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SPEAKER_03: and I'm really excited about our 10th guest in the 10-part series of The Next Unicorns. His company is Citizen. His name is Andrew Frame, and this is an app that many folks are aware of, especially if you live in a big city, New York, San Francisco, come to mind, Los Angeles. You've probably seen people tweeting about it. It gives you alerts on what crimes are going on in your area,

SPEAKER_04: and it is something that has become kind of essential for living, sadly, in San Francisco, where there is a lot of crime going on. Welcome to the program, Andrew Frame. How are you?

SPEAKER_05: Hi. Thank you for having me.

SPEAKER_03: So Citizen has a feed of events going on in your neighborhood, specifically crimes and police activity, and that is from both citizens reporting stuff, and then some amount of it is provided by citizen. These alerts, I think, are maybe captured off of things like police scanners

SPEAKER_08: and then normalized and then put into the app. Am I correct?

SPEAKER_11: Yeah. In essence, that's correct. So we are a safety product meant to keep you safe. And so the way we got to market was the observation that there are police scanners chattering all day long, all across America. They're wide open. We all remember being little kids and going to Radio Shack, for those that are, of course, of our vintage, and listening in to what the police are doing. Now, it was pretty hard to figure out what they were talking about. It was generally hard to hear. It was all 10 codes, but there was an address with every single incident. And so when I was first starting Citizen, I wanted to do something that was mission-oriented, and safety seemed to be the ultimate urgent need. And this is back in 2016. Right now, it's definitely hit a boiling point with things like police accountability and all of the social unrest we're seeing. But even back then, right when I was starting the company, there were police killings, if you guys remember, when five Dallas police officers were shot by a sniper in response to a police killing. This is not exactly a new topic. And the need for transparency was urgent even then. And so when I came up with the idea to sort of democratize all of this public safety information, instead of just giving it to first responders in real time, every time somebody

SPEAKER_12: calls 911, that's public information. That's transmitted through the open radios. So why not just give it to everybody? And when somebody's nearby one of the addresses, as long as it meets the policy, notify

SPEAKER_13: everybody within a quarter of a mile. That was the original idea.

SPEAKER_03: And is that limitation of the quarter mile around wherever that call came in or police were dispatched

SPEAKER_17: to? Is that still exist? Because it would seem to me this is public data. Why couldn't I know that two towns over there was a bunch of police activity?

SPEAKER_20: You can now.

SPEAKER_17: You can now. Yeah.

SPEAKER_11: You know, when I first thought about it, I was sitting on my balcony, I was in New York City. And I was thinking about this. And as soon as I started trying to understand what was going on through those radio waves, I was thinking about the open radios that were just transmitting through these, these buildings and how long that's been going on since like, you know, 60s, 70s, they've been using open radios. And it just dawned on me. I was like, oh my gosh, this is the biggest treasure trove of information that needs to be unlocked. Imagine if a child gets kidnapped right now, the police are alerted that a child has been kidnapped. Here's the address. Here's the description. But why isn't the whole community alerted? Or if there's a fire, let's say you live on the fourth floor in a building and you call and say, hey, the building's on fire. Well, why aren't the other people in the building notified at the same time as the fire department? So it almost like knocked me like straight over the second I thought about it. I was just like, oh my gosh, I came up with a quarter of a mile thing just in conjunction with opening the information. The idea was if we create this kind of transparency, could you even get away with a kidnapping? What happens if everybody gets alerted when there's a bank robbery? And it just kind of blew my mind. And the quarter mile was a bit arbitrary. And we actually had it for the first year. And now, of course, we have like full ML teams and there's all sorts of optimization that's continuously going on. So depending on the geographic location, the density of people living there, the density of citizen users, the density of alerts, all of those things are taken into account when the incidents are routed. But it was

SPEAKER_02: a quarter of a mile when this was first started. Was there any objection to the service from either

SPEAKER_23: cities, law enforcement, or neighborhoods? Or did everybody see this as a positive thing that you were taking what was probably information that was known to a tiny fraction of the community and then

SPEAKER_03: documenting it, organizing it, and essentially normalizing that data so everybody could consume it. Was there any pushback? And I'm curious what their best argument was against allowing you to do

SPEAKER_29: this. You know, it's funny. I mean, we know how much change the government likes and how much change

SPEAKER_11: that police like. I mean, they were standing in stark opposition to this. In fact, I'm pretty sure I was being followed around by like the FBI. And there were definitely some vehicles following me and the police were kind of like figuring out what we were doing, who we were, what we were all about. This was nothing but resistance. When this idea emerged, we had problems, very few people saw it as a good idea. They thought it was dangerous. They thought it was wacky. You know, now I work very closely with the former police commissioner of New York, Bill Bratton, who was once the LA police commissioner. And you know, he's been a mentor on police policy. He's now a civilian. But the first time I finally were able to sit down with him and ask him because, you know, part of this is police accountability, but also officer safety. We don't want to get anybody hurt if there's a SWAT operation. There are certain things we just don't want to be involved with if we can create less safety because our mission is more safety. So we've taken advice from all sorts of constituencies, including police. But when I first sat down with him, he came over to my apartment and, you know, he had already left the police force, but he was leading the NYPD at the time. And the first thing is I sent him an email and I said, Commissioner Bratton, we intend to open up your 911 system. We are going to give this information to all 8 million New Yorkers. We mean no harm. We're trying to create safety with these 8 million New York for these 8 million New Yorkers and create police accountability. If you need to reach us, you know, here's how to get ahold of us. There might be some press. And we put it out. Of course, there was an extraordinary amount of press and it was an extraordinary amount of bad press. And people thought it was like a Black Mirror episode or something like that. And so when I finally told Bratton, you know, first thing he said is that letter is probably still working its way up to me, even though I left a year ago. But the second thing he said was, you know, you coming into the police and basically saying, hey, I have an idea. You know, that piece of technology that your police officers use to figure out where the crime is in real time across New York City? We're going to make something that's 10 times better, even faster, more real time. We're going to make it a free app, make it a number one app and give it to all people that have no police training or no. I mean, that completely terrified them. All they could think of is worst case scenarios. And so there was there was an abundance of resistance and just obstacles when

