Comment by saghm
3 days ago
I don't know what neighborhood you live in, but there aren't many billion-dollar corporations hanging out on my block. Given how much shady stuff has come out about some of these companies, I don't think it's really that terrible a presumption that pretty much anything they've invested time and effort into that isn't already public knowledge might have been used for some stuff that we'd be unhappy to find out about.
The density of these offices in downtown Seattle is super high and it's also an area that has a lot of crime so this implementation makes sense. Probably low ROI in other areas like your neighborhood that don't fit this profile.
My point is that if you start with the premise of something rife with frivolous fear-mongering like Nextdoor, swap out "random individuals with no real clout" with "some of the most powerful companies in the world", and then move everything behind a login that only established business and law enforcement can view, there's plenty reason to think that maybe this might not end up being a healthy thing for society at large.
There are already established ways for crimes to be reported to law enforcement, and arguably even in those ways that are ostensibly open to the public, it's already a well-known thing that the amount of help someone gets is proportionate to their wealth/power/social/influence/etc. There's absolutely no need to have a special extra channel for them that's not visible to the public if there's truly nothing to hide because the justice system already is tilted widely in their favor in the normal way things work.