As if pushing ever more news of "crime" (much of which may be inconsequential, entirely non-criminal trivia, judging by the kind of material mentioned in the article) at the public will somehow make our society better/happier/safer.
Didn't Bowling for Columbine suggest that a key element in America's fear-driven and violent society, when compared to its northern neighbour, might be the extent to which US media already focuses on such reporting (if I remember right -- it's been a long time)? This sort of toxic, alarmist "news" is already poisoning our social fabric; so let's double down on it and focus even more on feeding people's fears. Great.
It could be that the desire is so great to have your fear justified that the quiet that a lack of reporting from your local Ring community is seen as a lack of quality.
"My neighbour's kids are constantly being held hostage by sex slavery rings. My Ring feed just isn't reporting it!"
I think in this case we don’t yet know the consequences:
- It hasn’t ramped up
- They’re still haven’t fully integrated with LEOs (people must report the traditional way, but this could change)
So here are some obvious observations:
it increases surveillance (people can be followed across these networks via facial recognition).
If more people who commit crime are reported and LEOs become more effective (better evidence/leads/suspects) then it’s possible this could put down pressure on burglaries and other street crime.
Maybe it will depend on neighborhood, composition, attitudes, engagement, etc.
Begrudgingly I find it useful knowing to look out for bands of roving thieves, meter maids, anti social behavior, etc.
Do I like where it’s going? It has good and it has bad. No verdict yet.
This, moreso, seems to emphasize how much partisanship has gripped everybody. For instance homelessness is substantially down across the US. [1] But of course certain areas, especially in California and New York, do not follow this trend. And so for people in these regions and especially in certain areas of them, homelessness is very much an issue, aggregate stats notwithstanding.
Imagine having the same interview, except now have an advocate for focusing on homelessness as an issue and a journalist who keeps interjecting 'but homelessness across the country is down!' Now furthermore, have somebody go and insert laugh tracks when the homeless advocate speaks. People would react to it entirely differently even though it's the exact same logic, just with the issue being discussed swapped. I think this is mostly reflective of partisanship, as it emphasizes that the logic itself is not what people are mocking.
Increasingly often we mock or support logic based not on the soundness of said logic, but whether it affirms or challenges our views and values.
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But more on topic I completely agree that the media holds some responsibility (I imagine many people even outside of New York and California believe that homelessness is on the rise, contrary to the data) but there's also the very real issue that aggregate stats do not necessarily represent local conditions. There are also a couple of other factors to consider.
People are much more influenced by relatively recent changes rather than changes that happened decades ago. For instance the violent crime rate has been increasing recently. That it's far below the levels of the 90s is probably not much comfort for those in areas where it's increasing. Another issue that increases in population can see a rate decrease, but the number of incidents increase or remain stable. If the population increases 10% and the murder rate declines 1% you'd see an increase in the number of murders happening. That it's at a lower per capita rate is, once again, probably not very comforting to those in the area.
A neighbor recently got a Ring out of some security concerns (partner got deployed for a year and they have two young kids). However, I've think it's made things worse in some ways:
- Every potential interaction is viewed with suspicion
- Everybody who walks up to the door prompts an interruption wherever you are (on your smartphone)
The local neighborhood sharing aspects of Ring strongly remind me of NextDoor, whose suspicion raising and general uselessness can pretty much be summed up in this tweet:
I've never seriously considered installing cameras outside my house, and the #1 reason is that I don't want a reason to fear something when there's nothing to fear.
I've never had my home broken into. But I guarantee you there have been all kinds of suspicious-looking things happening outside of my house. Someone's probably looked in the windows of our cars. Hell, I'm sure folks have wandered into (and out of) our gated back yard. Nothing's ever been stolen or disturbed, and while it would still be trespassing, it's not hurting me. My life would be worse, rather than better.
Maybe I'll sing a different tune when my house gets broken into some day, but for now I'll be blissfully unaware. And what would the video do for me, anyway? It seems the news is full of video clips asking people to call the police if they recognize the person. And what? Usually, nothing.
I live in the bay area, and have never once worried about package theft. I think homogeneity is probably the biggest predictor of it. Live in a multi-generational neighborhood? No problem.
Live in a cookie cutter subdivision with one way in and out, and every single resident is gone all day? Package theft heaven.
