The best part is that flock owns the cameras and the poles so even when the contract expires the cameras keep running and recording data that flock can sell to e.g. CHP, LASD, FBI, Palantir; and LAPD can just call them and access the data
the flock scam was engineered to be resilient to political pressure by giving departments and jursidictions this fake exit ability while the data continues to be harvested, it is a noose that only tightens; the amount of flock cameras recording only ever goes up not down.
Yeah it's kinda crazy you can't legally take them down even if they are banned/contract expires. IKE Skelton, a county commissioner took it into his own hands and they were pressing felony charges on him. Not sure what ended up happening. Basically flock wouldn't respond to take them down, he felt it was his duty to remove them, he brought them back to his office, and then the state hunted him down.
I'm curious how they could prevent taking them down if the local gov doesn't renew the contract? Presumably they're installed under some works dept land/pole/utility access permits that allow them the space and electrical, which all goes away and requires their removal.
Sorry if this is answered in the pod, don't have time for it immediately.
Id have to re-listen as well for all the details. But I think this is slightly different than the headline here.
In this case, the county voted for an ordinance banning them. Ike was threatened saying your going to be charged this is potentially state property, he did a sunshine request to see that they were privately owned by flock. Then he requested flock take them down but they didn't. After a few months he decided he will enforce the ordinance as the sheriff refused too.
He took them down brought them to his office. Then later 5 state officers (4 in plain clothing, one in uniform) were looking for him at his house. He brought them to the cameras and said here have them back.
Still got charged with theft somehow...
Moral of the story, that doesn't really sound like democracy to me. That sounds like kinda the opposite of democracy.
Anyway it's worth a listen if you have time. This isn't how these things should go and shows there is a little more than meets the eye here. Even if citizens perfectly execute democracy, these things may not budge. And there is a larger net of protection keeping these in place.
This is just FOIA. You don't need any special website or process; just Google [(your state) FOIA] or [(your municipality) FOIA officer]. In Illinois, you can simply email free-form requests for documents and start a 10-day clock on the public body's side.
What you do is: you sue. On my 13th FOIA lawsuit and I have a couple more in the works ;)
Depending on where you're from, it's pretty easy to find a pro bono attorney. In Illinois, the plaintiff's attorneys recoup their costs on a successful win.
> he did a sunshine request to see that they were privately owned by flock. Then he requested flock take them down but they didn't. After a few months he decided he will enforce the ordinance as the sheriff refused too.
yeah that's basically theft then. The cameras are probably a lot of money and so the dollar number put it in felony territory.
> I'm curious how they could prevent taking them down if the local gov doesn't renew the contract?
IANAL but based on the facts available to me, they can't. It's a sham held up by intimidating local officials. The cameras were installed on public property, that's that.
If they somehow keep this nonsense running for very long, I'd anticipate a Meigs Field-esque incident at some point.
If the cameras and poles are private property then, contract or not, taking them is theft is it not? You'll get in trouble taking lime scooters and throwing them in the lake regardless of whatever contract exists or doesn't exist.
The cameras and poles are private equipment installed on public property. If the city terminates the contract and says "get rid of it" and the contractor says "no," well someone has to deal with it.
Imagine if a power company got cleared to bury a bunch of power lines, but they left all the unused poles in the ground, on land they no longer have rights to. That's closer to the situation we're dealing with here.
Wireless and solar make some of the more visceral approaches to this problem ineffective. In the past, the city could have strongarmed Flock by severing power or data service somewhere on the public side.
I'd bet there are still tons of tricks LA can pull, though. These 1000 9-square foot patches of land have been rezoned as green space, we're clearing it for native plant life.
Or, like I said, just pull a Daley and remove them. The city owns the land. Flock can complain, they can sue, and they might even win. But once the city removes the cameras, Flock can't put them back. The city owns the land, and Flock has no rights to it.
> installed under some works dept land/pole/utility access permits
Another option might be right of way or easement permitting, similar to how utility poles and such are regulated as private property with an allowance to be in a public space. If the provider got a permit to use the right of way separate from the contract, then the provider would retain the same right to be there as any other infrastructure.
You can definitely take the cameras down. We did, there was zero drama.
On the other hand, it wouldn't be surprising if a single county commissioner got in trouble for just deciding by fiat to take civic infrastructure down himself. That's not a power county commissioners have. Was there a county board vote authorizing that action?
In this case, law enforcement selectively enforced local laws. So the commissioner exhausted his options. And flock didn't seem to be bothered by breaking the local laws and their action was inaction.
So what else are you suppose to do? I think it's reasonable to decide that if no one is enforcing the new local law, that it may be the commissioners purview and authority to enforce after exhausting all his options.
Charging the commissioner with felony theft is clearly just bullying at that point.
> So what else are you suppose to do? I think it's reasonable to decide that if no one is enforcing the new local law, that it may be the commissioners purview and authority to enforce after exhausting all his options.
County commissioners are generally legislative officers. While the legislative body is smaller, this really no different than a member of Congress deciding that the they don’t like the way DOJ is enforcing federal law and deciding that gives them arbitrary power to take whatever action they feel is appropriate to manifest the intent of the law.
Silliness. Who enforces it then? The local law banning it was already equally as valid as a court order would have been. Would the county need to ask the judge to take it down?
Someone has to physically take it down and I'm guessing flock didn't put that in the budget.
Ultimately, as a member of a legislative body, if you don’t like the way the executive bodies charged with inplementing a law are doing so, your choices are:
(1) Work with other members of the legislative body to hold the executive accountable for failures, via hearings, sanctions (often, if at the same level, including removal), etc., or
(2) Work with the same body to file a lawsuit as a body to compel compliance, which has additional enforcement provisions (including contempt orders by the court for noncompliance) not available with the bare law and no court case,
(3) Taking any avenue open to the public at large (including individual lawsuits, public advocacy including including electoral advocacy against any elected executive officers involved, etc.).
What is not generally an option is unilaterally assuming the role legally assigned to the executive in inplementing the law, or simply assuming whatever other powers you imagine are best to realize the intent of the law even if they are outside of its letter.
I agree in general but on the other hand, isn't removal of unauthorized private property from public lands a routine duty of local government employees? So if anything I feel like flock is lucky the cameras weren't physically destroyed upon removal.
For example, if a maintenance worker had been instructed to remove them how would this have played out?
The cameras would have been removed. Munis don't generally destroy random tech infrastructure they pull off poles, though they might throw it in a big pile. Flock could invoice for the cameras, but most munis would probably tell them to go fuck themselves.
An ordinance banning ALPRs that impacts previously-installed Flock cameras is not an ex post facto law. But a municipal ban on private Flock cameras poses constitutional problems --- and not because of post facto or takings. Generally, the ballgame here is over publicly-owned cameras, so none of this is really apposite.
The court enforces it. We're getting into movie plot politics here. The sheriff's department will not in fact ignore a district court ruling. These scenarios rapidly reach the point where the sheriff is removed from office and imprisoned for some amount of time. This is what happened to Joe Arpaio.
This is much simpler in a municipality: the board simply fires the village manager and the chief. A sheriff is usually an elected though.
Before you reach the point of suing, you cancel contracts, payments, IT infrastructure, and have public works remove the cameras from any county-owned infrastructure.
I mean, all this is pretty silly, though, because what you really do is just turn the cameras off.
This is all very silly. Flock is not a scheme to install forever-cameras. They get paid primarily by municipalities. If your muni votes to shut the cameras off, they will shut the cameras off. If it votes to take the cameras down, nobody is going to stop public works from doing that.
The problem is that the First Law Of Message Board dictates that the most interesting narrative wins, and the narrative where Flock has deviously come up with a surveillance "forever chemical" to attach to every municipal road is much more interesting than "this is a service and if you stop paying for it it goes away".
I thought what was going on was they would keep them up after the local contract as they could still get value from them as part of the national network.
I don't doubt that they will, if all your muni cares about is "not paying anymore", they'll take advantage of the easement or whatever. Kind of the same way DirecTV was happy for you to leave the dish installed.
> If your muni votes to shut the cameras off, they will shut the cameras off.
That's simply not true: there are numerous instances of municipalities having to fight flock to get cameras removed or shut off, and instances where local governments pass ordinances that local law enforcement refuses to enforce because the cameras, which have been banned, are not off, as you allege is what happens, and law enforcement continues to use the data the cameras provide despite the contract being terminated.
Just google e.g. "flock trash bag" to see how cities are having to deal with Flock.
There are links elsewhere in this thread to a few of the many instances where this happens but I'll link to something that hasn't been mentioned yet, where flock cameras are turned back on and used by law enforcement in Springfield after contracts are cancelled, and cameras are left up that flock pinky swears are off that turn out to be on and accessible by law enforcement:
And again, that is just talking about the instances where the municipality actually wants the flock cameras turned off or removed, there are many instances, like TFA, where the local government wants them on or doesn't care, and they remain on and used by other agencies, despite the termination of the contract with one of the client agencies.
When a municipality passes an ordinance prohibiting ALPRs, and the municipal police force refuses to shut off the ALPRs, and the municipality does not then fire the chief (or the muni executive, if needed), then the muni was full of shit about being opposed to the ALPRs in the first place.
I'm deeply involved in municipal politics and was for many years involved in national politics (and, more to the point, discussions of national politics online) and I see this all the time: people crossing the streams between the two, as if the levels of responsibility and accountability were comparable. A municipal sworn law enforcement official that ignores a duly passed ordinance that has gone into effect is breaking the law and their contract and can trivially be fired, not after a long drawn-out procedure but immediately.
I watched us shut our cameras down. As I said: there was no drama, at least procedurally. If our chief had tried to prevent the cameras from coming down, she'd have been out on her ass the next day. I'm sure there are places where there was drama, but I'd need to see the full story before drawing the conclusion that you're drawing. What I see here is the more interesting narrative ("the cameras are impossible to take down, they're a virus!") asserting itself in its natural habitat, the online message board.
I don't know what this story about a misconfigured camera (it strobed an "outage" alert after being deactivated) being reactivated by a technician is supposed to tell me. The theory here is that Flock is running a scam where they're rolling trucks to surreptitiously enable individual cameras?
Flock's value proposition is having a national surveillance network, local PD are not their only customers, here is yet another instance where oops, a camera that they promised was off, turned out to be on in Eugene:
And obviously these are only the cases where they were caught making convenient mistakes, there is very little incentive for the likeliest parties to know (Flock, law enforcement) to bring to light the fact that flock cameras are still on, being serviced, and the data is still accessible despite local ordinance.
I don't know what you think these links are accomplishing for you. I'm not talking about Flock in the abstract; I have firsthand experience with it. I'm part of a group of people who ultimately got the cameras taken down in my municipality, and before that, I spent years helping craft local rules and ordinances limiting them.
