A wealthy New Orleans real estate developer has created “Uber for cops,” an app that allows anyone with a smartphone to report nonviolent criminals, drug dealers, homeless people and others they feel may be “suspicious.”
According to the creator, Sidney Torres, the French Quarter Task Force app is a user-driven platform that allows bystanders to identify and photograph suspicious behavior and alert cops about where the suspected culprits are located. The app focuses on petty nonviolent crime not usually considered emergencies by law enforcement. Torres says the app would make it easier for cops to know exactly where to find a suspicious person or if a crime — the list offers categories like theft, vandalism, carrying of weapons, drug dealing, assault, prostitution, or “aggressive solicitation” — is in progress.
After hearing about the app’s implementation in New Orleans, Jim Whyte, the head of a St. Louis neighborhood security group that operates outside of city law enforcement, wants to pay the $1,200 subscription fee to adopt the technology and pressure police to crack down on “quality of life” issues, such as public urination or homeless people sleeping on the street. Many of those offenses aren’t technically crimes, and people who call 911 to report them may not be taken seriously.
Whyte offered an example in his neighborhood, in which a young woman called the police to report that a homeless person was standing in the lobby of her apartment building. “The dispatcher wanted to know if the homeless person was doing anything wrong, making the woman doubt herself about having called 911,” according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Whyte patrols a “transitional” neighborhood filled with “students, visitors, foreign exchange students” and the Washington University Medical School, and says permanent residents want a way to report suspicious people.
A police spokeswoman told the publication that St. Louis law enforcement hasn’t been involved in the expansion process, even though the app is intended to assist cops in their duties.
The technology is akin to apps developed for bystanders to record, save, and report police misconduct to law enforcement and civil liberties organizations, it leaves room for over-policing and targeting the wrong people.
Racial bias often influences what constitutes suspicious behavior and determines who looks criminal. That’s why so many people of color, such as Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates or football star Jonathan Ferrell, who was shot by police after a white woman told them he was trying to break into her house, get reported, even when they aren’t doing anything wrong.
Last year, the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C. was slammed for an app that effectively reported innocent black people to police, simply because they didn’t look like they belonged in the predominately white, upper-class community. Operation GroupMe was developed for residents and businesses to report suspicious activity to law enforcement in real time, but African Americans accounted for 70 percent of the suspects. Comparable platforms, including SketchFactor in New York and Nextdoor.com in Oakland, California, were also used to racially profile black people.
A tech engineer in New York also created a “Map the Homeless” app last summer to try to force police officers to crack down on homeless people even though they were not committing serious crimes. The Sergeants Benevolent Association in New York also separately encouraged people to post pictures of “the homeless lying in our streets, aggressive panhandlers, people urinating in public or engaging in open-air drug activity, and quality-of-life offenses of every type” on Flickr, so that the union’s officials could inform the NYPD. That put a target on the city’s large and heavily-policed homeless population.
Instead of heeding these calls, New York City has decided to stop prosecuting quality of life offenses altogether, instead choosing to invest in mental health treatment (though that has also backfired in some ways).
On the flip side, similar technology has turned the scrutiny on police themselves. Several civil liberties organizations and activists have developed apps to record, save, and report police misconduct.