By Tom Jackman November 4
Information is power, they say.
So the makers of a new phone app, “Vigilante,” believe that letting people know
when any nearby crime in progress is being reported to the police, thereby
enabling users to either avoid or approach the area, is empowering. Safety
enhancing. Revolutionary. #CrimeNoMore
The cops in New York City, where
Vigilante was unveiled last week, don’t see it that way. And neither did Apple,
which removed the Vigilante app from its store shortly after its launch last
week. But entrepreneur Andrew Frame, who created Vigilante, sees the app as a
way to use transparency both to fight crime and improve police-community
relations. He is working to restore the app on Apple phones, to release it soon
on Android phones, and to expand it beyond New York, where it debuted after a
closed test with 1,000 users in Brooklyn.
The app not only maps where new
crime is being reported, but allows users to live stream an event if they so
choose or report an incident. Vigilante cautions people not to get involved, to
stay safe and allow the police to handle the situation. But even in the small
test in Brooklyn, Frame wrote on Facebook last week, “people have been saved by
this app under somewhat extraordinary circumstances.” In a public manifesto
released on Medium, Frame wrote, “Transparency is the single most powerful tool
in the fight against crime and injustice, and we believe it will rebuild
cooperation towards a shared vision.” In addition to crime, users presumably
could record police actions at a scene, as civilians did with the South
Carolina police shooting of Walter Scott and the fatal New York police arrest
of Eric Garner.
“Crimes in progress should be
handled by the NYPD and not a vigilante with a cell phone,” the New York police
said in a terse e-mail. The police would not answer any questions about whether
they were involved in getting the app removed by Apple, whether they would seek
to keep it from being revived, and how exactly Vigilante is getting their
information about 911 calls in the first place.
It would appear that Vigilante is
mainly listening to police scanner traffic, then creating short summaries of
the event as dispatched and pinpointing the location on a map. Frame told the
New York Post that “we are not hearing the victims’ 911 calls. There are police
scanners involved and we have a network of antennas across the boroughs.” New
York police and fire dispatch frequencies are not encrypted and can be heard by
anyone with a scanner, though every reporter who’s ever spent much time
listening to a scanner knows that erroneous information often leaks into the
chatter between dispatchers and officers or firefighters, and it’s not intended
for public consumption. But the initial dispatch usually has the location and
nature of the call mostly right.
Vigilante’s video explaining how
it works, below, indicates that concerned citizens can respond and scare off
the bad guy, maybe getting some video as well. It’s the kind of aggressive
involvement that police departments tend to discourage, but watch for yourself:
“Police can’t be everywhere at
once,” Frame’s manifesto noted, particularly in a city of eight million, “and
by the time an officer arrives on the scene, the situation is often over. With
Vigilante, vital information is unlocked and everyone can do their part.”
That “part” has long been defined
as witness or bystander. “If people intervene and police officers arrive at the
scene,” said Jim Pasco, executive director of the National Fraternal Order of
Police, “then they can mistake well-meaning vigilantes for perpetrators, and a
horrible tragedy can ensue. If vigilantes and posses were answers to the law
enforcement problem in the U.S., we wouldn’t have discarded them in the 19th
century.”
Frame founded a New York-based
startup, Sp0n, to create Vigilante, both the software and the staff to digest
the information and post it or send push notifications. He said in a press
release he was backed by technology venture investors and celebrities such as
Deepak Chopra and Russell Simmons have issued endorsements. The app comes with
ample liability waivers should one of its users become injured while responding
to a Vigilante-reported incident. Some have noted that allowing people to track
police movement on an app might enable criminals to commit crime in unprotected
areas, and the ability to report an incident could be abused for sinister
purposes.
“We believe the 911 system information
should be open,” Frame told Gizmodo. “If a person needs help and hundreds of
people are nearby, why shouldn’t they know?” On Facebook, he wrote, “we are
exploring the relationship between transparency and justice. Can we use
transparency to reduce crime?…What behavioral changes might this create? Are
they good for the world? Can we use transparency to repair the relationships
between community and police? We are hoping a long-term behavioral change will
deter criminal behavior.”
Frame declined an interview with
The Post. One question I had was, why the name? “Vigilante” seems to imply more
than transparency, more like a call to action. Sudden, untrained citizen
action, with the chaos and tangential damage that can ensue.
Nancy La Vigne, director of the
Justice Policy Center at the Urban Institute, said, “That branding is really
counterproductive. It suggests citizen intervention, and you’re thinking about
Trayvon Martin. It’s pretty disturbing.”
But “the functionality of the
app,” La Vigne said, “encouraging the public they could and should think about
having a role in transparency, could be beneficial.” She noted that when people
decide to turn on their cameras, and where they are located when they film, all
play into the consideration of a citizen video’s credibility in the context of
an entire incident, such as a police shooting. But for episodes such as the
North Charleston, S.C., police killing of Scott, “would we have even heard of
it?” without citizen video, La Vigne asked.
John DeCarlo, a former police
chief in Connecticut and now a professor at the University of New Haven, said
having large numbers of citizens rush to a crime scene is “problematic. I think
the intent of the people is to record police officers potentially hitting
someone, when they’re actually heading into what could be a dangerous
situation.”
But DeCarlo endorsed the idea of
greater transparency as a way to reduce crime, saying that both surveillance
and body-worn cameras have increased the civility of those being filmed on either
side of a police encounter. In addition, making crime information available
more rapidly to citizens, which DeCarlo did in Branford, Conn., a suburb of New
Haven, “brought crime way down. People knew what was going on, where it was
going on. We actually started getting more calls, when people were more aware.
It’s very important that you don’t leave people in fear. Knowing what’s
happening is a mechanism to alleviate that fear. Being in a communicative
partnership with the police department is a valid tool.”
Frame said on Facebook that Sp0n
was being asked to bring Vigilante to Chicago and other cities by community
leaders who had heard of its results in Brooklyn. We’ll see if it catches
on.Share via Email
Tom Jackman has been covering
criminal justice for The Post since 1998, and now anchors the new "True
Crime" blog.
Follow @TomJackmanWP
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