SPEAKER_03: we first got this thing. I understand people saying it's a new idea. It's wacky. But what exactly was their best example of there being downside to alerting somebody you sort of mentioned a SWAT situation? It would seem to me if somebody was SWATed or they called for about a shooter, it would be good for the neighbors to know so they could shelter in place and get out of the way and not walk down the street and get in the middle of a SWAT situation. So is there any conceivable situation that you heard from critics that you said, oh, yeah, that makes sense? Or there's some validity to that argument? Because I have yet to hear an argument for, you know, not sharing the

SPEAKER_11: information. I mean, you're totally right. I mean, the vast majority of examples are for transparency. I'll give you an example of against transparency that could have gotten a police officer hurt. Las Vegas has gone crypto on the radios. The reason they went crypto has everything to do with the massacre that happened from the hotel. Was it the Mandalay Bay?

SPEAKER_41: Yeah, it was that it was that big shooter situation, the mass shooter. And I guess he was

SPEAKER_11: listening to police radios. He was listening to police radios. And so the only thing that you want to make sure is that if somebody is doing an event like that, some sort of mass shooting, that they are not aware of the police activity. So if it says, hey, the police are coming up elevator 12, and they're going to be, you know, in the hallway in 30 seconds. Well, that's not information that you want the

SPEAKER_03: shooter to have. Yes. And so that makes total sense. And I would think police would not be giving that kind of information over the open radio, knowing that in this edge case, a terrorist organization would be or, you know, professional bank robbers, or a professional mass shooter would have thought out, hey, I'm going to get a scanner when we get back from this quick break. I want to know examples of

SPEAKER_04: the data leading to better policing or better government policy when we get back on this week in

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SPEAKER_03: media like This Week in Startups. Let's get back to this amazing episode. All right, welcome back to This Week in Startups. It's our next unicorn series. We did 10 great companies. You may remember

SPEAKER_52: caffeine, ghost, loom, degreed, zero mass water, cockroach labs, roof stock, homebound, and of course

SPEAKER_50: in Citro. What a great season of the next unicorns we had. And today, I'm really excited to finally have citizen.com. It's an app. You can download it now if you haven't already. It's a really

SPEAKER_03: important thing for you to have on your phone to know what crime is going on around you from public data sources that have been normalized by Andrew and his team. Andrew, I'm curious when you start normalizing this data and you see the statistics on it, do those statistics and patterns then lead to better policing and or the relationship between the community and the police? And do you have like

SPEAKER_50: an example of that where, hey, there were a lot of burglies occurring. People found out about the burglies. People took steps to lock their garage. As I know, we've had a massive amount of property crime here in San Francisco. And when I lived in the Cow Hollow, Pack Heights area, there were gangs, literal coordinated gangs going through and using garage scanners to like randomly open up garages. And people were having three or four garages hit in, you know, at four or five in the morning. And that led to people bolting their garages set so that the garage door opener scanners

SPEAKER_08: wouldn't do this. I'm curious if this type of thing, you've gotten reports back of, hey, this really

SPEAKER_37: helped us with policing. I mean, I think, yeah, countless, too many to tell. Yeah, do you have a

SPEAKER_54: good one? You have a good story? We have so many. I mean, the first thing is the principle,

SPEAKER_11: right? So one of the foundational elements of this is we must restore trust between community and law enforcement. That is the only way forward. And we have been trying to do that since we launched

SPEAKER_12: in 2017. And step one is to create an equal shared system where everybody has access to the same information. The police, they're doing a job paid for by tax money, and they should be okay operating in public. Well, with or without citizen, they are operating in public. We are not here to invent the transparency movement. That has been done already, right? Everybody is

SPEAKER_11: already live streaming or going live. See George Floyd and a million others that have created this kind of justice. So we are in the transparency movement. Citizen is simply organizing and accelerating it. And we have a strong focus on crime and police response and everything else. And so by creating a shared system, that's step one of accountability. The live video component shows you exactly how a crime was resolved. So you get to see exactly how the police officer conducted himself or herself, and exactly what they did to bring it to resolution. Explain what that feature is. So you can go live. So if it says a citizen can. Yeah, so people go live on almost every incident. And so you can live stream what's happening. So it's not just data saying that there's a missing child. It's live. It's here's the helicopter. Here's the response. It's a full live system that allows you to tune in to everything happening. And what this does is now when you're under observation, you are going to change your behavior. We know that that's the psychologically proven response to being

SPEAKER_12: under observation is behavior changes. And so for the better, for the better, you're going to be

SPEAKER_23: more buttoned up about how you're approaching. So the way this works on a workflow basis is a call comes in our scanner, there's been an incident and the police have been called for a bar fight or something. And there's some fight reported on Union Street, the police show up, but all the

SPEAKER_03: citizens around there may have gotten alerts. If one of those citizens is out there, they might stream. And that video is attached to the call that came in, correct? So it's all one piece of data.

