The Last Thing We Need Is an Uber for Off-Duty Cops

There are possible upsides to bringing in private partners to remove some of the opaque aspects to off-duty policing that make these gigs feel like under-the-table employment. These services, for example, have the potential to make some aspects of off-duty policing more transparent. If cops working second shifts have their hours and assignments logged into a database, municipalities can plan around potentially overworked officers.

Nevertheless, advocates of police reform aren’t entirely convinced by these rosier perspectives, and they warn that these new players that are seeking to make off-duty policing more accessible and efficient will only end up increasing all the avenues of contact between cops and civilians, and augment the ability to deploy a workforce that many believe has violent tendencies. “The idea that we could deploy cops faster everywhere is the exact antithesis of what communities are asking for, which is to curb the presence of police,” said Bianca Tylek, founder of Worth Rises, an anti-prison nonprofit in New York. “Having police in these jobs, whether they’re in uniform or not in uniform … typically escalates these things. They only know how to react to things in one way.”

Power, RollKall’s CEO, said that he doesn’t believe that off-duty cops working through his company are displacing private security officers. But if that’s true, that means that these programs are, as reformers fear, putting more cops in more places. “Uberizing off-duty police work is another way to fill in the gaps and make a more comprehensive police machine,” McQuade said. That machine increases the flow of people into the criminal legal system.

Yet even as concerns over the future commodification of police work run rampant, the drive to further enmesh cops into the gig-and-app economy is only accelerating. As Vice reported this week, Citizen, a popular neighborhood watch–style app that allows ordinary people to report crime and other suspicious activity in their neighborhood, is road-testing an on-demand service that would “deploy private security workers to the scene of disturbances at the request of app users,” in “a dramatic expansion of Citizen’s purview.” Given the fact that Citizen recently made news for posting “a photo of a homeless man” that it had wrongly identified as a suspect in the setting of a wildfire, while offering “$30,000 for information that could lead to his arrest,” there is reason to be skeptical, if not alarmed, by what the future holds.