They also appear to have a private security force (or to have branded a vehicle in a way that implies this, presumably because dystopian imagery seems like good marketing) https://www.vice.com/en/article/7kv88q/citizen-los-angeles-c....

Jesus, that’s chilling.

> “Subscription law enforcement service” [0]

[0]: https://losangelesprofessionalsecurity.com/

How are they not guilty of impersonating the police?

By never claiming they are police.

If their vest said police or had a police badge, or if they claimed to be police, they'd be guilty of impersonating police.

Dressing up in a generic tacticool uniform isn't impersonating police.

They have pictures which clearly show them detaining someone (at least for the camera). I think at some point this crosses a boundary, or at the very least it should https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5e55ad75dc2699....

Citizen’s (heh) arrests are legal (in some jurisdictions and with some restrictions). I’d assume that’s what’s happening in that photo.

I would hope to god one could make the legal argument that one only submitted to the arrest being under the impression they were police officers, and that they were thus impersonating police. Then sue them to hell and destroy the company.

I don’t see how people can build companies like this or work such jobs. It really stretches the limits of human decency.

That's the anarcho-capitalist security model, isn't it?

But if anything actually goes wrong they'll hide behind real security - the government and the police.

Fuck yeah, this is awesome. I’ve always wanted local enforcement that is decoupled from the nonsense that the police do.

Instead of SFPD, I could have my neighborhood served by high end local security that’s more responsive to local needs. We’ll just cut our spend if they’re douches instead of having some Dianne Feinstein sitting on Billionaire’s Row telling me that I need to accept some amount of robberies.

Fuck yeah! I’m rooting for you, Frame. Democratize access to police.

> Democratize access to police.

Pay to play policing seems... the opposite of what you're asking for? Can you elaborate on this?

Sure². I believe that decentralization and federalism are critical to democracy, i.e. the ability for local groups of people to opt-out of constraints that the rest of society wants to put on them is a good thing, or to opt-in to local constraints that the rest of society decides against. I see one of America's strengths as her federalism, where groups of people do this successfully.

Examples of this that I am hugely a fan of:

* California's stance on non-competes

* California's stance on not treating HIV-positive people differently from other people with STDs

* San Francisco's stance on AI-based policing

* Portola's (a neighbourhood in SF) stance on cars on sidewalks (otherwise illegal in SF) and the Dolores St median parking

At each layer, the group of people collectively decide what makes sense for their society, and then put it into practice.

In my ideal world, this is easy to do at each layer. My least ideal world has an all powerful Commander in (say) Washington DC who decides how people park in Portola.

For most things this is fine, devolution works. For policing, my neighbourhood is subject to the judgment of some person in City Hall who lives in a very affluent neighbourhood. They take my tax money, my payroll taxes, my sales taxes and eat it all. The policing there is far superior to that in my neighbourhood because they use the second currency: power.

I would prefer to just use the first currency: money¹. Every avenue where the first currency is prohibited for outcomes, the second currency takes over. As an immigrant to this country, I don't have the long relations that allow a normal person to have access to the second currency. I am also not Elon Musk or Ron Conway successful and so don't have that avenue to the second currency.

But I do have the first currency. So I would prefer to use the first currency (and the goodwill and first currency of my neighbours) to provide services to the devolved local admin region of my choice.

Policing is currently out of reach but I think it is possible eventually. It just needs some tech and organizational skillwork to get there. After all we already have the Patrol Special Police. It won't take too much work, unless they're too tightly enmeshed.

¹ To be clear, they can continue to eat my taxes. They're the predator, I'm the prey. So be it. I just want to also have some additional services to pay for. They can keep eating my flesh if they want.

² Unfortunately, heavy downvoting will trigger the flamebait filter and I won't be able to respond soon. I'm not complaining about the votes. It's okay to express displeasure that way. But if you happen to want a discussion, I'm afraid you're going to have to email me because I will likely be unable to respond to you soon. That's just how this platform works. I am saying what I am in good faith, definitely not trolling. Also, this comment will have to serve as response to everyone else too for the same reason.

EDIT: Apologies to responders, but I don't want to receive a site ban because I also like to talk about tech. Email me if you want to continue the conversation, or if you want some other public place, go ahead and pick it and we can chat there. Besides, if people are saying "Stop saying what you're saying" then I should be polite and either stop saying it or accept further censure. I'm going to choose the former.

It seems weird to conflate private policing with concepts like decentralization and federalism; which are pretty common in the world (see: Canada, Switzerland, Australia, the European Union, etc etc).

They don't seem related.

I actually agree with you that decentralization and federalism are critical to a functioning democracy, especially in a pluralistic/heterogenous republic, but there are so many questions I have on how pay-for-policing can reliably work.

* What happens when a private police patroller is within proximity of a victim of violent crime that doesn't have the "first currency" and is not a paid subscriber?

* Are the private police authorized to use force? If so, who anoints this power?