SPEAKER_50: So now you have a third party view of, hey, how did they break up that bar fight or whatever it was?

SPEAKER_19: Yeah, you might have 100,000 people tuned into your live stream. And that's one of the differences

SPEAKER_11: between citizen and like a social media network. It's all about the relevance of content. It doesn't matter who you are. If you go live, you know, I just thought of this. We have so many countless stories about this helping people. But here's one I'm going to, I'm going to mention. And I don't mention this one often because this happened a long time ago, but you made me think about it when you said bar fight. There was a woman and she called the police because she said that a man had pulled a knife on her. And this man worked in a Chinese restaurant, according to her. And she went live on this incident. And so she was live streaming and another person went live and the police would not help her. And they thought she was crazy. And this is a black woman who was just pleading, passionately pleading for somebody, please, please stop treating me like I'm crazy. And the police

SPEAKER_12: would not respond to her. They basically acted like she did not exist. And then one of the users that was

SPEAKER_11: live goes, hey, look at this. I'm live on citizen. You've got 5,000 viewers and pointed that at the police officer who instantly changed the conduct. Now, all of a sudden it was like, oh my gosh, I'm so sorry. Where was it? Let me take the police report. She got zero attention. She was treated like a lunatic up into the point that somebody said that this is on citizen with 5,000 viewers. And to me, that is exactly the mission of this transparency. She needed somebody. She needed that voice.

SPEAKER_15: And I'm curious if the police are now monitoring citizens. So when a citizen puts an alert in,

SPEAKER_50: not a 911 call, not a dispatch over the police radio, but let's say a citizen says, hey, there's a woman arguing with this Chinese food restaurant and the person's got a knife and they report it and they haven't called 911, but there's a police precinct there. Is there somebody at the police precinct with

SPEAKER_64: an iPad or open at the front desk watching citizen reports coming in and dispatching based on that yet?

SPEAKER_11: I have no idea. We do know. We have confirmation on that on the fire department. I wouldn't be surprised. I mean, first responders are using this for transparency and to get access to the same information as citizens. So if it's on citizen, it's public. People are watching. There's no way to make it private. And so you are putting it into the public domain. Your mom could be watching. The local police officer could be watching. Anybody could be watching. That is the point of citizen. Fires are a great example of the type of incident that gets a ton of live video because the duration of a fire is so long, you know, in that 30 minute time span, you might get 30, 50, 80 videos. Well, think about the situational awareness that you get if you're the fire chief. If you have all of these firefighting resources behind you, such as aviation, you've got helicopters and planes. How many fire trucks do you have to dispatch? This is the ultimate system for them to make decisions right from behind citizen. We've made special screens that go full screen for them

SPEAKER_12: and they can kind of watch it from the firehouse and it gives them situational awareness to fight

SPEAKER_23: fires more effectively. Do you think cameras, body cameras should be federally mandated for all police officers? I'm curious, knowing what you know about. I think so. It's kind of a no-brainer,

David Friedberg: isn't it? I think it's a public job. You just have to accept the fact, especially right now,

SPEAKER_11: given the level of scrutiny, given how much misconduct we've seen over the past, you know,

SPEAKER_12: we've seen it over the last five years. It's probably even worse before that.

SPEAKER_75: Of course it was worse before that. I mean, when police were really answering to nobody and

SPEAKER_50: now as citizens have more cameras and apps like Citizen, obviously the behavior is going to trend in the right way. What are your thoughts on who gets dispatched to a call? Because now you have

SPEAKER_23: this dispatch data. It turns out, you know, some folks are realizing and even acting on this that maybe when there's a domestic disturbance or a EDP, as I think what we called it when I worked on an ambulance, emotionally disturbed patient is what they would call it an EDP. When there's an EDP

SPEAKER_50: or domestic, you wouldn't send a police officer, you would send some other person, a counselor. I

SPEAKER_23: sort of hypothesized that we should be training a new generation of like Jedi Knights, people who maybe don't have guns on them, but know how to handle emotionally charged situations.

SPEAKER_17: What are your thoughts on this?

SPEAKER_11: I'm so glad you mentioned that because the Jedi Knights exist and we are partnered with the national system for that. So I'll tell you a little bit about the Jedi Knights and then you can look into this later. We have a whole playbook for, you know, there's all this talk about defund the police. I don't think that that's like something that resonates with most people.

SPEAKER_83: Yeah, it's just a really bad frame, isn't it? Like defund the police is just gonna make people think you're an anarchist. It's a terrible, terrible phrase, massive

SPEAKER_11: reconstruction of the system. We need better training, there needs to be deescalation training, you know, some of these cops should just be pulled off the force if they don't know how to deal with

SPEAKER_12: it. And so there needs to be a reform and there needs to be a drastic reform. And so as we think forward, maybe there's a defestiture of some of the funds of the police, because you're right, you don't always need somebody with a gun and a badge and handcuffs to respond probably to most of these 911 calls. So 911 really says, help, I'm in trouble. And the variety of cases is just