I have a few coworkers who recently got Ring devices. Now I see them constantly checking their phones and watching the security footage. The level of paranoia this device creates is pretty remarkable. These are rich tech workers living in low crime neighborhoods too.
Having a security camera isn't a bad idea at all, but one that gets you to check it constantly like it's instagram can't be healthy.
A good friend got one. Checks it constantly. He has slipped down the slope of constant surveillance. Cell phone buzzes while we are out..."let's see who is visiting the wife?" Let's listen in on how she's interacting with the kids as they play in the driveway.
It makes me uneasy and any suggestions I have made jokingly or seriously about it being weird are brushed off. I genuinely feel it straining our relationship as he turns into this other person every time he checks in on what's happening.
That is gross. It is the inflexible that shape society. This is why we have overly clean things, scents everywhere and a myriad of disposable one time use items.
As a counterpoint, I live in Arizona (hardly rich tech workers living in my neighborhood, excluding me). Tons of people here have them and almost every instance is either just a delivery person OR literally someone trying to steal crap from their porch etc.
> OR literally someone trying to steal crap from their porch etc.
To significantly reduce the chance of package theft, I got a simple outdoor cabinet (no lock) and put up a sign on my door asking deliverymen to place packages in it. They do it 95% of the time now, so it's very difficult for a potential package thief to know if there's anything to steal at my door.
Specifically, I got one of these and spray-painted it to match my house:
>OR literally someone trying to steal crap from their porch etc.
On one border you have CA (which basically laughs at the idea of prosecuting people for property crime), on another you have Mexico (a place to liquidate stolen goods). AZ is screwed from a property crime perspective.
That paranoia dies down quickly once you realize how boring your neighborhood is. At least it did for me. In fact, I recently had an item stolen, and didn't even know it until my neighbor told me about a strange man in her backyard (I had missed the notification entirely).
I do agree with the article, however. It makes sense that a constant drip-feed of local crime news can have a detrimental effect on perceived security and danger.
It’s primary season in New York, and Nextdoor in my area is a cesspit of people worried about the the pair of people with clipboards ringing their doorbell.
Replies range from “they could be casing your house” to “I think they stole packages from my porch” to helpful hints like calling 911, calling the gas company, or drive around looking for them. Usually somebody brings up something off topic like 5G towers as well.
It’s such a awful snapshot of paranoia and crazy. Ring happens to be a major sponsor on Nextdoor.
My local nextdoor recently had a 30 post flame-fest because someone was concerned that 3 11 year old girls walked up to their door and asked if they could have a glass of water. It's amazing how shitty neighbors will treat each other online but would never say similar things in person to each other.
Living in a state where everyone could be a backstabbing busybody you can't help but treat every interaction with suspicion. Like, I assume my neighbors are fine people. I still would be totally unsurprised if one of them called the police because my wife screamed loudly or something.
There's plenty of reasons to scream that don't necessitate a police call (the most common one seems to be "unexpected spider"). When you take the frequency of the various reasons to scream into account the chances that calling the police is a reasonable response to any particular instance is practically nil.
Your attitude is exactly the problem I have with a lot of the people of my state.
Thanks for explaining. This seems to be an expected value problem. If, indeed, there are many innocuous reasons for a loud scream (which I'm not convinced of) that may not need a police call, there are still some reasons that very much do need a police call.
The inconvenience of dealing with the police in the former is dwarfed by the value of them showing up in the latter, in my opinion. I would 100% most definitely want my neighbors to call the police every time they hear any screams from my wife or I.
Explore every single setting and preference for every single thing you ever buy, and that won't happen to you again. This philosophy has served me well in life.
I downloaded Neighbors—you can do so without owning a Ring doorbell—and plugged in my address in boring Arlington, Massachusetts, a city of 45,000 that recorded zero murders and only seven robberies last year. It decided I needed to know that someone in the uniform of a local lawn-care service had recently knocked on someone’s door instead of using the doorbell and, when no one answered, left. Also, there was a building fire two towns away, a couple of days ago.
Also, two young people, one male, one female, wearing identical T-shirts and lanyards with name badges, carrying clipboards—likely trying to get signatures for some cause or another—rang a doorbell and then walked away when no one answered. “Anyone know who they are?” the post from a Neighbors user asked, perhaps concerned about Islamic State infiltration of the Boston suburbs. “Call the police,” one helpful commenter replied.
