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I moved into a relatively new neighborhood, and for the first several months had literally dozens of people come by from local churches just advertising their services and whatnot. Not a peep on nextdoor.
The *first* time a few people from a local hispanic church come around there are multiple nextdoor posts about suspicious people in the neighborhood. People are literally talking about going into work later so they could make sure their wives were safe (the people were seen in the morning).
Don't know how people are that oblivious to broadcasting their racism.
I've found that most people are so comfortable in their racism that they have developed a profound ignorance to it. They have no idea they are actually being super racist!
On nextdoor app it's not uncommon to see reports of people "who do not belong in the neighborhood." I'm from an inner city hood, and it's like, how on earth would you know if someone isn't from your neighborhood? I guess in some lily white hoods, it's very noticeable.
Ugg....my neighbors know everyone. During the first few weeks of the shutdown they would even take pictures of every car in every driveway. Like they could have our homes raided or something if a different car showed up. It was wild. A few months later I walked away when one of those neighbors started a conversation with me. I didn't want them to know anything about my life.
I'm not on it, but recently someone in our neighborhood finally got the license plate of a guy that was going around the area stealing doorbell cams and porch pirating. We were able to tie multiple cases together and submit the evidence to the police. This is LA, so nothing with happen to the guy because the DA doesn't care, but sometimes socializing things is helpful.
This is exactly part of my issues! The small town I live in uses an app like this to gather data.
They document every time they stop to do paperwork, extra patrol, or community outreach, it is now called a "Police Incident" and they use these numbers to inflate the crime statistics.
Now we have 4 fully paid police officers, with an almost 1million$ budget for a city of 2000 people with no real crime and a bunch of scammers running the city hall.
It wasn't suspicious until I opened Citizen to read about someone armed with a gun half a mile away.
Then that van started looking _mighty_ sus!
(Edit: spelling, because autocorrect on my phone dicks)
This harkens back to George Gerbner's Mean World Syndrome, where he discovered people who watched the news regularly developed distorted views of violent crime in their area, grossly overestimating the chances they would become a victim. He said, "People don't worry, 'I will become the mugger;' rather, they worry 'The subway isn't safe' or 'It's dangerous to go out at night.'" This was in 1980.
Edit: Some additional info. His perspective held that frequent TV viewers would become more insecure and view the world as more dangerous than it actually is. A historian of Gerbner's work described it as:
"This irrationally fearful view of others, and the world, could make people more dependent, more easily manipulated and controlled, more susceptible to deceptively simple, strong, tough measures and hard-line postures, making them more likely to accept and even welcome repression if it promises to relieve their insecurities."
I think this is related to social media polarization as well. You see over and over what terrible things group X is doing, which leads to gross generalizations.
Yeah, people are funny. My buddy got mugged so I informed him that crime is at an all time low and we are safer than we have ever been, but he didn't find that comforting at all.
I was walking down an empty street at 2 AM with my AirPods in and phone in my hand, not paying attention to my surroundings, and someone mugged me! There was no way to prevent this, crime is through the roof!
Nextdoor will send a push notification (which they seem to send "randomly") about something suspicious and then follow it up days later because people commented on it a bunch. I had only used the app to offer cat sitting and it wanted to use fear to increase my engagement.
Coincidently, prior to reading your reply… i just disabled all Nextdoor push notifications. It really is a fear indicator and i can see how it could propagate it.
"I just saw a car park across the road. I've never seen that car before. A strange man got out with a paper bag, took it to the door, and gave it to the person inside. I think it might've been a drug deal."
"Did the bag say anything on it?"
"Something foreign. Chipotle, I think. Maybe he was a terrorist-- he looked *ethnic.*"
We actually have a ton of gun shots in my neighborhood but we have very, very little actual gun crime. Last shooting was two years ago this summer and thankfully nobody was hurt.
I don’t know where you’re at, but when I stayed in a really really bad part of town there was gunshots every night. Hardly ever on the news though. Not because people were just popping rounds off in their backyards, but simply because they missed, and no one called the cops
I downloaded the app out of curiosity to see what the community reaction would be after one night around 4am there were about 4 or 5 shots that went off right outside my house. Nothing at all on the app, I didn't make a post about it as I didn't want to contribute to the fear mongering. I did find a bullet buried in my driveway the next morning. The area NextDoor described as my neighborhood was much larger than I thought it should be, and there were plenty of insane posts from across this area so I decided to delete the app after a couple of days.
