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Hey everybody. Welcome to this week in startups and 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.
Era 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 is 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 that that 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 yep listening into what the police are doing now. It was pretty hard to figure out.
Out what they were talking about 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 seem to be the ultimate urgent need and this is back in 2016 right now. It's definitely hit 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 $5 police officers were shot by a sniper in response to a yeah stealing, you know, this is not exactly a new topic and that 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
Is 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 mile around wherever that call came in or police were dispatched to is that still exists because you would seem to be this is public data. Why couldn't I know that Two Towns over there was a bunch of
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 these buildings and how long that's been going on since like, you know, 60 70 s they've been using open radios and it just dawned on me. I was like, oh my gosh, this is
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, but why isn't the whole Community alerted or if he's a fire? Let's say you live on the fourth floor in a building and you call and say hey the buildings on fire. Well, why aren't the other people in the building notified at the same time as the fire department? So it yeah it almost like knocked me like straight over the
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 in 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. It'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 City's 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
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 the government likes and how much change that police like, I mean, they are standing and Stark opposition to this. In fact, I'm pretty sure I was being followed around by like the FBI and there were definitely some caught some Vehicles following me in the police were kind of like figuring out what we were doing who we were what we're all about. This was nothing but resistance when this idea emerged we had problems very few people saw.
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 is wants to La please 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
E8 less safety because I mentioned 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 eight.
In New Yorkers, we mean no harm. We're trying to create safety with these eight million New York for these eight 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 yeah an extraordinary to 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 you said is that letter is probably still working its way up to me even
No, I left a year ago. The second thing he said was you know, you coming in to the police and basically saying hey, I have an idea, you know that piece of technology that you're 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 please training or no, I mean
That completely terrified them all they could think of is worst-case scenarios. And so there was there was an abundance of resistance and just obstacles when we
first got this nailed. 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 sort of mentioned a SWAT situation it would seem to me if somebody was swatted or they called for about a shooter. It would be good for the neighbors to know so they could
To shelter in place and get out of the way and not walk down the 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.
Against transparency, they 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 at the Mandalay Bay.
Yeah. It was that it was that big shooter situation the mass shooter and I guess he was listening to Police radios.
She 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.
Being that they are not aware of the police activity. So if it says Hey, the police are coming up elevator 12 in they're going to be you know in a 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 where you know, professional bank robbers or a professional Mass shooter would have thought out here.
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 and starters.
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Umm, degreed zero Mass Water cockroach Labs roof stock Homebound. And of course in seat, row, what a great season of the next unicorns we had in 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
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 burglars 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
the garage scanners to like randomly open up garages and people were having three or four garages hittin, you know, 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 yet countless too many to
tell ya have a good one. You have a good story where
we have some people so many. I mean the first thing is the principal right so
One of the foundational elements of this is we must restore trust between the 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
set the transparency movement that has been done already, right? Everybody is are 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 an 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 plan what that feature is.
So you can go live. So if it says 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.
Juice 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 our scanner. There's been an incident in 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.
Data, so now you have a third party view of hey, how do they break up that bar fight or whatever it was
you might have a hundred thousand people tune into your live stream and that's when 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 what I'm going to 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 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.
I'm 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 in pointed that at the police officer who instantly changed the conduct now all the sudden it was like, oh my gosh. I'm so sorry. Where was it? Let me take the
This 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
I'd 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 the police precinct with an iPad or open and at the front desk watching citizen reports coming in and dispatching based on that yet. I
have no idea. We do have 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 opens on citizen its public like
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 now fires are a great example of the type of entity that gets a ton of live video because the duration of a fire is so long, you know that 30 minute time span, you might get 30 50 80 videos will 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 fullscreen 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.
Kind of a no-brainer isn't it? And I think it's a public job. You just have to accept the fact especially right now given the level of scrutiny given 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 EDI p is 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 any deep a or domestic you wouldn't 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.
It's people who maybe don't have guns on them. But know how to handle emotionally charged situation John. 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 there's all this talk about defunding police. I don't think that that's like something that resonates with most people
they are exhaustive really bad frame isn't it? Like to fund the police is just
gonna 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 D 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 reform and there needs to be a drastic reform and so as we think forward maybe there's a divestiture 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
And 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 Candy escalated and doesn't get anybody killed that needs to be how you're measured on the job.
But as far as like what you say the Jedis are there is 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 Jedis when we get back as quick break. I want to explain what they do and how they and it's I'm sure there are better options perhaps and setting the police room. And for what calls we get back on this video search Adobe Salesforce and Marketo all use out.
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For a 30 day free trial and 250 big ones go get it right now. Alright, we're back with Andrew frame with a really important discussion about policing and his amazing app citizen. If you don't have it Go downloaded citizen.com or just type citizen into your app store and will 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 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 Ben?
