Crime app mistakenly accuses wrong man of starting California wildfire

A photo and a $30,000 reward offer posted by a neighborhood crime and safety app of a man it identified as a suspect in a Los Angeles wildfire targeted the wrong man, officials say.

The photo and reward remained on the Citizen app for 15 hours, flooding law enforcement with mistaken tips, The New York Times reported.

But law enforcement authorities looking for a man suspected of igniting the 1,158-acre Pacific Palisades fire had already talked to the man and cleared him Saturday, the Los Angeles Times reported.

“We publicly posted the photo and offered a cash reward for information without formal coordination with the appropriate agencies,” Citizen said Sunday in a statement.

“Once we realized this error, we immediately retracted the photo and reward offer,” it read. “We are actively working to improve our internal processes to ensure this does not occur again. This was a mistake we are taking very seriously.”

The blaze, which forced more than 1,000 people to evacuate in wealthy Pacific Palisades and Topanga Canyon neighborhoods, began Friday night, KABC reported. The wildfire reached 32% containment and some evacuations have been lifted as of Tuesday.

Ramon Santos Rodriguez, 48, was arrested Sunday on suspicion of igniting the blaze, the Los Angeles Daily News reported.

A Los Angeles Fire Department helicopter pilot spotted him setting fires Saturday morning, but sheriff’s deputies sent to arrest him had to flee the flames. Rodriguez was later spotted leaving the area and arrested.

The photo of another man posted to the Citizen app and identified as a suspect had more than a million views before being taken down, KTTV reported. It attracted comments such as “let’s hunt him down.”

Citizen has more than seven million users in more than 30 cities and counties. It has sent more than four billion alerts, according to its site.

The app is “on a mission to make your world a safer place,” the site says, by enabling people to “use their phones to protect a neighbor, to prevent a tragedy, and to count on one another.”

After the wildfire broke out, Citizen app users shared information and photos of a man wrongly identified as a suspect using the new OnAir feature, company officials told The New York Times. The information was then improperly posted to the app without being cleared by authorities.

The error was potentially “disastrous,” Lt. Jim Braden of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department told a Spectrum News reporter.

“OK, I’ve turned against the Citizen app,” wrote comedian Kathy Griffin on Twitter. “The hosts are offering a $30K reward for completely unsubstantiated evidence regarding a homeless guy who they think started the #Palisadesfire. Now people are trying to hunt him down. No proof it was even arson much less this guy. Gross.”

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