What is Citizen? The controversial app for safety alerts and crime tracking, explained

• Citizen is a smartphone app that alerts you when crimes, emergencies, and other potentially dangerous events happen in your area.
• Events reported by Citizen are taken automatically from recent 911 calls, but users near the scene are encouraged to upload videos and pictures of what's going on.
• Although some have praised Citizen for keeping people aware of danger, others have criticized the app and its comment sections for fostering paranoia and racism.

In 2016, the New York-based corporation sp0n, Inc. launched an app called Vigilante. The supposed purpose of the app, based on the marketing that sp0n released for it, was to allow ordinary people to report on local crimes in their area and broadcast live video from the scene - possibly deterring the criminals in the process.

Vigilante was eventually removed from app stores for encouraging people to put themselves in harm's way for content.

Fast forward a few years, and sp0n has replaced that app with a new version called Citizen. Citizen has made a few changes to the formula, including constant messages about not putting yourself in danger when reporting crimes.

Other than that, though, Citizen is basically the same: An app for keeping aware of crime in your neighborhood, and reporting on it if you're nearby.

Here's everything to know about Citizen, including its purpose, uses, and the criticisms of it.

Citizen is built to keep users aware of danger in their area

There's an app for everything these days, including police scanners - and at its core, that's essentially what Citizen is, too.

Citizen's base function is to give users real-time notifications about crime, accidents, and other sorts of dangerous events in their area. All the notifications are taken from real 911 calls, although only a fraction of all calls in your area actually make it onto the app.

The app can also give you information about other events, like road closures or police activity - if you want to know why a certain street is closed, or why there's a helicopter flying overhead, all you need to do is check the Citizen app and you'll likely have your answer.

These real-time updates can be incredibly helpful if you've seen an incident and want to know what's happening. Citizen has also started participating in COVID-19 contact tracing, allowing users to know right away when they've had a possible exposure so that they can take the necessary precautions.

According to their website, Citizen alerts go out hours faster than AMBER alerts, which means people can be on the lookout for missing children hours earlier - which can and has actually worked for spotting missing persons in the past.

The live video feature of the app also means that people can see what is going on at the scene of a crime, emergency, or other event as it unfolds - no more waiting for the nightly news to come on for more information.

This also means that it's possible to get more points of view, and therefore more information about what transpired. Activists, for example, have taken to the app for its ability to record and transmit protest activity, and hold counter-protestors accountable for their actions.

sp0n, Inc. has even marketed the app as a solution for police brutality, saying that users can record police officers behaving badly and report it on the app.

However, despite these features, not everyone believes that Citizen is a force for good.

Critics of Citizen accuse the app of fostering racist attitudes and unwarranted paranoia

Despite the potential uses Citizen has, many critics have pointed out issues with the platform.

The first complaint goes back to when the app was called Vigilante: That the app encourages people to go towards crime scenes so that they can film them, rather than stay away from them. Safety experts and police departments alike have given warnings about the danger of this.

There are other objections to the app as well - Philadelphia activist Reuben Jones, for example, told Philadelphia Magazine that he worries that the ability for someone to see crime reports for any area at any time will create a sort of crime voyeurism network, and "stigmatize a whole community and put a whole bunch of people under additional scrutiny."

Not only that, but there are others who worry that constant notifications of crime in one's own area will create paranoia and anxiety - even for those who live in safe neighborhoods.

It should also be noted that since Citizen allows users to comment on any crime or incident as it's being reported, the app has notably become a host to racist comments.

Whether Citizen can help users more than hurt them remains to be seen. For now, at least, the app is gaining popularity, and spreading into more cities year-by-year. As it expands, the debate surrounding the app - which is inextricably linked to larger discussions of criminal justice reform in the US - will likely keep going.

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