SPEAKER_11: massive. And the police need to respond if there's guns, if there's gunfire, anything like that. Yeah, you have to show up, you've got to have a gun yourself. And you have to deal with that confrontation, hopefully in a way that that is professional and can deescalate it and doesn't get anybody killed. That needs to be how you're measured on the job. But as far as like what you say the Jedis are, there's a group, it's called the cure violence movement. It's all over the nation. We started

SPEAKER_50: working with them at the very beginning of the company. Cure violence. And these are the Jedis. When we get back to this quick break, I want to explain what they do and how they

SPEAKER_38: are better option perhaps than sending the police for and for what calls when we get back on the

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SPEAKER_52: All right, we're back with Andrew Frame with a really important discussion about policing and his

SPEAKER_41: amazing app Citizen. If you don't have it, go download it. Citizen.com or just type Citizen into

SPEAKER_23: your app store and it will come up first. This app will tell you what police or emergency activity is going on in your neighborhood and it will allow you to participate by videotaping and being a citizen journalist. What do these Jedi Knights that you speak of, who do they work for? Are they

SPEAKER_75: volunteers? And how do they get dispatched? And what's the result been?

SPEAKER_11: So funny enough, they get dispatched by Citizen in our trial. So Cure Violence are a group of heroes. They're community heroes. Some of these folks have been incarcerated. They've had troubled pasts. Some of them just love the community. But these are people who respond with no gun, no badge, no vest to some of the heaviest duty gun ridden conflict in the nation. Anytime there's a shooting in a major city, you've got Cure Violence on their way. And what they do, this kind of comes back from there was a scientific paper that basically called violence a contagious disease. And the reason that they were able to depict it as such is because, you know, if you're born in an area of heavy violence, there's almost no way to avoid it, either being a target or targeting somebody because you're being recruited to gangs or, and you might have no choice because you have no family, you have no money. So when you're in those areas, it's a contagious disease and it's probably going to get to you. And so Cure Violence's whole mission, and it's a beautiful organization, is to interrupt violence so it doesn't spread. One example is a shooting occurs in Chicago. What comes next?

SPEAKER_03: Yeah, more shooting. Retribution, right? Police come, more guns.

SPEAKER_12: More guns, more shootings. And then what? More shootings. And then what? More shootings. And like,

SPEAKER_11: stopping that cycle is what Cure Violence has set out to do. Now, we have been partnered with some of the different Cure Violence sites from the very beginning, and they use Citizen, and we're continuing to build tools to strengthen their response. Actually, we have a trial in Newark that's really interesting, along with some of the partnerships that we've had for a while in New York City. And

SPEAKER_12: what these guys do is they come out, and they arrive with compassion. They arrive to listen,

SPEAKER_11: which is not something you're going to get from a police officer. They're there to arrest people. What happened? What's going on? Wait, you want to kill this guy? No. Let me explain to you. I've been

SPEAKER_12: down that path. I've been incarcerated for the same thing. Some of these guys are former, you know,

SPEAKER_11: some of the most senior gang leaders that used to run some of the biggest gangs, and now they're in Cure Violence. So they are what you call credible messengers. So when they show up, they're from the community. They live in the community, unlike police officers who sometimes live an hour away and don't

SPEAKER_12: know anybody in the community. And they get involved and they listen. And the rate of effectivity

SPEAKER_13: through Cure Violence is just astounding. The amount of violence that they interrupt and shootings that they stop is phenomenal. So we have partnered with them. We are building them dispatch tools, data tools, ways to help them accelerate their work and hopefully accelerate their

SPEAKER_52: funding, because that's really what we want to see. I'm looking at their Wikipedia page right now, and there was a film produced in 2011 called The Interrupters, which you'll have to check out. It

SPEAKER_23: was directed and produced by Steve James, who is the director of one of my top five documentaries of all time, Hoop Dreams, which was an amazing film. And it looks like PBS Frontline aired this documentary, so I'll have to check it out. So how did the police look at these Jedi Knights from Cure Violence coming in and intervening? And then are they wearing like a badge? Do people know where they are? Or do they just show up and say, Hey, everybody? Can we just talk about what's going on here? It seems like something police would be opposed to somebody following the scanner. So I'm curious how the police think about these individuals.

SPEAKER_13: So I mean, the results speak for themselves. And the fact that this organization is so effective, I think if

SPEAKER_11: you're a mayor, if you're listening to this, give them more money, right? Like, I've always said from the beginning, $4.8 billion is spent on the NYPD. This was two years ago, I was talking to the city official in charge of this program. And it's like, how does this program only have $100 million when the police have $4.8 billion? This is the sort of divestiture that is necessary to move forward. When these guys show up, it works. They get the young folks to put down their guns, to put down their anger, to not think as if, Hey, I'm going to look dumb if I don't go kill this guy. Everybody's going to know I didn't do it. And so they're super effective at that. And that is a program that I think is unbelievably

SPEAKER_12: revolutionary. Like that to me is the future is people from the community that come in with empathy

SPEAKER_95: and love, not with guns and badges. Wow. And that's pretty brave of people to do. And if you

SPEAKER_23: look at the statistics, I'm just looking at, obviously, an effort like this is going to be put under scrutiny and rightfully so because it's, you know, dangerous, but it could also be effective. And based on what I'm reading here, the Department of Justice funded report on ceasefire,

SPEAKER_52: found the program successfully reduced shootings and killings by 41 to 73% and retaliatory shootings