I hate these things and all the things that go with them (NextDoor, etc). They promote a world where we're all locked in our boxes peeking through the blinds at each other and checking Twitter to see what's wrong.
When we don't trust each other, especially the people in our local community, we move towards a slightly worse world.
This is part of the same phenomenon frequently discussed on Hacker News where children are not allowed to play outside freely anymore. We're all convinced the world is full of Bad People who need stopping.
Nextdoor depends on where you live and who you live near. I've learned a lot about my city and local politics from my neighbors. It's a great place to get recommendations for local contractors. I live with a lot of nice people around and I appreciate getting the exposure to that.
There are definitely stories about needle sightings, break-ins, and package thefts, but I've found needles at the park and I've even had police come to my door asking about a dead body found nearby in a tarp. It's not like staying off of Nextdoor really stops my exposure to bad things, but I do get to learn more about my neighbors and keep in touch with what's going on in the 'hood.
Can you point me to an example of a successful local forum? There's Craigslist for buying/selling items and the local subreddit for discussions, but both of those encompass the wider area of the city as opposed to the neighborhood.
I live in a very affluent and safe area in Central Indiana. Yet my Next Door and FB neighborhood group has lot of posts from people living in fear of “rising crime” due to the constant stream of crime reporting from various sources.
I’m fine with being “aware” of what’s happening but there needs to be sensible curation of the info.
Los Angeles recently got the Citizen App. I was excited at first to be better informed. Then I realized... perhaps it's better I don't get a notification every time something happens within a 10 block radius. The world around me started to seem more dangerous, and that isn't helping anyone.
I hear that (I'm in Brooklyn), but there have also been cases where something happened nearby that would have changed my route (if I was about to go somewhere).
Or at work, there are alerts about things happening in Grand Central Station, which would also change my plans (if it happened when I was about to leave).
I guess it's never actually caused me to change plans, but I still think it's pretty valuable.
Actually, I did notify relatives when there was a dude with a gun walking around their neighborhood. It's really astounding how much craziness can happen right under your nose.
I turned off Ring notifications because they were, in fact, making me fear my neighborhood. I try to be safe in my neighborhood. These notifications don't change that. They just make me scared.
I have a Ring doorbell camera and a camera in our garage, mostly to see if the garage door is closed. The "crime alerts" are annoying, so I've basically turned off all the notifications. Looks like amazon has figured out that crime sells security equipment.
We had a problem with teenagers were ringing our doorbell and screaming late at night around 1 a.m. It became a nightly ordeal, and sometimes several times a night. Sometimes they would kick the door and run away. Surprisingly, some of them were teenage girls. Since my wife is pregnant, I knew this had to stop. There is no way I wanted to deal with this with a newborn infant.
The comments on NextDoor are funny to me because it is filled with wingnuts and busy bodies. When I asked for advice on how to handle this situation, I was shouted down by social justice warriors who told me not to call the police because it was racist. I said fine, I'll just tell the registered sex offender who was recently released from prison (for abducting and raping a young woman) that there are young women harassing us, oh and by the way, all are neighbors are conditioned to ignore their screams and we won't call the police... because it is racist. Oddly enough, none of the social justice warriors replied to say I shouldn't.
I called the police and posted the videos on YouTube and sent them the link. They found them and calmly talked to them. Problem solved.
This is an entirely inflammatory and baseless article.
Yes, you should care a bit about local crime. If someone in your neighborhood is stealing hubcabs, maybe it's a good idea to park in the garage. Likewise, if there's a spat of minor vehicle burglaries, it's probably wise to make sure your vehicle is locked.
Yeah, is some idiot going to theorize that the salesman who ignored their no soliciting sign a secret islamist infiltrator who is casing their house? Probably. That doesn't undo the value of the other things because silly people exist.
On the other hand, when there are bad things happening in your neighborhood like serious break-ins or joggers keep getting kidnapped, then you know, harass your local police department to step up patrols and act accordingly.
Crime as a whole lowering doesn't mean crime in your neighborhood isn't happening. Yes the world is getting more peaceful as a whole, but yes, you can still be mugged and killed.
