[Scan-DC] Has anybody tried the Citizen app?

[Alan Henney]

CNN Wire

March 12, 2019 Tuesday 9:07 PM GMT

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

BYLINE: By Heather Kelly, CNN Business

LENGTH: 1213 words

DATELINE: SAN FRANCISCO (CNN Business)

SAN FRANCISCO (CNN Business) -- At 8:07 p.m. on Monday evening in San
Francisco, a man was spotted shooting a gun at streetlights.

Twenty minutes later, an outdoor trash fire broke out in another part of
the city. A few miles south, a KFC employee allegedly assaulted a co-worker
with a chair, and then 20 bikers were reportedly involved in a brawl.

It's a typical hour in the San Francisco Bay Area as seen through Citizen,
the real-time crime and fire alerting app that uses a smartphone's location
to share updates about incidents happening nearby.

Its alerts ping mobile devices daily in New York City, San Francisco,
Baltimore and starting Tuesday, Los Angeles.

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

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

"What we have done, in essence, is open up the emergency response system
from an information perspective," Citizen co-founder and CEO Andrew Frame
told CNN Business.

Because it is drawing straight from sources like police scanners, news of
an incident can sometimes reach a neighbor before police or fire fighters
are even on the scene. It has earned a reputation as a place to get updates
before local news or even Twitter. Frame said the timeliness has helped
save lives.

The pull of real-time crime

The app, which launched in 2016, gained attention after major incidents
including an evacuation of CNN's headquarters in December 2018 and a truck
attack on New York's West Side in October 2018. During a fire last year at
Trump Tower in Manhattan, 34 simultaneous users livestreamed on the app as
the fire blazed, including one from a person inside Trump Tower, Frame
said. When a shooting happened at YouTube's headquarters in San Bruno,
California, last April, some of the earliest details were from Citizen
livestreams.

"Every time a fire happens, we notify sometimes dozens of people that are
within the building where the fire is occurring, and this is the first time
they're hearing of fire," said Frame.

Most updates are for smaller incidents, like 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 the stranger
alerts, like a fight over cotton candy or the citywide search for a white
poodle (it was found), and share them on social media.

The company has not yet released user numbers, but incidents with
livestreamed video will regularly have thousands of viewers in New York. A
recent car crash in Brooklyn included seven separate videos from people at
the scene, more than 137,000 viewers and 600 comments in the app.

Frame declined to share how the company plans to make money off of the app
but said it will not include advertisements or monetize users' location
information. It raised a $12 million round of funding led by Sequoia
Capital in late 2017.

Trying to be a good Citizen

The app originally launched in New York with the name "Vigilante" and was
quickly taken down from the Apple App Store over concerns it would
encourage people to rush toward danger. At the time, the New York City
Police Department spoke out against the app: "Crimes in progress should be
handled by the NYPD and not a vigilante with a cell phone," it said in a
statement.

Since it relaunched as Citizen in 2017, many of the early fears about the
app have faded. Police departments CNN Business reached out to for comment
were neutral about the app.

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

Meanwhile, a police department spokesperson in Baltimore, where the app
launched in February, was in support of more information.

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

The NYPD did not reply to a request for comment.

"We know when we first came out with this, the police department hated us.
I don't think we're still there," said Frame. "I don't know how much they
love us, but they at least don't hate us anymore."

CNN Business spoke to two San Francisco police officers who said they used
the app themselves and weren't aware of many issues with residents getting
too involved with crime scenes. The app doesn't encourage people to put
themselves in danger other than the red circle that says "Record."

But it also doesn't provide information on how to stay safe, offering no
tips or advice on what to do in emergency situations.

After a gun was fired at San Francisco's Balboa High School and the campus
was put on lockdown in August 2018, some students used the Citizen app for
updates and to livestream the scene. One student was heard warning another
that being live on the app could give away their location to a shooter.

Citizen's co-founder said the app is a neutral source for information.

"We create transparency, and we create situational awareness," Frame said.
"We do not influence the result of that transparency and situational
awareness."

He added that people use it in different ways: "Some people use it to
escape a burning building. Other people use it to not turn down a certain
road or go into a certain subway station where there might be an active
incident or emergency."

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

Balancing safety with anxiety

Some of the Citizen users CNN Business spoke with reported a side effect
much different from walking into danger: anxiety.

According to psychologist Pamela Rutledge, director of the Media Psychology
Research Center, the constant stream of alerts can cause "people to hyper
focus on the negative."

"This can lead to a perception that the world is much more dangerous that
it really is since these events are isolated among the thousands of other
events that occur every day."

She said the human brain is hardwired "to notice danger as part of our
innate survival instinct" and an app like Citizen can amplify the sensation
of risk by giving information on a larger geographic area than necessary.

Of course, users can choose to receive fewer alerts or no alerts unless
they open the app. But Frame thinks knowing less isn't necessarily best
approach.

"There's two things that can make you scared or make you anxious," said
Frame. "One: Knowing exactly what's going on. Two: Not knowing what's going
on around you."