SPEAKER_23: reduced 100%. Another independent evaluation of cure violence at the Baltimore partner program site conducted by John Hopkins University showed that it reduced shootings and killings by up to 34 to 56% and it goes on and on. So clearly this works and clearly there's some legs to this, but the police might not, I wonder, I wonder how the police view this and you actually being part of now dispatching it. And then how do you think about your own liability when you build a startup like this? I'm sure venture capitalists or insurance providers are like, Whoa, be careful. You know,

SPEAKER_50: we're going to blame citizen for telling people about these things. And, you know, do you guys have some risk or insurance that you have to run in case, you know, the scanner, the scanner data is going to be wrong sometimes, right? And you're going to publish stuff that could be wrong. That's like errors and omissions. How do you think about that? When you're running a startup that's on the front lines

SPEAKER_12: like this, that was my biggest concern when I was starting this is like, I mean, this took a lot of just

SPEAKER_11: thought, a lot of just consideration, because I knew this was just going to continue to grow. Like I was more nervous about this getting to scale than excited because it's kind of like, the burden of responsibility is so

SPEAKER_13: great. And knock on wood, we have had nothing but hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of stories of

SPEAKER_11: families escaping fires of people escaping terrorist attacks of, I mean, it's just, I will send you some videos. Maybe you, I don't know how the YouTube works, but if you can incorporate some of the videos, we'll give you a full sizzle reel that you can show to the viewers on all of the, well, some of the amazing work that's been done by citizen. And we have had none of that kind of like backfiring, but I think anytime you do something new, you know, if you were starting Uber, it's like, well, this is crazy. Like, wait a sec, you're going to like commercialize and scale hitchhiking. You're not supposed to hitchhike or Airbnb. It's like, wait, this is crazy. This is a honeypot for murderers. I mean, anytime you're doing one of these things on the front end, it's filled with anxiety because you don't quite know how it can go wrong. And you know, there's a lot of ways it could go wrong, but you have to just take that leap and hope the net appears. And thankfully for citizen,

SPEAKER_19: and again, knock on wood, that net has appeared extremely strong.

SPEAKER_23: Yeah, it would seem to me that you would go through each data type. Okay, there was a shooting. Okay, there's a fight. Okay, there's a domestic disturbance. And you would have to think in each situation, I was thinking about this with preparing for the interview with you. I went through every possible situation. There was no situation where I thought, gosh, you know, people in the community should know about this, or there's some downside to it. And I could only think of upside. And obviously, if you're a citizen, going into a situation where there is police activity, there's a certain amount of risk to that. And you might buy into that risk, you might not.

SPEAKER_50: That's a choice that each citizen gets to make, right? And if there's a car accident,

SPEAKER_23: some people run to the car accident, some people run away, they don't want to be involved in it, right? And so that that's a that's personal choice. One thing that I'm super curious about, and I think a lot of people are wondering is what's the what's the business here? How eventually or how are you making money? When we get back from this final break, I want to know about what is the business

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SPEAKER_52: citizen, go ahead and download citizen if you haven't already. Andrew, what's the business model

SPEAKER_19: assistant? How do you make money? So the first thing I'll tell you is what it's not. It's not an advertising network. It's not a platform where we scrape data and sell ads against it. We could probably

SPEAKER_11: make a lot of revenue if we did that. A lot of the people at citizen came from those types of businesses and have zero interest in ever building that again. So we are in the process of testing and soon to be launching a subscription service, which is, I'm so excited about this. This is the most powerful personal safety service ever created citizen free is amazing. People are getting tremendous value out of it, but there's only so much we can do in a free product, but citizen, uh, I can't even give the name yet, but when this comes out, uh, I think it is going to be an absolutely essential

SPEAKER_12: safety service, both for your individual level as well as for families. So citizen pro will be a paid

SPEAKER_41: service. I'll be able to pay 10 bucks a month for five bucks a month for, and that's how you monetize. It will be subscription monetization. Yes. Perfect. And I, and that would, I guess, allow me to, if I'm in trouble, I could hit a button and the citizen community could be activated to know I was having

SPEAKER_50: a problem. So if I was being attacked, uh, or if somebody was banging on my door, I could say, there's somebody trying to break into my home and report it on citizen and then have that immediately

SPEAKER_11: go to 9-1-1 as well. Let's put it this way. This is like the complete do-over of the 9-1-1 public

SPEAKER_17: safety response system. Ah, okay. Wow. I'm super intrigued. Yeah. Because it, it does seem like,

SPEAKER_50: um, there have been some attempts like with the Apple watch, I guess, uh, there is a panic button you can do on your phone. Does that panic button on your iPhone where like you accidentally set it

SPEAKER_80: off because you're leaning on your phone in your bag and then it does the emergency thing. It starts

SPEAKER_118: making that noise. Does that actually work? Do people actually, I think it does comments. I've read

SPEAKER_65: stories. I think it's just a shortcut to 9-1-1. So instead of having to push 9-1-1, you can like

SPEAKER_120: hit a button. So it's just a shortcut really. I think I, I should probably fact check that,

SPEAKER_08: but I believe it. Yeah. I, it, I, I couldn't figure that out. What about aggregate statistics? Do you provide aggregate statistics to people in the app or people in the community? Because over time

SPEAKER_41: being able to see, well, the police, I mean, this is a privacy issue, I guess in some way. Um,

SPEAKER_23: but I guess all the information is public anyway, like you're saying 9-1-1 calls are public. Um, if the police got called 10 times to the same house and it was a drug den or there was, you know, regrettably domestic violence occurring at the same location multiple times, do you have the ability, do you share the aggregate data over time of the calls, like the database of it with people who have accounts or is that, is it just real time right now?

