A quick warning before we get started, this episode contains some adult language.

If you're listening with kids, you might want to skip this one.

Hey Amy, how you doing?

I'm good. How are you?

I'm good. Thanks for taking a minute to...

Last year, I was renting a room in Chicago. My landlord, whose voice you just heard, was Amy.

The apartment we lived in was on this beautiful tree-line street.

It's just so peaceful and calm and quiet and full of beautiful trees and families.

And you can sleep with the windows open.

It's a very beautiful community.

But since I arrived there, Amy's attitude towards this area has changed a little bit.

Because of an app she had downloaded called Citizen,

it fed her every detail of what was going wrong in the neighborhood.

It turned out like one block from my front door.

People are being robbed, people are being attacked,

women are being assaulted,

and there were places I would walk to that I just stopped walking to,

like walking to the lake alone. I would never do that now.

Started parking closer to work. Really, if I need a friend for dinner in the neighborhood,

kind of scared about walking home, it's changed things a lot. I used to just walk around carefree,

not scared or worried. But then as soon as I started looking at that app, I was scared to death.

Citizen combines reports from police scanners with user submissions to create an interactive map of all the shifty things happening around you all the time.

...