There are tens of thousands of Flock cameras all over the country. It would be weird if there weren't misconfigurations. The Evanston story is a great example: the reinstallation of cameras happened the week the contract was expired, and Flock notified the city of Evanston (which, for what it's worth, is our twin sibling city in Chicagoland), at which point Evanston said "you've made a mistake" and Flock said "ok we'll take them down".
You seem a bit distracted by the links instead of the content that can be accessed by clicking on them, they show that in tens of instances, your personal anecdote about how flock removal went don't hold. Flock drags their feet, makes legal threats to cities that cancel, forgets to turn cameras off, turns cameras back on, claims cameras are shut off when they are on, installs new cameras after cancellation, leaves cameras up after promising to take them down, etc. etc.
And you are representing the situation in Evanston disingenuously here's the timeline AFAICT:
- Aug 26, 2025 Evanston issues a termination notice to Flock, effective Sep. 26 2025 after it learns that Federal law enforcement and immigration enforcement are able to access license plate data from the Flock cameras in Evanston, something the city claims Flock lied about. (https://evanstonroundtable.com/2025/08/26/evanston-shuts-dow...)
- Notably at this point EPD believes the cameras are off: An EPD officer: "The last read on an Evanston Flock camera was logged shortly before 1:00 p.m. on August 26th, which is consistent with the City’s request for de-activation,",
- Flock did not inform Evanston, a technician unintentionally informed the city: "[City spokesperson] Vargas said the city learned that Flock reinstalled new cameras after a Flock technician called the Evanston Police Department to ask questions on where to find a camera’s power source." (this is from the tribune article I linked above)
- Despite the city's belief that the cameras have been off since the termination letter on Aug. 26th, RoundTable journalists show that the cameras are still on and logging locations.
- Mar 3, 2026 Journalists notice that two of flock's cameras are still up in Evanston and contact Flock asking for comment, Flock does not reply but removes the cameras.
Again, not sure what you're trying to prove here. By your own timeline the cameras were inactive by the deadline in the termination notice. But even if they weren't, what do you think the plot was? That they were just going to keep the cameras up forever, come what may from Evanston? I take it you don't live in Evanston, so let me fill you in: that's not plausible.
They'll never do it because Flock has the money and lawyers to fight it and friends in high places. Textbook "high risk of setting precedent you don't like" situation. They don't want to lose the ability to do the same to hundreds of dollars per violation per day routine (something that's constitutionally kind of sketchy to begin with) to normal people.
> In January of 2024, the Camden County Commission passed a county ordinance banning the use of all automated license plate readers in the county (a 2023 ordinance had banned all static license plate readers, but the 2024 ordinance expanded that to include all automated license plate readers). In that ordinance, commissioners cited "numerous complaints" about the cameras "and the potential of unwarranted/inappropriate monitoring of its citizens [sic] freedom of movement and travel in violation of their right of privacy, unreasonable search and seizure and other constitutionally protected rights[.]"
> The ordinance also stated, "Any Automated License Plate Readers currently in violation of this Ordinance shall be immediately removed. If identification of ownership is listed on any such device, the listed owner shall be notified to remove said device. Any device not removed within 30 days of notification to remove said device may be removed by Order of the Camden County Commission."
My understanding of this case was that the commissioner was charged with theft because even though the county had an ordinance requiring flock to take the cameras down, and they had failed to do so, it was not lawful for him to remove them himself and then take possession of them because they were the property of Flock.
And final re: in many if not most of these cases the jurisdictions don't actually want to take the cameras down, they just want public pressure to let up a bit, and agencies are known to share flock data between each other, so law enforcement, the public, and lobbyists are all made happy by terminating the contract without removing the cameras, it is the smart thing to do politically.
I don't know much of anything about any other jurisdictions. I'm saying that my municipality took the cameras down with zero drama. I'm on one of its commissions with oversight on this.
(More precisely: there was drama, but it was all public drama from residents who didn't want the cameras taken down.)
They do have a legitimate purpose and help to solve crimes. The network effect, funded by federal grants to make a surveillance infrastructure nationally is the biggest issue.
Closed loop systems that require explicit consent to share outside the organization. Flock is like 50x worse than NSA stuff like PRISM that everyone freaked out about.
The Feds have full access to search everything, are no doubt exempt from any transparency on the platform, and ICE is already using it to abuse and intimidate political enemies.
It’s a nationwide surveillance system posing as a local police tool.
They're pretty comparable in that the people most het up about them tend not to know what either actually was. The feds do not have full access to search everything on Flock's platform except through the same mechanism by which they'd have access to search literally anything (a court order).
Fair. I’d argue that lack of friction is meaningful.
Also, the Feds are creative in their application of the law. Things like HIDTA designated areas led to Flock-predecessors - scaled infrastructure deployed decades ago. One of the “drug corridors” is the I-95 corridor from Miami to Maine.
You still have people with very tempting access to a whole lot of data. I don't see how this is different from the current situation other than it's just different (corruptible) people with access.
I think motivations matter. Putting a for-profit company hired by the police, and the police in charge is just the worst.
There are many other contexts where we trust properly supervised people who lack an immediate and obvious incentive to abuse the system. Combined with good overall software design, auditing and transparency almost all of the harms could be mitigated. And the tech does have some pretty major benefits.
Everybody is filter-bubbled and people on HN are profoundly filter-bubbled. Wait'll you find what a huge number of ordinary people think about NSA surveillance.
The cameras apprehend criminals. I can show with evidence that the juice isn't worth the squeeze, and in fact that the cameras had the effect of tasking our police force with doing municipal debt collection for Melrose Park and Maywood, at the cost of 5-7 hours of sworn officer time per "failure to appear warrant" arrest. But supporters of the cameras will point to multiple stolen car interdictions and recovered firearms.
If you go into these kinds of things assuming that the median resident of a municipality is anti-policing, you're already way, way off. And I find when I talk to anti-Flock advocates (that is: people who have "anti-Flock" as part of their personal identity, not just a person chosen at random who would happen to answer "no" to "should we ALPR") that many of them are operating from anti-policing premises, and so these kinds of responses are very surprising to them.
(Totally reasonable for your reaction to this to be "whoah, that was a lot more than I asked for", I just feel like I've been in these kinds of conversations a lot. It's not personal.)
Sounds like his only recourse was to sue the county as a private citizen for failing to enforce their laws? Or something like that. Going vigilante, as much as I like it in this case, is still illegal.
My thing with this story is that no part of it has anything to do with him being a county commissioner; it's just added to the narrative because it makes it sound like he should have been authorized to do this.
I share the same thing. In fact, being a commissioner he was probably explicitly warned against taking any action into his own hands.
A commissioner can easily mess things up and get sued trying do work on their own. Say they try to “repair a playground” by replacing a missing bolt. Well, were they qualified to do that? Do they have insurance? Was the action approved by a properly filed motion? Etc etc etc
I learned this is why it costs my town egregious sums to do simple maintenance work; the only companies willing to put up with all the red tape of working with the government have to charge a premium.
The part about him being a commissioner smells like a simple publicity stunt.
Yeah I don't think you understand the full context. He took them down and told flock to come pick them up. And obviously didn't deprive flock from their property in any form.
This article seems to confirm what I stated above - he took the cameras, and was later confronted by law enforcement about it.
And even if your telling is correct, that's still theft. Similarly, I can't just take your car, drive it around, and call you later to tell you where it is.
What gives them the right to install and operate those cameras? I would have assumed that the license for placing them on public property was inherently linked to the services they provided to the local government.
But if it's not tied to that, does that mean that anyone can install cameras anywhere? What grounds would they have to give permits to Flock while refusing them to other interested parties, like StalkingMyEx LLC. and CopTrack Corp.?
I don't have the answer, but I wonder if they are considered a utility and operate on utility easements. Then we have to look at the county and state, too.
On the other side, I've read they operate a considerable number of private installations, too. Even that is suspect, too, in that there is existing case law affirming that people have a reasonable expectation of privacy in "the whole of their public movements."
No, the right-of-way is not anything-goes. The property is legally owned by the deed holder of the real property thru which it passes, but practically the right-of-way is managed and maintained by the jurisdiction claiming the right-of-way, i.e. municipal, county, state government agencies. Installations need to be permitted by the agency.
Dane County, Wisconsin Sheriff's Office took steps to prevent unauthorized surveillance.
"With the contract set to expire on May 31st, the Sheriff’s Office informed Flock Safety that all 26 cameras must be removed by that date. When removal did not occur, the Sheriff’s Office took steps to ensure the cameras were not in use and placed covers over them."
IANAL, but making some assumptions to fill in gaps, it seems they are avoiding having to comply with CCPA and other privacy laws like this: they harvest camera data and retain the images probably forever, but only turn it into identifying data on demand for customers. So you really do have to go talk to the customer, because Flock never "has" any identifying data about anyone, they just have anonymous images that when mixed with a model happen to produce identifying data.
This allows them to promise that they don't keep any data and have strict retention policies etc. to jurisdictions that are on the fence or where the contract-purchasers are constrained by law in some way, but they can transfer identifying information at any point in the future to any customer, by mixing raw data and a model.
> but only turn it into identifying data on demand for customers.
How could this seriously hold legal weight? The data is identifiable. Just because it’s gated by some transformation doesn’t mean they are magically not holding my identifiable information.
> “Personal information” means information that identifies, relates to, describes, is
reasonably capable of being associated with, or could reasonably be linked, directly
or indirectly, with a particular consumer or household. Personal information
includes, but is not limited to, the following if it identifies, relates to, describes, is reasonably capable of being associated with, or could be reasonably linked, directly
or indirectly, with a particular consumer or household."
The phrase "reasonably capable of being associated with" seems like it would apply against this transformation argument, but later:
> (2) (A) “Personal information” does not include publicly available information or
lawfully obtained, truthful information that is a matter of public concern.
> (B) (i) For purposes of this paragraph, “publicly available” means any of the
following:
> (II) Information that a business has a reasonable basis to believe is lawfully made available to the general public by the consumer or from widely distributed media.
So I think the above comment was wrong, this might be the actual way around it, AIUI courts have long established that individuals don't have a reasonable expectation of privacy from being photographed or recorded when in public, so it seems like public surveillance footage is actually exempt from CCPA even if it can be reasonably linked with personally identifying information.
Is there any realistic road to having them outlawed nationwide? Eg, ignoring probabilities here, could a wildly successful grassroots program where it became an issue as politically salient as immigration or abortion eventually lead to legislation banning them?
A national ban is unlikely to happen. Big companies like Flock are incredibly experienced at paying off enough of the Congress to stop legislation they don't like. You're better off trying to focus your efforts on your local municipalities and the state.