SPEAKER_11: It's all real time. And that was kind of a product decision we made early on. It's not to say that we won't ever change our mind on that, but the reason we make it real time is for exactly what you said, like trying to figure out patterns and, you know, a 9-1-1 call, what if you bought a house or moved into an apartment? And before that there were 59-1-1 calls over the last year and a half at that address, you're kind of tainted, right? As you move into the house, the house is tainted. And so, because of the level of complications around that data, there are things like, you know, there's a ton of requests to say, Hey, what are the dangerous neighborhoods? Well, if you look at the dangerous neighborhoods, it's usually directly correlated with the socioeconomic profile of the neighborhood. And so rather than just say, Hey, this is a dangerous neighborhood, we give you the facts, which is, Hey, here's an incident that's happening,

SPEAKER_42: and it's happening in this in this neighborhood. And when it's no longer happening, it's gone.

SPEAKER_23: Yeah, see, I think actually, in terms of harm and not doing harm, which is something you think about, and you think about the benefit of it, I mean, if a home if I was going to move into an apartment, that would be invaluable data for me to know that 911 has been called 10 times in the last three

SPEAKER_95: months, it's, it's actually I think you'd be doing, I'm trying to think about who you'd be doing harm to, in that case, the landlord, I guess, trying to rent the apartment without telling people that

SPEAKER_23: there was some drug dealing going on in the building or something. But that seems to be like a pro version that people would pay for, I would love to be able to look at the history of crime in

SPEAKER_38: my neighborhood or a neighborhood I was considering moving into. That seems like a

SPEAKER_19: worthy thing to share. No, you know, there are a lot of complications. I mean, the example you give

SPEAKER_12: is pretty clear cut. We have spent years on the policy of what goes in the app and what doesn't go in the app. And I'll give you an example of something that does not go in the app. Suicide

SPEAKER_11: attempt in a private home. You don't you don't want that in the app, especially if the person like, you know, you just don't want that in the app, even a lot of the domestic violence and domestic disputes. It just becomes broadcast to the whole neighborhood. And so there needs to be some response and some out for somebody who's in that kind of situation. But it's not sharing with all the neighbors that this is happening, that could create retaliation for the person who called.

SPEAKER_12: There's just a lot of complexity. And there's a lot of gray area.

SPEAKER_23: Yeah, those two are particularly with the suicide, for sure, if somebody was suffering, and you would be basically outing somebody who was suffering from either suicide attempts, etc. And then in just domestic violence, yes, that would be you might be violating somebody's privacy. I guess one group might argue if you're if 911 is called, you've given up the right to privacy. I don't know.

SPEAKER_80: Yes is how one person would argue it. I'm just thinking trying to think both sides.

SPEAKER_13: There are certain gray areas that we may go into later, but like, we've decided to draw the line a

SPEAKER_11: little bit more conservatively. Sometimes if there's police on the scene, and everybody wants to know, it might say domestic incident and just give the cross streets, because we don't want to give the exact address. So there's some sort of, I mean, Apple did this with the new iOS release, they kind of did this like generalized location thing. We've been doing that for a long time with with certain types of incidents.

SPEAKER_23: Yeah, that makes total sense. When you look at San Francisco, and you must have the data on this. It feels to people, anecdotally, that it has just gone supernova. We have a district attorney named Chessa, who is not, who doesn't believe in prosecuting crime, apparently. It might be a big generalization, but he seems to be not enforcing, and San Francisco has given up enforcing property

SPEAKER_03: crime. And so it's feeling kind of lawless, what are the statistics show on San Francisco, you must see some aggregate statistics, the San Francisco just spiraling into chaos, like it feels like to

SPEAKER_11: many citizen usage on San Francisco is growing very quickly. It's not just crime, right, we built this whole safety platform where we can rapidly put out new real time applications. We recently added air quality, which was a huge issue for San Francisco. We added wildfires, a wildfire map layer that was all real time evacuation points exactly where the fires were happening in real time. We've added a tornado layer. So we continue to kind of like expand upon this safety mission. We did a full contact tracing layer.

SPEAKER_139: Oh yeah, safe pass. Talk about that. What was that? And what was that product?

SPEAKER_11: So our mission is to make our users world safer. And all of our worlds got turned upside down due to the virus, right? So we had to ask ourselves, what role can we play? The pandemic is obviously inbound, like we knew it was happening in China and some of the Asian countries. But now the question is, is it going to hit the US? And if so, what do we do? And there's a lot of discussion about this at the all hands and everybody was very active and wanting to come up with something. And as soon as we saw that you could use Bluetooth for contact tracing, I mean, it just dawned on me like, oh my gosh, like you could not have come up with a, you couldn't have invented a better technology for tracing a contagious virus, then everybody turns on a 10 foot radius antenna in their pocket. That'll basically say hello to other ones when they come in contact where you could have exchanged the virus infected each other. So I was like, oh my gosh, we have 30% of New York City active on the app. We just get them to opt into the Bluetooth and it's just like turnkey contact tracing for New York City. So it took us about a week to build this. But unfortunately, we were not allowed to launch this on our schedule.

SPEAKER_23: Yeah, so they basically contact tracing is just doesn't, it seems like it's built into phones right now. If you do a search in your settings right now for COVID, you'll see contact tracing, but then it says you have to add an app. And there's no federal app, we just have tracing built

SPEAKER_75: into every iOS and Android phone, but no app to actually do the tracing. Is that correct?

