Trust For Public Land Releases National Park Score 2021: Mesa Ranks #96 In The Nation and Lowest for Arizona Cities

This year's results of the annual survey were much the same as years before - near the bottom

Ranking Park Systems in the 100 Largest U.S. Cities  

Mesa, AZ             

2021 ParkScore^® Ranking: #96

The analysis is based on five characteristics of an effective park system: access, investment, acreage, amenities, and equity.

Reference Source: https://www.tpl.org/city/mesa-arizona

2% of Mesa's city land is used for parks and recreation.     

National median 15%

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RELATED CONTENT ON THIS BLOG Report from 2018

Reference: https://mesazona.blogspot.com/2018/05/real-news-trust-for-public-land-ranks.html

It's not often that a message your MesaZona has been sending for more than three years now gets some more momentum from a non-profit organization named The Trust For Public Land.

What's the message?

> To empower people to hold their leaders accountable

> To ensure residents are involved and engaged.

When is Mesa Mayor John Giles gonna get that?                               Clue-Less is NO EXCUSE.

Our 10-Minute Walk^™ campaign calls on mayors to demonstrate their commitment to parks and adopt long-term, system-wide strategies to ensure every resident has a great park close to home.

Tell your mayor: pledge to make parks a priority!

Find out how

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NEW YORK, NY — A new report has ranked the best cities in America for park systems.

The Trust For Public Land, a San Francisco based nonprofit group that aims to create parks and protect land for people, released its 7th annual ParkScore rankings 3 days ago 

 

The Trust for Public Land Releases 2018 ParkScore® Index, Ranking ...

https://www.tpl.org/.../trust-public-land-releases-2018-parkscore®-index-ranking-par..

3 days ago - The Trust for Public Land Releases 2018 ParkScore® Index,

______________________________________________________

Ranking Park Systems in the 100 Largest U.S. Cities 

" . . . The national nonprofit organization is leading a movement to put a park or natural area within a 10-minute walk of every U.S. resident.

More than 200 mayors have endorsed the 10-minute goal.

"The research is clear: quality, close-to-home parks are essential to communities. Everyone deserves a great park within a 10-minute walk of home," said Diane Regas, President and CEO of The Trust for Public Land. "These rankings are the gold-standard for park access and quality, and empower people to hold their leaders accountable.” . . .
This shows how the onus is on cities to make parks as attractive as possible and also to ensure their residents are involved and engaged.

Source: https://www.smartcitiesdive.com/news

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Dive Insight:

TPL is pushing hard for city residents to be a 10-minute walk or less from a park.

The organization unveiled its ParkServe tool earlier this year in collaboration with mapping software Esri to provide information on who does and does not have such access.

The benefits of parks, especially for those who live in cities, include higher levels of physical activity for residents while mitigating the risk of storm damage and helping with issues like carbon emissions.

“High quality parks make cities healthier in nearly every way,” Adrian Benepe, TPL’s senior vice president and director of city park development, said in a statement.

ParkScore’s rankings are based on access, acreage, investment and amenities, which counts the availability of features like off-leash dog parks, playgrounds, basketball hoops, “splashpads” and restrooms. The rankings added the latter two this year as part of its calculations on amenities, as well as volunteer hours and charitable contributions for spending.

The ParkScore rankings were based on four factors:
park access,
acreage,
investment
Amenities

Here are the lowest-ranking park systems:

90. Baton Rouge, LA: 32.9
91. Memphis, TN: 32.8
92. Winston Salem, NC: 31.9
93. Laredo, TX: 31.5
94. Fresno, CA: 30.9
95. Hialeah, FL: 29.7
96. Mesa, AZ: 28.4
97. Charlotte, NC: 25.0
____________________________________________________________________________

RELATED CONTENT 2019 - The trust — a national nonprofit that conserves land for park and historic use — scored Mesa in the bottom five for the third consecutive year, although its ParkScore this year is 95, up one spot from last year.

