When a brush fire ravaged 1,300 acres between Pacific Palisades and Topanga Canyon in Los Angeles in May of this year, the “personal safety app” Citizen posted a photo of a homeless man named Devin Hilton, alleging he was suspected of starting the fire. The app offered a $30,000 bounty to its users for Hilton’s capture or information leading to his arrest. But sheriff’s deputies of Los Angeles County almost immediately cleared him as a suspect and went on record with the Los Angeles Times saying he was not the one responsible for igniting the blaze.
Police benefit from making you more afraid of crime, because the more afraid you are the more you think you need police with more powers and funding in your city.
“It took hours for them to realize they got the wrong guy,” says Matthew Guariglia, policy analyst for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit digital rights organization. “They had posted information out to the world, offered a massive reward for his capture even though he was not responsible. This is terrifying. They could have gotten this guy seriously injured by people in the area who received the alert or who just wanted the $30,000.”
Citizen, formerly known as “Vigilante” before being rebranded, has been embroiled in controversy for pushing unverified information and for encouraging vigilantism (as its previous name suggests). Billing itself as “the future of personal safety,” the app plays into the public’s growing obsession with crime prevention.
Citizen is just one of a growing number of services and products in the sprawling “digital neighborhood watch” sector, where fear of one’s neighbors has become a lucrative business. Social media with surveillance technologies such as Citizen, Flock Safety, and the popular Neighbors app from Amazon’s Ring promote the myth of security while endangering people’s freedom and safety.
Since this past April, police departments have formed new neighborhood watch groups in California, Illinois, Michigan, and Nevada, as well as “revitalized” existing programs with new technologies.
A neighborhood watch sign in Oakland, California.
Neighborhood watch programs ostensibly bring residents together to help curb crime and promote neighborhood safety. Acting as the “eyes and ears” of law enforcement, they started cropping up around the United States as early as the 1960s. They gained national recognition when the National Neighborhood Watch was founded in 1972, at the same time as “an increase in crime heightened the need for a crime prevention initiative focused on residential areas and involving local citizens,” according to the group’s official history.
National Neighborhood Watch is a division of the National Sheriffs’ Association, an organization representing thousands of sheriffs, as well as other law enforcement and safety professionals; it now oversees more than 24,000 watch groups involved with more than 2,500 law enforcement agencies across the country. Contrary to the popular perception of these groups as “grassroots” efforts, programs associated with National Neighborhood Watch receive funding and guidance from the Department of Justice, the Bureau of Justice Assistance, and the Office of Justice Programs.
Many groups invite police officers to speak at meetings and join programs like “Volunteers in Police Service,” which recruits citizens to “offer their time and talents to their local law enforcement agency.” Information collected by watchful neighbors may be shared with police for use as evidence in investigations or prosecutions.
“The state has always recruited citizens to carry out the work of policing one another,” says Joshua Reeves, associate professor of new media communications and speech communication at Oregon State University and author of the 2017 book Citizen Spies: The Long Rise of America’s Surveillance Society.
As Reeves sees it, the main effect of neighborhood watch programs is to “channel bourgeois anxieties about crime and terrorism into supervised and sanctioned forms of civic action,” specifically by getting neighbors to spy and snitch on each other.
“It’s a time-tested method of political and social control. And this isn’t just about stopping crime,” he says in an email. “It’s also about helping citizens come to see themselves as cops—that is, to identify with police work and the authorities who carry it out.”
Since the 1970s, neighborhood watch programs have been plagued with reactionary tendencies, where “outsiders” are seen as the primary sources of criminal activity. These heightened fears among often openly racist residents. Modern-day neighborhood watch groups have been weaponized by law enforcement and politicians for various agendas, including the War on Crime, the War on Drugs, and even the War on Terror.
Shortly after the attacks of September 11, 2001, the George W. Bush Administration jeopardized civil liberties with the signing of the USA Patriot Act and approving an expansion of the National Security Agency’s monstrous surveillance apparatus. The administration then created the USA Freedom Corps as part of an effort “to connect Americans with more opportunities to serve their country and to foster a culture of citizenship, responsibility, and service.”