SPEAKER_11: Yeah, this was my worst fear because we had a late lockdown debacle in the US. We had a testing debacle in the US where the US government was not okay using a proven test. They had to invent their own. It took two months. By the time it started, by the time they had it, it didn't work. So we've had debacle after debacle. So we had a contact tracing system ready for the entire US, which is like, here's a safety platform. Here's how to do privacy preserving contact tracing at scale. We built this whole testing tracing flywheel where you integrated testing with tracing so that when somebody tests positive, it automatically triggers the tracing. So the potential notifications come as a result of that test. Those people are offered a free test. If they test positive, the people they might have gotten it from then can take a test. So like it's scale, it is the perfect containment technology. We were not allowed. I mean, the approval process on the app stores was very hard.

SPEAKER_150: Brutal. I mean, it's just unbelievable how we've mismanaged this. And you just think about

SPEAKER_23: how this is the upside that we talk about the downside of privacy and smartphones and,

SPEAKER_03: you know, all the risks around privacy. Well, this is the benefit of, you know, giving up that privacy. That's exactly right. You get this huge benefit that we could actually do test and tracing. And there's anonymity because you can just, it doesn't matter who was

SPEAKER_65: Jason, I wish we were talking about this four months ago when we had the solution working.

SPEAKER_11: We, I mean, we're still operating the largest contact tracing system in the US, but we had it ready to go when we were locked down a month or two months before lockdown. Like everybody was waiting for hope. We had this testing, tracing flywheel ready to go. And we weren't allowed to go. White House had a contact tracing program. Like they had a whole task force. That thing was abolished. We were the first in line to like be their solution. Then they just shut down the program. I mean, just another debacle to add to the list.

SPEAKER_23: One thing I don't understand is, uh, and I, it must have been discussed at some point.

SPEAKER_127: And when we have this discussion of policing, Andrew is we have citizens live streaming these events.

SPEAKER_04: Are there any body cams for police or dash cams that are live streaming to the precinct?

SPEAKER_03: Uh, so that, you know, lieutenants, captains, sergeants, et cetera, could watch an arrest occurring in real time or when there were protests going on and there's 20 police officers, you could have 20 cameras, just like when you're watching any kind of a movie with the Navy seals, they have the little camera on there like eyeglasses where you can kind of watch in real time and see what's happening. Why are, why are police precincts not watching in real time or are they when these kind of interactions occur?

SPEAKER_11: You know, they might be, I agree. Like getting that point of view camera is just such a no brainer. And I think it's all coming. I really do. Like we are watching just a radical transformation of what public safety reform looks like. And people are fed up. I mean, this is the first like sort of

SPEAKER_12: revolt we've ever seen in our country that we're familiar with. And it has everything to do with police accountability. And so I think we're at that boiling point where we have to redo the system.

SPEAKER_11: And believe me, if you're a good cop and if you do the job, and if you're disgusted by the behavior

SPEAKER_12: of, of the people that are creating this mess, because there are plenty of great law enforcement officers who are just embarrassed. Yeah. The majority. The majority of them are embarrassed and disgusted because they have to take the brunt of this, of this horrific behavior. And so I think everybody's dying for change. The police want

SPEAKER_13: change. The community wants change. Like now is the time for change to come. No question.

SPEAKER_35: Yeah. I mean, the, the live streaming would really help. And I think what's interesting about

SPEAKER_23: this moment in time, I'm curious, you know, as we sort of broaden the discussion, just to policing in general, I think what we're finding out is that, you know, we get the video of

SPEAKER_50: these instances and it's very hard to tell from the video exactly what's going on, but you start to piece it together over time because you wind up getting three or four cameras. And so it's like very,

SPEAKER_23: you have to be very careful with the first video you see, because you don't know what happened before or after or what the views are. But then what it highlights is, well, maybe the training is the problem here because in the Breonna Taylor instance, the, the issue it seems isn't that there was a shootout there because there was a shootout and the police are not going to be expected

SPEAKER_50: not to return fire if they're being shot at. That's kind of the one instance where you would expect them

SPEAKER_03: to return fire. It's that this no knock warrant doesn't make any sense. Why would there be a no knock warrant? Why not wait until the morning? And when the person leaves the house, then arrest them? Like, why would we be putting the cops in harm's way? And why is there even a concept of a no knock warrant? Like with the exception of like, I mean, for a drug deal or no knock warrant makes no sense to me, like, let them come out of their house, arrest them and don't put anybody in harm's way. And that's feels to me what's happening right now is like, those police officers all got off because it, or most of them, it seems like it was done sadly by the books and the book needs to be

SPEAKER_12: rewritten. That's, I think what we're starting to see is like, some of these needs to be disrupted and changed. Like it is the training dire need of reform. I mean, the other instance where the

SPEAKER_23: gentleman was coming around his car and wasn't listening to police and then they grabbed him by a shirt and just shot him in the back. It was like, Oh my Lord. And that one seems like that's going to wind up being a clean shooting as well because maybe he was reaching for a knife,

SPEAKER_168: but they could have tackled that person. Like, why didn't they tackle the person?

