Nextdoor Is Courting Cops And Public Officials Using All-Expenses-Paid Trips To Its Headquarters

Failures

from the lobbying-for-a-worse-America dept

A COP IN EVERY HOUSE: that’s the American dream. Maybe they can’t enter the home, what with the Fourth Amendment and all, but they can be invited to every online get-together thrown by apps that promise neighborhood unity while asking law enforcement to get in on the action.

Ring, Amazon’s doorbell/camera company, has made the relationship between neighborhood “sharing” and law enforcement explicit. It’s right there in the term sheets. While Ring takes the PR reins to steer the official discourse, it’s offering cops steeper discounts on Ring cameras they can hand out to citizens in exchange for pushing citizens to sign up for Neighbors, Ring’s snitch app. Once attached to the app, Ring makes sharing of camera footage seamless and encourages homeowners to report suspicious people and activities. Unsurprisingly, many of the suspicious people reported are minorities.

It’s not just Ring and Neighbors, as Citylab has discovered. Nextdoor — a hyperlocal Facebook clone (and hotbed of bigotry) — is courting cops as forcibly silenced partners in its plans to increase its user base.

Charles Husted, the chief of police in Sedona, Arizona, couldn’t contain his excitement. He had just been accepted into the Public Agencies Advisory Council for Nextdoor, the neighborhood social networking app.

“You’re the best!!! A great Christmas present,” he wrote in a December email to Parisa Safarzadeh, Government Relations Manager for Nextdoor.com Inc., obtained by CityLab through a public records request.

The invitation was too good to turn down: an all expenses paid trip to Nextdoor’s headquarters in San Francisco. The company covered the costs for all invitees. In exchange for their participation, Nextdoor picked up the estimated $16,900 tab. And it swore participants to silence with a non-disclosure agreement.

Unfortunately for Nextdoor, this doesn’t cover public records, which is what Citylab used to uncover this unseemly relationship between the social media company and US law enforcement. Chief Husted has no regrets — or at least none he’s willing to share publicly, possibly because of the NDA he signed. From what he can see, this isn’t questionable. It’s just a step in the right direction.

Husted says that leaning on social media — not just Nextdoor, but also Facebook or Twitter — in the line of duty is an inevitability of the current age. “It’s naive to think as public safety folks that we can keep doing our work the same as we have for years and years,” he said. “We have to evolve with the times, and the times have to do with social media: That’s where our communities are at. We have to find a way to be there too.”

He’s right. Social media can’t be ignored. But Nextdoor isn’t inviting anyone from its largest group of stakeholders: members of the public. Instead, it’s paying for government employees and officials to travel to San Francisco to hear its pitch for greater government involvement in a private company’s communications platform. Nextdoor may claim to be connecting locals with each other, but its efforts are focused on roping in the people who are supposed to be serving its users: public servants.

Robbie Turner, a senior city strategist with Nextdoor, wrote to Husted that when expanding Nextdoor’s reach to Canada, the company was using “the same strategy we used when we first launched in the U.S. — recruit the major Police Departments and have them help us grow membership and engagement quickly.”

That’s the bottom line: bumps in usage and users. Turning public entities into tools of corporations is seldom a good idea and it’s certainly a bad idea when Nextdoor’s user base appears to be willing to turn themselves into snitches at the drop of a hyperlink. If cops want to break bias patterns, they need to steer clear of unsubstantiated reports from biased Nextdoor users. Instead, Nextdoor is encouraging police to embrace the platform and all the problems inherent in its “see something, say something” nudges.

As for other public officials who took advantage of Nextdoor’s all-expense-paid offer, they’re having a problem seeing a problem with any of this. Never mind the optics. Officials want everyone to focus only on the letter of the law, which contains enough loopholes to drive an entire junket through.

Several public officials who were part of the Public Agencies Advisory Council say that the trip didn’t conflict with any city policies. Lara Foss, a corporate communications marketing consultant for the City of Austin, told CityLab that since the trip was work-related, it did not violate the city’s gift policy. Sedona’s Husted also said there were no endorsement regulations that prohibited him from participating. Katie Nelson, social media and public relations coordinator for the Mountain View Police Department in California, said that because the city’s policy prohibits taking paid trips on clocked time, she took a few days off from work to participate in the San Francisco meet-up.

Being wined and dined on a corporate tab makes people more receptive to their pitches. Everyone knows this. And that’s why nearly everyone thinks things like this reek of buying off cops and politicians. Everyone, that is, but the cops and politicians being seduced by a whirlwind trip to a tech company’s headquarters.

Once the dirty has been done, it’s time to let what happened at Nextdoor HQ stay at Nextdoor HQ. This isn’t so much a slogan as it is an existential lawsuit threat. Shut up, says Nextdoor, or it will be more than an un-invite to future events. It will be your proverbial ass in a litigation sling. Public officials owe a duty of transparency to their constituents. But Nextdoor is appending a whole lot of asterisks to the duties of public officials. The exceptions include a completely separate arm of the government.

In the terms of Nextdoor’s NDA, advisory council members are not allowed to release public statements about the partnership without the consent of Nextdoor, nor are they able to follow a court order to disclose any information deemed confidential by Nextdoor without alerting the company first.

And Nextdoor has made it easy for its snitchiest users to bring the government in on conversations other Nextdoor users might have thought were private. The platform can’t allow users to file actual police reports but it does give users an option to screw other users over. A feature called “Forward to Police” allows users to send copies of private conversations to officers monitoring accounts. This feature is activated by police departments themselves, so those willing to further demonstrate their indifference for the people they serve can give people an one-click solution for all their snitching needs.

Sure, any participant in a private conversation could take screenshots and hand them to law enforcement. Removing the minimal tech hurdles, however, encourages people to use this option anytime they come across something that bothers them. It’s a “speak to the manager” button, but one that potentially involves government-blessed use of deadly force. If people don’t even have to leave their chairs to engage in SWATting-adjacent activities, they won’t. Giving them a button just increases the chance someone’s going to get hurt or killed.

At the end of the day, it’s problematic all over. Public officials are endorsing a platform that paid to have them feel good about it — both by covering their trip to San Francisco and by giving them the impression they are doing something to make their communities better by making them members of a private company’s “Public Advisory Council.”

Filed Under: law enforcement, nextdoor, police, social media, surveillance
Companies: nextdoor