Nothing prevents you from hiring a bodyguard or a security guard/guards. Have you tried that?

I am also a fan of devolution, but it has significant limitations when it comes to policing. Police need more than just local accountability.

There is a fundemental need to trust that non-locals will be treated fairly alongside locals. A lack of fair treatment is already a problem for outsiders and out-groups in this country.

Policing devolution can happen, but it has to be structured in a way to maintain accountability. The concern is that as private security moves into policing, this creates incentives to make our existing policing problems worse.

Hey, how do you do the superscript 1 and 2?

Unicode: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superscripts_and_Subscripts_(U...

> Democratize access to police.

That's not what's happening here, for a few reasons. The first being that these are mercenaries (or "security contractors" if you want to use euphemisms), not police. Furthermore, nothing is being "democratized" here. They only work for you if you pay them. This has nothing to do with democracy.

Agreed. I really detest how the word "democratize" got buzzed to death. It's become a zombie marketing term, and it wraps familiar ideology with vague associations of a rallying cry. Better phrasing maybe: it's a zombie marketing term that became a persistent and damaging bit of propaganda/ ideological meme.

Democratized means cheap enough that an upper middle class person can afford it. Disrupted means fucked up. I also hate this language.

Well put!

Even if we allow ourselves to imagine policing as a commodity in the most charitable way possible, what citizen did is still way out of bounds. Rabble rousing an anonymous mob to chase people down is something different from buying security on the open market. I'm against even the most charitable take on private policing because it requires an incredibly childish understanding of society to even take seriously, but these psychopaths are just forming random lynch mobs and should have their funding pulled.

In your mind, does a company like Frame have the authority to use force and/or arrest people? What happens if one resists arrest?

Frame is not the company. Andrew Frame is the CEO of Citizen.

You’re right, a typo. Question still stands.

With a name like that you don't need to wonder what's going on in the CEO's head. Why is such permitted in civilized society?

Because it's the sort of mentality America was founded on. Not trying to be political, though I'm sure this can be an unpleasant topic. A couple hundred years of, "you're responsible for defending your land and it's your right to defend it," has fascinating and, often, disastrous outcomes.

I would disagree with that pretty strongly.

Big difference between an individual defending his property/family with his own property vs funneling that defense through a corporate crowd-sourced surveillance system.

The idea of property being defended by an individual is the myth. The reality was that, on the frontier, property was defended by the community. It wasn't just you, standing there with your musket, fending off the hordes of "injuns" and "rustlers" all by your lonesome. It was you and your posse.

I think the vigilantism implicitly endorsed by Citizen is entirely typical of the historical American attitude towards how one should defend their property. Moreover, it speaks to the breakdown of law and order in California that an app that organizes a modernized form of "frontier justus" can find enough traction to get off the ground.

I don't think this speaks much of California given that it was founded in New York years ago. It just so happens that this incident took place in one of the most populous places in the US, but I wouldn't rush to imply causation.

I agree there is a difference, though I'm not sure it's big. It's a natural evolution of individual efforts to coalesce into a group effort. That's the history of humanity.

Right, but banding together in mobs tends to precede the establishment of a state with laws, due process etc. Hence why we tend to be appalled by vigilantes (even the professionals do a pretty uneven job when it comes to enforcing our laws, letting everyone do it as a hobby is not likely to produce a better result?)

The _existing police_ is a banded together mob.

Citizen and all other private security firms operate under the same laws as any other individual or company. It’s not like these guys went out and started committing violent felonies...

The existing local police is a coalesced group effort. In some regions (like SF) the existing institutions are no longer effective. There is nothing surprising or particularly heinous about an attempt to create alternatives.

Add to that a conservatism that treats the constitution like a religious text designed to curtail any kind of societal evolution or transformation as circumstances change.

Some people in the US do not consider vigilantism to be antisocial behavior.

For example, in my neighborhood a few people freaked out over a guy going through people's trash cans (trash cans are located in the alley, so not on anyone's property). This involved lots of internet sturm und drang, with people arguing whether or not it's legal to shoot someone going through your trash.

It’s... trash. While it’s not an elegant thing to dig through trash, what’s wrong with someone doing it? You threw it away which means you don’t care what happens to it, right?

It's a rather large privacy violation

It can be but this person was searching for cans not identity theft or stalker stuff. Also: if they were sniffing around for that stuff, killing them on public property when they pose no immediate threat to you or anyone else isn’t the answer.

Your neighbours are sick in the head.

It isn't really permitted. That's why they had to change their name and that's why this incident is news.

He's rich. Rich people do whatever they want in USA.

I dunno, maybe it's because the state itself is not much better? To some degree, if some asshole falsely accuses you, at least you have the grounds for a civil suit where the judiciary is a true neutral party and be recompensed. Whereas when the state via its law enforcement does something bad to you the judiciary isn't truly neutral, the best you can hope for is for it to try to be.