Jackson Heights Life

A small excerpt from this very good criticism of Citizen:
https://www.phillymag.com/news/2020/02/24/citizen-app-philadelphia/

"Another concern: The constant crime notifications coming in through Citizen have the potential to shape users’ psychology, says Temple criminal justice professor Ajima Olaghere. Maybe someone watches a series of crime-scene videos in a neighborhood with boarded-up homes. There’s nothing criminal about boarded-up homes, but now an association has been made. In facilitating this, the app “reinforces perceptions of people’s ideas of crime and fear.” These “notions of ‘disorder,'” she adds, “stoke fear in people and often translate to a 911 call” even when nothing criminal is going on.

Citizen can also shift the perspective of longtime residents. Lynn Rinaldi, who has lived in Girard Estates for 20 years, never used to worry about coming home late at night after work at Paradiso, the East Passyunk restaurant she used to own. But she recently downloaded Citizen, and seeing all the crime notifications “created a little bit of anxiety for me,” she says. “I started to say, I’m not going to take my car out after dark; I’ll just Uber if have to go somewhere.” Though she decided to stop checking the app, it’s easy to imagine how Citizen could produce a self-perpetuating cycle in someone else: A user downloads Citizen and becomes more anxious about crime; the person becomes hyper-vigilant and starts calling 911 when something “suspicious” goes on; that, in turn, generates new Citizen notifications, which ultimately makes everyone else using the app more paranoid, too."