Hi W—,
That is really nice to hear that you’re into Mapzen services. Thanks for getting in touch, but I feel like Citizen might not be a great fit for me.
- I stopped using a smartphone recently, in part to understand what the experience is like for those who cannot afford a data plan (and to work on the gaps)
- That all residents (citizens as well as non-citizen residents) have smartphones seems an unfair assumption
- I have done some training in bystander deescalation, and have complicated feelings about 911 as a sufficiently inclusive option, especially for people of color
- I am in favor of police reform and reducing over-criminalization, and fear that the “5 o’clock news effect” might increase the overall sense that crime is rampant, driving public support for more policing
All that said, I only just got a first impression of Citizen. Hopefully you don’t mind me dropping my politics in, right up front. After a year like 2017 it feels more urgent to work on the things that are important to me.
I do like the idea of crime data being standardized!
Best,
Dan
On Jan 10, 2018, at 5:54 PM, W— <[snip]@citizen.com> wrote:
Hi Dan,
I head up engineering at Citizen.[1] I was sad to hear of Mapzen’s shutdown, we had just begun exploring using your APIs and mapping functionality for our internal tooling instead of GMaps since it’s so much better visually architected. I’m not sure how you’re thinking about your next steps, but I’d love to grab coffee and chat and see whether Citizen may be a fit.
A bit of background: We want to make people safer by increasing the transparency of the 911 system. Currently we’re a mobile app that notifies people in NYC when a crime happens near their vicinity. 3% of NYC uses us. Our thesis is that if every person in a quarter mile of a reported crime was immediately aware of it it would change the shape of our cities and policing.
I read your blog post about rescuing data. One of the things we want to explore doing in the near future is creating a common standard for how crime data is reported, both in real time and historically, then help establish it and make it easy to contribute. I think it’s one of the only ways we’ll get the smaller towns to open up.
Perhaps early next week?
Cheers,
W—
[1]: https://medium.com/@Citizen_App/introducing-citizen-a8d2f3fabf03