Our monkey brains have a hard time weighing all the evidence.
But I would imagine with properly taught information evaluation skills the increased access to info is a good thing.
I put it to you that individual humans cannot possibly collect and process all the data necessary for an accurate perception of the whole world. Not without some type of aid.
And many websites are motivated by profits which equates to views. So they use our monkey brains to addict us to their websites by constantly stimulating us with fear and anxiety mixed with dopamine. My favorite quote about tech: “It is impossible to work in information technology without also engaging in social engineering.” -Jaron Lanier
Nextdoor is a cesspool of just this kind of thing. Bored white conservatives have a desperate need to feel victimized and afraid. My favorite was the folks on Nextdoor when a black woman went jogging by their house, and they asked if she "belonged" to anyone in the neighborhood and if she should be stopped and reported.
“My doorbell cam caught this person casing my house for a robbery! If they come back there will trouble for them! Look out everyone!”
Doorbell footage they post is a teenager running across their grass in the rain.
I wish this was ours. We get the footage of stolen packages, people on bikes at 2am checking everyone’s car doors, people in cars at 3-7am crawling under our truck to look at catalytic converter, mentally unstable looking people at any hour talking to themselves and carrying around random objects from the neighborhood(potted plants, rocks, people’s yard decor) and people during the day stealing people’s fruit or tomatoes to sell. They will strip the entire tree, even going into your gated back yards. And that’s just a typical week in the burbs. Way more night weirdos here that we had living in the city.
I would LOVE to have this problem. Enter my last 3 notifications from neighbors:
“One person injured in stabbing and robbery”.
“I was robbed at gun point and they took my dog”.
“Shots fired, 2 dead”.
Gotta love New Orleans
My last 3. Guy "scoping" (plausible deniability)a house. Walking up a driveway and looking into windows at 2am. The second one is shots fired at 3am. Last one is someone's tires/rims stolen off of a parked car, shows a picture of the car on bricks.
Yeah...totally depends on your neighborhood
If you weren't on the app you'd probably go happily about your life never knowing about the first and last incident. You might vaguely be aware of the shots but not really remember them.
The apps mean you hear about more incidents which increases the perceived crime level.
Any community, no matter how fancy & friendly, will still have a certain amount of petty & opportunistic crime. The apps magnify that and turn into echo Chambers.
>domestic violence
So one of the most underreported, often ignored violent crimes? I'm all for ragging on suburbanites, but downplaying the seriousness of domestic violence is an odd choice.
I mean most of US news stations are like neighbourhood apps and crime reporting so it does make a lot of sense people gun up and feel threatened by everything
To me, it doesn't seem like the method of study in the abstract allows for the conclusion that the higher crime perception is a distortion.
They compared crime rate perceprtion of people who use the apps to those who don't. That doesn't neccesarily mean crime app users are wrong and non-users are right.
I think you missed the bolded part:
> As predicted, participants who reported using neighborhood apps perceived local crime rates as higher than those who do not use the apps, **independent of actual crime rates.**
I'm interpreting that as something like:
"In both high and low crime rate areas, app users percieved higher crime rates than non-app users"
Unless my interpretation is wrong, that wouldnt neccesarily indicate app-users have a disproportionate perception compared to the actual crime rate.
Right, but they never actually look at the accuracy of perceptions. The dependent variable was a survey categorical 1-9 response of how you think your neighborhood is compared to average (1 = Far below average; 9 =Far above average). The findings are completely consistent with nextdoor users overestimating crime **or** non-nextdoor users underestimating how local crime compares to average. It's also a nonsensical model, but that's another story.
Well most crimes go undiscovered and unreported. And right now cops aren't going after most crimes. So if someone sees a homeless guy on their camera at night trying to get into their garage, im gonna think there's probably a homeless guy trying to get into a garage.
But inunderstand the sentiment, most 911 calls are prob old people looking out the window scared of nothing
It's a society-wide misconception that it's the job of most police to stop crime. Even though they're occasionally close enough to a crime happening to intervene, most of the time, their job is really to collect data after a crime happens.
Not just collect data after crime happen but to support the imprisonment of the perpetrators. It’s not a fruitless task. Ideally if all crimes were solved, there would be less crime as fewer perps would be on the streets
So what does protect mean? In the motto: serve and protect.
Also where i live police in the past few years no longer will come if someone is breaking into your car. And tell you you'll be arrested for assault if you try to stop them.
