This Week in Startups - E1117 The Next Unicorns E20: Citizen CEO Andrew Frame on creating a safer world through access to public data, reforming policing via transparency & more

Episode Date: September 30, 2020

Check out Citizen: https://citizen.com FOLLOW Jason: https://linktr.ee/calacanis

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Your first app is free forever. And right now, Odu is offering $1,000 off your first implementation pack at odoo.com slash twist. That's ODOO.com slash twist. Hey, everybody, welcome to you this week in startups that 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. And it is something that is become kind of essential for living, sadly, in San Francisco, where there's a lot of

crime going on. Welcome to the program, Andrew Frame. How are you? Hi, thank you for having me. 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 and then normalize and then put into the app. Am I correct? 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 had a boiling point with things like police accountability and

all of the social unrest we're seeing. But even back then, you know, 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. You know, 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 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 everybody within a quarter of a mile. That was the original idea. And is that limitation of the quarter of mile around wherever that call came in or police were dispatched 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.

You can now. You can now, yeah. 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 buildings and how long that's been going on since like, you know, 60s, 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. Well, 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 knocked me like straight over the second I thought about it. I was just like, oh my gosh, I came up with the 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 like 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 quarter of a mile when this was first started. Was there any objection to the service from either 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 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 this. You know, it's funny. I mean, we know how much change that government likes and how much change 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 a hold 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 dad 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 an abundance of resistance and just obstacles when 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 their being downside to alerting somebody? You sort of mentioned a SWAT situation. It would seem to me if somebody was swatted or they called 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 situation. 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 information. And 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?

Yeah, it was that big shooter situation, the mass shooter. And I guess he was 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 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 the data leading to better policing or better government policy when we get back on this week in startups. Wish you were in on some of those early

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You may remember caffeine, ghost, loom, degrade, zero mass water, cockroach labs, roofstock, homebound. And of course, 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 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 an example of that where, hey, there were a lot of burglaries occurring.

people found out about the burglaries, 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 wouldn't do this. I'm curious if, this type of thing you've got reports back of, hey, this really helped us with policing? I mean, I think, yeah, countless, too many to tell. Yeah, did you have a good one? You have a good story? We have so many. I mean, the first thing is the principle, 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 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 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 under observation is behavior changes. And so. For the better. For the better. You're going to be more buttoned up about how you're approaching. So the way this works on a workflow basis is a call comes in on a 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 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. So now you have a third party view of, hey, how did they break up that bar fight or whatever it was? Yeah, you might have 100,000 people tuned into your live stream. And that's one of the differences 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 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 would not respond to her. They basically acted like she did not exist. And then one of the users that was 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. And when I'm curious if the police are now monitoring citizens, so when a citizen puts an alerted, 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 an iPad or open at the front desk watching citizen reports coming in and dispatching based on that yet? 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 to citizens. So if it's on citizen, it's. It's a lot of citizen. It's. public. Like, 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, and they can kind of watch it from the firehouse, and it gives them situational awareness to fight 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, isn't it? I think it's a public job. You just have to accept the fact, especially right now, given the level of scrutiny, given how much misconduct we've seen over the past, you know, we've seen it over the last five years. It's probably even worse before that. Of course it was worse before that. I mean, when police were really answering to nobody and 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 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 or domestic, you wouldn't send a police officer. you would send some other person, a counselor.

I 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. What are your thoughts on this? 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 police. I don't think that that's like something that resonates with most people.

Yeah, it's just a really bad frame, isn't it? Like to fund the police is just going to make people think you're an anarchist. It's a terrible, terrible phrase. Massive reconstruction of the system. We need better training. There needs to be de-escalation training. You know, some of these cops should just be pulled off the force if they don't know how to deal with 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 defestature. 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 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 is professional and can de-escalate it and doesn't get anybody killed. That needs to be how you're measured on the job.

But as far as what you say the Jedi's are, there's a group. It's called the Cure Violence Movement. It's all over the nation. We started working with them at the very beginning of the company. Cure violence. And these are the Jedi's. When we get back on this quick break, I want to explain what they do and how they are better option, perhaps than sending the police room and for what calls when we get back on the Swedish

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Citizen. If you don't have it, go download it. Citizen.com or just type Citizen into your app store and we'll come up first. This app will tell you what. police or emergency activities 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 volunteers? And how do they get dispatched? And what's the result been? So funny enough, they get dispatched by citizen in our trial. So cure violence are a group of heroes, their 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 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. So cure violence is a 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? Yeah, more shooting. Retribution, right? Police come, more guns? More guns, more shootings. And then what? More shootings.

