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Credit: Gillian Diebold

An application that provides users with crime and emergency updates is now being rolled out in Philadelphia. 

Citizen, a company based in New York, designed an app to provide users with information about 911 emergencies in real time. The app launched in the Philadelphia area on April 16.  

The app's interface allows users to record videos of the incident, react to posts, and share incident reports to outside social media apps. Users can also chat with fellow users who are viewing the same incident.

In September 2018, a man was alerted to fire in his own apartment building through the Citizen app, The New York Post reported. Dan Humphrey, who was a law school student in New York City, told The New York Post that when he woke up in the middle of the night, he smelled smoke and only realized the building was on fire because of a notification on his Citizen app.  

The Citizen app is free for both iOS and Android users and is also accessible in New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Baltimore. 

US News & World Report ranks safety in Philadelphia as a six out of 10. The report noted that Philadelphia has a higher crime rate than similarly sized metropolitan cities. 

In January 2018, College of Liberal and Professional studies graduate Dillon Heffernan created a digital map to track crime in West Philadelphia after his neighborhood was experiencing three robberies a night.