reported positive
correlation between violent crime and economic inequality is largely
driven by economic segregation across neighborhoods instead of
within-neighborhood inequality". A 2020 study found that in Europe,
the inequality-crime correlation was present but weak (0.10),
explaining less than 3% of the variance in crime with a similar
finding occurring for the United States, while another 2019 study
argued that the effect of inequality on property crime was nearly
zero.
From that same article, Alaska has the lowest wealth inequality in the US and also the highest homicide rate.
Impoverishment doesn’t cause criminality, see e.g. post-internment Japanese-American and early 20th century E.European Jewish American immigrant populations. Rather, the root causes of systemic poverty are strongly correlated with criminality [2]. Which isn’t to say extreme wealth inequality isn’t bad: the French Revolution readily disproves that notion. But the French Revolution is in a different league from property crime.
The popularity of such security services in Brazil and South Africa is the first thing I thought about when I heard "defund the police" last summer. I then told everyone that people will start spending a lot more money on increasing their security, be it fencing or private security forces. It's not a complicated concept.
Private security patrolling exclusive neighborhoods in LA has been a thing since the 70s. Even the scientology properties all over town have a private security force riding on those mall cop segways.
Who is the American customer for a service like this? I knew someone who did VIP protection (standard former military, protecting bank execs and families during travel), but the work was mainly international travel.
The threat model appears basically to be urban street crime and maybe targeted harassment and political pressure. Unsure what else. If I could get this for airstrikes, I would totally buy it though.
In my neighborhood in Seattle I've seen a tweaked-out individual literally just walking down the street spray-painting cars at around 6pm on a weekday.
I called the police and they told me all officers were busy on more urgent/violent calls and wouldn't be able to respond.
This was before COVID and the department is even more short-staffed now.
Ha, that's nothing. Two years ago, I walked up to a police officer in Seattle and pointed out an individual who was splayed face-first on the sidewalk a half-block away, in front of a food truck where a line of customers was patiently stepping over them.
The officer shrugged and walked off in the opposite direction. I think that was the moment that I decided it was time for a change of scenery.
>In my neighborhood in Seattle I've seen a tweaked-out individual literally just walking down the street spray-painting cars at around 6pm on a weekday.
Despite the damage to the cars, that sounds more like a mental health problem than a crime problem.
Which is one of the big problems we have with current policing models. We throw folks trained to use deadly force at issues that are better suited to mental health professionals trained in de-escalation.
I get it that many folks don't really care about their fellow humans except as threats/enemies/potential rivals for mates and resources.
And I also get that, as in your example, many folks don't care about the well-being of other people (as in your example, a 'tweaker'. How do you know that? Were they shooting meth as they spray-painted the cars?), especially if they engage in anti-social behaviors.
In fact, many folks would support it if we just killed/imprisoned anyone who makes them uncomfortable or unhappy.
The issues that we lump into a black box called "mental illness" are poorly understood and even more poorly addressed in our society.
Even worse, more often than not we dump the "mental illness" black box into a larger black box called "criminals".
As Hubert Humphrey put it[0]:
The moral test of government is how that
government treats those who are in the dawn of
life, the children; those who are in the twilight
of life, the elderly; those who are in the shadows
of life, the sick, the needy and the handicapped.
I posit that our current policies and practices fail that moral test. Those who are most distressed/needy/lost are usually abused, shunned and thrown away by our society, rather than nurtured, helped and hopefully brought into society as productive members.
Why is it generally the former rather than the latter? I'd say that it was a culture of selfishness, greed and a lack of empathy buried under several layers of soft-soaping like "personal responsibility", "pulling oneself up by the bootstraps", "poverty is a moral failing" and a bunch of other tropes.
Sentient life is precious. We should treat it that way, IMNSHO. But we don't. And more's the pity.
> Despite the damage to the cars, that sounds more like a mental health problem than a crime problem.
In the long term, I agree with you. In the short term, it would be nice if the people who we are forced to pay for the task of preventing antisocial behavior would stop the person who is causing tens of thousands of dollars in property damage, since broadly speaking nobody else has the right to do so.