Mesa officials take issue with low parks rating

• By Jordan Houston, Tribune Staff Writer
• Sep 2, 2019 

Reference: https://www.eastvalleytribune.com/news/mesa-officials-take-issue-with-low-parks-rating/article_6b32099e-cb72-11e9-a827-0f8b5ab2957c.html        

Mesa parks officials say they do the best they can with the resources they have to provide residents with enough parks, such as Riverview Park. (Special to the Tribune)

More . . .Homeowners associations is another element not included in the ParkScore. 

PRIVATELY-OWNED

“We have a lot of neighborhood parks managed and owned by the HOA,” said Heirshberg. “So, when we’re balancing and looking at where city investments make sense, we want to make sure we’re not duplicating services that are already being provided.” 

“We don’t have that much additional vacant land for us to develop,” he added. ???????????????????

The parks and recreation director also noted that while the city may be out of space for additional parks, it still maintains and updates its current parks. 

A few new projects are in the works, thanks to the passing of a capital bond last November that allocated $75 million to the department. 

A 2-acre public plaza that will “complement and support” downtown is underway. 

The site, which is expected to be done by the summer of 2021, will include passive small and large group areas, shaded seating, a water feature, a seasonal ice skating rink and grassy area for recreation. 

At Palo Verde Park, aging equipment will be replaced and shade addition will be provided, while Red Mountain Park will also look at expansions. 

Future projects include a 1.5-acre expansion at the Countryside Dog Park and parking lot improvements at the Crimson & Elliot Basin. 

Monterey Park Athletic Field will see four lighted youth baseball and softball fields, three lighted soccer fields, a playground shade structure and additional parking near the existing park near Power and Guadalupe. 

Construction for the phase 2 of Signal Butte work is also expected to be completed by summer 2023. 

“The other piece with this score is that the Trust for Public Land is looking at how many parks communities have and where they’re at,” said Heirshberg. “But it doesn’t talk about how they are managing the resources they do have.” 

He noted that Mesa is one of four finalists for the National Gold Medal Award for Excellence in Parks and Recreation Management, which recognizes excellence in management in parks and recreation operations.

 

 

“I think we’re doing the best we can — if not better than — providing the acreage and the properties we have available,” said Marc Heirshberg, Mesa parks, recreation and community facilities director.  

How Electric Roads Could Power the Future

Just another one of those wild and wonderful things that could be? How do we get from what's here now to a future that's free from using fossil-fuels for moving people, goods and services?

Intelligent and autonomous transport using hydrogen and battery-powered vehicles may be one of the solutions to the problems created by using internal-combustion engines at the advent of the 19th Century - from "horse-power" to "horse-less-carriages", to cranked-up cars using the power of ignition and "auto-mobiles" guzzling gallons of gasoline on roads and highways at the same time emitting tons of toxic transmissions that pollute the air and destroy the environment.

On the road ahead (maybe) A Carbon-Free Future.

What exactly might alter that "footprint" ?

A 1.2-mile stretch of road in Sweden does that by electrifying a rail in-the-roadway, Electreon.

South Korea did it another way in 2013

World’s first road-powered electric vehicle network switches on in South Korea

• By Sebastian Anthony on August 6, 2013 at 7:51 am [Source:https://www.extremetech.com/]

South Korea has rolled out the world’s first road-powered electric vehicle network. The network consists of special roads that have electrical cables buried just below the surface, which wirelessly transfer energy to electric vehicles via magnetic resonance. Road-powered electric vehicles are exciting because they only require small batteries, significantly reducing their overall weight and thus their energy consumption. There’s also the small fact that, with an electrified roadway, you never have to plug your vehicle in to recharge it, removing most of the risk and range anxiety associated with electric vehicles (EVs).