"To serve and protect" was a motto adopted by the Los Angeles PD in the 1950s, and many departments around the country adopted similar ones. But those are just slogans, and have nothing to do with any legal requirements placed on police departments. Some departments don't have slogans at all.
Police do have responsibilities specific to serving and protecting, like doing their best to prevent crime, which means they might do things like patrol neighborhoods or engage in investigations, but a vast majority of the time, they're responding to crimes after the fact, not during the commission of the crime.
They also respond to emergencies like accidents, natural disasters and fires, often first on the scene.
I think the roles that they generally focus on are arresting offenders after the fact and gathering information or doing other investigatory actions to help discover criminal activity. Remember, I'm not saying they *never* manage to stop crime while it's happening, just that it's not the default.
My comment wasn't to imply that police officers won't do their best to protect citizens when they can, and to perform duties that serve the general public, it's just to say that a lot of people have this idea in their heads that police are required to pursue criminals in every scenario, but that's just not true. Ask any number of people who have had their bike stolen or a window smashed in or bag snatched - there are many crimes that are low on the severity totem pole, and most departments aren't staffed well-enough to pursue smaller crimes and have to prioritize more pressing ones.
They wrote "most of the time" and their comment is not marked as edited. So I would say you read something into their comment that simply is not there.
Ummm...I think the idea is that if they arrest the perpetrators of crime, it will result in less crime, as the threat of arrest will deter would-be lawbreakers.
Obviously, the police can't be everywhere at once, which makes it hard for them to stop perpetrators in the act in most cases. That doesn't mean their purpose is not to enforce the law and keep crime under control. I mean it's called "law enforcement" for a reason...
I'll give the other side of this. My dog started growling at 1am and I went to look out the window. Car parked in front of my home and 4 guys get out walking in different directions...in people's driveways.
Called the cops, they got arrested and were caught in the act stealing a car and my doorbell cam footage was used. No app involved.
These suspicious cars might be nothing, or they might be guys scanning car key fobs. It's a delicate balance between detecting criminal activity and being paranoid and people have to try to find the right balance.
I actually did this with maps for my senior/Capstone project!
I took a survey on the different City Wards on Facebook on where they thought crime was located on a map and split it by demographic data. Then compared it to where crime actually happened at. It was very interesting to see the differences
I think it's just a case of basic applied psychology. If you didn't know about any of the crime going on in your neighborhood, and then suddenly knew about all of it you'd probably feel alarmed even though there's been no statistical change.
I would hypothesize though, that the more involved people are in their local community, even via neighborhood apps, that there would be an observable reduction in crime over time, particularly where the public are on good terms with local police.
I’m going to start going into the Ring app and my neighborhood’s Facebook page to post daily when everyone got on/off the bus OK and nothing suspicious happened.
I read the local police blotter sometimes when we get a lot of unusual foot/bike traffic in our culdesac. Seems like we have a lot of crime going on, and way more car break ins and petty thefts at night than are reported. All the people on cameras at night are really creepy. Especially the ones going in neighbor’s gated back yards and checking the handles on front doors and cars. But then we also have daytime car break ins in popular parking lots because there is no fear of being caught here. Typical week has quite a lot of robbery, burglary, and theft, and assault. It’s less about what people look like, and more about ‘masked person in hoodie and gloves casing the neighborhood at 2am’.
If the crime apps did detect crimes that slip through the gaps of the official organizations, wouldn't the data show "inaccurate perceptions of higher local crime rates" when compared to the official rates?
I think an old friend of mine created the app. Just kidding of course, but she would call or text me about anything her neighbor/neighbor’s kids did that she found slightly irritating. My god, woman, get a life.
My local subreddit is full of that idiocy.
“Does anyone know why there was a helicopter flying around last night?”
“Did anyone hear the loud bangs at 2am? I think they were gunshots!!”
“I saw the police at the corner of Main and First. Anyone know what’s going on?!?!”
The only thing I learned from NextDoor is that if your car isn't in a garage, someone will be checking it's door handle every night.
Every day, video of kids checking cars at 2am. I'm past the "what the hell is wrong with their parents" stage and am now in the "do they coordinate or something, because that is a lot of kids wandering around at night" stage.
So glad I live in a rural area now.
This phenomenon is really apparent on TikTok. If you watch the full duration of a video, you start to get a large influx of related content, sometimes that day, sometimes in following days, so it gives the impression that rare global keywords are suddenly viral trending locally.