There is no sneak up from behind in this system, or at least it can be very hard to target. You must know the full extent of the network, emerge from the blind spots, dismantle pieces, then return to the blind spots. Faster than they repair the machines.
Ride there on an e-bike with a full motorcycle helmet. Cut down the pole. Cut off the camera. Throw the camera head in the river. GoFundMe if they catch you.
The Flock contract I read from Oak Park, where we designed what I think are the country's most restrictive ALPR rules and ultimately took our cameras down, did not allow Flock to continue running, recording, and selling data after we turned the cameras off. In fact: they explicitly didn't allow them to sell the data at all. Can I ask where you got this idea from?
We didn't really negotiate the contract, either; these were just their stock terms. Does someone have a Flock contract that says something else? A reminder: for most munis deploying Flock, these contracts are public record; you can just ask for them.
And these are just the cases where the municipality wants the cameras taken down, GP also talks about the cases where they just want to sate the public while keeping law enforcement and lobbyists happy. LA is a great example, the inaction of letting the contract expire in no way means that the cameras will be taken down, if no further action is taken, those cameras stay up, and law enforcement will continue to have access to all flock's alpr data.
And further it's unclear if the "data" governed in these contracts applies to the CCTV footage or the data produced for the customer by transforming the footage with models into identifying information. Given that flock has a profit incentive, it's reasonable to assume these contracts are written adversarially to maximize Flock's ability to persuade jurisdictions to sign the contracts and Flock's ability to use all of the data they harvest to maximize profit, we have enough examples of this in the 21st century to know this isn't paranoid, this is the basic playbook of all surveillancetech/adtech companies and they have all used language in contracts that is confusing to nonexperts that affords them maximum leverage to store all the data they harvest permanently and use it however they want.
You made the same claim based on a personal anecdote in multiple places in this thread, giving it the same reply seems reasonable, but I'll grant there's probably a better way than a wall of links.
With Marc Andreessen, the boy from rural Wisconsin, major investor and ambassador of Flock Safety, now part of the federal government, expect the number of Flock civil surveillance systems to increase even more.
Just out of curiosity: doesn't the US have any laws against private surveillance of public spaces? As a European I find this quite irritating (not saying we do not have problems as well with more and more cams installed and risks related to an increasing number of e.g. parking lot cams)
I'm not a lawyer and I think this varies state by state, but I think that in general anyone is allowed to record in public spaces.
I think the general idea is that if you could (legally) go stand in that public space (sidewalks, roads, parks) and watch something happen then you're allowed to record what you see.
This is probably good - I think it's the basis of being able to record misbehavior (by private citizens and/or the police), for example.
In contrast you're generally not allowed to record stuff happening in a private space unless everyone's been informed that this will happen.
This is why you'll see signs saying "Warning - this place is under surveillance" signs on every single door going into a corporation that wants to use security cameras.
In Germany we have the concept of informational self-determination for a long time, so that I am not able to follow those scaling laws easily. The problem is not the single image or video (which can be legal), but the extension over space and time. This creates a situation where you can create information profiles. I as a subject have the right to control this information (actually the same goes for the pure online stuff).
You are allowed to record stuff happening in private spaces depending on the situation and state you are in.
For example, you could photograph or record the dance floor in nightclub since dance floor is very public. However, the bathroom would not be allowed. Of course, the venue could make up rules and eject you for doing so.
Most of "Warning signs" are deterrence, maybe someone will behave better if they know cameras are watching. Also, it's cheap insurance dictate by the lawyers who think "Signs are 100 bucks total but someone filing privacy lawsuit is thousands, put up the signs."
"You are allowed to record stuff happening in private spaces depending on the situation and state you are in."
The part about "depending on the situation and state you are in." is doing _a_lot_ of work there. Here in WA state, for example, if you go into a private meeting and record the thing without getting folks consent first then you're guilty of a misdemeanor.
Another example: in my old neighbor we had a nuisance neighbor who we all thought was engaged in Crimes, Plural. The immediate neighbor wanted to put up a video camera to catch them in the act but was told that they can't film the neighbor's yard directly. Filming their own yard and the field of view happens to catch something in the adjacent yard might get by a judge, maybe. So even if you can stand on the sidewalk and see past the trees into someone's backyard that doesn't mean you can film it.
(To be clear - I think this probably a good rule. I don't want folks filming me in my backyard :) )
Clearly, the tl;dr is that if this really matters to someone then they should check with a lawyer first.
This norm around privacy was kinda set before the concept of mass surveillance became a thing, though. Maybe we should revisit it and rethink what privacy means.
People shouldn't expect privacy in public, sure. They should expect they may be overheard or witnessed. But that's not really equivalent to mass surveillance and long-term recording
"You should not expect privacy in public" does not imply "you should expect no privacy and you should expect everything you do is recorded and stored forever"
I don’t see why you should expect any privacy in the middle of a public road. What are you doing there that is private?
I think everyone’s threat model is severely miscalibrated if they are threatened by being recorded driving somewhere via Flock, yet use a phone or social media account. There’s way more meaningful threats to actual private matters than Flock.
The police observing your car driving down a road is not threatening, and acting as if it is is hysteria.
Furthermore, if you’re worried about that, have you considered that “they” could get even more comprehensive tracking data just by requesting it from a data-broker? There’s no divide between the online and real world if you have a phone or an online presence.
> The police observing your car driving down a road is not threatening, and acting as if it is is hysteria.
Yeah, but a national license plate surveillance system that lets a single police officer observe all of the movements you and your family members make every day for the past few years is not a single police officer making a plainview observation of you driving down the road.
And it's clearly a power that threatens liberties, you cannot have a free society when a government has that power.
"Palantir, what are the names and home addresses of all of the people that were at the pro-Mamdani rally, show me places that many of them go to in common, I want to find where these criminals are having their secret meetings."
Probably not in voice-to-text form, but this power is already in the hands of some US agencies, in part thanks to the national ALPR system.
Can they? Does anyone know the terms of these contracts? Does flock just look the other way if a licensee just gives away the data to some other entity without getting a fee for it? I can see arguments on both sides from flock's perspective, i.e., revenue vs lock-in.
Do they have the resources to consistently clear camera obstructions, or are they relying on police to do that? The wind can be just devilish in its ability to coincidentally tangle opaque films up with cameras and solar panels.
Flock may own the camera and the physical pole, but I find it hard to believe that they own the ground the poles are installed in. Almost definitely owned by the Department of Transportation.
I didn’t know this but it’s the kind of stuff our tax dollars pay for and ultimately why I’m so disgruntled about the high taxes we pay - especially in the middle class
No problem paying taxes - my entire gripe is with what what the moneys spent on
The US has below average middle class tax rates. But luckily we can just choose what our tax dollars are spent on through democracy! The main problem is nobody agrees about anything and lots of people are really dumb and can't handle the responsibility of electing competent people into government.
This is naïve. The US government is less democratic than advertised, and there are many factors for that. Not going to write a tome, but if you're going to point a finger at one group, it shouldn't be private citizens.
This is a common coping mechanism, but the US is quite democratic and almost any objection you have about corporate control or whatnot can be easily overridden by getting like 100,000 more people to agree with you.
>Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.
Unless all of congress is included in that 100k, I’d love to hear a plausible scenario where this is actually achievable and not merely some clever edge case you found
Is that legal though? Usually the poles stand on public ground, so
there is no way, in my opinion, that the ground on which the poles
stand are owned by that company.
>The best part is that flock owns the cameras and the poles so even when the contract expires the cameras keep running and recording data that flock can sell
if the cameras continue recording, LA can subpoena those recordings on an as needed basis.
I don't understand flock cameras in high crime areas. Every time somebody commits a heinous crime it's always like "they were arrested 72 times and were well known by the police"
What's the point in helping the police catch criminals when they don't do anything after the fact!
Definitely, but they represent the opposite problem. The thing about the LASD and LAPD is that they are... extrajudicial. It's not "They catch a gang member and do nothing", but rather "They arrest a gang member with no valid reason to do so, and tortured/killed them over some street shit." Sometimes it's not a gang member at all. The end of the CRASH unit started when an officer thought he'd flash gang signs and try to kill a plainclothes officer, all in a fit of road rage. Who knows how many times that happened to a random civilian and it got blamed on gangbangers (who happened to not be police)
Friend, that's a.... deep, deep mischaracterization of how the courts work. The cops, prosecutors and judges have deep relationship with each other. Yes, these are "courts problems", but you can't have these courts problems without cops, without prosecutors, without judges, etc.
Ask yourself: why do public defenders have a tiny fraction of the budget of prosecutors?
Police don't do anything after the fact. The problem is with attorneys general and/or judges either not prosecuting people or giving them too light of sentences. All police do is arrest and collect evidence, and they're generally even more frustrated by the problem than most people.
Too few prosecutors. Police only arrests, but the real job is done by prosecutors. However, there's a global shortage of them, and cities don't hire more. I don't know whether that's a popular job nowadays.
So without proper charges judge cannot do anything but release. Police cannot do anything but arrest.
Prosecutors are the main line of defense (defending public from criminals).
No, it’s not a quantity issue, it’s a quality issue.
DAs used to go after particularly egregious offenders and throw the book at them. This creates incentive effects for all the other would be criminals. It doesn’t take all that much enforcement before criminals get the idea and stop or are put in jail for decades.
Instead we have prosecutors going after all the wrong kinds of crime. Murderers are getting no cash bail while guys who cut down a tree in their yard are getting visits from the police and court summons for non-crimes.
This is intentional policy from DA offices. Pay attention next time your DA is up for reelection, they impact your quality of life far more than your representatives.
Have you ever looked in who is the police? How they become police in first place? Like how police even started to be police in the first place. Is quite a ride and I can see many similarities to organized gangs.
The US has the highest per-capita rate of imprisonment I think we’re plenty “hard on crime”. What we lack is a principled stance that Americans deserve basic dignity and access to things that make people live less violent lives. It’s no secret that poverty is the key contributor to one’s likelihood of being in prison.
People who are “soft on crime”, practically speaking, are the people and politicians so committed to dehumanizing others that they’d rather watch their neighbors wallow in poverty or rot in jail than to actually do something to address the root causes (the foremost of which being the aforementioned societal dehumanization of the poor).
> the people and politicians so committed to dehumanizing others that they’d rather watch their neighbors wallow in poverty or rot in jail than to actually do something to address the root causes
This is exactly the false dichotomy that people engaging in this like to play up. It's not an either/or situation... we can and should _both_ address root causes to avoid crime where we can _and_ punish crime when we must.
Populations across the world are not comparable in a variety of ways, including in a "best-case" base criminality rate. So you can't compare per-capital rates of imprisonment and go, "Gee, that's high in Country X compared to Country Y and Country Z".