So funny enough to get dispatched by citizen in our ladder 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.
Is 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 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 in 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 cure violence is whole mission and it's a beautiful
Ization 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? Please come more guns
more guns more shootings and then what more shootings and then what more shootings and like you stopping that cycle is what cure violence has set out to do now, we have been partnered with some of the different cure 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 partnership's that we've had for a while in New York City and
These guys do is they come out and they arrived with compassion. They arrived to listen, which is not something you're going to get from a police officer 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.
Once so they are what you call credible Messengers. So when they show up there 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 any of the the rate of affectivity 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 dispatched tools data tools.
Ways to help them accelerate their work and hopefully accelerate their funding because that's really what we want
to see the fact I'm looking at their Wikipedia page right now and there was a film produced in 2011 called The Interrupters which will 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 fellman. It looks like PBS Frontline are at this documentary, so I'll have to check it out. So how did the police look at these Jedi Knights from cure violence coming in and
intervening and then are they wearing like a badge to people know where 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.
Like I've always said from the beginning 4.8 billion dollars 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 a hundred million dollars when the police have four point eight 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 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 under scrutiny and rightfully so because it's you
Dangerous, but it could also be effective in based on what I'm reading here Department of Justice funded report on ceasefire found the program successfully reduce shootings and killings by 41 to 73 percent and retaliatory shootings reduce a hundred 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%
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 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 start-up 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 the scanner data is going to be wrong sometimes right and you going to publish stuff that could be wrong. That's like errors and omissions. How do you think about that when you're running a start-up that's on the front lines like this.
That was my biggest concern when I was starting. This is like 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 the 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 of stories of families escaping fires 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 have your full Sizzle reel that you can show to the viewers on all of the people some of the amazing work that's been done by Citizen and we have had none of that.
Like backfiring but I think anytime you do something new, you know, if you were starting boober. It's like whoa, this is crazy. Like wait a sec. You're going to like commercializing scale hitchhiking. You're not supposed to hit check or Airbnb. It's like wait, this is crazy. This is a honey pot for murderers. I mean any time 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 network.
It 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 have to think in each situation. I was thinking about this was 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 should know about this or there's some downside to it and there's a 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 and 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 that's a 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 what's the business here? How eventually or how
are you making money when we get back from the final break? I want to know about what is the business of citizen?
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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 citizen? 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 every building that again, so we are in the process of testing and soon to be launching a subscription service.
Yes, which is why 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 of its 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 your family.
So citizen Pro will be a paid service. I'll be able to pay ten bucks a month for five bucks a month for and that's how you monetize. It will be subscription monetization. Yes, perfect. And I 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 reported on Citizen and then have that immediately go to.
To 911 as well.
Let's put it this way. This is complete like the complete do-over of the 911 Public Safety response
system. 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? We're like you accidentally set it off because you're leaning on your phone in your bag and then it does the emerging starts making that noise. Does that actually work?
Do people actually I think it does comments. I've read a lot worse.
I think it's just a shortcut to 911. So it's set up in a Porsche 911. You can like hit a button. So it's just a shortcut. Really I think II should yeah probably fact check that but I believe
it. Yeah it is I couldn't figure that out know. What about aggregate statistics. Do you provide aggregate statistics to people in the a poor 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 information is public. Anyway that you're saying that a 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 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?
Now it's all real time. And that was kind of a product decision we made early on is not to say that we won't ever change our mind on that. But the reason we make it real time. It's her 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 your 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 requests to say. Hey, what are the dangerous neighborhoods? Well, if you look at the dangerous neighborhoods, it's usually directly correlated with the socio-economic 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 is 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 it's actually I think you'd be doing I'm trying to think about who you 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 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 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 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
Violence and domestic disputes, it just becomes broadcast to the whole neighborhood. And so there needs to be some response in 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 the with the suicide for sure if somebody was suffering and you would be basically outing somebody who
Who was suffering from either suicide attempts Etc and then in dust domestic violence? Yes, that would be you might be violating. Somebody's privacy. I guess one group might argue. If you're if 911 is called you've given up the right to privacy. I
don't know if yes is how one person
arguing I'm sitting here trying to think both sides.
There are certain gray areas that we may feel scratchy later. But like we've decided to draw the line a little bit more conservatively.
I'm sometimes if there's police on the scene and everybody wants to know it might say domestic incident in just give the cross streets because we don't want to give the exact address. So there's some sort of I mean apple juices Apple did this with the new iOS release they kind of did this like generalize 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 there feel. It feels to people anecdotally that it has just gone Supernova. We have district attorney named chesa who is not who doesn't believe in Prosecuting crime. Apparently might be a big generalization, but he
Seems to be not enforcing in San Francisco is 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 the San Francisco just spiraling into chaos, like it feels like too
many citizen usage on San Francisco is growing very quickly. It's not giant crime, right? We built this whole safety platform where we can rapidly put out me 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 phone contact tracing Leia safe path
talk about that. What what what was that? And what was that
product? So our mission is to make our users World safer and all of our world's got turned upside down due to the virus, right?