I don't think the article's thesis is that people shouldn't care about local crime news. Its main concern seems to be that a company who directly benefits from people being fearful (justifiably or not) of neighborhood crime, is also getting into the business of disseminating crime news, something which is known to increase people's fear of crime. The author points out that news organizations have traditionally been saturated with crime news, because of its popularity with readers, and that this might contribute to the public's skewed perception of actual crime incidence and trends.
Obviously, Amazon is not just a traditional news publisher, and may end up bringing innovation and doing things much better than journalists ever did. But there has been reason to believe big tech can end up being blindsided and/or fail when trying to disrupt traditional domains and problems.
My house was broken into last year. I wish I had Ring then. We never found any leads and police were unable to do anything.
Since then I have gotten Ring and definitely feel more secure. We even found footage of a man stealing our mail and were able to confirm with Ring app footage from a neighbor that the man stealing the mail was the same stealing their mail.
My experience is that giving all the camera footage in the world will make little difference to a home robbery investigation, hopefully other's mileage is better.
All of the people I know with Nest/Ring/Arlo/whatever who have been unlucky enough to suffer a break-in have found the thieves frankly don't care about the obvious presence of the cameras and neither did the cops care all that much for the footage.
I like these smart cam products for spying on if my Amazon parcel has arrived, or what my kids might be up to in the yard. For crime _prevention_, I don't especially rate these things personally.
> My house was broken into last year. I wish I had Ring then. We never found any leads and police were unable to do anything.
> Since then I have gotten Ring and definitely feel more secure. We even found footage of a man stealing our mail and were able to confirm with Ring app footage from a neighbor that the man stealing the mail was the same stealing their mail.
As a victim of package theft, I’m going to say, no.
Even with a picture of a car, and a decent photo of a face, there’s not much that can be done. You need a license plate. There’s no way to identify these people.
Nope! Which perhaps you could argue makes it not worthwhile if it couldn't help accomplish that.
However, some in our household were worried being targeted because of our position or industry. However, the security camera showed it was a homeless person stealing the mail of everyone on the street which (although annoying) was nice info.
> My house was broken into last year. I wish I had Ring then.
Wouldn't it be more useful, not to mention less prone to falsely inflaming your fear and still being respectful of your fellow man, to put security cameras and motion detectors inside your home instead?
By then it's a bit too late no? Sure you might be able to use it to arrest them, but they've already gotten inside your house and done whatever it is they plan to do - whether that's simply take your stuff, or harm your family.
I don't see how an external camera changes that, really. By the time you've been notified, called the cops, and the cops arrive, the intruders will almost certainly be gone anyway.
And what happened with the man stealing the mail ? My father had video footage of someone stealing and the police couldn’t be bothered to find the person
I wonder if something came of your footage
Crime reporting is big business. Besides 'Ring', look at the opportunistic hyping of fake hate crimes, ala Jussie Smollett. The desired outcome is the same: Injecting fear into people, causing them to buy something or vote a specific way.
It's despicable. It pits people against each other.
Back in the earlier days of the Internet, one of my first web apps I created as a reporter was a local crime map (inspired by, but much less sophisticated than Adrian Holovaty's chicagocrime.org [0]). This involved contacting each police department individually and asking them to email me the data. A couple of departments were happy, because they didn't want to pay to develop their own online map. Others (small jurisdictions) didn't have the IT process in place. But there were also large departments that definitely had a data process, but declined to participate (and I didn't really have the capacity to start a legal fight for it, since this was a side project, and I was the sole developer).
What I had been told unofficially, even by departments that did agree to send data, was that publicizing the data was perceived to have possible negative consequences -- such as scaring off potential home buyers (this was during the housing bubble). My point is that crime has always been a big draw for local news organizations, and this includes data applications like crime maps. But even ignoring how it might distort public perception of crime, there was always a pretty implicit downside to a local publisher in making their own community look like a shithole. Not just the negative feelings, but the price of real estate (and those real estate advertisers).
From what I can tell, Ring's proposed news service is just for Ring customers? That is, a non-Ring user (or someone not in the local geofenced area) might not get to see the crime news for a given area, in the same way that any Web user could visit a public crime mapper like chicagocrime.org. So the Ring news service gets all the upside of the attention that crime news draws without the same downsides that would usually be part of a publisher's news equation. This, added to Ring's already inherent appeal to customers paranoid about local crime, might lead to problematic incentives in their crime coverage.