There's an old saw: A Scandinavian economist once said to Milton Friedman, ‘In Scandinavia, we have no poverty’. Milton Friedman replied, ‘That’s interesting, because in America, among Scandinavians, we have no poverty, either’ [0]
China's murder rate is about 0.5 murders per 100,000 people per year, while South Africa's is 44 per 100,000 people per year (assuming both countries report honest statistics). That's an 88x difference between two large countries. [0]
Judges are not soft, it's just liberal cities don't hire enough prosecutors. So judges never receive properly investigated charges, and can do nothing but acquit.
Prosecutors defend public (us) from criminals, but for some reason are neglected.
Easily disproved. So much inaccurate malarky on this thread. I would assume it's bots AstroTurfing, if American zeitgeist wasn't already so demonstrably poisoned.
I've lived in California my whole life, and I'm just basing it off my experiences over the years.
California enacted a law in 2014 that turned all theft under $950 into a misdemeanor instead of a felony (reverted last year). Theft became so common that police wouldn't even respond to theft calls unless it was over $950, which enboldened theives. During covid especially, entire stores would be looted and robbed constantly.
When people were caught, the judges would often give them minimal sentences, and release them over and over. Then the same people would commit more crimes because they knew the judges were lienent.
I'm not saying every single person fits into this box, but it's common enough to be recognized as a trend that happens in liberal areas. Los Angeles, Oakland are prime examples.
>California enacted a law in 2014 that turned all theft under $950 into a misdemeanor instead of a felony (reverted last year)
So all states with $1000 Felony cutoffs or higher should have this issue, right?
So why don't they?
You know the National Retail Federation had to stop posting their annual shrink numbers after they demonstrated that shoplifting was not meaningfully higher than previous years.
The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.
Those other places are just lying they don't have clean streets and stores without bars over the windows they're secretly just like us we have the numbers to prove it!
My man, if your comments can't be distinguished from a bot's, you're no better than one. Also if you can't tell that your comment's unsubstantiated bait, you really need to go touch grass.
Everyone has an annecdote. "it's common enough to be recognized as a trend" is equally justification for racial profiling, and at least racial crime statistics are easily citable. And you still haven't even put forth that modicum of effort.
I'd appreciate it if you wouldn't put words in my mouth. I never once suggested racial profiling as acceptable, and I wasn't insinuating it either. I know you were just using it as an adjacent example, but I don't appreciate that.
I'm just giving my experiences man, I lived in Los Angeles for years. Have you ever been here or lived here? There is very little respect for the law because the law is not enforced. I'm not saying I have all the answers, it's just what I've noticed.
I'm not trying to be rude, and I'm not a stupid bot. Am I not allowed to have a point of view and express it?
No one is saying you can't have an opinion and you can't express it.
I'm just saying there's a predictable result when you express it with the level of detail and amount of effort that you _did_. And frankly, your comments are no better than pre-reasoning era LLM rage-bait.
What level of engagement are you looking for here; support for your lack of citations, or "yeah that's also my personal experience rah rah"?
I'm having a meta-level discussion, if you can't tell. I'm not "putting words in your mouth", I'm trying to discuss: the quality of your discussion. I'm discussing the quality of your arguments and your evidence. If you think that "racial profiling" is too hot, substitute in something else; that's not the point.
The way you're using the word "liberal" is technically wrong and your comment was basically a cheap fox news talking point aimed at below-average TV viewers.
It's totally fine if those talking points resonate with you, but it makes me sad that you don't have the mental capability to actually think about what the career path of a judge entails, what kind of room for decision making they have, and what kind of trade-offs they might need to consider in order to adjust the punishments.
This is good. But unfortunately it doesn't mean the Flock cameras will be removed because the city doesn't own them. Flock does. And Flock will likely want to keep them there. In other cities when the contract is canceled or let expire Flock prevented those cities from removing the cameras. Some had to resort to covering them with trash bags because they could not legally remove them. This happened in Dayton, Ohio and many other cities. https://www.cnet.com/news/privacy/cities-covering-flock-surv...
> "Some locals have taken matters into their own hands by dismantling Flock cameras and covering them with trash bags"
This techcrunch article incorrectly characterizes this need and required behavior as something done by random citizens. But it is actually the cities themselves having to resort to it, totally officially and legally, because of Flock behaving badly.
Aren't the cameras on city's land or did city lease the land to Flock? If they are on city's land couldn't city require that Flock removes their stuff from city's property or city will do it on Flock's expense?
I've seen videos of flock cameras installed improperly (missing a breakaway device) right next to roads. The city must be able to remove unsafe devices!
Presumably the license to surveil the city is extended to flock by the city? Presumably they should be able to compel them to disable them, and provide proof of this (whether they’re trusted or not…)
are they on land flock owns though? I don't think I could go put up a camera on city infrastructure like traffic lights without their permission. does flock buy a lot of little permissions to install and power their cameras or something?
I assure you that if I slapped a camera on city infrastructure they would absolutely find some license or permission that I don't have and threaten me with a million+ dollar fine over it.
Thanks !! It is so easy to assume that ending contract means turning off the cameras. Hopefully ciities can fight back harder for them to remove them, specially when people don't want that surveillance.
I don't know, I'd prefer cops have access to technology that helps them apprehend criminals and enforce the law. Better audits and accountability are the solution, not removing technology.
I do not want to live in a society that is under 24/7 surveillance. Of course, if the cops can watch everything you do all the time, there will be less crime. But that is not a sacrifice I’m willing to make.
> if the cops can watch everything you do all the time, there will be less crime
I disagree there. If cops watch us at all times then more crimes will be prosecuted, think they'll just sit bored with nothing happening? They will find things, real or not.
The reality is that crime is way down, we do not need more enforcement. Leave us alone already.
https://www.opencrime.us/years
What planet do you live on? Go to a low crime neighborhood. Cops are super friendly and basically spend their day happily helping old ladies cross the street or getting cats down from trees.
If you think cops like cracking heads and dealing with petty crime that they'll just invent otherwise and use to harass people, you're out of your mind. You really need to get out more.
You're right and wrong. The first paragraph is absolutely accurate -- I live near some of these areas (SW Connecticut) and the contrast is stark.
The second is not. There are absolutely people who take pleasure in the bullying behavior cops are often associated with. They're the ones who want the cushy jobs in Greenwich but don't get them (probably for the aforementioned reasons in many cases) and wind up being doubly punitive and cruel to people in Bridgeport.
What I was saying is that there are absolutely cops who do _like cracking heads_. I (very personally!) know cops and they're often attracted to the job primarily for the benefits (retire with a pension after ~20 years; the part they'll tell anyone) and because they get to treat people like they did ants on the playground or freshman on the football team with impunity (the part they'll tell whoever is around after 10+ drinks).
> they get to treat people like they did ants on the playground or freshman on the football team with impunity
I've never seen this. Instead I see cops taking abuse more often than not. Crazy person in the street screaming at the cop and the cops just waiting to see if he starts attacking someone. Seeing them navigate literal drugged out zombies and decide whether they really want to call the medics this time as it's a monthly occurrence with this exact individual. Things like that.
I feel like you get your impression of police from TV show and movies rather than real life.
Police body cameras have completely dispelled this notion and are a god-send to the vast majority of police officers that want to do good work. So much so the left has turned against them
>Go to a low crime neighborhood. Cops are super friendly and basically spend their day happily helping old ladies cross the street or getting cats down from trees.
>If you think cops like cracking heads
They adore getting to crack heads. That's the entire reason they became cops. They love being able to use their power, rightfully or not, they don't really care.
Thats not necessary. They have the loving embrace of Nest cameras connected directly to Google. Gladly share footage when there's a string of property crimes. Whats your point?
I'll take shifting crime as long as it's away from me.
Camera's 100% prevent crime because you catch the bad guy, and in a sane society lock the person up so he can no longer commit crime. See how that works?
C'mon, you aren't going far enough. Catching someone after the crime was committed is not preventing the crime. You need AI to watch the cameras non stop and alert you before someone commits a crime ;-)
I think you should have the liberty to do both but there should be no reason for anyone to do so. Your two instances are happening because that's what available for them.
I don't think this is true. With the advent of body cameras, cellphones with cameras and FOIA requests you can build a good case if someone violates your rights. The bigger issues are that there is little to no consequence of a flagrant violation of rights because the police union is VERY protective over its members.
The ability to make a case is directly related to how much free time you have and how much money you are able to spend.
We cannot just wave this away when the vast majority of people cannot take off time from work or afford to hire attorneys when their rights are violated.
I don't know, I'd prefer the cops do their jobs and solve crime without the state having intimate knowledge of my whereabouts and activities any time I enter the public sphere.
It obvious this should be the case, but when you dump billions of dollars getting around 4th amendment protections, lets just say it takes awhile to close the loopholes.
Why do you think the government couldn’t collect this information themselves? ALPRs are legal, cameras covering a public roadway are legal, and the 4th amendment doesn’t extend to driving on a public roadway.
Could the government set up 80,000 cameras to spy on everyone? No, they are not aloud to create dragnets or conduct mass surveillance. They need warrants.
How many highways and bridges charge tolls via license plate reading cameras? A lot, it's legal, and I would be surprised if that data was used only for processing tolls.
HB 4006 nullifies the entire purpose of obtaining Tollway information in an active investigation by requiring promptnotification to the subject of a search warrant and potential criminal actor. This information can be incredibly usefulin a multitude of criminal investigations, including homicides, kidnappings, and interstate trafficking of contraband.With this provision, law enforcement would not proceed with seeking a search warrant if it could jeopardize the abilityto apprehend the suspect, result in the destruction of evidence, or even worse result in harm to a victim.
Additionally, the proposed bill forecloses the possibility of obtaining information about a person traveling through aTollway pursuant to a subpoena, including license plate information or photographs of the driver, where a knownsuspect may not be identified but the route of travel could be useful to generate leads. A warrant is not required toobtain this information. Placing such a requirement that creates greater protections beyond those required under theFourth Amendment creates an unnecessary limitation on law enforcement's ability to investigate crime. The currentrequirement to obtain a subpoena is sufficient to ensure that law enforcement has a documented investigative purposeand criminal predicate tied to Tollway information.
Some case law background explaining why a warrant is not required for this type of Tollway information:
"This court has not previously addressed in a published opinion the question of whether an individual has areasonable expectation of privacy in his license plate. In two unpublished decisions, however, this court has agreedwith the other circuits that have decided this issue by holding that no such privacy interest exists. The reasoning ofthese opinions, as well as that of the Supreme Court in related cases, leads us to agree that a motorist has noreasonable expectation of privacy in the information contained on his license plate under the Fourth Amendment.No argument can be made that a motorist seeks to keep the information on his license plate private. The very purposeof a license plate number, like that of a Vehicle Identification Number, is to provide identifying information to lawenforcement officials and others."