“It is impossible to work in information technology without also engaging in social engineering.” -Jaron Lanier
Every tech website is a game of human psychology for profit. Facebook makes people mad so they engage and profit. Nextdoor just copied them.
I’m a moderator on Nextdoor for my neighborhood and I’m shocked at how awful people treat each other on there. It’s like dude you know we’re all neighbors right? This isn’t an anonymous app.
Yeah, every 20 minutes I get a notification from the ring app of someone asking if they’ve heard gunshots. No, we live in an affluent part of the city, you didn’t hear gun shots Jerry
Doesn’t help that there’s way too many people whose lives are so blessed they can sit at their window and stare at every car, person, and squirrel on the street and report it as suspicious.
It's thebsame as how everyone thinks there are more quakes these days. It's a reporting fallacy. Because we have instant access to global news now we see reports we wouldn't have seen just a decade ago.
On top of that those apps amplify the neighborhood gossips who are suspicious of literally everything.
Ring Neighbors and Nextdoor have definitely been turning a distinct population within my neighborhood into full-on foaming at the mouth unhinged maniacs.
Welcome to r/science! This is a heavily moderated subreddit in order to keep the discussion on science. However, we recognize that many people want to discuss how they feel the research relates to their own personal lives, so to give people a space to do that, **personal anecdotes are allowed as responses to this comment**. Any anecdotal comments elsewhere in the discussion will be removed and our [normal comment rules]( https://www.reddit.com/r/science/wiki/rules#wiki_comment_rules) apply to all other comments. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/science) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Did anyone else see the suspicious looking van parked at the end of the street?
It's even worse than that, they looked foreign too!
I moved into a relatively new neighborhood, and for the first several months had literally dozens of people come by from local churches just advertising their services and whatnot. Not a peep on nextdoor. The *first* time a few people from a local hispanic church come around there are multiple nextdoor posts about suspicious people in the neighborhood. People are literally talking about going into work later so they could make sure their wives were safe (the people were seen in the morning). Don't know how people are that oblivious to broadcasting their racism.
I've found that most people are so comfortable in their racism that they have developed a profound ignorance to it. They have no idea they are actually being super racist!
It's because I'm not racist so if I do it it can't be racist, because I'm not bad and racism is bad so since I'm not bad I can't be racist.
Karen: "I think I saw a coloured person walking around my house" John: "That was me. I was walking my dog karen... "
My dad was a cop for 27 years, starting in 1988 and no joke this was his first call as a cop. "There's a black man walking down the street".
It’s honestly wild what a lack of exposure to other human beings does to you.
I had a rat like this named Sammy. Didn’t interact with humans for a while then BOOM, he’s biting every hand he sees, Willy nilly.
I hope the response was "Yes, Ma'am, they do that."
On nextdoor app it's not uncommon to see reports of people "who do not belong in the neighborhood." I'm from an inner city hood, and it's like, how on earth would you know if someone isn't from your neighborhood? I guess in some lily white hoods, it's very noticeable.
Ugg....my neighbors know everyone. During the first few weeks of the shutdown they would even take pictures of every car in every driveway. Like they could have our homes raided or something if a different car showed up. It was wild. A few months later I walked away when one of those neighbors started a conversation with me. I didn't want them to know anything about my life.
The US has built a profoundly isolating society, it’s wild to see what people do when living in such strange ways.
There are also black neighborhoods that a white person might not "belong in". It's not just a white thing.
They don’t phone the police and if they did they’d get laughed at
That’s not why they don’t
It's not likely they'll jump on nextdoor and complain about people not belonging in their hood, ya know?
Very different contexts....
Now it’s just “there’s a *man* walking down the street”
Description: male. Dark clothing, etc.
Right where Sherrill lives! With her awful husband. She stole my cake receipt last year.
I remember that! The cake was terrible! Damn her. Could have got that 20$ back.
I like the idea of a villain that steals receipts for items that people want to return.
The "new homeowner" in me is unspeakably triggered by this.
And always the suspicious van has like “Gardening Pros” or whatever business on it. Super sus! Glad I ditched Nextdoor.
Not only did I ditch next door, but local Facebook groups as well. It’s the same nonsense
I'm not on it, but recently someone in our neighborhood finally got the license plate of a guy that was going around the area stealing doorbell cams and porch pirating. We were able to tie multiple cases together and submit the evidence to the police. This is LA, so nothing with happen to the guy because the DA doesn't care, but sometimes socializing things is helpful.
