Public safety apps are creating a new kind of surveillance culture, absent of context.

Adrian Ye downloaded the Citizen app weeks ago, looking for more information about an incident she'd read about on Nextdoor.

But when she did, a notification nearly made her heart stop.

"400 Feet Away: Child locked in car."

Turns out, the alert was a test notification on display on the app's boarding page. But to Ye, a UX designer who has worked for companies like Apple, it was indicative of the app's design: to keep people alert, to keep them scared.

"When it comes down to it, it's part of their bottom line, it's what they want people to feel," she said.

"Their videos are literally the size of my fingernail on my phone, yet I feel like a helicopter in a way. I feel like some sort of vigilante."

Citizen is one of the newer public safety offerings online. Like Nextdoor, a hyperlocal social media platform with a public safety focus, it has seen a large increase in users during the pandemic, a year in which homicides, aggravated assaults and gun assaults rose sharply.

But those statistics aren't the whole picture. In July 2020, overall crime was down in 25 American cities compared to the same period the previous year, according to a New York Times analysis of Uniform Crime Report data.

Property crime was down in 18 of those cities, and violent crime was down in 11 of them.

For the millions of new users this year on Nextdoor and Citizen, though, constantly bombarded with alerts about vandalism, and stolen catalytic converters, and gunshots, that might be hard to believe.

"If you look at public opinion surveys, they'll tell you uniformly that the thing that people are scared of is always rated far higher than its actual occurrence," said Faiza Patel, director of the Brennan Center's Liberty & National Security Program.

"(People) estimate crime rates as being far higher than they are. They'll estimate the number of immigrants or Muslims in the country as higher than it actually is. These kinds of things happen all the time, and Nextdoor is just a microcosm of that."