There is no expectation of privacy in public. Look at NYC, the government most certainly has setup a network of cameras without a warrant. Flock cameras are all (to my knowledge) in public as well
Of course they can and of course they do. It gets much more complicated when you consider that each state has different laws about records sharing.
And, lol, yes the 4th amendment extends to driving on a public roadway... roads aren't international waters. Probable cause and such are still important. I recognize what you're saying but -- details matter, dammit.
Details do matter: extensive case law supports a very low standard for privacy in cars and searches on the roadway. Pat downs, being ordered out of the car, free air sniffs via drug dogs, DUI or immigration checkpoints, etc.
Furthermore, just being recorded on a public roadway doesn’t constitute a search or seizure.
The strongest evidence in support of your position is that Boston aerial surveillance case, which is frankly a stupid extension of the idea of viewing = searching, and I’d like to see it or another case reach the Supreme Court for clarification.
See the two paragraphs before? That lays out my position.
The courts have repeatedly upheld far more invasive searches and encroachments of vehicles, but now confusingly consider simply observing the outside of your vehicle to constitute an excessive search.
The Baltimore decision is stupid because it contradicts 50 years of case law over what constitutes a search and what degree of privacy you expect to have on a private roadway.
No need for snark; I'm genuinely interested in your position. From my re-read and re-read, you've provided a conclusory statement without actually explaining the details.
Is your definition of "stupid" anything that contradicts 50 years of case law? That seems.... tautologically limp.
I’m saying it’s stupid to equate viewing = searching for multiple reasons. 1) A lay understanding of a search would require way more than just seeing and recording the license plate of a car on a public roadway. 2) Courts have extensively and repeatedly upheld the idea that cops can examine your car, your house, your trash can, your curtilage, and more without it constituting a search. To backpedal and now claim being observed driving on a public roadway is a search creates a huge contradiction in the law that will need to be resolved by either kneecapping basic police investigation or rightfully reversing the idea that you can’t be observed on a roadway displaying a government issued license plate without a warrant.
Do you mind providing your position? Do you think being observed on a public roadway constitutes a search or seizure in the context of the 4th amendment?
This wouldn't even help anyway. Flock sells to law enforcement, sure, but they also sell data to everyone else who wants to know everything about everyone.
Are there any privacy-first security camera provider where it's the city that manages data access and uses it purely for local law enforcement purposes?
I wonder why we aren't addressing the real problem which seems to be cops behaving completely unethically. Their job is about enforcing the system that codifies our societies agreed up and codified rules of ethics. They should be obsessed with this the same way people here obsess over system performance, correctness, etc! If we cannot trust them with the very basics of ethical behavior they are absolutely in the wrong job and there need to be very clear consequences.
Because finding people that are 100% ethical is extremely difficult. Even if we are wildly optimistic and say 20% of the population is 100% ethical. You aren't likely to weed out unethical people, so you are hiring people, training them, and then firing them 4 out of 5 of them. There are many cases where an experienced but occasionally unethical worker is better than an unexperienced but ethical worker. When faced with this dilemma it is likely that more police debts would simply cheat or cover up police abuses to retain valuable staff or staff at all.
The solution is not making humans more virtuous but reducing the capability and the harm done that unethical humans can do.
> If we cannot trust them with the very basics of ethical behavior they are absolutely in the wrong job and there need to be very clear consequences.
Police should not be trusted because they are police. There should be audits and controls that prevent abuse and unethical behavior. Small unethical behaviors should result in corrective measures but not termination, since when the punishment becomes too great you create incentives for cover ups or scapegoats. A small number of minor punishments, that catch people as soon as they step over the line, functions better as a deterrent than a large scale punishments that are unlikely to be actually enforced. Granted if a police officer does a major crime, they should face serious consequences, but the goal should be to creating a system that makes major crimes by police less likely. If they know they will get caught for minor crimes, they are less likely to commit bigger crimes.
It's not possible. Whether it's a city government, judges, cops, schoolteachers, or clergy... some number of people are unethical. Trying to pretend otherwise is a source of a lot of problems. The best way to avoid it is to make it impossible, i.e. in this case don't collect the camera data in the first place. Once it is collected, it will eventually be abused no matter who has control of it.
They do, but unethical people don't announce themselves. In fact an ethical person is probably more likely to admit their faults, which usually doesn't play well in elections.
Police are extended 'good faith' all the time simply for the fact that they are police. Including in situations such as loss of chain of custody for evidence, etc. We have the appearance of what you outline, with a blanket 'good faith' exemption that allows quite a bit of bad behavior/breaks the systems/rules the public believes to exist/be enforced.
The problem is simple: qualified immunity has become a blank check. The officer can simply claim they didn't know the law. They somehow can't be expected to understand basic constitutional protections.
Qualified immunity is more nuanced. It allows the first offense to be absolved but it works like legal precedent where future offenses by _any law enforcement officer_ is not covered.
Now there’s plenty of loopholes where you can craft “unique defenses” based on nearly identical underlying offenses. But it’s important to have the distinction
How many instances of are there of qualified immunity actually resulting in an officer being found liable because of past precedent where someone else was considered to have had qualified immunity in the same circumstances? If it's not anywhere close to the number of times when they were found to be immune, then the distinction is theoretical only, and it's arguably more misleading to emphasize it as if it's a real limitation.
Well, I didnt bring it up but the other element of qualified immunity is that its purely for civil suits. So it would only show up if an officer was basically sued personally. It doesnt apply to criminal prosecution. Thats another can of worms though.
Sure, the issues there are also not particularly nuanced; prosectors rely on cops to arrest people and provide evidence for them to do their job, so they're incentivized to keep a good working relationship with them (i.e. by not prosecuting them, especially for things that end up helping them secure convictions, even if they're illegal)
I agree. The issues arent super nuanced (and are pretty "blatant")
But I do think the nuance of "who/what should we point our finger at" is important. Because like we see in this thread, the finger is being pointed at qualified immunity when it almost never is the actual issue for a given injustice, and fixing it will not get rid of the thing you are mad about. Fixing it would go a long way to resetting some cultural precedence though in my opinion.
Fair enough. My instinct is that qualified immunity is such a common target because it's not an emergent property of the system that would potentially require structural changes to fix, and that lawsuits are often the only remedy people have for the structural problems like the ones we're talking about. Being able to "have your day in court" is at least theoretically the way that regular people can get justice when the system fails them, so when the system adds another layer of protection onto itself to prevent that with virtually no constitutional basis via judicial review (and therefore could also theoretically be removed in the same manner by a future court more sympathetic to victims of injustice perpetrated by law enforcement), it's kind of hard not to fixate on that.
> If you hold police accountable, they respond by refusing to work. That's a problem that, at this time, has no solution
Of course it does. You dissolve the police department and create a new one. New York did it twice, first replacing the city-controlled Municipals with the state-controlled Metropolitans [1], and then in 1870 creating the NYPD [2].
> they respond by refusing to work. That's a ~~problem~~ solution that, at this time, has no ~~solution~~ problem.
If a police department reuses to accept accountability, and dig in their heels by refusing to work, "just" dissolve it. And while at it, half the calls could be handled by folks without guns.
In practice that obviously would not go over well, people are too attached to the status quo. We just lack the political will to rethink and retool the system (despite most Americans favoring police reform).
> half the calls could be handled by folks without guns
This can't be emphasized enough. A lot of enforcement and "civil order" work does not require guns, and in many cases (e.g., mental health crises), they're the wrong people to be engaged to resolve.
I think one of the biggest issues with policing is that they are supported by the "law and order" crowd, which is a euphemism for keeping "others" in their place.
I swear to god that "Defund the police" was an inside job to discredit police reform by turning it into an all or nothing proposition and that's not gonna fly.
Oakland CA has serious crime problems because there's "not enough" policing and a lot of people are emboldened to do all the crime they want because nobody's there to stop them. One of many articles on this: https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/oakland-business-o...
I believe there are some fundamental changes to the system that could correct a lot of this:
1. End the War on Drugs. It's literally designed to create crime and it's low hanging fruit for cops to focus on rather than real crime.
2. Legalize and regulate sex work. Like drugs, this is a moral issue and by driving it underground it's designed to create more crime. Regulate and monitor the fuck out of it to minimize opportunities for sex trafficking. It's also a favored low-hanging fruit for cops to bust.
3. Use social workers for mental health emergencies and have the cops notified for possible backup
4. Invest in housing/mental health/rehab services and get the homeless off the streets
5. Revisit the legal system to avoid catch and release scenarios (though most of it is #1 and #2). If the cops are busting the same people over and over again that disincentives them to even bother
6. Fix qualified immunity and put some teeth into it. We should never simply take the officer's word for anything without some sort of proof (like leaving their body cams on).
7. Make the police self-insured backed by their pension fund. They have no skin in the game and municipalities pay out vast sums of money for the misdeeds of officers.
I like this general list and I would add a shift from harder punishment to increased likelihood of getting caught. This means more cops, more prosecutors, more judges, more public defenders, less jail. Studies have shown that higher likelihood of getting caught and getting punished is more significant than a harsher punishment. However, I understand that right now incentives and finances are misaligned for accomplishing this. Much of the catch and release happens because there are not enough public prosecutors or jails are full.
Oh yeah that belongs too. The current "justice system" is really just a legal system that is designed to punish.
Prisons are expensive and we would be better served helping keep people out of prison in the first place. It doesn't help that the private prison industry has extensive influence with legislators (as do the police and prison guard unions).
More so, just shoving people out the gates after time served is almost like planned recidivism. Investing in rehabilitation, training, and guidance for those released would pay off for the public purse.
In other countries, cops may carry guns, but if those guns are ever fired, there is an investigation to ensure it was fired for a very good reason. Those places still have cops.
They also have months or years of cop training, not weeks.
Think about who's harmed by supply side constraints and artificially high prices.
The government isn't hiring cosmeticians or plumbers or whatever in bulk. It's hiring cops. So it wants them to be cheap. The fact that they're scary thugs who could potentially be dumb and hot headed is a feature. Scares the peasants into compliance. It's a force multiplier basically.
On the flip side the government is happy to enforce supply constraints for any random trade so long as it's not so absurd that it hurts the legitimacy of the government by making it look corrupt and making people resist it.
It's easy to say these anti-capitalistic platitudes, but do you really want to live in a society where the concept of private ownership is not supported by the state?
Society is not starting at zero right now, it has developed for 10.000 years with many genocidal wars. As a result, 1% of the population has achieved generational wealth due to some sort of "value creation" by their ancestors.
Through trial and error and a lot of violence, humanity has noticed that with free trade and free enterprise, the welfare of everyone else can significantly improve (toilets, food, entertainment), while the overall amount of violence significantly decreases.