The network consists of 24 kilometers (15 miles) of road in the city of Gumi, South Korea. For now, the only vehicles that can use the network are two Online Electric Vehicles (OLEV) — public transport buses

How Electric Roads Could Power the Future

The transition from horse to horsepower ushered in an infrastructural revolution that rippled through every part of society and made the modern world possible. A century later, we may be on the cusp of another massive transformation, this time with electric roads. (Source: Bloomberg)

May 27th, 2021, 3:58 AM MDT

A new paper by Thomas Piketty makes the rise of right-wing populism look like a historical inevitability

From The Economist: You could fill a small library with book on RIGHT-WING POPULISM.

Some authors argue that these movements emerged in reaction to relatively recent events, such as the financial crisis of 2007-09 or the advent of social media.

Others look to longer-lasting regional trends, like European integration or racial politics in America

"Thomas Piketty, an economist, became famous for a book that analysed 200 years of data on wealth inequality in a wide range of countries. This month he published a paper, co-written by Amory Gethin and Clara Martínez-Toledano, which applies a similar approach to the relationship between demography and ideology.

Source: “Brahmin Left versus Merchant Right”

by Amory Gethin, Clara Martínez-Toledano and Thomas Piketty (working paper, 2021)

Its findings imply that the electoral victories of Donald Trump and the Brexit campaign in 2016 were not an abrupt departure from precedent, but rather the consequence of a 60-year-old international trend.

In a paper in 2018 Mr Piketty noted that elites in Britain, France and America were split between intellectuals who backed left-of-centre parties—he dubbed them the “Brahmin left”—and businesspeople who preferred right-wing ones (the “merchant right”).

Brahmins v merchants
Educated voters’ leftward shift is surprisingly old and international

May 29th 2021

His new work expands this study from three Western democracies to 21.

It combines data on parties’ policy positions with surveys that show how vote choices varied between demographic groups.

The paper finds that income and education began diverging as predictors of ideology long ago.

> In 1955 both the richest and the most educated voters tended to support conservative parties. > Conversely, both poorer and less-educated people mostly chose labour or social-democratic ones.

Today, wealthy people still lean to the right.

> In contrast, the relationship between education and ideology began to reverse as early as the 1960s. Every year, the 10% of voters with the most years of schooling gravitated towards left-wing parties, while the remaining 90% slid the other way.

> By 2000, this had gone on for so long that, as a group, the most educated voters became more left-wing than their less-educated peers. The gap has only grown since then.

> This trend is strikingly consistent. It developed just as fast in the 20th century as in the 21st, and appears in almost every Western democracy studied. This includes both two-party systems and proportional ones, in which green parties now lure educated voters, and nativist parties attract the less educated.

Such breadth and regularity make the rise of right-wing populists like Mr Trump—and of left-of-centre technocrats like Emmanuel Macron or Justin Trudeau—look like a historical inevitability.

Although the authors do not identify a cause for this trend, the simplest explanation is that it stems from growing educational attainment.

> In 1950 less than 10% of eligible voters in America and Europe had graduated from college. Any party relying on this group for support would have had scant hope of winning elections.

> In contrast, more than a third of Western adults today have degrees, which is enough to anchor a victorious coalition.

> And once candidates and parties began catering to educated voters—who often put living in a liberal society above lowering their tax bills—rival politicians could start winning elections by taking the opposite position.■

Source: “Brahmin Left versus Merchant Right”, by Amory Gethin, Clara Martínez-Toledano and Thomas Piketty (working paper, 2021)

This article appeared in the Graphic detail section of the print edition under the headline "Brahmins v merchants"

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THE WEEK THAT WUZ: MesaZona Stats for The Most Viewed Posts Sunday May 23 - Saturday May 29 2021

Let's take a look >

Total Page Views since starting this blog site February 2015

Total page views 418374

Most Viewed Last 7 Days

• 

  Feature Post Today from Tim Cushing @Techdirt: Welcome To Maricopa County, The Confusing Clusterfuck "Forensic Audit" Side-Show

  Don't know about you, dear readers, but too much about all of this misses the point of specifically looking into about 10,000 ballots ca...
• 

