The City of Philadelphia has a lot of problems, fiscally. We aren't suffering from the budgetary woes that are showing up other places, mostly because we're not afraid to raise taxes, but the services bangs for our tax bucks are sometimes not where we'd like them to be. This is due in part to the fact that Philly is a patronage city, in the old school east coast meaning of the word. There are also programs that operate less efficiently than they should (or are officially assumed to), programs that seemed like a good idea at the time but have since proven otherwise (like the thing where we pay city administrators to retire, then hire them back on), and in some cases as in any system this complex, we've got straight up fraud and abuse.
The person tasked with finding and fixing our fiscal issues is this guy;
And so far in his two terms as controller he's done a pretty good job. He and his office have routed out fraudulent overtime claims from city contractors that had apparently been routinely filed since at least the Nixon administration. They also cracked the whip and finally got our (privately operated) ambulance corps running efficiently and with some degree of speed. And now he's out after absentee landlords that aren't keeping up their lots. There are a lot of wins on this guy's record.
Now, he's asking for help.
His office has produced an Iphone app that lets citizens report perceived fraud instantly. Complete with photo-upload capability, GPS tracking, etc. I don't have an IPhone or IPad, or any internet phone for that matter, so I can't really say how user friendly it is.
What do we think, D&D? Is this the future of combating fraud? Or is this just going to turn into a way to troll the government with thousands of false reports that they must then follow up on? How much good is this sort of crowdsourcing when it comes to government responsibility? Obviously, citizen reports are already a big part of identifying fraud. Is this going to make citizens more likely to do so? Are we all going to have one of these apps for our locality in 5 years?
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I don't know what the bureacratic atmosphere of the Philly Controller's office is like, but I know that for a long time in my city (LA), civilians were reluctant to file complaints against the police because they were intimidated and feared retaliation. A more anonymous complaint system would have helped to reduce that fear.
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I think this is a good idea. Lord knows Philly needs to using its resources as efficiently as possible. My opinion may be biases, but when I was in a South Philly police station (as a victim of crime), it seemed apparent that they did not have the back-end resources they should have in this era. For a city that large, it was kind of depressing to see the station was far from modern.
Maybe, but then it shouldn't take someone more than a minute or two to review the submission and determine its not worthwhile to investigate.
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That is going to be the biggest problem. Education can help, maybe even some tips in the app.
And any tip submissions can be looked at and either discarded, filed away for later (in case they get more information), or marked for active investigation.
It's an interesting experiment, I'm curious to see how it goes.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
Ahh, I knew as much, but didn't know the term, nor did I realize it was almost designed that way.
NintendoID: Nailbunny 3DS: 3909-8796-4685
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
Police and cell phone video cameras don't exactly get along.
I was waiting for that.
Plus you've got a way of charging them directly presumably if it's a fraudulent claim, since it's something also used my marketeers and competition runners so the biggest problem (despite the fact that a phone can do this anyway at the moment).
And that's only the stuff that has discrete, physical meaning. If all they're doing is lying on paperwork or shifting assets or a billion other kinds of white collar crimes there's zip all this will do.
I think in the case of videos or pictures, it could tell the investigators something like "hey it is obvious enough I am taking pictures, how about come down and secretly tape some construction sites and go through their records afterwords."
As far back as the 1980s it has always been that way. It may be caused in part by the never ending mafia presence. Or that nearly all positions of power/authority are given to a friend of a friend with few people being capable of handling their positions.