And then what? More shootings. And like, stopping that cycle is what cure violence has set out to do. Now, we have been partnered with some of the different pure 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 what these guys do is they come out and they arrive with compassion. They arrive to listen, 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 down that path. I've been incarcerated for the same thing. Some of these guys are former, you know, 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 know anybody in the community, and they get involved and they listen.

And the rate of effectiveness 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 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 Interruptors, which I'll have to check out. It 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 nights from Cure Violence coming in and intervening? And then are they wearing like a badge?

Do people know who 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. So, I mean, the results speak for themselves. And the fact that this organization is so effective, I think if 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, if I don't, you know, 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 revolutionary. Like, that to me is the future, is people from the community that come in with empathy and love, not with guns and badges. Wow. And that's pretty brave of people to do. And if you look at the statistics, I'm just looking at, obviously, an effort like this is going to be put on discreetly 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, found the program successfully. reduced shootings and killings by 41 to 73 percent and retaliatory shootings reduced 100 percent.

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 percent. 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 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, 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 data is going to be wrong sometimes, right? And you're going to publish stuff that could be wrong. That's like errors and emissions. How do you think about that when you're running a startup that's on the front lines like That was my biggest concern when I was starting this is like, I mean, this took a lot of just 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 great. And knock on wood, we have had nothing but hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of stories of families escaping. of people escaping terrorist attacks of, I mean, it's just, I will send you some videos. Maybe 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 hitchhiking. 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, and again, knock on wood, that net has appeared extremely strong. 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, 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 shouldn't 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. you might buy into that risk, you might not. That's a choice that each citizen gets to make, right? And if there's a car accident, some people run to the car accident, some people run away. They don't want to be involved in it, right?

And so 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 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 of citizen. One of the toughest parts of building a company is choosing which tools and providers to use. You want to pick the best solution for each department to help your employees succeed

because they deserve the best. You want them to do well. But there are so many functions in a startup and each space has endless vendors. You got sales tools over here, marketing tools, email tools, accounting, HR payroll, project management, of course, customer support, the point of sale, e-commerce,

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All right, Andrew Frame is here from Citizen. Go ahead and download Citizen if you haven't already. Andrew, what's the business model 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 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, I can't even give the name yet. But when this comes out, I think it is going to be an absolutely essential safety service,

both for your individual level as well as for families. So Citizen Pro will be a paid service. I'll be able to pay $10 a month for or $5 a month for, and that's how you monetize. It will be subscription monetization. Yes, perfect. 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 a problem. So if I was being attacked 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 go to 911 as well. let's put it this way. This is like the complete do-over of the 911 public safety response system. Ah, okay. Wow, I'm super intrigued.

Yeah, because it does seem like there have been some attempts like with the Apple Watch, I guess. There is a panic button you can do on your phone. Does that panic button on your iPhone where like you accidentally set it off because you're leaning on your phone in your bag? And then it does the emergency thing and starts making that noise? Does that actually work? Do people actually come if I've read stories? I think it's just a shortcut to 911. So instead of having to push 911, you can like hit a button.

So it's just a shortcut, really. I think I should probably fact check that, but I believe it is. Yeah. 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, being able to see, well, the police, I mean, this is a privacy. issue, I guess, in some way. But I guess all the information is public anyway, like you're saying, 911 calls are public. If the police got called 10 times 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?

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 911 call. What if you bought a house or moved into an apartment? And before that, there were 50 911 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 request 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 and it's happening in this neighborhood.

and when it's no longer happening, it's gone. 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 months. 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 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

my neighborhood or a neighborhood I was considering moving into. That seems like a worthy thing to share, no? You know, there are a lot of complications. I mean, the example you give 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 attempt in a private home. 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. There's just a lot of complexity and there's a lot of gray area. 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 domestic violence, yes, that would be, you might be violating somebody's privacy. I guess one group might argue if you're, if nine, when one is called, you've given up the right to privacy.