  HYPER-LOCAL CONSUMER ALERT > Complete Recall For “Re2al Water Drinking Water” From One of The Three Company Facilities Here in Mesa

  Information for the public: Local news outlets revealed that Jones was merely repackaging Las Vegas tap water, which would be bad enough any...
• 

  CITIZEN THE UBER-LIKE VIGILANTE JUSTICE APP: A Private Cut-Out For Public Law Enforcement Space

  What Tim Cushing writing in Techdirt yesterday described as "a marauding cop-like patrol vehicle emblazoned with the Citizen logo (and ...
• 

  Virtual Mesa Chamber Coffee Time - Sponsored by Camp Bow Wow- Dobson Ranch....

  WFHO Working-From-Home Office sometimes has its own rewards in the wide world of Virtual Reality
• 

  Weekly Feature From The Far-Right: Arizona's Own Congressman Andy Biggs Representing The Fighting 5th Congressional Distric

  Airing different points of view is one of the bedrocks in the foundation of any democracy we can believe in and support. You don't need ...

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AUTOMATIC OPT-IN BY DEFAULT: Amazon Sidewalk Will Co-Opt Millions of People (Whether You Know It or Not. . .)

WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG? What is Amazon Sidewalk?

"Amazon Sidewalk is a shared network that helps devices work better."

Operated by Amazon at no charge to customers, Sidewalk can help simplify new device setup, extend the low-bandwidth working range of devices to help find pets or valuables with Tile trackers, and help devices stay online even if they are outside the range of their home wifi. In the future, Sidewalk will support a range of experiences from using Sidewalk-enabled devices, such as smart security and lighting and diagnostics for appliances and tools.

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POST NOTE: See farther down Fortunately, turning Sidewalk off is relatively painless

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Thanks to Dan Goodin writing in Ars Technica yesterday:

 

If you use Alexa, Echo, or any other Amazon device, you have only 10 days to opt out of an experiment that leaves your personal privacy and security hanging in the balance.

Amazon devices will soon automatically share your Internet with neighbors

Amazon's experiment wireless mesh networking turns users into guinea pigs.

Dan Goodin -

Ars Technica | 5/29/2021, 1:10

On June 8, the merchant, Web host, and entertainment behemoth will automatically enroll the devices in Amazon Sidewalk. The new wireless mesh service will share a small slice of your Internet bandwidth with nearby neighbors who don’t have connectivity and help you to their bandwidth when you don’t have a connection.

By default, Amazon devices including Alexa, Echo, Ring, security cams, outdoor lights, motion sensors, and Tile trackers will enroll in the system. And since only a tiny fraction of people take the time to change default settings, that means millions of people will be co-opted into the program whether they know anything about it or not. The Amazon webpage linked above says Sidewalk "is currently only available in the US."

More

Why should I participate in Amazon Sidewalk?

Amazon Sidewalk helps your devices get connected and stay connected. For example, if your Echo device loses its wifi connection, Sidewalk can simplify reconnecting to your router. For select Ring devices, you can continue to receive motion alerts from your Ring Security Cams and customer support can still troubleshoot problems even if your devices lose their wifi connection. Sidewalk can also extend the working range for your Sidewalk-enabled devices, such as Ring smart lights, pet locators or smart locks, so they can stay connected and continue to work over longer distances. Amazon does not charge any fees to join Sidewalk.

Amazon has published a white paper detailing the technical underpinnings and service terms that it says will protect the privacy and security of this bold undertaking.

To be fair, the paper is fairly comprehensive, and so far no one has pointed out specific flaws that undermine the encryption or other safeguards being put in place. But there are enough theoretical risks to give users pause.

Wireless technologies like Wi-Fi and Bluetooth have a history of being insecure. Remember WEP, the encryption scheme that protected Wi-Fi traffic from being monitored by nearby parties? It was widely used for four years before researchers exposed flaws that made decrypting data relatively easy for attackers. WPA, the technology that replaced WEP, is much more robust, but it alsohas a checkered history. Bluetooth has had its share of similarvulnerabilities over the years, too, either in the Bluetooth standard or in the way it’s implemented in various products.

