Nextdoor Pulls It's 'Forward To Police' Feature Amid Racial Abuse Concerns

Source: ERIC BARADAT/AFP via Getty Images / ERIC BARADAT/AFP via Getty Images

Nextdoor is a popular app intended to help neighbors and neighborhoods keep in touch with eachother stay up to date on important local issues. Looking to get rid of some lightly used furniture and want to bless someone close to you? They’ve got you covered. Questions about when you can start doing remodeling work on your home? Hop on the app and the neighbors will drop the city ordinances expeditiously. The downside of the app, though, is the inevitable racial profiling that happens daily. According to Engadget, the app has read the social climate and acted immediately to make changes that should have been made ages ago.

Nextdoor said in a statement that it had already cut “problematic posts” by 75 percent through changing the flow of safety posts to teach people about bias and prevent knee-jerk posting. Only 0.001 percent of posts were “related to racial profiling,” the company added, and there were efforts to lower that volume further.

There are still ways to get in touch with police through Nextdoor’s app, including direct messages. The company isn’t completely against facilitating those conversations. This is more of an acknowledgment that where and how Nextdoor users contacted the police could feed into biases.

This is definitely a small step in the right direction, which will hopefully lead other platforms to follow in their footsteps.