To put it another way, how much more damage does this person need to do before you consider it a crime problem?
>In the long term, I agree with you. In the short term, it would be nice if the people who we are forced to pay for the task of preventing antisocial behavior would stop the person who is causing tens of thousands of dollars in property damage, since broadly speaking nobody else has the right to do so.
I don't disagree with you. At all. This is a complicated set of issues that will require complex solutions (note the plural).
It would be great if we could stop such folks from causing property damage.
Our society is governed by laws and, more importantly, respect for those laws by the vast majority of us.
Unless we kill or imprison everyone who might engage in such activities, I'd say that we'll likely always have some of that sort of activity.
Reducing the number of folks without strong ties to society/the community seems the best way to address these issues over both the medium and long term.
As for short term solutions, that's much more difficult, as we've spent centuries demonizing the mentally ill, the poor and others society has deemed as "lesser."
>To put it another way, how much more damage does this person need to do before you consider it a crime problem?
A valid question. Without a lot of reflection I'd say that it's less important to determine whether or not some act (or collection of acts) is "criminal" than it is to identify the appropriate mechanism(s) to minimize the likelihood of such behavior from that individual in the future.
And there are many mechanisms to choose from. That incarceration has been the default for a long time doesn't always (or even most of the time) make it the right mechanism.
A broad and complex set of issues underlie this discussion and I haven't done it justice here. That said, I urge people to look beyond the display and use of force as the only mechanism to address these issues.
Short-staffed? SPD has one of the largest police presences, per-capita, of any American metro area, (while Seattle has middling crime statistics).
They aren't short-staffed, as much as they are deliberately avoiding doing any work. They were also engaged in a lot of overtime grift over the past decade, which the city started to crack down on in 2019.
The problem with police today is that there is no single problem with them. They are near-useless for solving crime. They are useless for preventing it. They are bad at dealing with situations that don't require a thug with a gun. Sometimes, they can't follow the law, while trying to enforce it. Other times, they enforce something that is not the law. Sometimes, they ignore dangerous, illegal behaviour. Sometimes, they employ incredibly excessive force to deal with not-dangerous, maybe-illegal behaviour. When they screw up, regardless of how badly they screwed up, it's nearly impossible to hold them accountable for it.
Yes, you can cherry-pick one of those problems, and claim that uber-for-mob-justice will solve it. Will it make any of these other problems worse? Better? Worse for people who can't pay, better for people who can?
I don't want the perfect to be the enemy of the good, but I am not particularly impressed by this.
> Oh? They are going to figure out who stole my catalytic converter, and arrest the fence who bought it?
I think the idea is to try to catch it in the act. The LAPD is notorious for being slow. I was in a hit and run accident where my car was completely totaled and I was in a daze and it took them an hour to come and I'm pretty sure the only reason they actually came was because a bystander was mad and claimed there was injuries after waiting with me for a while. If they wont' come to an accident in a good time, I doubt they come to a break in. lol
The NYC counts are bloated because they include a whole bunch of 'police' that have nothing to do with boots-on-the-street policing. Financial regulators and port inspectors, for instance, are included in those counts.
I can see many use cases:
- A woman going home late after a night out needing to walk thru a dangerous neighborhood
- Elderly Asian person who needs to withdraw money from a bank
- Urban photographer who wants to photograph abandoned buildings but is afraid of squatters/gangs
- Woman who needs to go to a heavily-protested abortion clinic
- Owner of a store that is about to get looted in a riot
- Owner of a store who needs security personnel at peak shoplifting hours
- Owner of a late night restaurant who needs security personnel at peak violent drunk people hours
These aren't practical or realistic use cases, though, and many are already covered by the existing private security industry.