Because when people put their money where their mouth is, capital can be allocated much more efficient than through other means (e.g. the King of England forcing a levy and centrally deciding what industry to invest it).
The only problem with this model is deflation, because if there is no incentive to deploy capital, then the overall pie shrinks and people start fighting about keeping their shares. That's why central banks talk about target inflation rates of 2%, because purchasing power of your hoarded capital needs to shrink in order to incentivize you to use your capital in a productive way, which also increases the overall pie for society.
The main thing one can criticize about generational wealth such as Trump, Epstein, Musk or Thiel is the fact that they have to lie about its existence, and keep up a charade of "I'm self-made" due to their low self esteem.
The alternatives are always worse for the common person. I'd rather have Trump, Epstein, Musk and Thiel than even bigger capital concentration like it was with the British crown and the Catholic church in their full bloom.
Ideally, those figures would also follow the moral code of the rest of society, but still it's much better than their parents who did crazy shit in Africa only 50 years ago, or the crown and the catholic inquisition a couple hundred years ago.
I agree. Society needs to be intolerant against intolerance.
But there is no better way to overcome old money than inflation.
Any violence is basically a struggle between different factions of old money, and it's overall impact is net negative for the majority of people. That's why certain factions of old money bring in their religious beliefs in order to justify violence - but in the end the normal people suffer from it.
> It's easy to say these anti-capitalistic platitudes, but do you really want to live in a society where the concept of private ownership is not supported by the state?
>
There is a country that allows police to just take your stuff and then demands you to prove it wasn't illegal. Also such property can be used/sold/spent by police force it was stolen by. Does it sound like private ownership is supported by the state? BTW. It's called civil forfeiture and country is named USA.
I know. I'm not saying it is good, it is just the best system that humanity has found so far. Because back in the day any representative of the monarch could rob you blind at will.
Realistically civil forfeiture only affects small fish because old money first sets the tariffs, then uses their legal invincibility to circumvent them for maximum profit, all while flying in their product directly to US military bases because some racists think it's a good idea to feed drugs directly to black people in order to derail their civil rights movement. Profits are moved through offshore accounts in the financial system overseen by the British monarch and managed by people like Epstein.
That's the system, we won't be able to change it, our only option is to get a small slice of the pie by creating a win/win situation for an heir of old money who claims to be self-made billionaire.
Cameras do address that problem. We live in a country where people go to jail for life because two witnesses they swear they saw pookie shoot dee dee. Where cops beat the hell out of citizens and say they were resisting arrest.
That Pookie can show a video from a flock camera showing him somewhere else is a massive boost to his civil liberties. Same with whatever poor sap gets beat by the cops.
> That Pookie can show a video from a flock camera showing him somewhere else is a massive boost to his civil liberties. Same with whatever poor sap gets beat by the cops.
Not even remotely. The US is already at the stage where citizens can be brutally murdered, have said murder filmed at multiple angles, and have the officers involved get away with it.
Your civil liberties are irrelevant when we can just redefine and expand what it means to endanger a police officer. Or have the officers bypass the judicial system entirely.
Camera footage will only be used against you, not for you.
The government is not a monolith. Being owned by the city doesn't have to mean the cops are in control. The municipality can determin by law exactly who operates the infrastructure, who has access to what, what process they must follow, and how that all will be monitored and enforced. "The government didn't handle this well, therefore they can't be trusted for anything like it again" is a misunderstanding of how governments are constructed and how power can be separated between legislatively mandated structures. Find the source of the abuse, then build a structure to check that abuse.
Do we genuinely, really need a mass surveillance network? Isn't the expansion of surveillance through increasing prevalence of technology already way too much? Police can real-time track almost anyone if they have a warrant as it is, thanks to the magic of modern cell phones. We didn't even have time to discuss whether that was a good status quo before it became normal. Are we really sure we want to expand this to a massive network of cameras?
I get that it helps solve crimes, but solving crime is not the end-all-be-all of improving society. If anything, it's a highly symptom-oriented solution, and we absolutely have plenty of levers we could be trying to pull if we wanted to prevent crime instead.
Forget whether one global surveillance network is more trustworthy than another global surveillance network for a minute. Do we want this at all?
Hmm. Personally, I disagree; I'd prefer to outlaw it explicitly. That's just my opinion, but I think that regulation has failed to keep up with the pace of technology and we've essentially lost the effect of some constitutional protections.
Sadly this was the entire lesson of Marbury v Madison, and the courts are supposed to be the mechanism that brings the hammer down on things that clearly violate the constitution where legislation has not yet arrived, but the courts are completely failing to protect us from what are obviously 4th amendment violations writ large on the entire nation, absurd.
I don't necessarily disagree, but I also don't think that it makes sense to wait to address the immediate issue of a private company centralizing the surveillance until there's sufficient political will for that (which realistically might not ever happen).
The large distribution of silo'ed law enforcement across the US is one of the driving reasons why it can be so hard to solve crimes (murder, vehicular theft, etc). Once any crime has the potential to cross state or even jurisdiction lines, dealing with the inner-bureaucracy of crossed enforcement agencies adds days to weeks to solving urgent crimes.
A distributed system without consideration into how to coalesce the data together is no better of a solution vs what we have today.
I would like to see some evidence of this demonstrated. I feel a large majority of high-profile cases that went unsolved for a long time most often hinged on incompetence or negligence rather than lack of information sharing.
Also, once crime does cross state lines the local FBI gets involved and they have a lot more resources than a small-town police force
Agreed, and more than that, those siloes are governed by democratic processes. Of course, democracy doesn't preclude abuse but it's a lot better than private governance.
I want local cameras that require physical connections to offload data. Camera access panels can be locked with a wireless system that publishes the access timestamp and details to the city’s website. Each access must correspond with signed warrant.
If my family gets kidnapped, I want a department to be able to check a camera. I’ll wait for the judge’s signature.
But that’s night & day from today’s reality. I simply cannot stand being recorded to the cloud by a creepy corporation everywhere I drive in California with just about no oversight.
“I think a lot of it, too, is that I don't think that there is a sense among just users of these platforms that privacy is a winnable fight anymore. I hear so much nihilism and fatalism about this when I talk to people, and they, you know, I'm, I'm, you know, asking them about their privacy practices, and they're kind of like, well, that ship has sailed. Like, the government has all my data anyway. What is the point of trying to fight? I'm sure you get this, too.
Starting point is 00:57:11
[Yes. What is your response to the privacy nihilists?] I think there's a couple of things. One is that this idea that because your information is already out there, it's all over. Like, if you talk to people in intelligence or in cops, they will tell you that old information has a, it's a very short shelf life, right? So your information isn't all out there because you're continuing to live your life. And so, yes, it would have been great if 10 years ago we'd passed a comprehensive privacy law that included law enforcement as well as the commercial
Starting point is 00:57:46
entities. That's the first best time. The second best time is today. Because if we can begin to cut the knees out from under this massive data collection, the information will get less and less important and their ability to spy on us will get smaller and smaller. So it's never, I mean, if it were game over, they'd stop spying on us, right? Like, they're not like, oh, we're going to unplug the spying machine because we've got everything we need, folks. Like, that would be a different world than the one we're living in. So one of the things is, like, it's never game over. It's not game over. I mean, it's ultimately game over when you're not live anymore maybe, but as long as you're living, your data is valuable to the, to the government
Starting point is 00:58:31
and to the companies, and the minute we stop this business model, the better. The second thing I would argue is it's easy to say it's all over and there's nothing I can do if they're not sweeping up your grandma in an immigration raid. But I think it's a, it's a bit of a denial or entitled position to think that you could not care and nothing because what's what's going on there and the nihilism is I don't have to I don't care about this. It feels like too big a fight and nothing will really happen to me or anyone I love if I don't care about this. And I think we're living in a time where that's not a safe assumption anymore. We have to fight for our privacy.”
A better designed system could be driven by warrants issued by courts, without (or at least minimal) access to individual officers.
It requires better access controls.
Even invasive ideas like automated license plate scanning city-wide can have its data only accessible to an API to eg, track a stolen car across the city to avoid a dangerous high-speed chase in populated areas.
I think to throw the baby out with the bathwater around networked security cameras is failure around designing robust and secure APIs and systems (including audit trails).
Bars on windows and cages on retail goods, gated driveways, armed security at anything of importance, etc, etc, are a heck of a lot cheaper in the long run than a 1984 police state.
And another common claimed abuse of Flock data is cops using it to stalk people in other cities, other states, and across the country.
The potential for abuse rises with the number of people who have access to that data, regardless of who they work for. Restricting access strictly to users in the municipality under contract reduces the number of people with access and thereby mitigates some abuse vectors.
flock shares the data with other cities and jurisdictions a little more easily, and also flock workers can see your videos. That's some amount of extra abuse potential?
Also, there's plenty of past incidents of cops abusing their access to state and federal databases for the same kinds of purposes.
The profession attracts individuals who are willing to abuse power for their own purposes. That's not to say that every cop is in the job to abuse power, but many are, and we have to build our law enforcement structures in a way that directly acknowledges and addresses this fact.
The problem with Flock is its continued existence as part of the surveillance state. Like guns or bombs, these are things with one intent, and that intent is always ALWAYS bad as the resource is inevitably concentrated in the hands of a few to control the many.
Garrett would acknowledge being inspired by Minority Report, ignoring the message of it as a cautionary tale. Hell, he's even said that to him, a false positive in Flock is better than a false negative, which is a hell of a hot take in our current climate.
Because there's a more robust legal framework for curtailing the inevitable abuse when the government does it than when it's done via the "oops our contractor who's a private company" slight of hand.
Same basic reason I'd rather have the cops after me than have the environmental/zoning/whatever civil enforcement jerks after me. There's just sooooo much more scrutiny (which really says a lot considering how bad the cops are).
Said by someone who's clearly never tangled with civil enforcement.
Nearly your rights go out the window when it's non-criminal prosecution. The organizations also aren't nearly as robustly structured to limit damage by "bad apples" as real police departments are.
I know this sounds insane in light of how bad the cops are. That's because it is. Civil enforcement is essentially 50yr behind policing when it comes to transparency and accountability.
The one who owns the data is the one who should be responsible to provide proper guardrails in certain cases if not all, specially like these ones. It comes down to the fine line around business, rules and regulations. The motivation of business is to make most profit with least cost and implementing regulatory mechanisms are cost. Abuses are natural to happen in the absence of guardrails and audits.
The purchasers of the cameras, ie HOAs, law enforcement, etc, own the data. They are also the ones routinely caught abusing this. This is a real problem that should be dealt with by enforcing laws against the people improperly using the data.
