Become a Crime-Fighting Superhero in Your Spare Time

A new wave of social networks are helping police and residents fight crime more collaboratively.
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Illustration: Ross Patton/Wired

Chris Goodroe doesn't do Facebook, and he doesn't do Twitter. Online socializing isn't his thing. But after watching his neighbors use the internet to bust a pair of burglars earlier this year, the Oakland attorney decided to make an exception for Nextdoor, a neighborhood social network that is increasingly being used to fight crime.

"This collective mentality that Nextdoor allows us from a crime and public safety standpoint is really beneficial," says Goodroe. “It alerts neighbors of all ages and backgrounds to what's out there.”

In the first wave of online social crime-fighting, police used networks like Facebook and Twitter to ask for help identifying images of suspects and to broadcast messages over a large area like an entire city. Now a new, more targeted set of networks like Nextdoor are allowing residents to better police themselves and police to reach residents more efficiently. "What we saw happening very early on with Nextdoor is people were coming to us saying, 'We'd like to be able to include our local police officer in our neighborhood,'" says co-founder Sarah Leary, who estimates about 20 percent of Nextdoor content is related to crime and safety.

The scam run by the burglars in Goodroe's neighborhood worked like this: Two men carrying magazines knock on a door. If a homeowner answers, he gets a pitch for magazine subscriptions from one guy while the other scopes his valuables. If no one answers, the burglars let themselves in.

'We have learned to be more alert. If I see somebody that doesn't belong in my neighborhood, I can post it and it goes to everybody.'In years past, few homeowners bothered reporting such vaguely fishy visits. But with Nextdoor small suspicions can be easily pieced together, fusing into a troublesome pattern.

"Time zero, someone posted something, saying, 'It may be nothing but, you know, I had these people come to the door and they were suspicious because they were selling magazines but they couldn't tell me what the charity was that they were doing it for,” Goodroe says. “Not more than 10 or 20 minutes later, someone else posted saying, 'Yeah those people came to our place as well, it's very weird.'"

"That happened to maybe three or four different homes. And finally one home, when these people came and knocked on the door, called the cops."

Contacted by a Nextdoor user, the Oakland Police Department took a description, tracked down the suspects, and found them in the midst of a burglary. Goodroe, who now keeps a close eye on Nextdoor postings, credits the bust to the site.

Tools like Nextdoor and Nixle, a text and e-mail alert system used by police, are not just altering the landscape of social networking. They're also changing the ways cities across the U.S. ensure safety -- helping residents look out for one another, helping cops make highly targeted disclosures and inquiries, and turning the tables on criminals who have long availed themselves of sophisticated communications systems and carefully plotted strategies. The change is being driven less by cutting-edge technology than by new demands for police transparency, by budget cuts, and by calls for greater efficiency and efficacy on the part of law enforcement.

If crime-fighting social networks continue to attract users and spread geographically, they could help police departments reduce crime rates while forging deeper and more meaningful relationships with the communities they patrol.

“Involved neighborhoods with a strong sense of community tend to look out for each other, tend to notice if there's a guy walking around going into people's backyards,” says Quinn Fenwick, assistant police chief in Ventura, California, which has partnered with both Nextdoor and Nixle.

Cities are using new social-networking tools to enhance safety in two fundamentally different ways. Along one axis, police are able to send information to residents faster, for less money, and in a much more targeted fashion. They might be telling people to be on the lookout for specific suspects or missing persons; they might be offering a more general heads-up about, say, a rash of burglaries in an area; or they might be performing public relations, for example by introducing new officers or describing changes in force deployment.

For broadcasting information, tools like Nixel and communities like Nextdoor are a big improvement over the old system of pushing information out through neighborhood watch groups, town council meetings, and individual conversations between officers and neighbors.

“We probably have on average maybe nine people going to a crime-watch meeting,” says Assistant Chief Vincent Golbeck of the Dallas Police Department. “And those nine people may be representing a neighborhood of 300 households. So we have to rely on the crime-watch chairpersons and those that were in the meeting to use an e-mail distribution list, or a phone tree.”