If industry-standard wireless technologies have such a poor track record, why are we to believe a proprietary wireless scheme will have one that’s any better?

. . and

The omnipotent juggernaut

Next, consider the wealth of intimate details Amazon devices are privy to. They see who knocks on our doors, and in some homes they peer into our living rooms. They hear the conversations we’re having with friends and family. They control locks and other security systems in our home.

Extending the reach of all this encrypted data to the sidewalk and living rooms of neighbors requires a level of confidence that’s not warranted for a technology that’s never seen widespread testing.

Last, let’s not forget who’s providing this new way for everyone to share and share alike.

As independent privacy researcher Ashkan Soltani puts it: “In addition to capturing everyone’s shopping habits (from amazon.com) and their internet activity (as AWS is one of the most dominant web hosting services)... now they are also effectively becoming a global ISP with a flick of a switch, all without even having to lay a single foot of fiber.”

Amazon’s decision to make Sidewalk an opt-out service rather than an opt-in one is also telling. The company knows the only chance of the service gaining critical mass is to turn it on by default, so that’s what it’s doing. Fortunately, turning Sidewalk off is relatively painless. It involves:

1. Opening the Alexa app
2. Opening More and selecting Settings
3. Selecting Account Settings
4. Selecting Amazon Sidewalk
5. Turning Amazon Sidewalk Off

No doubt, the benefits of Sidewalk for some people will outweigh the risks. But for the many, if not the vast majority of users, there’s little upside and plenty of downside. Amazon representatives didn’t respond to a request for comment

 

052721 IHS MUTS - Jazz 1 - Georgia on my Mind - by Hoagy Carmichael, . .

TEDDY AWARDS 2021 NOMINATIONS ARE OPEN

Here is the official information

THE THEODORE ROOSEVELT GOVERNMENT LEADERSHIP AWARDS

Each year, the Theodore Roosevelt Government Leadership Awards (The Teddies) program honors an all-star team of distinguished federal officials and industry leaders for outstanding achievement in delivering on government’s promise to serve the American people. The annual awards highlight noteworthy accomplishments across the federal sector in a given year.

The annual Government Hall of Fame program celebrates current and former government officials and stakeholders who have made historic achievements and advances in various areas of government.  Nominations are now open for the 2021 Theodore Roosevelt Government Leadership Awards.  Who should I nominate for the Teddy Awards? The Teddies honor an all-star team of distinguished federal officials and industry leaders for outstanding achievement in delivering on government’s promise to serve the American people. You can find past winners here. The categories are:  Pathfinders: These winners bring the best information technology solutions available into the federal sphere. Directors: These leaders put a premium on employee engagement, goal-setting and program management. Visionaries: Winners in this category have a proven ability to generate new ideas and new approaches to addressing critical issues.  Defenders: Winners have demonstrated sustained achievement in advancing the country’s security interests at home and abroad.  Partners: This category recognizes significant, lasting achievements by government’s cross-sector partners in helping federal officials meet mission goals. How are the winners selected? A Selection Committee made up of representatives from the Government Executive editorial team and luminaries in government management and public administration will select two winners per category.  When is the nomination deadline? Friday, May 28 at 11:59 PM ET. Can I submit more than one nomination? Yes! You are able to submit an unlimited amount of nominations. NOMINATE NOW Get social with us! Use the #GOVHOF hashtag to share the nominations with your peers! Thank you to our Founding Underwriter Have a question? Reach out to Annie at abruce@govexec.com. Government Executive Media Group 600 New Hampshire Ave NW, Washington DC 20037

Large Solar Eruption, Mars Changes, Orion | S0 News May.29.2021

"I'm So Sick Of Him": Matt Gaetz Slams Dr. Fauci At "America First" Rally

Acosta shares his fear for after the Memorial Day weekend

INFINITE Official Trailer (2021)

Vigilate Re-Branded: AI-Enabled App "Citizen" Creeping Over-Reach for Private Wanna-Be Cops

More evidence emerging in two more posts (as well as other sources) for clouding the lines between private and public. Snagged in PR blunders and data breaches - so maybe this is just Citizen inadvertently laying the groundwork for its move into the public sector.