An uber ride is cheaper than hiring private security to walk you through the hood. An elderly asian person is more likely to die crossing the road to a bank than be robbed at a bank. Urban photographers who wouldn't already be operating with a small crew are probably too broke to hire a bodyguard, nor is there some big wave or urban photographers being targeted currently. Chances are if that gear is your work its also already insured. The store owner probably already hires private security for not much more than minimum wage, and in the case of a looting, chances are the store owner would rather you go home and have insurance pay for the damages, than deal with the legal headache of their hired gun potentially killing someone in their store. Keep in mind when D.C. police who were defending the capitol building faced a mob, they allowed them to breach the building. I doubt private security is going to stick out their neck for your little shop more than D.C. police did for the U.S. capitol. You probably aren't hiring Blackwater mercenaries. The owner of the bar is paying their bouncers under the table already, the last thing they want is some pricey contract for a job they are already getting done just fine.
An elderly asian person is more likely to die crossing the road to a bank than be robbed at a bank.
I don't think you've been keeping up with the news of the wave of attacks targeting Asian elders. Many of them have been beaten and robbed on the way to run errands.
in the case of a looting, chances are the store owner would rather you go home and have insurance pay for the damages, than deal with the legal headache of their hired gun potentially killing someone in their store.
You're way overestimating the number of small business owners who have sufficient insurance to cover a looting event, and way underestimating the extent to which small business owners are willing to protect their store (e.g. Roof Koreans)
Keep in mind when D.C. police who were defending the capitol building faced a mob, they allowed them to breach the building
That actually demonstrates the value provided by an app offering on-demand private security. When cops failed to stop the insurrectionists, they faced minimal negative consequences. On the other hand, if your hired private security fails to stop looters, they can expect a negative review from you on the app which in turn threatens their career on the app.
The owner of the bar is paying their bouncers under the table already
I said late night restaurants, not bars. When was the last time you've seen a bouncer at a late night restaurant?
I agree that some of the cases I brought up are a bit far fetched. That being said, here's a great use case that I'm sure we can both agree on for on-demand security:
- Domestic violence prevention. In cases where a spouse feels threatened but does not have enough evidence for the cops to get involved, on-demand private security is the best option.
A tragedy like the Adam Matos case would have been prevented had the victim used on-demand private security. The victim was threatened by Matos, her ex, and she called the cops, who didn't/couldn't do anything, which resulted in her and her family being killed by said ex within 24 hours.
I live in an area where people dump debris (furniture, construction debris, yard waste) in the public park and on sidewalks every day.
I would love to hire security to watch for dumpers and report them to the city's dumping hotline, along with descriptions and plate numbers.
This would be peak gentrifier behavior, but a (hopefully) handful of bad actors are trashing an otherwise nice neighborhood and I'm at the end of my rope.
>
I live in an area where people dump debris (furniture, construction debris, yard waste) in the public park and on sidewalks every day.
>I would love to hire security to watch for dumpers and report them to the city's dumping hotline, along with descriptions and plate numbers.
If that's really a serious problem in your area, you and your neighbors can set up a neighborhood watch/surveillance cameras/etc. to address that without hiring private security to do it for you.
Or are you too good to support your neighbors and neighborhood with your time and effort?
Want to have a good neighborhood? Be a good neighbor.
Just clicked for me that someone on Fiverr living somewhere very cheap could pilot an internet connected drone that can return to a charging pad and it would replace a lot of these use cases.
In Brazil the state provides free healthcare and of course, security through two polices, the day to day enforcement through the Military Police, and the investigative arm the Civil Police.
Since both services are lacking, everyone that can pay, either from out of pocket or as a employment benefit, uses the private healthcare system. The more well to be pay for private security, bullet-proof cars, and other measures.
It's symptomatic to see people using private services, as it may show the state provided ones are falling short. Defunding only hurts the poor that can't afford to pay for good private services.
Between these leaked e-mails and the leaked Slack transcripts in the Verge article ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27236660 ) it seems some Citizen employees are at least doing their part to push back on this ridiculousness.
when employees at facebook or google push back against the bad parts of the business, that's an encouraging sign because it might cause the company to focus more on the good parts of their business.
when the employees at a company that only exists for the sake of authoritarian bullshit start pushing back, it's not really encouraging in the same way, because Citizen has no "good part of the business" to shift to.