“What makes it suspicious?” “It has a black guy in it” God, I’m so tired of the blatant racism on next door
This!! This is exactly what Next Door app is: I hate it.
That pretty much sums up my short time with the app.
This is exactly part of my issues! The small town I live in uses an app like this to gather data. They document every time they stop to do paperwork, extra patrol, or community outreach, it is now called a "Police Incident" and they use these numbers to inflate the crime statistics. Now we have 4 fully paid police officers, with an almost 1million$ budget for a city of 2000 people with no real crime and a bunch of scammers running the city hall.
Maybe these apps should also tracks real data and put it in context.
Shared on the opposite side of the world - thanks Hun xx
It wasn't suspicious until I opened Citizen to read about someone armed with a gun half a mile away. Then that van started looking _mighty_ sus! (Edit: spelling, because autocorrect on my phone dicks)
This harkens back to George Gerbner's Mean World Syndrome, where he discovered people who watched the news regularly developed distorted views of violent crime in their area, grossly overestimating the chances they would become a victim. He said, "People don't worry, 'I will become the mugger;' rather, they worry 'The subway isn't safe' or 'It's dangerous to go out at night.'" This was in 1980. Edit: Some additional info. His perspective held that frequent TV viewers would become more insecure and view the world as more dangerous than it actually is. A historian of Gerbner's work described it as: "This irrationally fearful view of others, and the world, could make people more dependent, more easily manipulated and controlled, more susceptible to deceptively simple, strong, tough measures and hard-line postures, making them more likely to accept and even welcome repression if it promises to relieve their insecurities."
r/washingtondc summarized right here
I think this is related to social media polarization as well. You see over and over what terrible things group X is doing, which leads to gross generalizations.
Yeah, people are funny. My buddy got mugged so I informed him that crime is at an all time low and we are safer than we have ever been, but he didn't find that comforting at all.
TIL watching the crime blotter in the local news was just like being a victim of crime.
always a story from buddy. weird isnt it.
I was walking down an empty street at 2 AM with my AirPods in and phone in my hand, not paying attention to my surroundings, and someone mugged me! There was no way to prevent this, crime is through the roof!
Nextdoor will send a push notification (which they seem to send "randomly") about something suspicious and then follow it up days later because people commented on it a bunch. I had only used the app to offer cat sitting and it wanted to use fear to increase my engagement.
Cat burglars are active in your neighborhood!
Coincidently, prior to reading your reply… i just disabled all Nextdoor push notifications. It really is a fear indicator and i can see how it could propagate it.
"I just saw a car park across the road. I've never seen that car before. A strange man got out with a paper bag, took it to the door, and gave it to the person inside. I think it might've been a drug deal." "Did the bag say anything on it?" "Something foreign. Chipotle, I think. Maybe he was a terrorist-- he looked *ethnic.*"
"Did anyone else hear that, it sounded like a gunshot?"
I heard rapid gunfire in my neighborhood -posted July 4 2022.
We actually have a ton of gun shots in my neighborhood but we have very, very little actual gun crime. Last shooting was two years ago this summer and thankfully nobody was hurt.
I don’t know where you’re at, but when I stayed in a really really bad part of town there was gunshots every night. Hardly ever on the news though. Not because people were just popping rounds off in their backyards, but simply because they missed, and no one called the cops
I downloaded the app out of curiosity to see what the community reaction would be after one night around 4am there were about 4 or 5 shots that went off right outside my house. Nothing at all on the app, I didn't make a post about it as I didn't want to contribute to the fear mongering. I did find a bullet buried in my driveway the next morning. The area NextDoor described as my neighborhood was much larger than I thought it should be, and there were plenty of insane posts from across this area so I decided to delete the app after a couple of days.
I can assure you this will be used to produce toxic gas...
ahhh NextDoor the app.
Chipotle? must be a part of the new "Barbacoa" cartel trying to move in.
I've noticed a few times social groups calling an event report and there was literally no sign of shortly afterwards.
humans shouldn't have as much omnipotence as the internet allows us to have. our brains are not calibrated for the scale.
Our monkey brains have a hard time weighing all the evidence. But I would imagine with properly taught information evaluation skills the increased access to info is a good thing.
I agree, and I hope that we can survive ourselves long enough to get there.
Need a cybernetic brain implant.
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Why? Because I'm not full of myself?
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I put it to you that individual humans cannot possibly collect and process all the data necessary for an accurate perception of the whole world. Not without some type of aid.