> The app pitches itself as a public-safety tool, but aims to grow its user base and revenue just as much as any other startup.

More

1

Citizen -- The App That Wants To Be A Cop -- Offered A $30,000 Bounty For The Apprehension Of An Innocent Person

Legal Issues

from the nice-going,-fuckos depth

Fri, May 28th 2021 9:14am — Tim Cushing

Citizen -- an app for reporting crime and other suspicious events -- wants to be in the police business. The app developers have purchased at least one faux patrol vehicle -- co-branded with Los Angeles Professional Security -- and have been driving it around Los Angeles, California.

But should private companies be in the business of enforcing the law? Most people would say no. We have enough problems with our actual cops -- ones who are supposed to remain on the right side of the Constitution. Private companies don't have these obligations. That's why they don't have the power (or the ability) to take other people's rights away. But the effort to cloud the lines between public and private is continuous, and it's going to do additional damage to citizens who are already subjected to the violations perpetrated by government employees.

Let's not forget that Citizen has always been willing to blur these lines. It debuted as "Vigilante" before its booting from Apple's app store forced a more friendly rebrand. But Citizen hasn't abandoned its vigilante principals. The people at the top of the organizational chart are aggressively pursuing private expansion into public law enforcement space and courting some of the nation's largest police departments.

They're also living up to the "vigilante" moniker. Prior to the leaks to Joseph Cox and Motherboard, Citizen was publicly and privately urging the public to take justice into their own hands, as Scott Morris reports for The Verge. . .

LOL. "Safety network." Whatever. Frame saw this as a chance to turn Citizen from a news receptacle to a newsmaker, despite his mild protestations otherwise. If Citizen could catch a criminal, it would convert it from a receptacle for user videos and police scanner readouts into something that could actually combat crime. Employees were urged on by Frame, who made it clear he had a fever. And the only cure was "MORE VIGILANTISM!" Joseph Cox has obtained even more internal communications about this dangerous farce.

"first name? What is it?! publish ALL info," Frame told employees working in a Citizen Slack room who were working on the case.

"FIND THIS FUCK," he told them. "LETS GET THIS GUY BEFORE MIDNIGHT HES GOING DOWN."

"BREAKING NEWS. this guy is the devil. get him," Frame said. "by midnight!@#! we hate this guy. GET HIM."

Huh. Looks kind of like threats in interstate commerce or whatnot. . .No harm? No foul? Wrong. A person was wrongfully detained as the result of an app's overzealous CEO and his promise of a $30,000 payout. Citizen apologized soon after, calling it a "mistake" it was "taking very seriously." It also promised to overhaul its "internal processes." It seems like the first overhaul should be to prevent its CEO from weaponizing his app and offering bounties for the information leading to arrests. That's not the business Citizen is in. Yet.

Clearly, Citizen wants more. Andrew Frame got his taste for blood. The blood may have been tainted but it hasn't deterred Frame and his app from pushing for its addition to law enforcement's arsenal. But this wielding of its power doesn't bode well for its intrusion into this space. Sure, cops arrest the wrong people all the time. But that doesn't mean private companies should get in on this racket. We need less of this, not more. And when apps like these encourage people to act on their impulses, they not only encourage physical manifestations of users' underlying biases, they place innocent people in harm's way.

Filed Under: bounties, crime reporting app, private law enforcement, vigilant
Companies: citizen

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2

Citizen Continues Its Push To Become Cops-For-Hire By Leaking Sensitive Data... Twice

Failures

from the another-confidence-boosting-PR-debacle dept

Fri, May 28th 2021 12:38pm — Tim Cushing

The bad news keeps coming for Citizen, the app that really wants to be a cop.