I don't know if you have. Yes is how one person would argue it. I'm just trying to think both sides. There are certain gray areas that we may go into later, but like we've decided to draw the line a 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. 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 Chesa, who is not, who doesn't believe in prosecuting crime, It might be a big generalization, but he seems to be not enforcing, and San Francisco has

given up enforcing property crime. And so it's feeling kind of lawless. What are the statistics show on San Francisco? You must see some aggregate statistics. San Francisco just spiraling into chaos like it feels like to many. Citizen usage on San Francisco is growing very quickly. It's not just crime, right? We've 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. Oh, yes, safe pass. Talk about that. What was that product? 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 U.S.? 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 in 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 will 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 turn key contact tracing for New York City. So it took us, it took us about a week to build this. But But unfortunately, we were not allowed to launch this on our schedule. Yeah. So 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 into every iOS and Android phone, but no app to actually do the tracing. Is that correct? Yeah. This was my worst fear because we had a late lockdown debauched. in the U.S. We had a testing debacle in the U.S. where the U.S. 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 U.S., which is like, here's a safety platform. Here's how to be 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 trick. 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 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. Brutal. I mean, it's just unbelievable how we've mismanaged us and you just think about how this is the upside. We talk about the downside of privacy and smartphones and, 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 infected. I wish we were talking about this four months ago when we had the solution working. We, I mean, we're still operating the largest contact tracing system in the U.S. 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. One thing I don't understand is,

and it must have been discussed at some point in when we have this discussion of policing, Andrew, citizens live streaming these events. Are there any body cams for police or dash cams that are live streaming to the precinct so that, you know, lieutenants, captains, sergeants, etc., 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 their 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? 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 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. And believe me, if you're a good cop, and if you do the job and if you're disgusted by the behavior 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 disgust. 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 change. The community wants change. Like now is the time for change to come. No question. Yeah.

I mean, the live streaming would really help. And I think what's interesting about 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 these instances and it's very hard 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, 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 Brianna-Taylor instance, the issue, it seems, isn't that there was a shoot out there because there was shootout and the police are not going to be expected not to return fire if they're being shot at. That's kind of the one instance where you would expect them 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? 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 a no knock warrant makes no sense to me. Like let them come out of their house, arrest them and don't put anybody in the same. harm's way. And that feels to me what's happening right now is like those police

officers all got off because it or most of it seems like it was done sadly by the books and the book needs to be rewritten. That's I think what we're starting to see. Some of these needs to be disrupted and changed. It is the training dire need of reform.

I mean the other instance where the gentleman was coming around his car and wasn't listening to the police and then they grabbed him by his shirt and just shot him in the back. 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.

But they could have tackled that person. Like, why didn't they tackle the person? I mean, there are a tremendous 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 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 those behaviors on a smaller scale and just say this person is not cut out to be a police officer. 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. I think I was talking, I was getting a haircut and the woman washing my hair. She said, I've got to do this for like two years before I'm allowed to like, dash 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 records and they're already associated with misconduct before it hits that point of somebody getting killed. And so like, this is a sort of system that just needs to be like looked at across the board. And it's going to make the, the good police officer's happy. It's going to make the cities happy. The community's happy. Nobody wants anything else than good law enforcement, good community, trust, working together. That is the shared vision of all. 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 people who are in it, you know, to protect their rights, whatever, you know, do collective bargaining to, well, wait, what exactly are they protecting? 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, you see it in other areas of a society too, where the unions are fighting to keep bad actors in their positions. And that, to me, seems unforgivable. And it's very hard to make change when all of the, 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, you know, issue is.

Well, this is what makes, you know, like I love what we're doing. I know everybody at Citizen loves what we're doing. And when I first talk, you probably know Joe Lonsdale. When I first show 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 fascinated 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 10x, 20x what it was 10 years ago. Yeah, absolutely. 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 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 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 see this pro version? When can we pay you?

I'll put you on the beta. I've got a couple of things I can add you to the beta. Oh, really? Yum, yum, yum. You got a test flight? Jason at Calicanus.com. Let's go. Test flight.

I've got a test flight for something that is going to launch in a couple weeks that is... Okay. I'll friend EA. I won't tell anybody. The continuation of how we continue to operate in the COVID world. So contact tracing was the same. starting point, but the ultimate product 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 much as we all are before we launch it.

Well, I hope this is I can rat people out for not wearing 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 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. 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 you. Let me take my mask. 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. It's bonkers. I hope everybody can soon understand how this thing is transmitted. I hope it happens soon. It is crazy the time we're living in. All right, listen, continue success. Everybody out there if you want to join a. great company citizen is hiring, I understand. A lot of job openings and

great mission to make the world safer and protect all those citizens. And, you know, doing policing as a community, a lot better than just putting everything on the police. Really loved the introductions to some of those groups that are doing interesting Jedi night stuff.

I think that's going to be a big unlock. So continue success to you, Andrew, and the team. Thank you, Jason. Really appreciate you coming on the pot. All right, everybody. We'll see you soon. Download the app and we'll see you soon. Cheers now. All right.