Mapping Crime, or Paranoia?

South Park Studies: Safety in the Public Realm

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Technology has given the average citizen more information about crime in their community than ever before. Warnings and rumors fill the app Nextdoor, and Ring’s Neighbors app allows people to share video from their own doorbell with neighbors. Citizen, a controversial public safety app, allows people to track crime in real time using police reports, 911 calls, and ambulance dispatches. Learn more in this article from CityLab:

An App For Mapping Crime, or Urban Paranoia?
CityLab, March 11, 2019

It is 2:25 p.m. on a Wednesday, and on North Streeper Street in East Baltimore, a worker is threatening to burn down a building. Seven hours earlier and a few blocks north, a woman was assaulted. The day before, in the same neighborhood, a shot was reportedly fired, and a teenager was spotted “with axe” by a 911 caller who said the boy was off his ADHD medication. Last weekend, another woman — or the same one — was assaulted there, too.

I know all this and more not because I’ve reporting from the streets of Maryland’s biggest city but because I’ve been tracking Baltimore for the last few weeks on an app called Citizen. Using police reports, 911 calls, and ambulance dispatches, the public safety app places red dots of varying sizes on a dark, gray-scale Gothamscape. They glow like sirens, indicating where and when and with what intensity things are going wrong. With the tenor of a military video game, Citizen creates an image of a city coursing with widespread dysfunction each day — for free, and in real time.

Citizen was deployed first in the New York City metro area in 2016 and then in San Francisco, before launching last month in Charm City. There’s a big difference between the app’s initial markets — two affluent enclaves that are now enjoying historically low homicide rates — and its third one. Of the 50 biggest U.S. cities, Baltimore reported the highest homicide rate in 2017; nearly 24 percent of its residents live below the federal poverty line. The city, said Citizen founder and CEO Andrew Frame, was specifically chosen in part because of these fearsome stats. “Given the escalating crime and lack of public safety resources, Baltimore was a great place to try something new,” Frame wrote in a blog post.

Read the full article here.

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South Park Studies is a new initiative designed to bring you news and resources on the topics we hear questions about the most — homelessness, daycare and school availability, transportation, and more. Each topic will consist of a multi-week series of article recommendations, volunteer opportunities, and more. Catch up on our first series, exploring homelessness, by clicking here. Learn more about South Park by visiting southpark.la.