SPEAKER_11: I mean, there are a tremendous of, of options available other than like shooting somebody in the back when it comes to, you know, and this is, this is again, where it's like, you either have to like the training, not everybody is going to be cut out to be a police officer under the, under the new rules. They need to create new rules. And it's just like, Hey, if they see certain behaviors, maybe it doesn't escalate to the point of somebody getting killed, but maybe you're able to identify

SPEAKER_19: those behaviors on a smaller scale and just say, this person is not cut out to be a police officer.

SPEAKER_80: Yeah, that would be, or just quadruple the amount of training. I mean, the average is like six months of training in the United States. I was shocked when I saw that. It's like, you're giving people a gun with six months of training. It should be like four years before they get a gun.

SPEAKER_172: I think I was talking, I was getting a haircut and the woman washing my hair, she said,

SPEAKER_11: yeah, I've got to do this for like two years before I'm allowed to like touch the scissors on my own with like somebody's hair. And I'm like, wow, six months to get a gun as a police officer. So I think like, you know, there has to be transparency around police conduct, police misconduct. You see these police officers that have these, these, these records and they're already associated with misconduct before it hits that point of somebody getting killed. And so like, this is the sort of system that just needs to be like looked at across the board. And it's going to make the good police officers happy. It's going to make the cities happy, the communities happy. Nobody wants anything else than good law enforcement, good community,

SPEAKER_174: trust working together. That is the shared vision of all.

SPEAKER_23: Absolutely. And it does seem like these unions, you know, we, there's a point at which a union goes from being helpful to, you know, the, the people who are in it, um, you know, to protect their rights, whatever, you know, and do collective bargaining to, well, wait, what exactly are they protecting?

SPEAKER_03: Because it seems like they're protecting bad behavior and bad actors. And the unions seem to be the ones that are fighting just basic ideas like body camps. And, you know, these, and you see it in

SPEAKER_23: other areas of our society too, where the unions are fighting to keep bad actors in their positions. Uh, and that to me seems unforgivable. And it's very hard to make change when all of the,

SPEAKER_03: in order to be a local politician, you need the support of the union to become the local politician. And then that means you're going to back them in fighting body cams or whatever the,

SPEAKER_177: the, you know, issue is.

SPEAKER_178: Well, this is what makes, you know, like, I love what we're doing. I know everybody at citizen

SPEAKER_11: loves what we're doing. And when I first talked, I know you probably know Joe Lonsdale, when I first showed this to Joe, Joe goes, oh my gosh, like, we have to partner on this, please right away. He said, my thesis on the world is that the final frontier for technology is to start replacing government. And that is the hardest thing to change. And as soon as technology makes its way, and that's where we are, that's what's so fascinating about being in technology in 2020 is like, this is real world, sticky, hard stuff. Like we're nothing more than an iOS app, but we didn't talk about any of that. We didn't talk about features. Look at the issues we're talking about with that iOS app. So I think that's what makes technology so interesting right now is that the role and the responsibility that it has is, is 10x 20x what

SPEAKER_41: it was 10 years ago. Yeah, absolutely. You know, and, and I remember when Uber was raising their first round of capital, there were many investors who passed and just said, listen, I don't want to be

SPEAKER_50: involved in a real world business like that. I don't want to be involved with Airbnb with people potentially renting their houses. What if a serial killer kills somebody in an Airbnb, and then there's a headline Airbnb serial killer, I don't I just don't want to be involved in it. And, you know, really, kudos to you for being brave enough to actually go into the real world and tackle these issues. Continued success. Andrew, did I miss anything in terms of where you're headed? When will we

SPEAKER_65: see this pro version? When can we pay you put you on the beta? I've got a couple things I can add you to the

SPEAKER_04: beta. Oh, really? Yum, yum. You got a test flight? Jason at calacanis.com. Let's go test

SPEAKER_11: flight. We've got a test flight for something that is going to launch in a couple weeks that is Okay, I'll friend DA. I won't tell anybody. The continuation of how we continue to operate in the COVID world. So contact tracing was the starting point. But the ultimate product has has now been built and is in testing. And I'll get you on the beta. And I think you'll hopefully enjoy it as

SPEAKER_165: much as we all are before we launch it. Well, I hope this is I can rat people out for not wearing

SPEAKER_75: their mask. That's making me crazy when I find people with no masks on. My Lord, I got in a fight with my butcher because they wouldn't wear a mask. And I was like, it's the law. It's a butcher

SPEAKER_180: shop. Like wear a mask. This is so difficult. The vast majority of people still don't know how this thing is spread. Like they don't know it comes in and out of the nose. They don't know like I see people wear masks in cars. But then they get out of the car and they go have close contact with another person and they take the mask off. They wear it in the car. Yeah, they're like, I can't hear

SPEAKER_80: you. Let me take my mask off. I was like, no, no. When you talk, that's when the air particles vaporize. That's when you need the mask. When you're quiet, you don't actually need it.

SPEAKER_180: It's just I hope everybody can soon understand how this thing is transmitted. I hope it happens

SPEAKER_23: soon. It is crazy the time we're living in. All right, listen, continued success. Everybody out there, if you want to join a great company, citizen is hiring. I understand a lot of job openings and a great mission to make the world safer and protect all those citizens. Doing policing as a community,

SPEAKER_95: a lot better than just putting everything on the police. I really loved the introductions to some of those groups that are doing interesting Jedi Knight stuff. I think that's going to be a big unlock. So continued success to you, Andrew, and the team. Thank you, Jason. Really appreciate you

SPEAKER_41: coming on the pod. All right, everybody, we'll see you soon. Download the app and we'll see you soon. Cheers now. Bye.