The controversial application Citizen has wrongfully named an innocent person as an arson person and has provided a reward of $30,000 for the information for his arrest.
However, it had to apologize for the same after a few days. This mistake can have a negative impact on its endeavors to make itself a public safety application and its efforts to overcome its reputation as a Vigilante.
Initially, the app was named ‘Open 911 system’, which focused on alerting people about possible crimes reported to the police. The idea was that the police force was overworked and unable to handle these situations, and the general citizen could do the work themselves.
However, Price Mapp, the head of the community and culture of Citizens has mentioned that they strictly do not encourage people to solve crimes themselves. However, he was one of the persons who made the mistake of blaming an innocent person, OnAir. They accused the person of being responsible for the wildfire in the Pacific Canyon area of Los Angeles.
Roughly 8,60,000 people watched the broadcast, and it received millions of views. The two hosts had allegedly encouraged people to bring the person to justice. However, the suspect had already been apprehended and released by Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.
However, the spokesperson of this company has mentioned that they are taking proper measures to improve their internal process so that no such mistakes happen again.
This mistake is partly due to the fault of the Los Angeles Police Department as one of the offices had mentioned to a resident’s association that they are still looking for the person and that he is still setting the fire. The association has posted the videos to Facebook and Nextdoor. However, the association deleted the video afterward.
Another similar application had done similar things in the past. The crowdsourced crimefighting application, Vigilante, is used to give information about crimes to the general public and encourage them to handle the same. This app was banned from Apple’s app store and resurfaced as Citizen.
Citizen generally brings out criminal incidents from 911 calls through a combination of human verification and artificial intelligence. This application claims that it does not spread misinformation as the information is cross-checked and screened by real people.
This app has tried becoming an emergency alert system by making a separate contract tracing application and entering a partnership with Los Angeles County. It has also tried to highlight good deeds through something called ‘ Magic Moments.’
Citizen has recently debuted OnAir, whereby it has been able to find a missing teenager previously. OnAir is staffed with Citizen employees who have received proper company incident reporting training.
The spokesperson of Citizen said that this company uses new technology and needs to improve itself further by learning from its mistakes.