Putting aside this particular company, I do think that there may be a market for a service that would provide documented accountable security responses for situations where subscribers have a legitimate hesitancy for ethical reasons to call public emergency services that have a history of racism or disproportionate violence. I'm not going to call my local PD for a noise complaint I can't handle because I worry that they're going to kill a person or their dog and I don't want that on my conscience.
Likewise, there could also be a market for a service that comes to your aid when you are targeted by a private security force. For instance if someone comes to my house because of a noise complaint, I would not want to answer the door, but could call either the police or my own security service to hash it out with whoever is visiting me.
Privately owned police departments and privately funded police officers already exist in the US. University Police, private police forces at nuclear plants and chemical plants, heck I know of at least one megachurch that has a SWAT team.
The US Marshalls service has a "special deputy" program where bodyguards of the rich and famous become federal law enforcement with little to no oversight. This allows them to carry firearms nationwide regardless of state or local laws.
I'm currently reading The Sovereign Individual (1999), which predicted that the State would start to lose it's monopoly on the use of force in the Information Age. I wonder if that's what we're seeing happen here. It's a bit disturbing to think that we may be going from having a state that (in theory) offers protection to all of it's citizens to only the privileged being able to hire private security, which is virtually unaccountable to the law, at their own expense. I'm hoping that this Citizen app is just one organization that's crossing the line that is soon to be shut down, but I worry that it represents a larger trend.
Perversely this is where the equity madness leads.. in education, since they can't make everyone achieve like asian kids, they are going to eliminate programs for advanced students. Rich people will go to private schools.
In policing, since they can't figure out how to keep certain groups from committing crimes at higher rates than other groups, they're going to just stop policing. Rich people will get their own police forces.
If we want to know where we are going, we should just look at other countries with similar levels of rampant crony corruption and growing inequality. I'd say an example would be Brazil, but they actually build a lot more housing and have a stronger social safety net than the U.S., and a favela seems like a decent place to live compared to a ripped up tarp and some cardboard on the sidewalk.
I think that in most countries but the US, the state will stomp down on any such infringement hard; and in the US the state will use a much lighter and slower hand.
Every time I can think of that people have predicted (with hope or fear) the Information Age will bring about an erosion of state authority, the state's control of existing levers of power have trumped the mere ability to organize/communicate.
I sincerely hope you are reading that trash just because you want to empathize with the libertarian wing of the VC class, because it would be sad if you expected it to be the product of serious thinking.
Sounds like OmniCorp from Robocop. Private security firms in gated communications is well over 60 years old, but now augmented with new IT technologies and AI, this could be a problem, especially if legislation is passed to legitimize these outfits and give them special police powers, which many private security firms have now, including carrying firearms.
if you use the app and call for help, who shows up to help? If it's someone trained and equipped to deal with any emergency i don't see how it's going to be even remotely affordable. They would have to keep scores of these people all over every part of every city.
If it's just a random person who signed up as a responder i think they'd make the situation worse instead of better.
People lack critical thinking skills. Anyone who thinks they’re getting better value from a consumption priced private service than from a public institution funded by the progressive tax system isn’t considering the economics of it.
Like I said in another thread... You’re paying $20 per month to be a surveillance endpoint so Citizen can sell the real services to the rich.
You know what would be great? If Karens had access to an app that could deliver branded cars full of rent-a-cops to their location at the push of the button.
What's the problem, Customer? Did that nasty man demand you leash your dog in an area where dogs are required to be leashed? Let us just sit on him and hit him with sticks for a bit.
Thanks for the heads up Vice! Just signed up. Been looking for solutions to state and local CA gov pulling the rug out from under basic law enforcement.
If rich people can hire private security why can’t other people have that ability as well? As evidenced from this years riot’s lots of businesses weren’t protected by the police, I’m sure plenty of people would have needed this.