I'm not sure what a realistic solution is for Flock to try and manage data they do not own nor if it makes sense for them to deny access to data they are not the owners of.
This is false. the HOAs and LEOS have access to the data. Even if the contract specifies that the data is owned by these organizations, they are not the true owners.
The difference is that the government has rules and limitations on the data they collection. Meanwhile for-profit corporations operate under an obligation to make as much money as possible for the shareholders.
You don't need to trust them. You can request information as allowed under FOIA and vote the mayor out in the next election if there is any sign of misuse.
I think Flock is probably the worst solution besides all the rest. They seem to be the most auditable and accountable. The fact that anyone even knows the service and founder is a testament to accountability.
Lol, what totalitarian nightmare do we live in that this is your standard for acceptability when it comes to mass surveillance. “Well fellas, atleast we know whats happening and look here’s the name of the guy in charge, I mean how bad it could be?”
Yes guys if you don’t like flock please please please just send a dm to the ceo with your social media account, or you can send him a letter in the mail, just dont send some anonymous crap he doesnt like that just use your real name and address or your social media handle and just go ahead and send him a message and let him know how ya feel. Flock loves to know how it’s customers are feeling, and will definitely keep a ticket open for any unsatisfied customers with your name and how to contact you so they can fix it.
You do realize that we have "executives" in most government jurisdictions as well? And that there are actual mechanism for changing who they are that you have the ability to take part in as a citizen, which is not a privilege afforded to everyone under surveillance by these systems for the CEO of Flock?
(Yes, I know that shareholders have the ability to vote on board proposals as well, but even if you think those mechanisms are equivalent, there's a pretty huge difference between "if you buy stock, you get the right to vote" and "you have inherent human rights including but not limited to the ones enumerated by a written constitution")
> The fact that anyone even knows the service and founder is a testament to accountability.
As opposed to their mayor/governor/president, who they not only can easily find out who it is if they don't already, but can also vote out (and who often will have term limits)?
Lmao not remotely. Their security is a joke. Axon's evidence system at least has concepts of security. Flock has had numerous high publicity security failures (see: Benn Jordan's work with 404 media).
A lot of the "don't tread on me" is window dressing.
Peter Thiel and his ilk absolutely adore what China has done. You have an elite - in this case, the CCP - that is entitled to their position by law. It bills itself as the "best and brightest" of society and has ideological constraints that it gets to impose on its members through the cadre system. The rest of the population labors for the benefit of this elite with little-to-no input on the operation of the ruling class.
That's what Thiel wants, just with his kind in the positions of power. It'd eliminate any opposition to what they imagine as the "right" way of doing things and reduce the friction to the creation of economic value for their holdings.
Note that "friction" in this case means things like human rights, democracy, competition, workers rights, etc.
Salem, Oregon, assembled its own using OpenALPR and an on-prem server. There are plenty of reasonable criticisms of that approach too, but it's currently the farthest thing from Flock on the municipal mass-surveillance tech scale bar that I'm aware of.
"The system does not utilize facial recognition and does not have automated functions, such as automatically running license plates through the state Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) or Law Enforcement Data System (LEDS) databases. All license plates must still be verified by an investigator and then individually queried through the appropriate database."
This sounds like a lot more than your average flock installation at a local PD
that's not privacy-first. There's no such thing as privacy-first surveillance. How can Americans spend so much time criticizing surveillance states only to build the world's largest
It's astonishing to me that the largest tech hubs in the world do not have the money to invest in developing a camera system that is sovereignly owned by the city. There are a lot of very talented engineers who would work on a project like this.
Also simply putting a person in between the information would certainly reduce the profile for abuse with stalking and harassing people
do not have the money to invest in developing a camera system that is sovereignly owned by the city
That would render the city liable for handling the data which is already politically volatile. In America, if it's a commercial entity doing it then there is no liability and you can just fold the company if something bad happens.
And in reality, it's a handwave. The city will refer you to Flock, and then Flock will cancel the contract, but leave the cameras up, so now there's no customer. Funny that.
The city can buy cameras and install them an operate them, but I don't think there's really space for an ethical SAAS play here.
Companies are either out of the loop, or they're in the loop and the only way to do right by their shareholders is to exploit that data in every way they can.
I'd say most are hosted first, Milestone, Genetec, Avigilon, etc. They all sell software to host feeds from your own standardized cams (Axis, Hanwah, Samsung, etc) via h.264/mpeg. The cloud hosted CCTV at scale is relatively recent.
There is no need for mass surveillance of public spaces. The moment data is collected, it can be misused, so it is better that nothing be collected in the first place. This is what a truly robust privacy policy looks like, unlike absurd laws like the GDPR that don't address the root of the issue.
Any number of companies sell cameras and recorders both on-premise and cloud stored which are managed entirely by the customer. Most security cameras you see on any given building work this way, and most such camera systems also support features like LPR (license plate recognition). Most of the time you're on your own to sort out connectivity and power though.
What Flock is selling is the whole package: The hardware (including power, networking, and the pole), the software, the infrastructure, the logic design, the connectivity. For someone who doesn't want to operate and support a wide area network of IoT devices, you can see why "just give them money to watch your streets" looks appealing.
> The top three payout categories totaled $345 million. Civil rights violations, police shootings, excessive use of force, and illegal searches collectively accounted for $183 million, almost half of the claim amounts.
Plenty of civil rights violations, but Flock is too much even for them.
Does it say how many cameras the LAPD pays for or if they are getting rid of the flock software from their org? Folks conflate this a lot but often times most regions have a substantial number of private flock deployments, city owned, rarely directly with the police.
Police get access to software no costs (AFAIK) for BOLO alerts on tags.
Honestly, if Flock forces people to enforce speed limits and follow the rules of the road, its expansion can't come fast enough. I realize how contrarian of a view this is to the mainstream, but car accidents are a leading cause of death worldwide, and it's my belief that many of them wouldn't have happened if driving rules were respected.
Flock has been critisized a lot. Unfortunately it
seems that technology will overrule civil rights;
there are a ton of youtube videos about that topic
from all involved views.
I have had my rough brushes with the mutant laureate, but I do miss his presence. Always compelling, and rarely if ever without substance. And Flock (among obviously everything else) happens to be a familiar subject to him/it. He has done local work, in his area, on surveillance and accomplished unusual things. If you have a super computer, mine his/its comment history. It's a trove.
They should hire some juniors to patch together analysis with local LLMs and do that on an as needed basis to avoid the creepiness. Networks of cameras remain a highly powerful way of holding evildoers accountable.
In CA: Kostas Linardos had 17 tickets — including for speeding, reckless driving and street racing — and had been in four collisions. Then, in November 2022, he gunned his Ram 2500 truck as he entered a Placer County highway and slammed into the back of a disabled sedan, killing a toddler, court records show. He’s now facing felony manslaughter charges.
In December of last year, while that case was open, the DMV renewed his driver’s license.
3D printer regulation:
A.B. 2047 goes further than any other legislation on algorithmic print-blocking by making it a misdemeanor for the owners of these devices to disable, deactivate, or otherwise circumvent these mandated algorithms. Not only does this effectively criminalize use of any third-party, open-source 3D printer firmware, but it also enables print-blocking algorithms to parallel anti-consumer behaviors seen with DRM.
Do you need flock to do this for you, though? I have cameras around my property, and they catch everyone entering and leaving my subdivision. If the police need access to the recordings, they can get a court order or ask nicely. What I don't do, is share the feeds with everyone willy-nilly so the police can cast wide dragnets and do god-knows-what-else with the data.
By the time you get a court order. The trail has gone cold at least that's what the police said at our HOA meetings. Maybe they're getting paid by big money to say these things but these were not head of police people. Low levels coming to HOA meetings.
Presumably a victim of a crime would provide the footage without a court order. A court order would be more applicable if it caught something unrelated to the actual property the camera was on.
This sort of footage is only useful after you have an arrest and need to build a case for prosecution. It's rarely useful to actually effect an arrest.
Getting the chain of footage you need - even with enthusiastic cooperation - takes days if not weeks to complete. Most folks are not great at providing this, and most consumer security cameras kinda suck. You're dealing with cops and residents who are not the most technically proficient, so a bunch of random different video files provided via e-mail, USB stick, etc. takes a lot of time.
I have direct experience with this and Chicago PD asking for my and my neighbors footage for a carjacking that happened in my alley. It took days for everyone to respond, and by that time it's pretty useless until they catch the crew responsible and just add that charge to whatever crime they actually got caught doing in real time. This can take months to years to happen. CPD is not great though, so you always need to take things with a giant grain of salt. However, the problem is legitimately difficult even if everyone is acting in good faith.
I'm not saying this in support of Flock at all. I do not support their use since it's so trivial to abuse the capability. But the capability is there and very useful if used correctly - that's why it's such a concern. Not worth the security vs. freedom tradeoff for me. Especially when you look towards the future of how an even more robust network and better technology will be used in practice.
Your big problem in Chicagoland is Illinois LEADS, which is the statewide hotlist Chicago uses. It was never intended for real-time enforcement, and it doesn't work; Flock curbs large numbers of innocent cars simply because LEADS isn't updated after "stolen" cars (which often aren't stolen, but rather borrowed by friends and family members) are recovered.
There is a difference between this situation, a targeted install in a problem situation, and hundreds of thousands of these cameras at every intersection in the country
Also, Flock cameras are not just on roads. Many institutions use them for surveillance inside buildings. There is a community center in Atlanta that has them and there is evidence that random people with access to all Atlanta area cameras, including Flock employees and police officers in other jurisdictions, were watching juveniles at the pool. More than one deputy at a suburban Atlanta sheriff's department has been fired for abusing Flock cameras to track romantic interests
Like everything else in this country we've taken something that has a useful purpose when used in a limited, controlled fashion and pushed it to the maximum extreme. We can't do anything based on nuance anymore
There is a lot of middle ground between ">100k cameras tracking the movement of every vehicle in the country and retaining those data indefinitely" and "cameras in a private neighborhood in response to a specific crime wave".
Why couldn't the police, who you pay taxes to, do their jobs? Apparently a sophisticated robbery ring was operating with a well understood MO in a predictable location and the police couldn't figure out how to use those facts to effect an arrest?
Instead of "protecting" one neighborhood by installing privately owned surveillance devices, seems like the police could have just sat there, waited for a BMW full of Tren de Araugua gangsters to show up and arrest them.
In what world is this the reasonable course of action that was arrived at with the police.
Nothing about OP's story sounds plausible or reasonable. The criminal gangs are magically afraid of flock cameras but not any other kind of surveillance? They had footage of the crooks but it took too long to evaluate it, and yet the cops knew exactly which gang was doing it?
