This is GetWired. I'm your host, Lauren Good.

If you weren't super familiar with an app called Citizen, before now, it might have come onto your radar in recent weeks because of all of the social upheaval that's happening.

The idea behind Citizen is that its users, people like you and me, upload videos of the

things going on in the neighborhood in real time.

This could be anything from a gas leak to something potentially a lot more violent.

It's an app built on the premise that the more information a community has, the better off it is.

But it also has the same problems that a lot of community surveillance has.

The app has some toxic comments.

It can lead to racial profiling.

And it's hard to know who's benefiting most from these live neighborhood alerts, whether

it's the users, law enforcement, or citizen itself.

My wired colleague, Boone Ashworth, has spent months reporting on Citizen, trying to better

understand exactly what the company's mission is. But he's also been talking to people who

are on the app, who rush to the scene to capture

what's going on in their neighborhoods. And he found one person who's particularly interesting

and who agreed to take us behind the scenes. So Boone, tell me about this latest story. I know

a little bit about it already, but our listeners don't.

And it's pretty wild.

Yeah.

So before this whole pandemic erupted, I was interested in Citizen.

Basically, here's how it works.

So when a call comes out and it goes across police or emergency scanners, Citizen picks up that call and

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