This initiative birthed USAonWatch, an expansion of the National Neighborhood Watch program as an arm of the administration’s War on Terror. As stated in the USAonWatch manual, “Neighborhood Watch is homeland security at the most local level. It is an opportunity to volunteer and work towards increasing the safety and security of our homes and our homeland.”
From that point on, the slogan “If you see something, say something” has become a way of life for people in the United States. Citizen-on-citizen spying is encouraged by law enforcement and government agencies more strongly than ever, and technological advances have made it easier than ever to eavesdrop and snitch.
Neighborhood watch has come a long way since its seemingly humble origins, as technology has grown increasingly sophisticated. In the early days, neighborhood watchers kept in touch with each other by knocking on doors, distributing fliers, posting bulletins, mailing newsletters, and calling on landlines. Today, they can communicate using phone apps and social media to spread information about “suspicious activities” they observe.
The digital revolution has broadened the channels of communication, creating vast networks between the police and citizens that could hardly be fathomed decades ago.
Patrick Royal, a public information officer for the National Sheriffs’ Association, says in an email there are more than 100,000 registered users in the program. “Neighborhood Watch groups—and people interested in forming or participating in one—are still increasing in presence and it’s becoming easier to participate as many groups add digital elements or move online completely.” But critics warn that this partnership between law enforcement and private corporations can lead to nightmarish (and often unintended) consequences, such as dystopian digital gated communities and 24/7 racial profiling.
“We live in a time of hyper-vigilance—constant vigilance, often rooted in fear, about others’ beliefs, their words, their behaviors,” Reeves says. “So the political logic of these programs is reflected in other parts of our society. Many people today treat spying and snitching as forms of activism, as a legitimate form of political action. It’s part of the general political tragedy of the moment.”
The early months of the coronavirus pandemic forced people into isolation and into greater reliance on delivery services from online retailers such as Amazon. The increased incidents of package theft (“porch piracy”) in recent years have spiked sales of doorbell cameras and other devices to monitor activities outside of people’s homes from their phones and computers.
The Los Angeles Police Department launched an investigation into allegations that at least 100 officers received discounted or free products from Ring, in exchange for encouraging fellow officers and residents to buy the company’s devices.
In 2020, Ring, a digital neighborhood watch company owned by Amazon, sold more than 1.4 million video doorbell cameras, making it the highest-selling doorbell camera on the market. The Neighbors by Ring app is among the most popular downloads from Google Play and Apple’s App Store.
“Amazon revolutionized wealthy people having their every need delivered to their doorstep in packages, causing package theft to spike and people to feel less safe in their homes,” says Lia Holland, campaigns and communications director for Fight for the Future, a nonprofit advocacy group defending Internet freedom and privacy, in an email. “Then, Amazon began offering Ring doorbell cameras to ‘solve’ package theft—but they generate so much footage of so much petty crime that it is impossible for law enforcement to respond or process it all.”
And now, Holland says, Amazon is deepening its investment “in racist and invasive facial recognition software that could be used to automatically identify people on camera, and in some dystopian future, automatically punish them.”
Since its acquisition by Amazon in 2018 through August 2021, Ring has partnered with at least 1,700 police departments, according to information obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation through public records requests. Ring publishes blog posts on its website carrying headlines like “How to Form a Neighborhood Watch” and “Fifteen Neighborhood Watch Success Stories.”
“Ironically, these apps make people feel less safe,” Guariglia says. “With your phone constantly buzzing with alerts, you’re associating those notifications with immediate danger. Police benefit from making you more afraid of crime, because the more afraid you are the more you think you need police with more powers and funding in your city.”
It’s no secret that corporations in Silicon Valley harvest user data and keep tabs of online searches, readily making this data available to government and law enforcement agencies. Typically, access to this information requires a warrant or subpoena, but in many cases law enforcement can circumvent this by aggregating information easily available on the web, a practice known as “open-source intelligence,” from social media surveillance and analysis done by companies like Dataminr.
During the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, some demonstrators were later identified by law enforcement on social media and subsequently arrested. Government agencies can also purchase information on users from data brokers the same way as would a marketing company. If an app collects geolocation data from a user and sells that information to advertisers, the government could also buy it on the open market.
