spotcrime.com seems to be one of those sensationalist media spreading paranoia. there are so many people wrongly believing cities to be dangerous, per-neighbourhood tracking can not be helping people's fears
I am generally of the mind even if it results in negative externalities, knowledge is good. So even if it on average increases fear of crime, knowing the reported crime nearby your home is a good thing.
Apply this to:
Vaccination / disease management
Housing availability ("if they only know of these areas, will those areas become swamped and drive up prices?")
Price of drugs / medical services, or even medical test results (how many more suicides "might" occur if someone gets a possible cancer diagnosis)
Climate change
or anything else.
I think you'll find you're quickly concentrating knowledge dissemination into a central authority who decides what is "right" and that is much more dangerous than incomplete information.
Is this how the citizen app also gets its data?
Surveillance tech and cop tech generally don't contribute to society because of these problems.
If you wouldn't trust RFK Jr. about vaccines, you should also be skeptical about what many PDs tell you. LAPD is just a particularly notorious example.
> "knowledge is good" is such a naive take. Trivial example: You only have knowledge of crimes committed by immigrants but zero knowledge of crimes committed by citizens. How is that good?
That counter-logic is so fundamentally flawed b/c it rests exclusively on the prejudgement of others and prediction of their use of the data while "I", the good thinker, can determine that it is bad for "them" to have access to this data. That is just a very bad way to think and is precisely what RFK-types do all the time.
nekusar•1h ago
We saw this with NYC before Mamdani.
Ive seen this play out anywhere that FLOCK is being challenged.
And, well, LA.
gosub100•30m ago