So we had asked 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 US and if so, what do we do? And there's a lot of discussion about this if you 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 TurnKey to contact tracing for New York City. So it took me, isn't it took us about a week to build this, but unfortunately, we were not allowed to to launch this on our schedule.
Yeah, so they 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 Tracy, 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 debacle in the u.s. We had a testing debacle in the US where the US 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 us which is like here's a safety platform. Here's how to improve privacy-preserving contact tracing at scale. We built this whole testing tracing flywheel where you integrated testing with tracing so that when somebody test positive it automatically triggers the tracing so that potential notifications come as a result of that test. Those people are often offered a free test.
If they test positive but people they might have gotten it from then can take a test. So it like it's scale. It is the perfect containment Knology.
We were not allowed. I mean with the approval process on the app store's was very hard
brutal. I mean, it's just unbelievable how we've mismanaged. Just you just think about how this is the upside. We talked 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 at racing and there's anonymity because you can just it doesn't matter.
ER who was Jay's affected. I
wish we were talking about this for months ago when we had the solution working. We I mean, we're still operating the largest contact tracing system of the us, 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
Mind to like be their solution and they just shut down the program. I mean just another debacle to add to the list. One
thing. I don't understand is it must have been discussed at some point and when we have this discussion of policing Andrew is we have citizens live streaming these events 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 they 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 there 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're 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 there were 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 this system.
Sleepy if you're a good cop and if you do the job and if you're disgusted by the behavior of the people that are creating this mess because there are plenty of great law enforcement officers who are just embarrass ya the majority the majority of them are embarrassed and disgusted 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 that mean though,
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 to 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 that would add highlights is well, maybe the training is the problem here because in the Brianna Taylor instance the the issue it seems isn't that there was a shootout there because there was a shootout in 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
Most and arrest them like, 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 dealer or no-knock warrant makes no sense to me. Like let them come out of their house arrest them and don't put anybody In Harm's Way and that's 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 is like sis. Some of these used to be disruptive and change like 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 police and then they grabbed him by the shirt just shot him in the back. It was 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 comes to you know in 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 under the new rules. They need to create new roles 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 is like you're giving
People have gone with six months of training 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 touch 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 records and they're already associate praise his conduct.
Before it hits that point of somebody getting killed and so like this is the sort of system that just needs to be like looked at across the board and it's going to make the good police officers happy. It's going to make the city's 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 either to protect their rights whatever, you know do collective bargaining to what wait what exactly are they protecting because it seems like they're protecting bad behavior and Bad actors and the union seem to be the ones that are fighting just basic ideas like body camps and you know these you and you see it in other areas of our society to with 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 had citizen loves what we're doing and when I first talk, I know you probably know Joe Lonsdale when I forgot to show this to Joe Joe goes. Oh my gosh like we
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 not as the hardest thing to change and as soon as technology makes its way and that's what we are. That's what's so fascinating 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.
Sap, so I think that's what makes technology. So interesting right now is that the role in the responsibility that it has is 10x 20x what it was 10 years
ago. Yeah. Absolutely. You know, when and I remember when Uber was raising their first round of capital there were many investors who passed and just a 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 would have a serial killer kill somebody in an Airbnb and then there's a headline Airbnb serial killer. I don't I just don't want to be involved in it.
And you know really it kudos to you for being brave enough to actually go into the real world and Tackle these issues continued success. And did I miss anything in terms of where you're headed? And when we see this pro version, when can we pay you
put you on the beta? I've got a couple things I can add you to the beta.
Oh really? Yum. Yum. You got a test flight Jason calacanis.com. Let's go test
flight. We got a test light for something that is going to launch in a couple weeks that it's
okay. I'll Friday. I won't tell anybody
the continuation of
How we continue to operate in the covid world? So contact tracing was the starting point but the ultimate product has now been built in his intestine and I'll get you on the beta and I think you'll hopefully enjoy it as much as we all are before we launched it.
Well, I hope this is like a rat people out for not wearing their masks. 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 we're a magical this is so difficult the vast majority of people still don't know how this
You're spread, but they don't know it comes in and out of the nose. They don't know like 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 vaporized. That's when you need the best when you're quiet. You don't actually need it.
It's just unlike its progress. 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 continued success everybody out there. If you want to join a great company citizen as 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 lot better than just putting everything on the police really loved the introduction to some of those groups that are doing interesting Jedi Knight stuff. I think that's going to be a big unlock so continued success to you and ruin the team. Thank you Jason. Really appreciate you coming on the pot? All right.
Buddy will see you soon download the app, and we'll see you soon. Cheers now. Bye.
