Bad Takes: Apps like Nextdoor aren’t making us more neighborly but more paranoid

Bad Takes is a column of opinion and analysis.

The paranoia exuded by suburbanites is enough to make even this diehard advocate of marijuana legalization second-guess himself.

In his 2012 comedy special What’s Wrong With People? comedian Sebastian Maniscalco riffed on how different a feeling it is when someone’s at the door today versus a couple decades ago.

“Twenty years ago, your doorbell rang, that was a happy moment in your house. It’s called ‘company,’” he said. “You’d be sitting there on a Thursday night, watching TV, your doorbell rang, the whole family shot off the couch and went to the door. Nobody looked to see who it was. And the person would be like, ‘I was in the neighborhood, thought I might stop by see how the kids are doing.’ And you lost track of the time, two hours went by, you were like, ‘Next time we’re gonna come by your place,’ they were like, ‘My door’s always open’.”

Maniscalco continued: ”Now, your doorbell rings, it’s like, ‘What the fuck?’ You have to turn and ask your family: ‘You invite anybody over? You invite anybody over?’ You can’t stop by anybody’s house anymore. If you do, you have to call from the driveway. You’re like, ‘I’m here, can I approach?’”

The irony here is that in the ye olde great-again days, we were a more violent society. Both consolidated FBI reports from police departments across the country and the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ annual victimization surveys “show dramatic declines in US violent and property crime rates since the early 1990s,” according to the Pew Research Center. However, we stubborn Americans “tend to believe crime is up, even when official data shows it is down,” Pew added.

Right-wingers may quibble over shifting definitions of what counts as a felony, but there’s near-universal agreement on what constitutes a murder: the homicide rate was 9.8 per 100,000 residents in 1991, and it was 5.7 per 100,000 last year.

Sociologists coined a fancy term for this cognitive bias in the early 1970s: “mean world syndrome.” That’s when people perceive their society as more dangerous than it actually is, typically due to exposure to media violence. Back then, it was cop shows on TV, today it’s smartphone footage of unhoused people and teenagers “up to no good.”

A 2023 study led by Adam Fetterman, director of the the Personality, Emotion, and Social Cognition lab at the University of Houston, found that “participants who reported using neighborhood apps perceived local crime rates as higher than those who do not use the apps, independent of actual crime rates.”

Just last week on Nextdoor, I was greeted with a notification to “Be on the lookout for these 3 teens.” The youths were “trying to break into backyards,” a user in Whispering Oaks ominously warned. She included three personally indefinable photos taken from her security camera, mentioning that one was wearing “a hoodie” and “had a bar.”

Turns out, the alleged crowbar was actually a pressure-washer wand, and the youngsters were going door-to-door offering to clean people’s trash bins for a little extra cash. Dozens reacted to the post. Who knows how many more viewed it.

And despite several neighbors, including one of the boys’ own moms, informing her the kids were saving up for bicycles, the post remains up as of press deadline. So do the following helpful comments: “Call SAPD,” “Spoiled kids trying to act like criminals, they won’t make it in prison” and “They aren’t going to live long being common thieves.”

“Nextdoor has digitized the so-called ‘neighborhood watch,’” columnist Hayden Buckfire wrote for The Michigan Daily last October. You may have heard that the Great Lake State, like Texas, was carried by a dogwhistle presidential candidate on Election Day. Not unrelated, Nextdoor has “enabled an irrational fear of crime and general toxicity that violate the very neighborly premise of the app,” which “contributes to a more divided and paranoid world,” Backfire concluded.

A recent study by University of Colorado Denver criminal justice scholar Mary Dodge of Nextdoor app posts and comments from the area where she lives backs up Buckfire’s conclusion.

“Citizens frequently employ the Nextdoor app to circulate information regarding suspicious activity and specific illegal incidents,” according to the study. “The use of social media apps to engage in participatory policing practices can generate a sense of safety and social cohesion but also produce ethnic profiling, risky vigilantism, and distrust among neighbors.”

And does this sound familiar?

“The perpetuation of stereotypes associated with potentially suspicious persons includes the individual’s personal characteristics such as race and gender, their choice of attire, including wearing black jackets, hoodies, and hats, while carrying a backpack, and loitering where ‘neighbors’ assume they do not belong,” Dodge states in her analysis. “Keyword phrases were exemplified by posts such as ‘Lock your doors at night’ and ‘Be on the lookout.’ Additionally, posting pictures and videos of suspected offenders is common on the platform. In similar cases, neighbors asked, for example: ‘Does anyone recognize these young teens?’ ‘If anyone recognizes this pair of low life smash and grab thieves, please PM me.’”

This relentless everyday reinforcement takes a toll, according to Dodge’s study.

“Nextdoor users, when responding to initial posts, often replied that crime is currently out of control and has become a normalized feature of the community. Specifically, these commentators believe that because of the increased criminal activity, community members are no longer safe to venture outside. For example, a user responded to a crime alert: ‘Good luck getting any interest from cops these days … Criminals don’t worry about cops.’”

A particular brand of politics naturally follows from there.

“Several users possess such myopic views that they insist that politicians have a stake in organized crime,” Dodge wrote. “Several other users shared this sentiment, directly admonishing the governor and the city’s district attorney for contributing to high crime rates: ‘The DA will not prosecute crime.’ Multiple users contend that politicians are ‘too soft on crime’ and should embrace the goal of retribution.”

And that’s where things turn nasty, according to the analysis.

“Posts specifically advocated for neighbors to confront possible suspects and criminals verbally and physically. In this context, vigilantism refers to actions that seek to punish, prevent, or investigate a crime without proper legal authority. Numerous commentators encouraged neighbors to secure access to weapons, including firearms, metal bats, pepper spray, and tasers. The respondents to the initial posts stressed that until community members confront offenders, residents’ quality of life will continue to deteriorate. For example, a user’s comment regarding a vehicle theft notes, ‘I catch someone screwing with my car, and they’ll eat lead.’ Some citizens endorse violence and are willing to go to extremes to eradicate criminal behavior. One user states, ‘Between porch pirates and these a-holes, I wish we had the lose-a-hand penalty for stealing.’”

When I posted this study on the Nextdoor app, one commenter dismissed the risk of unnecessarily escalating situations as “leftist nonsense.” Because who needs to listen to eggheads when you’ve got gut-feeling penal populism?

Nextdoor boasted nearly 46 million weekly active users in the third quarter of 2024, a 13% increase over the prior year. So, if you’re searching for yet another reason Biff Tannen re-won the presidency, look no farther.

A full 81% of Trump voters say the criminal justice system is generally not tough enough on criminals, according to Pew. Though, presumably, they’re not referring to Donald Trump himself, nor his cabinet picks. The U.S. already keep more people in sweaty cages than any nation on Earth. Setting aside the proposed return to Hammurabi’s Code, how much more punitive can we afford to be?

Of course we’d all rather our odds of getting robbed drop to zero, and being a victim of a serious crime can scar people for life. What’s more, crime does increase over the holidays.

But do we really need to overreact by treating anyone who steps on our property as a foreign invader? Wouldn’t it be best to ask common sense questions before plastering wanted posters of unsuspecting teenagers all over social media?

The loss of a sense of community can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Perhaps normalizing aggression and refusing to remedy the root causes of crime, like generational poverty, perpetuates the same cycles of violence we sensationalize.

Even if you did your part to vote against Trump and U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, if you have three deadbolts on your door in a relatively safe suburb and are itching to reach for a deadly weapon, it may be worth considering whether you’re part of the problem.

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This article appears in Dec 11-17, 2024.