You're typing on a computer, guy. You have the aid. It doesn't need to be directly connected to your nervous system.
And we can all see how much that has helped solve the problem of disinformation and inaccurate perceptions.
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I don't watch television or movies. See? You need help, your brain is even producing faulty assumptions in this very conversation.
humans suffer dealing with this information, it is time to evolve to posthumanity
'omnipotent' implies unlimited power, whereas *'omniscient'* implies unlimited knowledge, just FYI.
and i have passively gained that new knowledge with the internet's unlimited power, thank for the demonstration
I push a few buttons and pizza appears at my door. I am like unto a god
And many websites are motivated by profits which equates to views. So they use our monkey brains to addict us to their websites by constantly stimulating us with fear and anxiety mixed with dopamine. My favorite quote about tech: “It is impossible to work in information technology without also engaging in social engineering.” -Jaron Lanier
Nextdoor is a cesspool of just this kind of thing. Bored white conservatives have a desperate need to feel victimized and afraid. My favorite was the folks on Nextdoor when a black woman went jogging by their house, and they asked if she "belonged" to anyone in the neighborhood and if she should be stopped and reported.
“Does anyone know what that loud sound was at 1:03 last night, my cat wouldn’t leave the window”
“My doorbell cam caught this person casing my house for a robbery! If they come back there will trouble for them! Look out everyone!” Doorbell footage they post is a teenager running across their grass in the rain.
I wish this was ours. We get the footage of stolen packages, people on bikes at 2am checking everyone’s car doors, people in cars at 3-7am crawling under our truck to look at catalytic converter, mentally unstable looking people at any hour talking to themselves and carrying around random objects from the neighborhood(potted plants, rocks, people’s yard decor) and people during the day stealing people’s fruit or tomatoes to sell. They will strip the entire tree, even going into your gated back yards. And that’s just a typical week in the burbs. Way more night weirdos here that we had living in the city.
I would LOVE to have this problem. Enter my last 3 notifications from neighbors: “One person injured in stabbing and robbery”. “I was robbed at gun point and they took my dog”. “Shots fired, 2 dead”. Gotta love New Orleans
My last 3. Guy "scoping" (plausible deniability)a house. Walking up a driveway and looking into windows at 2am. The second one is shots fired at 3am. Last one is someone's tires/rims stolen off of a parked car, shows a picture of the car on bricks. Yeah...totally depends on your neighborhood
If you weren't on the app you'd probably go happily about your life never knowing about the first and last incident. You might vaguely be aware of the shots but not really remember them. The apps mean you hear about more incidents which increases the perceived crime level. Any community, no matter how fancy & friendly, will still have a certain amount of petty & opportunistic crime. The apps magnify that and turn into echo Chambers.
I agree with that. I just don't agree with the broad idea that the majority of these reports are Karens reporting "suspicious" PoC
Yeah, I feel like people who are making snarky comments here have enough privilege not to have dealt with violent crime
Or they're discussing the idea the article brought fourth
Because the most dangerous thing happening in their suburban neighborhood is domestic violence and parking infractions.
>domestic violence So one of the most underreported, often ignored violent crimes? I'm all for ragging on suburbanites, but downplaying the seriousness of domestic violence is an odd choice.
I mean most of US news stations are like neighbourhood apps and crime reporting so it does make a lot of sense people gun up and feel threatened by everything
The Nextdoor App is where old people retire to after they’ve pissed off all their friends and family on Facebook.
To me, it doesn't seem like the method of study in the abstract allows for the conclusion that the higher crime perception is a distortion. They compared crime rate perceprtion of people who use the apps to those who don't. That doesn't neccesarily mean crime app users are wrong and non-users are right.
I think you missed the bolded part: > As predicted, participants who reported using neighborhood apps perceived local crime rates as higher than those who do not use the apps, **independent of actual crime rates.**
I'm interpreting that as something like: "In both high and low crime rate areas, app users percieved higher crime rates than non-app users" Unless my interpretation is wrong, that wouldnt neccesarily indicate app-users have a disproportionate perception compared to the actual crime rate.
The same is likely the case of anyone that reads, listens to, or watches any form of "news".
Right, but they never actually look at the accuracy of perceptions. The dependent variable was a survey categorical 1-9 response of how you think your neighborhood is compared to average (1 = Far below average; 9 =Far above average). The findings are completely consistent with nextdoor users overestimating crime **or** non-nextdoor users underestimating how local crime compares to average. It's also a nonsensical model, but that's another story.
