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Dutch Police Build a Pokemon Go-Style App For Hunting Wanted Criminals (csoonline.com)
"How can the police induce citizens to help investigate crime? By trying to make it 'cool' and turning it into a game that awards points for hits," reports CSO. mrwireless writes:
Through their 'police of the future' innovation initiative, and inspired by Pokemon Go, the Dutch police are building an app where you can score points by photographing the license plates of stolen cars. When a car is reported stolen the app will notify people in the neighbourhood, and then the game is on! Privacy activists are worried this creates a whole new relationship with the police, as a deputization of citizens blurs boundaries, and institutionalizes 'coveillance' -- citizens spying on citizens. It could be a slippery slope to situations that more resemble the Stasi regime's, which famously used this form of neighborly surveillance as its preferred method of control.
CSO cites Spiegel Online's description of the unofficial 189,000 Stasi informants as "totally normal citizens of East Germany who betrayed others: neighbors reporting on neighbors, schoolchildren informing on classmates, university students passing along information on other students, managers spying on employees and Communist bosses denouncing party members."
The Dutch police are also building another app that allows citizens to search for missing persons.
CSO cites Spiegel Online's description of the unofficial 189,000 Stasi informants as "totally normal citizens of East Germany who betrayed others: neighbors reporting on neighbors, schoolchildren informing on classmates, university students passing along information on other students, managers spying on employees and Communist bosses denouncing party members."
The Dutch police are also building another app that allows citizens to search for missing persons.
The alternative is sensors and cameras automatically finding persons of interest and uniformed officers grabbing people without notice. Having at least one citizen in the loop may make the police more trustworthy, if the system is set up only for serious crimes.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
These methods have been used throughout time.
It's funny how Slashdot's idea of time begins in the twentieth century. Police didn't really exist until the nineteenth century. Before that there were soldiers to quell riots, and in some societies there were jailers and kinds of soldiers ("marshals" in American parlance, from "martial" meaning military) to enforce court orders. There weren't investigators or detectives like we have today: that's why detective fiction begins in the nineteenth century. In ancient Athens, the "Cretan Archers" existed to quell riots, but that's about all; in Rome, there were riot troops and firemen. Solving crime and bringing charges was the citizen's responsibility: the aggrieved party or someone acting on that party's behalf would have to investigate and prosecute. The idea of having the state do those things was totally alien for most of human history before the nineteenth century.
There is a huge difference between crowd-sourcing 'wanted warrant' search versus asking people to report perceived offenses against a state on their own volition.
East Germany (and other Eastern Block states) problem with citizens spying and reporting crimes was that it was mostly interested in political crimes/dissent. As it was something hard to prove or disprove, people were often reporting people they disliked, just for sake of causing them trouble.
It was:
1) possible false accusations due to personal hatred
2) being hunted for 'thought crimes' or any disapproval of state
3) not being able to trust your neighbors(or even family)
which was making it bad, not a pure fact that it was civilian reporting a crime.
That article kind of equates calling police when you see/hear somebody beating his wife in apartment next door to falsely accusing your coworker of anti-state collaboration so he will get taken to Gulag and you can get his position. In both cases you are turning against somebody who possibly trusted you and reporting him to state-run enforcement. But there IS a difference - and I think that finding stolen cars firmly fit into former category.
If police will start falsely flagging cars of political dissidents as stolen and using other citizens to hunt them down, only then it becomes a problem. But guess what - if they do that and do NOT involve other citizens, it is problem of same size.