In April 2021, Senators Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, and Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, introduced the Fourth Amendment Is Not for Sale Act. It would close the legal loopholes allowing law enforcement and government agencies to collect information about U.S. consumers through data brokers without a court order, putting an end to “shady data brokers buying and selling Americans’ Constitutional rights,” according to a press release.
In June 2021, the Los Angeles Police Department launched an investigation into allegations that at least 100 officers among its ranks received discounted or free products from Ring, in exchange for encouraging fellow officers and residents to buy the company’s devices. The Professional Standards Bureau, said Los Angeles Police Department Chief Michel Moore, will determine “whether any of the communications violated department policy and any actions of our personnel violated department policy.”
When contacted by The Progressive, Ring would not comment on the LAPD investigation or say whether similar programs occurred with other police departments. According to Guariglia, “I’m fairly confident that this same thing has happened in other cities.”
In June 2021, Ring announced an updated policy halting law enforcement from privately requesting Ring customers to share video footage from the Neighbors app.
“It’s easy now for Ring to claim they are part of the solution and not the problem, because police can file requests for footage,” Guariglia says, adding, “There was very little oversight into why police are filing this request [for user footage] and what they’re going to use it for.”
When seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin was gunned down in Sanford, Florida, by neighborhood watch coordinator George Zimmerman in 2012, the tragedy helped inspire what would become the Black Lives Matter movement. While many neighborhood watchers are well-meaning, traditional neighborhood watch groups inherently possess facets which discriminate on the grounds of race and class in the name of protection.
Every day, frivolous phone calls to police report allegedly “suspicious activities” being committed by people of color when no crime is taking place. More than 1,000 deaths were caused by police last year, a figure similar to previous years. Those who place these calls to police are placing people of color at risk of wrongful arrest, injury, or death.
“There is a very important misconception to recognize in the digital age—that computer algorithms and analysis do not need scrutiny because the computer is smarter than we are. That’s totally false,” Holland says. “Technology is only an extension of humanity, with all of our biases and limitations.”
Social media platforms allow people to share information, connect with police departments, and post information overheard on police scanner apps. “Many groups are moving online and it would be a mistake to ignore social media as a platform for neighborhood watch groups,” Royal says.
As neighbors become increasingly disconnected from each other and shift to online communities, these technological strides reflect the dark side of civic duty. Harboring shared prejudices that transcend the digital realm, Facebook groups and forums focused on crime watching, as with other platforms, can easily become magnets for racial profiling, identity bias, online harassment, false accusations, and death threats.
From 2017 to 2018, dozens of complaints were filed to the Los Angeles Police Department concerning the online activity of two West San Fernando Valley Facebook groups, “Crimebusters of West Hills and Woodland Hills” and “Homeless Transient Encampments of our West Valley,” both founded by former LAPD volunteer Fern Peskin-White. The posts to these groups included dehumanizing remarks (one screenshot comment reads, “Low life scum, they need a bath”). Group members have suggested a variety of hostile and illegal tactics for removing the local homeless population: Clorox, baseball bats, fire hoses, pigeon spike strips, stink bombs, poison oak, and firecrackers.
Even more disturbingly, group members include former and current police officers such as Sean Dinse, LAPD senior lead officer named in a civil rights lawsuit filed by Rex Schellenberg, an elderly homeless man, on February 10, 2020. According to the suit, Dinse “conspired with certain community residents to target and harass” Schellenberg in person and online, unlawfully seizing his property, and “repeatedly interfered with [his] right to be present in public places.”
The Plain View Project compiled a database in 2019 documenting thousands of “public Facebook posts and comments made by current and former police officers from several jurisdictions across the United States,” explicitly exhibiting bigoted statements involving “race, religion, ethnicity, and the acceptability of violent policing.”
For the same reasons people support defunding the police and limiting the presence of law enforcement, they are beginning to rethink neighborhood watch and reimagine the concept of community protection, based on alternative models including local mutual aid collectives, civil rights organizations, and social services.
“Those who want to make their neighborhoods safer should be investing their time, energy, and effort into ending the desperate circumstances that force people into crime in the first place,” Holland says. “Our communities can do so much better than spying on each other.”