[ajhurliman]

This seems like a huge flaw, the idea that cities and law enforcement agencies are reporting their own crime statistics. There's an obvious conflict of interest, it seems like this should be done by a 3rd party. I know it's not that simple, but at least getting some neutral indication of the level of crime in a city would go a long ways.

Crime is visibly exploding, the police are only recording the most heinous/obvious incidents, and then we're told that crime is down.

[SllX]

Do you have a methodology to go with that proposal?

When the paperwork is filled in, we have reported crime (because the police take a police report) and we have convictions (how many people were convicted is a matter of public record since courts are open). What we don’t have is a paper trail for all the crime that isn’t reported or when the paperwork isn’t filled out.

What can a third party bring to the table that the paper records cannot?

[ajhurliman]

Axon has an app for citizens to report crime and upload evidence, that seems like it would go a really long way to get numbers that are at least correlated with publicly visible crime statistics, and I think that's the main goal. The published numbers are a function of real crimes committed plus how hard the law enforcement agencies and local government are trying to suppress those numbers. The Citizen app would give us the dot product of publicly visible crime and use of the app, but I feel like that's probably more reliable than what's currently being published.

Also, Seattle has a Find-It-Fix-It app that allows people to report various things that are broken with the city, opening up that data to the public would be great. I know it's not crime-related, but getting an overall sense of the health of the city seems correlated. This would require that the app be administered by a 3rd party though.

[SllX]

I’ll give you credit, that is indeed a 3rd party addition that would bring something else to the table that I overlooked.

I can’t say I particularly like it though. I do care about suppressing crime, but not to the point of becoming a police state. That ship may have already sailed between both existing apps like the ones you listed and the prevalence of home security cameras, so I’ll say it’s at least worth considering.

> Seattle has a Find-It-Fix-It app

Is this like SF’s 311?

[ajhurliman]

Similar, yeah. Reports to it used to go completely ignored, but the city has recently been ramping up its efforts to pay attention to it.