If you want just the personally important hyperlocal crime news, your local police department might have an alerts email list that they use judiciously. Cambridge, Massaschusetts, USA, does this well. The advisories seem to be prompted by exceptional events/situations that people should know about (e.g., rash of B&E following a pattern in a particular neighborhood, or a rare shooting). If your local PD doesn't do this, consider asking them. Email list is vastly better than pushing you to follow them on Twitter or Facebook.
A city-wide genuine news outlet that cherry-picks important things from the police crime log, and follows up with additional reporting, is also good. And some awareness of the gist of it is important as a voting citizen and community member (e.g., you should be aware that, in some neighborhoods of your city, people might have justifiable fears of being hit by stray bullets, or how close to home the opiod epidemic, and read some of the journalism that personalizes ordinary people who are killed).
However, following every little hyperlocal thing exhaustively, or reading/watching for sensationalism/entertainment doesn't sound like a good idea, or at least is a huge time sink. Also, the reader/community comments can be spirit-crushing.
Separately, journalism is best done without any potential conflicts of interest. Most outlets I can think of have ownership that appears questionable (e.g., a big company/person with an interest in influencing public perception, or with other business before the politicians on which it's supposed to be a Fourth Estate check), but that kind of ownership shouldn't be the norm, and we should try to move away from that.
It’s propaganda 101, destabilize regimes and states by instilling fear in the population and mistrust of institutions. The fact it’s also profitable is a happy coincidence.
At the very least, the perception of rampant crime is a problem for local politicians; they’re seen as incompetent and not doing their jobs. The worst? See fascists regimes of ww2.
I own and pay a monthly monitoring fee for a home security system, not because I value the things in my house, but out fear some nut job would try to harm my family. This is not rational, the odds are near zero, and it wouldn’t stop a determined attacker anyway, but it is a deterrent. And I don’t want to kill anyone, even if it is often “justified” (castle doctrine). There’s definitly money in fear.
They probably found that many people lose interest in their Ring if they don't see a purpose for it, so they're manufacturing a point. The more your Ring tells you about crime, the more afraid you'll be, and want your Ring around to keep you informed about crime.
This article seems rather inflammatory and focuses on what other news stations do too much for an article centred around an Amazon product, I think.
I'm of the opinion that local crime reporting an neighbourhood watches and whatnot should be handled by the actual locals, instead of a giant corporation, but this article doesn't seem to support this view, either. I'm left to wonder what this article would suggest, because it seems to be suggesting doing nothing is better than locals handling it.
The "selling fear" narrative seems pretty far fetched and cherry picked. Crime happens regardless of your opinions.
Reporting it might actually make a difference since it will at least help people be aware of their area safety and attempt some organized effort to address it.
Yes, the way to address it might be buying security devices and yes, Amazon could profit from this (but not necessarily).
Either way, crime will happen regardless and this has nothing to do with Amazon or Ring. It's not like they are actually putting criminals in the streets or making up stories about crime to boost sales. The article make it almost sound like that.
The dichotomy here is whether you want to know if crime is happening around you or you want to be oblivious about it for whatever reason or belief. That sounds more like a choice, not like an imposition.
If you're going to demonize reporting facts or news about crimes, and you are going to raise concerns about the potential conflicts of interest between reporting and profits, you should start first with a sound judgement of journalism as a whole.
As far as I know most newspapers and media outlets are for-profit businesses, so their motivations might be as obscure. And this includes, The Atlantic, the publisher of this very article.
And that actually reminds of a wise spanish saying that seems like a good fit for this journalistic piece: "El ladrón juzga por su condición" ... That means "The thief judges by his condition"...
Most critics of journalists, and many journalists themselves, would agree with you that profit-motive is a main factor in deciding (consciously and unconsciously) what gets covered as news. And stories about crime have long been clickbait before "clicks" were a thing, e.g. the aphorism, "if it bleeds, it leads".
Didn't Bowling for Columbine suggest that a key element in America's fear-driven and violent society, when compared to its northern neighbour, might be the extent to which US media already focuses on such reporting (if I remember right -- it's been a long time)? This sort of toxic, alarmist "news" is already poisoning our social fabric; so let's double down on it and focus even more on feeding people's fears. Great.