New York Police to use IdeaScale social crowdsourcing platform to solicit tips and concerns from residents
New York Times : Tweets: @rosefox Tweets: Dandy McFopperson / @rosefox : Actual LOL at NYPD modeling its online customer service efforts after... the airline industry. http://www.nytimes.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
In 2015 the NYPD chose IdeaScale, a commercial crowdsourcing vendor, as its channel for resident tips and concerns — an early instance of a police department renting its public-facing intake from SaaS rather than building it. That choice sits at the start of a longer arc in the coverage: by 2020 Nextdoor had built a dedicated app letting police, fire departments, and city halls push geotargeted alerts, institutionalizing exactly this agency-to-resident channel.
The same department's digital portfolio was meanwhile growing in a very different direction — an NYT project showed how cheaply [[a:940644|New York City cameras plus Amazon's facial recognition service could identify people without their knowledge]], and officers and critics later described the NYPD repurposing post-9/11 surveillance tools for minor cases. The tension between outreach tooling like IdeaScale and dragnet tooling is what makes this otherwise small procurement story worth tracking.
First-order effects
- Residents gain a structured, non-emergency digital channel for tips and concerns, while the NYPD gains a searchable, vendor-hosted archive of citizen input instead of scattered social media mentions.
- IdeaScale lands a marquee public-sector reference customer — the largest US police department — which it can cite in sales to other agencies.
Second-order effects
- Commercial civic-platform vendors are pushed into direct competition for the agency channel, a race Nextdoor formalized five years later with its public-agency app.
- Every tip submitted through such platforms becomes another NYPD dataset, feeding directly into the transparency gap documented in coverage of New York City's slow moves to open up how its algorithms govern policing.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, citizen-police communication consolidates around commercial intermediaries whose data practices sit outside the city's algorithm-transparency process, making vendor contracts — not just police practice — a target for oversight.
- Departments end up running two parallel digital tracks, engagement and surveillance, and the boundary between them (a tip platform versus camera analytics) becomes a policy question rather than a procurement one.
The trend: Municipal agencies are outsourcing their resident-facing channels to commercial platforms faster than cities build governance over what those channels collect.