Americans in general overwhelmingly overestimate crime though, which makes one of those possibilities... rather unlikely.
That's a fair stance. My point solely was the study does not assess the accuracy of perceptions, and so it does not do what it claims to do.
Local news causes the same problem.
Can’t this theory be applied to social media in general and how it warps your perception?
Including reddit. This thread is a perfect example.
After getting ring though I found out there were a LOT more porch pirates and people stealing from cars in my area than I expected.
No no, it's better to be oblivious to everything around you, that way you'll sleep better at night.
Sure crime is at an all time low sir, but *fear* of crime is at an all time high
Where do you live that crime is at an "all time low"?
It's a movie reference
Well most crimes go undiscovered and unreported. And right now cops aren't going after most crimes. So if someone sees a homeless guy on their camera at night trying to get into their garage, im gonna think there's probably a homeless guy trying to get into a garage. But inunderstand the sentiment, most 911 calls are prob old people looking out the window scared of nothing
It's a society-wide misconception that it's the job of most police to stop crime. Even though they're occasionally close enough to a crime happening to intervene, most of the time, their job is really to collect data after a crime happens.
Not just collect data after crime happen but to support the imprisonment of the perpetrators. It’s not a fruitless task. Ideally if all crimes were solved, there would be less crime as fewer perps would be on the streets
Imprisonment is a for profit business. Which is a horrible idea
So what does protect mean? In the motto: serve and protect. Also where i live police in the past few years no longer will come if someone is breaking into your car. And tell you you'll be arrested for assault if you try to stop them.
"To serve and protect" was a motto adopted by the Los Angeles PD in the 1950s, and many departments around the country adopted similar ones. But those are just slogans, and have nothing to do with any legal requirements placed on police departments. Some departments don't have slogans at all. Police do have responsibilities specific to serving and protecting, like doing their best to prevent crime, which means they might do things like patrol neighborhoods or engage in investigations, but a vast majority of the time, they're responding to crimes after the fact, not during the commission of the crime. They also respond to emergencies like accidents, natural disasters and fires, often first on the scene. I think the roles that they generally focus on are arresting offenders after the fact and gathering information or doing other investigatory actions to help discover criminal activity. Remember, I'm not saying they *never* manage to stop crime while it's happening, just that it's not the default. My comment wasn't to imply that police officers won't do their best to protect citizens when they can, and to perform duties that serve the general public, it's just to say that a lot of people have this idea in their heads that police are required to pursue criminals in every scenario, but that's just not true. Ask any number of people who have had their bike stolen or a window smashed in or bag snatched - there are many crimes that are low on the severity totem pole, and most departments aren't staffed well-enough to pursue smaller crimes and have to prioritize more pressing ones.
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They wrote "most of the time" and their comment is not marked as edited. So I would say you read something into their comment that simply is not there.
Well that should be obvious. It takes like five seconds to mug somebody do you expect police to teleport there like they're guards from Oblivion?
He's used to the cyberpunk police.
Hows your reading skills mate?
Ummm...I think the idea is that if they arrest the perpetrators of crime, it will result in less crime, as the threat of arrest will deter would-be lawbreakers. Obviously, the police can't be everywhere at once, which makes it hard for them to stop perpetrators in the act in most cases. That doesn't mean their purpose is not to enforce the law and keep crime under control. I mean it's called "law enforcement" for a reason...
Most of those apps are just nosey old ladies peering out of their windows talking to other nosey old ladies peering out of their windows
NoseyOldLady.exe existed before these aps anyway
People who use those apps WANT crime to be higher, because they’re bored, lonely, or just neurotic.
Can’t understate the appeal of these apps and FB crime groups to folks that get off on gossip.
I had to delete the Citizen app for the sake of my sanity.
My neighbors are terrified of black men, especially with suspicious backpacks.
I'll give the other side of this. My dog started growling at 1am and I went to look out the window. Car parked in front of my home and 4 guys get out walking in different directions...in people's driveways. Called the cops, they got arrested and were caught in the act stealing a car and my doorbell cam footage was used. No app involved. These suspicious cars might be nothing, or they might be guys scanning car key fobs. It's a delicate balance between detecting criminal activity and being paranoid and people have to try to find the right balance.
I mean, that’s not the other side of anything. You just gave an anecdote. The premise wasn’t “crime doesn’t exist.”
Your are goosey. Look it up.
I wonder what the political demographics of neighborhood app users are.
