Re:Citizen pays New Yorkers to livestream crime scenes
by aiisahik on Monday July 26, 2021 @03:41PM
(#27964381)
Yeah their whole mentality of vigilantism is weird but we should be encouraging citizens to take out their phones and document things. Otherwise George Floyd would be another statistic and nobody would know his name.
The encouragement of cell phone footage works both ways - it can document more crime that induces anxiety from the right or it can document more police abuses. Citizen's agenda is off but their tool of choice is right.
are you so sure about that? You might happen to be the 'wrong guy' who accidentally gets into the crossfire of the citizen app mob one day.
""first name? What is it?! publish ALL info," Frame told employees working in a Citizen Slack room who were working on the case. "FIND THIS FUCK," he told them. "LETS GET THIS GUY BEFORE MIDNIGHT HES GOING DOWN." "BREAKING NEWS. this guy is the devil. get him," Frame said. "by midnight!@#! we hate this guy. GET HIM." He was growing impatient. He increased the bounty to $20,000. Thousands of people were watching Citizen's livestream, but the man still hadn't been caught. Frame asked his staff to send out another notification, one that would hit all Citizen users in Los Angeles. The bounty had to go higher. "Close in on him. 30k Let's get him. No escape. Let's increase. 30k," Frame said. "Notify all of la. Blast to all of la.[...]"
"Well after midnight, Los Angeles police made an arrest. In a separate Slack room, employees cautiously began to celebrate: "cop said its an ongoing investigation, this looks like our guy!!!" one employee wrote. It wasn't Citizen's guy. Frame and the entirety of the Citizen apparatus had spent a whole night putting a bounty on the head of an innocent man."
https://www.vice.com/en/article/y3dpyw/inside-crime-app-citi...