Not only is its desire to become some sort of private party/law enforcement hybrid generating it some bad press, but its prior incarnation as "Vigilante" suggests it has always wanted to be in the business of taking down bad guys, with or without the requisite lawfulness.

The former "Vigilante" proved true to its past moniker following a wildfire in California, promising a $30,000 bounty to any user or employee who took down the bad guy identified by Citizen. . .

Citizen is OnAir: Arsonist Pursuit Continues," the notification, which went out to 848,816 Citizen users in Los Angeles, said. "We are now offering a $30,000 reward for any information directly leading to his arrest tonight. Tap to join the live search."

Well… misidentified. After calls from CEO Andrew Frame to "GET THE FUCKER," Citizen had to offer up a bunch of apologies for turning an innocent person into a prime suspect.

Coming on the heels of all of this bad news is even more bad news. . .First off, as Joseph Cox reported late last week,

Citizen leaked a bunch of users' COVID-related data following its expansion into contact tracing late year under the name "SafePass."

Crime and neighborhood watch app Citizen, which also launched a COVID-19 contact-tracing feature and broader citywide COVID surveillance program, exposed users' COVID-related data to the public internet, allowing anyone to view specific users' recent self-reported symptoms, test results, and whether their device had recorded any close contacts with other people using the feature. The information is directly linked to a person's username, which often is the person's full name.

Hacker collective Anonymous was able to access the data and pointed Motherboard in its direction. The exposure of this data runs contrary to Citizen's security claims.

The feature's privacy policy says that "We have specific systems to control data access, and all access is logged and regularly audited." The SafePass website says "Data is private and encrypted" and that contact tracing data is deleted after 30 days (some of the data in the exposed cache dates from earlier than 30 days ago).

. . .Posted with the accompanying slogan of "Fuck snitches, fuck Citizen, fuck Andrew Frame and remember, kids: Cops are not your friends.", the data appears to contain plenty of what's already publicly-available through Citizen's online portal. The difference here is it's all in one place, which makes it much easier for researchers and journalists to parse the data for patterns and analyze user behavior.

And there's also some stuff Citizen doesn't make available to users and site visitors in this data dump.

The list appears to include videos that have been marked for removal from public consumption on the app by Citizen's content moderation team, with some including the tag "Moderator Blocked Stream," according to the hacker and Motherboard's viewing of the files. These videos are still accessible if visited with the direct link included in the scrape.

Not exactly a confidence booster, especially when the app's founder wants Citizen to become a crucial part of the law enforcement experience, if not actually law enforcement itself. But a combination of PR blunders and data breaches sounds about par for the (government) course, so maybe this is just Citizen inadvertently laying the groundwork for its move into the public sector. "

Filed Under: data breach, leaks, private law enforcement, snitching, vigilante
Companies: citizen

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3 FROM THE INTERCEPT

Here's one back story from March 2020

Citizen App Again Lets Users Report Crimes — and Experts See Big Risks

The revived video feature could foment racism, increase invasive surveillance, and stoke panic, the experts say.

Belle LinCamille Baker

The Intercept |                        

 

Citizen, a mobile app that alerts people to nearby emergencies, is testing the reintroduction of a controversial feature that lets users report crimes and incidents on their own by live streaming video.

Created by New York-based startup sp0n, Citizen first launched under the name “Vigilante” in 2016 in New York City, broadcasting alerts of 911 calls to users in the vicinity and allowing those users to send live video from incident scenes, comment on alerts, and report incidents on their own. In a splashy launch video with the hashtag #CrimeNoMore, several young men were depicted rushing to aid a woman who was chased by a menacing stranger; the video instructs users not to “interfere with the crime,” but then adds, “Good luck out there!” Vigilante was met with swift backlash from the public and police departments, and Apple soon pulled the app from its store. At that time, the New York Police Department issued a statement saying, “Crimes in progress should be handled by the NYPD and not a vigilante with a cell phone.”

