The latest attempt at crowdsourced policing is an “Uber for police” app.
Communities across the country are turning to crowdsourced mobile apps in order to report suspicious activity or crimes to their local police departments. In Washington D.C.’s Georgetown neighborhood, as part of “Operation GroupMe,” law enforcement and local businesses used the group messaging app GroupMe to try and crack down on shoplifting. As Terrence McCoy reported in the Washington Post, though the intent to crack down on shoplifting may be admirable, “the result … has been less so, laying bare the racial fault lines that still define this cobblestoned enclave of tony boutiques and historic rowhouses that is home to many of Washington’s elite.”
But where Washington D.C. police relied on a free app (GroupMe), in New Orleans a private real estate developer spent $500,000 to develop a new app and program: the French Quarter Task Force (FQTF). The app allows those living in the French Quarter to to report crimes, take photos of suspicious people, and, as Ethan Chiel reports in Fusion, “off-duty police officers are paid $50/hour to check out reports of crime or suspicious activity as determined by anyone using the app.” That functionality has earned the app the nickname “Uber for cops,” attracting other cities like St. Louis to test out the app.
NBC’s national news site credulously reports that FQTF “brought violent crime down a whopping 45 percent in just 7 months.”
In fact, it’s not clear what role the app played in the drop in violent crime reports: police themselves bill the app as a way to report nonviolent crimes.
Whatever their other effects, apps like these appear bound to reflect and reinforce racial prejudice. As Chiel writes: “In case after case apps designed for community policing inevitably reflect the racial biases of the community members doing the policing … The reality is that these apps are crowd-sourced extensions of surveillance that America’s black population is subjected to on a day-to-day basis.” Another concern is transparency: while it can be hard to get information from large police departments, like the NYPD or LAPD, it’s still possible. “With private groups like the FQTF, on the other hand,” Chiel notes, “there is no federally-mandated requirement that they comply with information requests.”
