For police officers throughout the country, what happened in a Rockville, Maryland high school in January was all too typical. A fight between two boys resulted in a shot being fired, and a 15-year-old was left bleeding on the restroom floor.

What happened next stunned even Betsy Brantner Smith, a nearly three-decade experienced cop and National Police Association spokesperson.

“The students started tweeting about it,” she said. “That’s just, unfortunately, the era we live in.”

Officials with the Montgomery County Police Department confirmed that fellow students had tweeted about a gunshot that had taken place, as well as details regarding the victim and perpetrator.

They didn’t call the cops or ask for assistance. It was only later that the injured boy was found.

Ms Brantner Smith is alluding to an era in which pulling out a phone has almost become a reflex, even while witnessing a crime.

Bystanders occasionally snap photographs or videos, and they occasionally post them on social media.

Commercial phone apps have appeared in recent years, encouraging onlookers to report crime to these platforms.

Most people use Citizen, which is one of these “public safety” apps. It leverages information from police scanners and social media to warn people about local situations. It was founded in 2016 under the name ‘Vigilante.’

The app’s basic premise is that public access to information can protect individuals from danger. It also has a “record” feature, which allows users to record video and live footage from a situation.

Citizen isn’t the only app like this in the US, but it’s probably the most well-known one.

Neighbors by Ring, an Amazon subsidiary, allows customers to share photographs and video clips from ‘smart’ doorbells and surveillance cameras, as well as discuss crimes with neighbors. Nextdoor is a social networking service that connects neighbors and allows them to exchange local news and events, with a focus on crime.

The emergence of these and other similar apps in the United States, termed “crowd-sourced suspicion apps” by some experts, along with the widespread use of mobile phone cameras has sparked fears of a new, digitally fuelled “bystander effect.”

In a situation where there is a strong desire for people to take pictures or report to apps, will people instead help or call the police for help?

The bystander effect, sometimes known as bystander apathy, is the theory that the presence of others prevents spectators from participating in emergencies.

The word originated following the 1964 stabbing death of Kitty Genovese, a 28-year-old New York City woman. Initially, it was said that scores of people witnessed the murder but did not intervene or notify the cops. This was later disproven.

While more recent research indicates that bystanders do, in fact, intervene in the majority of cases, public fear remains. Last October, a high-profile case exposed the issue sharply when fellow commuters in Philadelphia refused to report a rape on a train as it occurred in front of them.

Bystanders are not legally obligated to act or assist unless they have a “specific” responsibility to do so, such as if they are parents, educators, caretakers, or police officers in most US states.

According to Tamara Rice Lave, a law professor at the University of Miami, there is fear that spectators may seek “notoriety” by taping and uploading events.

“People want to go viral, and that competes with their duty – whether it’s a legal duty or not – but a moral duty to their fellow citizens,” she said.

There is little research on the psychology of persons who film a crime, though some psychologists feel it may be motivated by a wish to help without having to physically intervene or act.

“We don’t have a lot of data, but the hypothesis is that it is a way of people doing something,” said Elizabeth Jellico, a clinic psychologist and sexual violence prevention researcher and professor at New York’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

“I think people feel that by filming it, they’re kind of documenting [crimes] and in a way that they are contributing,” Prof Jeglic added. “It does help, sometimes, in the prosecution of crimes. However, it doesn’t, in the immediate moment, help the person who is being assaulted.”

The Citizen app has been accused by critics of creating “paranoia” and influencing crime perceptions.

“It’s pretending to provide public safety, but in reality, it’s just providing a paranoid spectacle,” said Angel Diaz, a law lecturer at the University of California – Los Angeles. “We shouldn’t be relying on a private company to supplement people’s safety.”

“It made me feel like the city is much more dangerous than it is, as the amount of crime reported is quite alarming,” said Nadia Tarasova, a 22-year-old Citizen user in Chicago.

Averaging 30 notifications each day, Ms Tarasova admitted that she was frequently overwhelmed.

“They report on small things such as a dumpster fire, or they exaggerate things. They’ll say it’s a crowd protesting when it’s just 10 kids standing in a park talking to their teacher.”

Ms Tarasova, like millions of other users, sees the technology’s advantages. In her situation, she believes it benefits her in making educated decisions about which areas are safe to be alone in and which are not.

“I like being aware of my surroundings, especially as a woman,” she said.

A Citizen spokeswoman told the BBC that the firm considers their technology to be “complementary” to 911.

“Citizen is not a substitute for law enforcement,” the spokesperson said. “If a user sees a crime being committed, they should contact local authorities.”

Some academics are also concerned that bystanders taping and sharing the footage to the internet could lead to racial profiling.

“Actually, my concern is not about the bystander effect,” said Lauren Briges, a PhD candidate at the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. “It’s about mob justice.”

“They are almost changing the definition of the bystander in a sense – that through the action of live streaming, or through the action of capture and recording, that it’s a form of intervention,” she added. “Except for the fact it’s heavily racially biased.”

According to a Citizen representative, such fears are a “mischaracterization of [the app’s] core functionality,” which is to alert individuals when potentially hazardous events occur nearby.

To counter criticism of the app’s impact on crime perceptions, the business claimed it has made steps to minimize the frequency of messages and increase their relevancy and frequency.

“We also avoid publicising vague suspect or suspicious person descriptions,” the spokesperson said.

The amount of people filming crimes and using crime-reporting applications is only going to rise in the future, especially as young, tech-savvy digital natives become a larger portion of the population.

Prof. Jeglic believes that instead of only filming, spectators should be taught to do more and act in the moment, such as phoning 911 or carefully attempting to interfere. She likened it to the sexual assault education that many high schools and universities around the country provide.

“I think that the younger that we teach students how to intervene, the more likely that they’ll practice these strategies and the more likely they are to intervene,” she said. “The more comfortable we are with a game plan before it happens in an emergency situation, the more likely we are to act on it instinctually.”

Others, on the other hand, aren’t so convinced.

Kevin McMunigal, a law professor at Case Western Reserve University and a former federal prosecutor, argues that the US system, in which the law cannot compel people to assist, means that in many circumstances, people would instead videotape.

“It seems very counterintuitive [to film] because it’s against one’s moral compass or what’s right and wrong,” he said. “But the US approach is very individualistic.

“It’s the same sort of ‘rights’ thing that you see with people saying they don’t want a vaccine or to wear a mask. People don’t want the law telling them when they should be good Samaritans.

“It’s amazing to me that it’s such a prevalent view in the US, but it is.”

Image Credit: Getty

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