Several months later, the app rebranded as Citizen, removed the incident reporting feature, and said it was shifting its focus to “safety” and “avoiding crime” — a far cry from its prior positioning.

Citizen’s return to public crime reporting has not been publicized, but is documented on the company’s user support website. The app’s latest version in Apple and Google’s app stores also includes the description: “Keep Your Community Safe: Report incidents right when they happen to protect the people around you.” . .

Illustration: Soohee Cho/The Intercept

Location data, privacy, and surveillance

Experts say Citizen’s location data collection raises questions about privacy and surveillance, the government’s interest in such data, and the lack of oversight into location data tracking.

 

Here's another

4

'FIND THIS FUCK:' Inside Citizen’s Dangerous Effort to Cash In On Vigilantism

vice.com |

Internal documents, messages, and roadmaps show how crime app Citizen is pushing the boundary of what a private, app-enabled vigilante force may be capable of.

Hacking. Disinformation. Surveillance. CYBER is Motherboard's podcast and reporting on the dark underbelly of the internet.

. . .Citizen's grand vision has never been a secret: From its initial launch as an app called "Vigilante" in 2016, the company pictured a world in which people were alerted to crime as it happened, and then app users stepped in to stop it before the police needed to intervene. In the Vigilante launch advertisement, a criminal stalks and then attacks a woman in New York City. The app broadcasts the location of this active crime to Vigilante's users, and a horde of people descend on the criminal, stopping the crime in progress: "Can injustice survive transparency?" the ad asks.

Thus far, however, Citizen has essentially been a social network for reporting crime that operates in around 50 cities. Citizen workers listen to and summarize police scanner audio as "incidents," which are then pushed to the app. Users can also post their own incidents, upload photos and videos, and comment on or react to incidents with emojis. The app allows users to search "around you" for incidents, and also sends push alerts to users for nearby events. 

"The whole idea behind Protect is that you could convince people to pay for the product once you’ve gotten them to the highest point of anxiety you can possibly get them to," one former employee said, referring to Citizen's subscription service. "Citizen can’t make money unless it makes its users believe there are constant, urgent threats around them at all times," they added. A Citizen spokesperson denied this in a statement: "It’s actually the opposite. With user feedback in mind, we have designed the Citizen home screen so users only see relevant, real-time information within their immediate surroundings," the spokesperson said.

Citizen incentivizes both its employees and the public to create incidents because they are the core currency of the app and what drives user engagement, user retention, and a sense of reliance on the app itself. The scrape of Citizen data published by the hacker earlier this week and shared with Motherboard shows at least 1.7 million incidents in the United States.

The weekly incidents on Citizen, using data scraped by the hacker. Image: Ishaan Jhaveri, Computational Research Fellow, Tow Center for Digital Journalism, Columbia University.

Workers have been measured by how many Citizen users see incidents they covered, how many reports they produce, and how quickly they do so, multiple former employees told Motherboard.

"It’s basically an anxiety sweatshop," a Citizen source said. "On days when things are 'slow,' they relax the standards around incidents because a dip in incident count is really bad," they added. The company sends congratulatory emails announcing which analysts reported the highest number of incidents, another source added.

This results in Citizen warning users about "everything," according to one former employee. This includes lost dogs, minor car crashes, unsubstantiated reports of gunshots, and domestic incidents, they said. This week in Los Angeles, incidents ranged in severity from "assault" to "gunfire" to "two men brawling" to "injured bird," "firefighter activity," and "crowd gathered."  

“In a healthy society we are typically not incentivized to sensationalize mundane events and code them as crime. I can’t help but think it plays into people’s anxieties and fears and magnifies people’s fears of the other,” Gilliard said. “What’s really dangerous is the ways they’re starting to serve as infrastructure, where people start to feel like they have to use them to maintain society and order.”