Citizen will share crime videos with the NYPD

Mayor Eric Adams announced during the weekend that New York will send users of real-time public security alerts according to their specific location through the Citizen crime monitoring application. The city has also announced that public security agencies, such as the New York Police Service, the fire service and emergency management, will have access to a portal to examine images shared by Citizen users.

The Citizen’s verified partners’ program for cities like New York is linked to a partnership with the Fusus of Axon platform (formerly known as Taser), the “real-time crime center” that it acquired last year. Axon announced a partnership with Ring in April which allows the police to request access to the video sequences of the security cameras of the owners in a certain area for a while. At the same time, he also announced integration with Citizen to support the sending of alerts and make public videos of citizens’ users. According to Citizen, users who do not want their shared videos to be directly withdrawn in the application settings, but all published videos are always “visible and downloadable by the public”.

Adams said the new New York public security account on Citizen will send notifications on public security, meteorological emergencies and major incidents depending on the district, postal code or the district of a user.

Citizen allows users to report potential security incidents, share videos and broadcast live images from its application. He also indicates that he can send alerts to nearby mobile devices “in a few seconds” of a call to 911 or a user report, and also offers a premium security line.

Citizen already authorizes the police to obtain information from its application as long as they have a mandate, but it also offers the police the possibility of obtaining data “without delay” in the event of an emergency. It was initially launched under the name of “vigilante” in 2016, but the application was started from the App Store for the promotion of vigilantism, Techcrunch reported at the time. The application then revived as a citizen and faced strong criticism in the years that followed, some arguing that he fueling fear in communities. In 2021, CITIZEN CEO Andrew Frame was criticized for encouraging users to track down the bad person suspected of having launched a California forest fire.