Citizen is a mobile app that sends users location-based safety alerts in real time. It allows users to read updates about ongoing reports, broadcast live video, and leave comments. The app uses radio antennas installed in major cities to monitor 911 communications, with employees filtering the audio to generate alerts. The app is currently available for iOS and Android devices in New York City, the San Francisco Bay Area, Baltimore, Los Angeles, Philadelphia. Detroit, Indianapolis, Phoenix, Cincinnati, and Cleveland. Developed by sp0n, Inc. and originally called Vigilante in 2016, it was rebranded and launched in New York on March 8, 2017. On July 15, 2019, Forbes reported that Citizen had over a million active users. Investors include Sequoia Capital, 8VC, RRE Ventures, Slow Ventures, and Lux Capital.
History
2016
The Citizen app was developed by sp0n, an American technology incubator formed in 2015 by software programmer Andrew Frame. Frame, who had previously started public telecommunications company Ooma, Inc. and was an early advisor to Facebook, invested $300,000 in sp0n and recruited several engineers. Frame had the idea for Citizen when "looking at the backs of former tenements in Lower Manhattan. He thought about the modern, invisible signals darting through the 19th-century buildings. Wireless calls, Wi-Fi, police radio. What if there was a way for smartphones to capture emergency calls? He ran inside and told his engineers—they had a prototype in a week." The working title was Vigilante and, according to Frame, it was developed to " up the 911 system." Vigilante was backed by a seed round of $1 million, led by Founders Fund. The Vigilante app was released to New York City, in the App Store on October 26, 2016. The app, which showed users where crime was occurring in real time, went viral. It proved controversial when its marketing videos seemed to encourage user vigilantism, with several publications also raising concerns about racial profiling and harassment. Within 48 hours of its App Store launch, Apple pulled the app due to safety concerns. sp0n subsequently asserted it was working with Apple to "resolve the issue" and still planned on shipping an Android version.
2017 – 2018
With New York City as its first test market, sp0n relaunched the app in March 2017 as Citizen for iOS and Android. The app increased its safety messaging to discourage users from approaching or interfering with crime scenes. While developing the new iteration, the company had consulted New York city officials, police, public safety experts, and "civil rights leaders — among others" on making it safe to use. Citizen only sent alerts deemed a threat to "public safety," omitting calls about suspicious people, suspicious bags, and drug incidents. According to the company at the time, "there are about 10,000 911 calls per day in New York City. We include 300-400 on average." Citizen received mixed reactions from critics. While some critics noted that the livestreaming option could tempt people to approach danger, it was also positively noted that the documentation could help prevent police abuse and catch criminals. In May 2017, the company said that the app had been downloaded 34,000 times in New York City over the prior few months. In September 2017, sp0n announced that it had raised $12.2 million in Series A funding. The round was led by Sequoia Capital, and the app was valued at $31 million. Other investors included RRE Ventures, Slow Ventures, and Lux Capital. At the time, Citizen had around 20 employees monitoring police and fire calls in all of New York's five boroughs full time, and had around 120,000 users in New York. On September 19, 2017, the app expanded into San Francisco, California, soon after spreading service to the larger Bay Area. The app began receiving attention in the press, in particular after alerting a New York school principal of a nearby terrorist attack before the event reached the news. According to CNN, during a fire in 2018 at Trump Tower, "34 simultaneous users live streamed on the app as the fire blazed," and during a shooting at YouTube's headquarters in April 2018, "some of the earliest details were from Citizen livestreams." The Citizen app was also used to livestream a lock-down at Balboa High School in San Francisco in August 2018 and, according to CNN, the app "gained attention after major incidents including an evacuation of CNN's headquarters in December 2018 and a truck attack on New York's West Side." In February 2018, Citizen reported having 250,000 monthly active users, and that overall it had sent a total of 26.5 million notifications.
2019 – 2020
Although Citizen had "no formal relationships with any municipalities, as of February 2019, downloading the app was mandatory for New York firefighters. The app launched in Baltimore, Maryland in February 2019 after ongoing conversations with elected officials and members of the Baltimore City Council On March 12, 2019, the app launched in Los Angeles, followed by Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, its fifth market. The app was met with mixed reaction from police departments, with CNN writing in March 2019 that "since it relaunched as Citizen in 2017, many of the early fears about the app have faded." Police departments that CNN Business reached out to for comment were "neutral about the app," including San Francisco and Baltimore. Citizen asserted that emergency room doctors used Citizen to anticipate incoming patients, while news organizations scouted the app for breaking stories. In June 2019, Bloomberg reported that around one million people had downloaded the app in New York City, and that the app consistently ranked in the top ten news apps in the App Store, "often higher than CNN, Buzz Feed, the New York Times and Google News." William Bratton, who had been opposed to the app in 2016 as New York City Police Commissioner, around that time joined Citizen's board of directors. In July 2019, Citizen sent out two million notifications per day and was the tenth most downloaded news app for iPhones, according to The New Yorker. At the time, Citizen had 70 full time employees, including 38 analysts, with Citizen's artificial intelligence software allowing a single person to cover incidents across multiple cities. After raising $27 million in early 2019 in a funding round led by 8VC, by July 2019 the company had raised a total of $40 million. sp0n had not revealed a revenue model, but did state that Citizen would not make profits from ads or share user information. Forbes reported that "sources in the company hint" that the app might utilize a model where Citizen charged venues to send notifications to users, "either to blast out emergency instructions or quell panic after a false alarm. There’s also the potential to let users message the officials about safety concerns."
Features
Alert process
The Citizen app generates alerts sourced from fire, emergency medical services, and 911 calls, with Citizen employees using Citizen software to monitor publicly available information. Specifically, the app maintains a network of R1 radios across multiple cities, which monitor "up to 900 public radio channels across a city’s first responder network: state and local police, fire and EMS, transit and airport security." Citizen digitizes the reports using a custom artificial intelligence system, which are in turn interpreted by employees. If users are near the report, they receive a push notification on their phone that geolocates the event, as a dot. According to Forbes, the alerts "contain a brief description, exact address and distance from the user. With a tap, the notification expands to a street map, more detail, plus user comments." With more detail added as incidents progress, the alerts include live video. The home screen organizes nearby incidents by distance and recency.
User content
To "ensure there are no graphic images," Citizen's moderators review all uploaded photos and videos, filtering graphic images and comments that are derogatory, racist, or explicit." For users close to an incident, a "record" button appears on screen to allow live-streaming. Users are not paid for videos, "nor are videos gamified with rankings or 'likes'." By March 2019, around 100,000 live videos had been recorded using the app. The New York Times reported that Citizen footage was provided to television stations for free, with more than 100 of those videos being used on local news broadcasts on a weekly basis.
Incident selection
The company has employees who screen 911 communications according to a set of company policies, with the main criteria for inclusion being that the information "needs to pose a public safety concern." The operations team includes analysts with backgrounds in writing and public safety, for example journalists and former first responders, who are "trained to make on-the-fly decisions about what goes into the app based on complex criteria." Some selected alerts are for non-emergencies, such as large crowds or blocked-off streets. Incidents such as suspicious persons, commercial burglaries, minor car collisions, and medical issues are not included.
Speed
According to CNN in March 2019, Citizen was differentiated from similar apps through the speed and volume of its text updates, making it "closer in spirit to police scanner apps." The app was reportedly faster at breaking stories than local news or Twitter by around 10 to 20 minutes.
