Citizen Wants to Send Private Security Teams to Your Neighborhood

In Nod to Dystopian Fiction, Citizen Wants to Send Private Security Teams to Your Neighborhood

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In what truly seems like a dystopian nightmare come to life, the public safety alert app Citizen apparently has plans to hire teams of security contractors to respond to app users’ incident response requests—a sort of Blackwater-ification of local public safety that can surely only lead to good things. When it started back in 2016, Citizen had a different name, Vigilante, and it was known for encouraging people to film and share videos of criminal activity in their community. Since then, the company rebranded, got a lot more funding, and transformed itself into a real-time public safety notification system that uses push alerts to tell users about local emergency information like fires, medical events and crime. Now, merely a day or so after the company mistakenly put a bounty on an L.A. homeless man and falsely accused him of starting wildfires, Motherboard reports that ex-employees and leaked internal documents show Citizen’s next cool thing: imminent plans to contract with major security firms to send private goon squads to your neighborhood, where they will ostensibly check on whether you’re OK or not.

Well, we all know what a great job Blackwater did in Iraq. I can't see how sending armed private security to do the job that police are supposed to be doing could possibly go wrong, can you? Of course, the police think this is a bad idea too.

Oh wait, they don't:

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The cops seem to think this is all a good idea, too. Emails viewed by Motherboard allege that the Los Angeles Police Department has been in touch with Citizen and called the solution a “game changer.” The emails intimate that the LAPD has been “overrun with property crime, and the agency has effectively thrown its hands up because they don’t have enough officers on the street to respond to these sorts of calls.” The police department, when reached for comment Friday, neither confirmed nor denied that it had made contact with the company: “We are working to verify if anyone at LAPD was contacted by Citizen app,” said Det. Meghan Aguilar, of the LAPD’s Media Relations Division, in an email to Gizmodo. “At this time, we are not able to confirm if what is included in online articles is accurate as it relates to LAPD.”

I just can't wait to be taken hostage in a bank robbery, and have these guys show up instead of the cops because one of the hostages has their app. They can come in with guns blazing and save their client while leaving me to be killed. Sounds like I better pony up for this service right away!

via International Skeptics Forum https://ift.tt/3wpEatk