Citizen, the application of real-time crime alert, continues to grow in major cities



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Twenty minutes later, a fire of outdoor garbage was declared in another part of the city. A few kilometers to the south, a KFC employee allegedly assaulted a colleague with a chair, then 20 bikers were involved in a fight.

This is a typical San Francisco Bay Area time, as seen in Citizen, the real-time crime and fire alarm application that uses the location of the city. A smartphone to share updates on incidents occurring nearby.

He daily alerts mobile devices in New York, San Francisco and Baltimore and begins Tuesday in Los Angeles.

Citizen scans hundreds of public safety radio bands around the clock in cities and towns, where it is deployed, sometimes reproducing audio at three times the speed. It filters what it deems nonessential and sends the information in the form of factual and factual alerts to all people lying within a quarter mile of the incident. The app updates a list of details as it appears and allows nearby people to take live video or comment information.

Some local governments and some police services have their own alerting applications, and sites such as Nextdoor are filled with reports of incidents reported by users. But what sets Citizen apart is its sources, the volume and speed of its text updates. This is closer to the spirit of police scanner applications.

"What we did, by and large, is to open the emergency response system from an information standpoint," told CNN Business, Andrew Frame, co-founder and CEO of Citizen.

The Citizen app sends mobile alerts on nearby incidents, such as crimes or fires, depending on the location of the phone.

Since it comes directly from sources such as police scanners, an incident can sometimes happen to a neighbor even before police or firefighters are on the spot. He's carved a reputation as a place to get updates before local news or even Twitter. Frame said that meeting deadlines saved lives.

The attraction of crime in real time

The application, launched in 2016, drew attention after major incidents, including an evacuation of CNN headquarters in December 2018 and a truck attack on the West Side in New York in October 2018. A fire last year at Trump Tower in Manhattan, 34 simultaneous users listened to the app while the fire was burning, including that of a person inside of Trump Tower, said Frame. When a shootout occurred at YouTube's headquarters in San Bruno, California last April, some of the first details were taken from Citizen.
"Whenever a fire occurs, we sometimes warn dozens of people present in the building where the fire is occurring, and it's the first time they hear about it." A fire, "said Frame.
Most of the updates are for minor incidents such as car accidents and fights. In San Francisco, a surprising number of alerts begin with the phrase "naked man". It's common for some users to take screenshots of alerts to strangers, like a fight around cotton candy looking for a white poodle all over the city (he was found), and share them on social networks.

The company has not released user numbers yet, but thousands of viewers regularly visit New York for live video incidents. A recent car accident in Brooklyn included seven separate videos of people on the scene, over 137,000 viewers and 600 comments in the app.

Frame declined to say how the company was planning to make money with the app, but said it would not include advertising or monetization of user location information. . He raised a $ 12 million seed fundraiser led by Sequoia Capital at the end of 2017.

Trying to be a good citizen

The application, originally launched in New York under the name "Vigilante", was quickly removed from the Apple App Store for fear of encouraging people to run the risk. At the time, the New York City Police Department had ruled against the application: "The ongoing crimes should be handled by the NYPD and not by a vigilante provided with the law." a mobile phone, "he said in a statement.

Since its launch as a citizen in 2017, many of the fears over the application have faded. The police services that CNN Business contacted to comment were neutral about the application.

"The department is still evaluating the pros and cons," said an official from the San Francisco Police Department.

Meanwhile, a spokesman for the police department in Baltimore, where the app was launched in February, was in favor of more information.

"Accurate and timely information is a powerful tool for community members," said the spokesperson, before promoting the city's own crime alert app. and Nextdoor presence.

The NYPD has not responded to a request for comment.

"We know that when we announced this, the police department hated us, I do not think we're still here," Frame said. "I do not know how much they love us, but at least they do not hate us anymore."

CNN Business spoke to two San Francisco police officers who said they used the application themselves and were unaware of the many problems that residents face in order for them to be safe. involve too much at the scene of the crime. The application does not encourage people to put themselves in danger other than the red circle that says "Record".

In the Citizen application, an event includes company updates, as well as comments and live feeds from other users.

But it also does not provide information about security, but offers no advice or advice on what to do in emergency situations.

After a shot was fired at Balboa High School in San Francisco and the campus was locked up in August 2018, some students used the Citizen app for updates and to broadcast in live the scene. A student was heard to warn another that being live on the app could reveal their location to a shooter.

The co-founder of Citizen said that the application was a neutral source of information.

"We create transparency and create awareness of the situation," Frame said. "We do not influence the result of this transparency and awareness of the situation."

He added that people used it in different ways: "Some people use it to escape from a building on fire. Others use it to avoid taking a road or getting on the road. go to a subway station where there might be an incident or an emergency. "

Neighborhood apps like Nextdoor have been criticized for encouraging racial profiling. Citizen tries to avoid this by not including reports of suspicious people, according to Frame. "It's not a crime, and it's not something that goes into the application."

Balancing security with anxiety

Some of the citizen users, of whom CNN Business has spoken, have reported a very different side effect of the danger: anxiety.

According to psychologist Pamela Rutledge, director of the Center for Research on Media Psychology, the constant flow of alerts can bring "people to focus on the negative".

"This may suggest that the world is much more dangerous than it really is since these events are isolated among the thousands of other events that occur each day."

She stated that the human brain is wired "to recognize danger as part of our innate survival instinct" and that an application like Citizen can amplify the feeling of risk by giving information about a wider geographical area than necessary.

Of course, users can choose to receive fewer alerts or no alerts unless they open the application. But Frame thinks that knowing less is not necessarily the best approach.

"Two things can scare you or make you anxious," Frame said. One: To know exactly what is happening Two: Do ​​not know what is going on around you.

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