“So Nextdoor is a tool we utilize along with Nixle, Facebook, tweets, to try to get our message proactively to as many households as we can. We'd rather hit 200 to 300 houses versus nine.”

Fenwick has seen similar benefits in Ventura. “At our height of what I call Neighborhood Watch 1.0, which was all manual and meetings at the station or at someone's house, we had 200 to 300" participants, the chief says. "In the five to six months we've been on Nextdoor, we're up to 1,500 members already.”

Along the other axis, residents are communicating peer-to-peer and coordinating their actions, often without involving the police. Residents help one another find missing pets, notify one another when they have mentally disabled children and parents who might end up wandering the streets, and discuss suspicious individuals who don’t necessarily warrant a call to the police (like Goodroe’s door-to-door magazine salesmen).

In the Crestwood North neighborhood of Birmingham, Alabama, neighbors have used Nextdoor and its “urgent alert” text-messaging service to help hunt a burglar’s getaway car and to try and identify a different burglar caught on a video security system.

“There’s a sharing of information,” says Darrell O’Quinn, president-elect of the Crestwood North neighborhood association. “People are made aware of what criminals are going after and how they're breaking into the house.... If somebody saw somebody suspicious they can offer a description and there are a couple of instances where that type of information-sharing led to arrests.”

In San Jose, California’s, Coyote Canyon neighborhoods, residents have long helped protect one another from gangs and graffiti taggers. Nextdoor just made that self policing easier and more common, says former neighborhood association president Darryl Ospring. In the mid-1980s, Ospring used to type the neighborhood newsletter and hand-deliver it to nearly 1,000 homes. She later attempted a fruitless experiment with Google Groups before turning to Nextdoor, which she credits with pulling in residents “that are more computer-based people ... or are just a little too busy to come to a meeting.”

“We have all types of new people just in the last three months that have joined [Nextdoor] along with me,” Ospring says. “And we have learned how to be more alert.... If I see somebody in my neighborhood that doesn't belong there, I can go directly to the website and post it and it goes to everybody.”

People have always talked to another about break-ins and vandalism over their fence lines. What systems like Nextdoor allow is for the conversations to happen much more frequently and over a slightly larger geographic area. Instead of chatting with your neighbor, you might end up trading information with the lady three blocks down. And instead of doing it a couple of times per month, you're doing it a couple of times per week, or a couple of times per day.

One impact of this is that criminal patterns can be identified sooner. Instead of waiting a week for the police department to notice a rash of burglaries and then notify residents through intermediaries, neighbors can alert one another instantly. The police, in turn, have new ways to rapidly solicit information from neighbors.

Nixle, which helps more than 5,000 police and public safety agencies send text messages based on ZIP code, is increasingly being used in a collaborative manner, with police seeking tips on homicides or, in one recent case, asking residents to help find an older man with dementia who commandeered an automobile and disappeared during extreme cold weather. Nixle even built special technology to optionally anonymize incoming texts before forwarding them to local cops. “You’re engaging and leveraging the entire population to catch bad guys,” says CEO Eric Liu.

On the flip side, the new neighborhood networks can sometimes enable residents to work themselves into a lather of fear. Birmingham's O'Quinn says some of his neighbors got a little too "freaked out" after hanging around on Nextdoor.

“People started hearing about, ‘Oh, my car was broken into, My house was broken into,’" he says. "And then people tend to overreact, they were like, ‘Oh, our neighborhood is completely crime-ridden.’ And I happen to be friends with our precinct commander, so I got the actual numbers from him and asked him to compare, and he was like, ‘No, your neighborhood actually has got one of the lowest crime rates in the entire precinct.’”

Becoming more aware of neighborhood crime can indeed be scary. But if enough people make the transition enabled by tools like Nextdoor and Nixle, from vaguely concerned resident to active community safety participant, they may yet prove that online social networks can have an impact beyond spreading viral videos, enriching Wall Street investors, and trading baby photos. Those sorts of activities all have value, but when it comes to visceral impact, it's hard to beat cleaning up the streets next to your own home.