Against my better judgment, I still have the Citizen app installed on my phone. It has much of the same content it always has: assaults, burning buildings, wagging penises, and other mayhem going on all around Becca and me as we hunker down in our apartment.

I always wondered about their revenue model. When they first started, it is possible they did not have one. If you have a seed capital and a neato idea, profitability is sometimes shelved until later. Then again, maybe my perceptions are hopelessly skewed by my experiences in the dot-com era.

Citizen is apparently looking for revenue now. One of my recent alerts is for one Elizabeth P, who is guilty of lewd or lascivious acts with a child under 14 years of age. Shame on her. She is 950 feet from my home and…

If I wanted to know more, I would have upgrade to premium. If I ponied up the money, the blurred photo, address, and vitals of Elizabeth P would be revealed.

I was not about to pay them anything. For one thing, I am a tightwad. For another, info on California sex offenders is readily available online. If I wanted the skinny on this person, all I had to was look her up on the government website.

So, that was what I did. When I pulled up a map view of registered sex offenders in my area, there were a bunch of them. I learned a couple of things from doing that. One was that many bore at least a small resemblance to Clint Howard. The other was that Elizabeth P was nowhere to be found.

Huh. I mentioned this to Becca and she told me she was alerted by Citizen about a sex offender 200 feet away. After her commute to work, there was another alert that the same person was 200 feet away from her new location.

I suppose it is possible that the alerts are based on the physical location rather than the listed address. Maybe it comes from tracking data from an ankle bracelet (or “Arizona bling” as it is sometimes known). Another possibility, and I think this is the case, is that neither Elizabeth P nor whoever showed up on Becca’s alert is a real person at all. If you upgrade, the fake offender vanishes and the real ones appear.

Again, I do not know if this is true. I am only guessing and unwilling to pay for the upgrade to find out for sure. If it is true, it is fucked. I’ll explain why.

Now, I am not going to start complaining about how concerned parents should not have to pay to find out if Chester the Molester is their next-door neighbor. That info is already available for free. My problem is with people who want to beat the shit out of a sexual predator and are also on a tight budget. What if a real person, a non-offender with the same first name, last initial, and possible resemblance to the blurred photo, lives in the alert area? Or worse, what if that case of mistaken identity happens to be me?

If there is one thing I have learned about vigilantes is that most of them are dumb as a stump. Due diligence is not their forte. They are the kind of people in the comments section who type in all caps, only more violent. If my demise is to be caused by bullshit and stupidity, I prefer it to be my own.