This is how the rich people hide behind whatever reason they find to justify hurting and killing random innocent people including "the Poors" and the plebs.
Now they want to be judge, jury and executioner. This should be banned
This is inevitable. Even before the defund the police movement, departments across the country had police shortages where for every 5 officers they needed, they only had 3.
Things have gotten worse regardless of which side of the debate you're on
I was just expecting AI and robots to take over ala Robocop and Little Sister cameras everywhere. I did not foresee the gig companies like Bannerman and Citizen doing it, but here we are.
Yes, I agree that US police forces need heavy reform, starting with decreasing the power and influence of their unions, then with limiting their function (e.g. they should be escorted by a health professional for mental health related calls), and then with increasing their increasing pay and expecting better and more educated results.
If we're just going to swing far right ("Nothing is wrong. Everyone else is wrong and we should stay the course"), or far left ("the police can never be reformed, let's abolish it") hammers to solve or ignore the problem, then both solutions will just lead to the same result: no one wants to be a police officer anymore which imo will also increase police brutality and crime as a side effect. If we go down either extreme route, I predict that eventually machines will be our judge, jury, and executioner. I hope I'm wrong.
Adequately funded police can still take forever to arrive or decide not to come at all. This has absolutely zero to do with defunding police. Which by the way doesn't mean taking -all- of their money away. It means readjusting their budgets and allocating some of that money to other types of responders.
There always has been a market for immediate response private security, if one has the money.
I’m homeless in SF and have had the feeling that something like this exists for about a year. Used to be in big tech, might’ve pissed people off with my mouth. I draw diagrams of how electronic harassment sustems could be implemented on my IG. Living in public isn’t scary on its own (1,085 nights), but apps like this are.
Detroit was going broke so they privatised Detroit police, OCP made the winning bid, then their plan was to replace expensive human police with cheap-to-run Robot-cops. That’s why the film was satire /first/, Hollywood-action-film second.
Unfortunately I don’t think Paul Verhoven can save us from this...
I think verhoven has a particular sense of humor and while he himself labels some of his movies satire I think he makes a particular kind of low brow action movie first and foremost. Its more "demolition man" than "a modest proposal". Labelling the whole thing as a Satire and pretending to be above Hollywood audiences is part of his sense of humor imo.
I can't afford a private chauffeur, but I can afford an Uber Black.
I can't afford a private security force, but I could afford an on-demand subscription.
You want to defund the tax-paid police? Go right ahead! Now I want to collectively fund my own security force, for crimes that the police is understaffed for, what _exactly_ is the problem?
If your concerns about police abuse or neighbors calling security on minorities, then focus on fixing that (defund them?) and let me interact with the private market. Or is this controversial from a rich-get-security perspective?
So in this dystopian future you require money in order to get security protection?
> I can't afford a private security force, but I could afford an on-demand subscription.
And if you run into hard times in life and can not afford this subscription? Are we going to have "levels" of policing depending on which company you are subscribed to and the higher cost ones offer "better" policing?
The "defund the police" movement will never be successful in a way that dismantles law enforcement. We'd have a lot more problems at that point than being forced to deal with for-profit security companies.
To me, your argument amounts to: you are rich enough to afford something, but poor people are not, so buying something unaffordable to the poor is a bad thing to do.
If anything, if 50% of the neighborhood has this subscription, and you are too poor to afford it, you can freeload on the enhanced security.
I do agree it is dystopian to require money for basic protection, and that this would not be collectively provided with tax money. Less if the protection is just enhanced (compare basic healthcare vs. being able to afford a private clinic).
If it was possible, I'd like to pay more taxes, then vote (could be democratic, not scaled to amount paid) on where it goes. If the neighborhoods really are problematic, then maybe the local government could hire on-demand security forces for when their police capacity is low (and hold them accountable and to government standards).
> you are rich enough to afford something, but poor people are not, so buying something unaffordable to the poor is a bad thing to do.
