But metrics are only as good as the goals and intentions that underlie them. And in this case, a high number of reports doesn’t lead to greater neighborhood safety. At best, they create clutter—too much noise for users to sift through. That can actually make people less safe, because they become less likely to notice, or take seriously, those reports that do have merit. At worst, as we’ve seen, unhelpful reports perpetuate stereotypes and ultimately target people of color.
Let’s assume a decent percentage of dropouts were because the form-fillers couldn’t recall enough detail to fill out the bigger form. So these incidents were probably not going to be actionable individually, might might still have been of value collectively, to monitor crime rates or “suspicious activity”. You can spin a positive narrative but hard to know why they didn’t complete the forms (unless next door did some research to find out why?)