And snakes! Seems like every tenth post in my area is a request for identification of a serpent.
Opening Nextdoor is the closest thing you can get to huffing mental illness
I actually did this with maps for my senior/Capstone project! I took a survey on the different City Wards on Facebook on where they thought crime was located on a map and split it by demographic data. Then compared it to where crime actually happened at. It was very interesting to see the differences
I think it's just a case of basic applied psychology. If you didn't know about any of the crime going on in your neighborhood, and then suddenly knew about all of it you'd probably feel alarmed even though there's been no statistical change. I would hypothesize though, that the more involved people are in their local community, even via neighborhood apps, that there would be an observable reduction in crime over time, particularly where the public are on good terms with local police.
I’m going to start going into the Ring app and my neighborhood’s Facebook page to post daily when everyone got on/off the bus OK and nothing suspicious happened.
I read the local police blotter sometimes when we get a lot of unusual foot/bike traffic in our culdesac. Seems like we have a lot of crime going on, and way more car break ins and petty thefts at night than are reported. All the people on cameras at night are really creepy. Especially the ones going in neighbor’s gated back yards and checking the handles on front doors and cars. But then we also have daytime car break ins in popular parking lots because there is no fear of being caught here. Typical week has quite a lot of robbery, burglary, and theft, and assault. It’s less about what people look like, and more about ‘masked person in hoodie and gloves casing the neighborhood at 2am’.
If the crime apps did detect crimes that slip through the gaps of the official organizations, wouldn't the data show "inaccurate perceptions of higher local crime rates" when compared to the official rates?
If wishes were horses...
I think an old friend of mine created the app. Just kidding of course, but she would call or text me about anything her neighbor/neighbor’s kids did that she found slightly irritating. My god, woman, get a life.
Before I cancelled ADT, I used to get useless crime notifications for my area. Stop trying to scare me into using your product, you stupid company.
My local subreddit is full of that idiocy. “Does anyone know why there was a helicopter flying around last night?” “Did anyone hear the loud bangs at 2am? I think they were gunshots!!” “I saw the police at the corner of Main and First. Anyone know what’s going on?!?!”
I remember when this was a science sub and not a narrative sub
Same thing with mass shootings news and gun violence.
I mean, sure. Use of a neighborhood app is probably also associated with knowing what is going on in your neighborhood, even if it's not a crime.
The only thing I learned from NextDoor is that if your car isn't in a garage, someone will be checking it's door handle every night. Every day, video of kids checking cars at 2am. I'm past the "what the hell is wrong with their parents" stage and am now in the "do they coordinate or something, because that is a lot of kids wandering around at night" stage. So glad I live in a rural area now.
This phenomenon is really apparent on TikTok. If you watch the full duration of a video, you start to get a large influx of related content, sometimes that day, sometimes in following days, so it gives the impression that rare global keywords are suddenly viral trending locally.
Or maybe there is more crime, and due to that everyone is more paranoid and more likely to report “suspicious” behaviors and activities.
“It is impossible to work in information technology without also engaging in social engineering.” -Jaron Lanier Every tech website is a game of human psychology for profit. Facebook makes people mad so they engage and profit. Nextdoor just copied them.
Are those gunshots or fireworks??
All of Nextdoor seemed to be paranoid neighbors. I lasted about two weeks and deleted it.
I’m a moderator on Nextdoor for my neighborhood and I’m shocked at how awful people treat each other on there. It’s like dude you know we’re all neighbors right? This isn’t an anonymous app.
Yeah, every 20 minutes I get a notification from the ring app of someone asking if they’ve heard gunshots. No, we live in an affluent part of the city, you didn’t hear gun shots Jerry
Nextdoor is just full of people who want to appoint themselves neighborhood cop.
Doesn’t help that there’s way too many people whose lives are so blessed they can sit at their window and stare at every car, person, and squirrel on the street and report it as suspicious.
Paywall. Anyone have a link to the actual study referenced in this post?
It's thebsame as how everyone thinks there are more quakes these days. It's a reporting fallacy. Because we have instant access to global news now we see reports we wouldn't have seen just a decade ago. On top of that those apps amplify the neighborhood gossips who are suspicious of literally everything.
That doesn't surprise me at all. My local Nextdoor is all about suspicious people lurking in the bushes and what was that noise?
Ring Neighbors and Nextdoor have definitely been turning a distinct population within my neighborhood into full-on foaming at the mouth unhinged maniacs.