For luxuries, I agree that would be a ridiculous point to make (a poor person can't afford a new BMW, but we as a society think that's ok). But stratification among basic services that everyone should have is the opposite of equitable. This is in part why American health care is so awful if you're poor, and it's not a situation we want to duplicate with policing.
> then maybe the local government could hire on-demand security forces for when their police capacity is low (and hold them accountable and to government standards)
Not exactly the same thing, but we've done that with military contractors, and that has not worked out particularly well for accountability.
I think the American health care system is a current dystopia: people are going bankrupt in a first-world country for contracting the terrible disease.
Once basic protection, education, healthcare, etc. is offered to anyone (I do not see America in the future relying on private security forces for basic protection, so I think basic protection is covered), then private protection, education or healthcare should not be a problem.
If America really needs private forces for maintaining basic protection, then it is probably better they have oversight of local government and serve the wider public, not secluded to a gated community.
This is already a false assumption, you know nothing about me.
> you can freeload on the enhanced security
Great thanks I'm glad I got cancer, had to declare medical bankruptcy, and can now "freeload" off the rest of you hard workers who are doing the exact same thing I did for decades.
I come from a country where private security is very common. Used to be ubiquitous until people started getting beaten up because the employer said so.
So the police force just got funded enough to be bigger than all of the private companies. They are now the biggest private security service provider (yes, for profit company, separate from public police but run by the state, full of ex-police/military). It's quite ridiculous tbh.
If you're rich, you're untouchable, while poor people eat dirt in prison even if they're not guilty. Not that different from the US.
Incidentally, our military is full of used American equipment. Great value, maybe a bit too much for a country that wouldn't last a week in a war with any neighbour.
While the "defund the police" movement certainly has a lot of different motives and goals, my personal take on it is that we should be defunding the police for things that they are a bad fit for: handling things like mental health issues and doing wellness checks. Funding should be kept at levels high enough to handle being first responders to actual crimes and such.
Completely agree. Should not have taken a jab at it (maybe a reaction to those both supporting defunding public police and also vocally opposing my decisions in a private market to recover my security).
IMO The entire justice system should be revamped with a focus on rehabilitation in society and viewing most drug-related "criminals" as victims who need treatment for their addiction or illness. Also concerned about the militarization of the police, and feel their budget could be spend better.
You probably can afford a private security force right now. In LA rates are like $20/hr. Not sure what this citizen app is offering, except packaging an industry that already exists and trying to sell it at markup to people who don't know this industry exists. I guess that's a pretty decent business model actually.
An example cited in the article mentions a Citizen staffer wanting an escort to a coffee shop...if these are the types of situations where one might want to utilize a private service...what's the harm? The police aren't your personal bodyguards. Most colleges have walk-home services etc.
In many states, security guards can be armed in public, but so can private citizens.
The endgame for this will be large-scale gated communities that are town-level. A surefire to prevent homelessness in a particular town is for the entire town to be private property. If you can't card-in, you don't get in. Dystopian yes, but probably inevitable, and the trail was blazed by the modern corporate campus that operates on the same principles.
I would say the trail was blazed by cities over-correcting from the war on drugs and basically making low-level crime completely unpunished or enforced.
What happens when your private security is infringing my rights? Maybe I'll hire my own private security to fight your private security. Only a fool brings nonlethal ammo to a knife fight...
Funny thing about the second amendment, people always gloss over the well regulated militia, and we're accelerating away from that, pedal to the metal
> people always gloss over the well regulated militia
Well, 'well regulated' did not mean the same thing in 1791 that it does now. And that part of the amendment was the prefatory clause anyway, so it's moot.
Just like how rideshare apps increased the availability of car services in areas underserved by traditional taxies, on-demand security services like this can provide value in a similar way, by making available security services in areas underserved by the police.
>>Protect also advertises "Instant emergency response to your exact location,"
Seems like a bit of overselling here. "Rapid emergency response..." would be more like it. Although the request and communication to initiate response may take only seconds, the actual arrival time is unlikely to resemble "instant".
Marketing getting ahead of the ability to deliver...
