For some odd reason I can't quite put my finger on, I've been more interested in crime news this year.
A friend who shares my paranoia (that's how we spell informed) told me about an app that gives alerts when crime happens.
"Pshaw. My doorbell does that," I said. (My friend's name is Pshaw.) "It has an app, and it's connected to other people who have the same brand of tattletale doorbells. When someone steals a package from someone's porch (which happens every 1.7 seconds), someone lurks in the backyard or tries the door at 3 a.m., everyone gets an alert (accompanied by a video), so we can lie awake in the dark contemplating the fallen nature of humanity."
From these videos, I've learned something: Motion-activated lights are no deterrent at all.
If anything, the miscreants seem grateful. "Hey, thanks. Now I can see what it is I was trying to steal."
I'd like a device that pitched them into terrifying super-dark that enveloped everything, so they'd run away and go smack into the side of the house. In the morning, you could make a plaster cast from the imprint they made in the stucco, give it to the cops, and they'd get right on it.
Anyway. The new app is called Citizen. It looks like a sonar or radar map, with your location right in the center, because the world revolves around you. Little dots appear when there's trouble.
Tap on one of the dots and sometimes you get a swarm of angry-face emojis rising and evaporating like sulfurous bubbles as other app users react. As I'm writing this, there's a report of a shooting at Powderhorn Park, and over 1,000 people who use the app have hit the angry-face emoji button.