Something of consideration: Flock cameras were installed after discussions across the HOA and local police department, after a multiple crimes happened in an area. So long as a discussion about the lifetime of the cameras is raised eventually, this sounds like a measured and reasonable use of surveillance.
There is still something to be said about the lack of alignment between Flock the company and the HOA as to how that data is used, but the compromise was explicit, and there was at least some coordination within the community. At the heart of the issue with automatic surveillance is the lack of accountability over those who retain the data and the lack of consent of those surveilled, and measures were taken to address one of those two within your community.
Yes, it's a nice catch phrase. Would you say that after a Tren de Aeagua gang member stole all your crap? At least I'm free you say. I don't think we've been free in the US for a long time. My tax bill says I'm in bondage.
This is such a bizarre story, each detail more absurd and ridiculous than the last, that I can't believe HN is falling for it.
Honestly there are a number of incredibly weird comments like this throughout the discussion. Is Flock astroturfing every discussion about the company?
I don't believe it. I mean, you might, but the story is fantastical nonsense.
Ignoring that the police "confirmed" suspects that they didn't catch, or that you claim the police would need a "court order" to look at cameras the HOA would own (and which require absolutely zero involvement of flock, with the enormous downsides that dystopian, busted company brings), or that you cited "manually going through footage" like it's 1997 and not 2026 where every security system flags every event -- car, person, line crossing -- with instant-accessible timestamps, the biggest problem with your comment is that gangs do not care about security cameras.
The preventative effect of cameras on such activity hovers around 0%. This ridiculous tale that a flock camera was a magic no crime shield is simply nonsensical.
Again, you might actually believe this. You might have misheard some things and come away with this impression. But it's ridiculous.
I'm a big fan of privately controlled, limited access-guarded and audited cameras, understanding that they're useful post facto to figure out what happened, and sometimes to catch criminals (but catching illegal immigrant SCARY GANG NAME criminals, usually in stolen cars and with masks...lol...utterly useless), but your post is 100% selling the tiger repellent rock, and it's simply incredible if anyone actually falls for that.
Flock's effect on crime has mostly been to increase it, by allowing sexual predator cops to stalk random women.
>This ridiculous tale that a flock camera was a magic no crime shield is simply nonsensical.
I was confused as well. I thought the next beat on the story after the camera was installed was going to be "and the next time the guys struck they were found within the day" or something, not "and the camera repelled the robbers somehow".
I stayed in downtown LA recently and looked like the set from the walking dead. Literally blocks of people wandering in traffic. I guess you could argue you definitely don't need flock cameras to see the problem, but also I don't know how anyone would not do everything possible to stop it.
The best part is that flock owns the cameras and the poles so even when the contract expires the cameras keep running and recording data that flock can sell to e.g. CHP, LASD, FBI, Palantir; and LAPD can just call them and access the data
the flock scam was engineered to be resilient to political pressure by giving departments and jursidictions this fake exit ability while the data continues to be harvested, it is a noose that only tightens; the amount of flock cameras recording only ever goes up not down.
Yeah it's kinda crazy you can't legally take them down even if they are banned/contract expires. IKE Skelton, a county commissioner took it into his own hands and they were pressing felony charges on him. Not sure what ended up happening. Basically flock wouldn't respond to take them down, he felt it was his duty to remove them, he brought them back to his office, and then the state hunted him down.
Here is a podcast about it. https://internationalflavor.podbean.com/e/the-surveillance-s...
I'm curious how they could prevent taking them down if the local gov doesn't renew the contract? Presumably they're installed under some works dept land/pole/utility access permits that allow them the space and electrical, which all goes away and requires their removal.
Sorry if this is answered in the pod, don't have time for it immediately.
Id have to re-listen as well for all the details. But I think this is slightly different than the headline here.
In this case, the county voted for an ordinance banning them. Ike was threatened saying your going to be charged this is potentially state property, he did a sunshine request to see that they were privately owned by flock. Then he requested flock take them down but they didn't. After a few months he decided he will enforce the ordinance as the sheriff refused too.
He took them down brought them to his office. Then later 5 state officers (4 in plain clothing, one in uniform) were looking for him at his house. He brought them to the cameras and said here have them back.
Still got charged with theft somehow...
Moral of the story, that doesn't really sound like democracy to me. That sounds like kinda the opposite of democracy.
Anyway it's worth a listen if you have time. This isn't how these things should go and shows there is a little more than meets the eye here. Even if citizens perfectly execute democracy, these things may not budge. And there is a larger net of protection keeping these in place.
Didn't know about sunshine request - the website[1] - until I searched for this term!
[1]: https://www.sunshinerequest.com/
This is just FOIA. You don't need any special website or process; just Google [(your state) FOIA] or [(your municipality) FOIA officer]. In Illinois, you can simply email free-form requests for documents and start a 10-day clock on the public body's side.
The problem is following up. It's hard to understand the process, and what to do when the public body doesn't respond.
If nothing else, the Sunshine Request site is a good place to get form emails for these requests from.
What you do is: you sue. On my 13th FOIA lawsuit and I have a couple more in the works ;)
Depending on where you're from, it's pretty easy to find a pro bono attorney. In Illinois, the plaintiff's attorneys recoup their costs on a successful win.
Whatever Chaps says about this, take to the bank.
Im not sure if there is a way to verify that the one he is talking about, but for public records request muckrock is great.
https://www.muckrock.com
Thank you for sharing this!
MuckRock is the gold standard for systematizing FOIA requests imho.
> he did a sunshine request to see that they were privately owned by flock. Then he requested flock take them down but they didn't. After a few months he decided he will enforce the ordinance as the sheriff refused too.
yeah that's basically theft then. The cameras are probably a lot of money and so the dollar number put it in felony territory.
Moral of the story: never talk to the police. Even if you yourself are police.
>Still got charged with theft somehow...
More equal animal acting in his official capacity gets treated like less equal animal.... basically.
[dead]
> I'm curious how they could prevent taking them down if the local gov doesn't renew the contract?
IANAL but based on the facts available to me, they can't. It's a sham held up by intimidating local officials. The cameras were installed on public property, that's that.
If they somehow keep this nonsense running for very long, I'd anticipate a Meigs Field-esque incident at some point.
If the cameras and poles are private property then, contract or not, taking them is theft is it not? You'll get in trouble taking lime scooters and throwing them in the lake regardless of whatever contract exists or doesn't exist.
The cameras and poles are private equipment installed on public property. If the city terminates the contract and says "get rid of it" and the contractor says "no," well someone has to deal with it.
Imagine if a power company got cleared to bury a bunch of power lines, but they left all the unused poles in the ground, on land they no longer have rights to. That's closer to the situation we're dealing with here.
Wireless and solar make some of the more visceral approaches to this problem ineffective. In the past, the city could have strongarmed Flock by severing power or data service somewhere on the public side.
I'd bet there are still tons of tricks LA can pull, though. These 1000 9-square foot patches of land have been rezoned as green space, we're clearing it for native plant life.
Or, like I said, just pull a Daley and remove them. The city owns the land. Flock can complain, they can sue, and they might even win. But once the city removes the cameras, Flock can't put them back. The city owns the land, and Flock has no rights to it.
> installed under some works dept land/pole/utility access permits
Another option might be right of way or easement permitting, similar to how utility poles and such are regulated as private property with an allowance to be in a public space. If the provider got a permit to use the right of way separate from the contract, then the provider would retain the same right to be there as any other infrastructure.
You can definitely take the cameras down. We did, there was zero drama.
On the other hand, it wouldn't be surprising if a single county commissioner got in trouble for just deciding by fiat to take civic infrastructure down himself. That's not a power county commissioners have. Was there a county board vote authorizing that action?
In this case, law enforcement selectively enforced local laws. So the commissioner exhausted his options. And flock didn't seem to be bothered by breaking the local laws and their action was inaction.
So what else are you suppose to do? I think it's reasonable to decide that if no one is enforcing the new local law, that it may be the commissioners purview and authority to enforce after exhausting all his options.
Charging the commissioner with felony theft is clearly just bullying at that point.
> So what else are you suppose to do? I think it's reasonable to decide that if no one is enforcing the new local law, that it may be the commissioners purview and authority to enforce after exhausting all his options.
County commissioners are generally legislative officers. While the legislative body is smaller, this really no different than a member of Congress deciding that the they don’t like the way DOJ is enforcing federal law and deciding that gives them arbitrary power to take whatever action they feel is appropriate to manifest the intent of the law.
> So what else are you suppose to do?
File a civil suit and get a court order for their removal.
Silliness. Who enforces it then? The local law banning it was already equally as valid as a court order would have been. Would the county need to ask the judge to take it down?
Someone has to physically take it down and I'm guessing flock didn't put that in the budget.
Ultimately, as a member of a legislative body, if you don’t like the way the executive bodies charged with inplementing a law are doing so, your choices are:
(1) Work with other members of the legislative body to hold the executive accountable for failures, via hearings, sanctions (often, if at the same level, including removal), etc., or
(2) Work with the same body to file a lawsuit as a body to compel compliance, which has additional enforcement provisions (including contempt orders by the court for noncompliance) not available with the bare law and no court case,
(3) Taking any avenue open to the public at large (including individual lawsuits, public advocacy including including electoral advocacy against any elected executive officers involved, etc.).
What is not generally an option is unilaterally assuming the role legally assigned to the executive in inplementing the law, or simply assuming whatever other powers you imagine are best to realize the intent of the law even if they are outside of its letter.
I agree in general but on the other hand, isn't removal of unauthorized private property from public lands a routine duty of local government employees? So if anything I feel like flock is lucky the cameras weren't physically destroyed upon removal.
For example, if a maintenance worker had been instructed to remove them how would this have played out?
The cameras would have been removed. Munis don't generally destroy random tech infrastructure they pull off poles, though they might throw it in a big pile. Flock could invoice for the cameras, but most munis would probably tell them to go fuck themselves.
> Who enforces it then?
The executive can enforce judicial orders. This is civics 101.
> The local law banning it was already equally as valid as a court order
The ban is an ex post facto law. Rights holders to property have a legitimate reason to defend those rights across policy changes.
An ordinance banning ALPRs that impacts previously-installed Flock cameras is not an ex post facto law. But a municipal ban on private Flock cameras poses constitutional problems --- and not because of post facto or takings. Generally, the ballgame here is over publicly-owned cameras, so none of this is really apposite.
The court enforces it. We're getting into movie plot politics here. The sheriff's department will not in fact ignore a district court ruling. These scenarios rapidly reach the point where the sheriff is removed from office and imprisoned for some amount of time. This is what happened to Joe Arpaio.
This is much simpler in a municipality: the board simply fires the village manager and the chief. A sheriff is usually an elected though.
Before you reach the point of suing, you cancel contracts, payments, IT infrastructure, and have public works remove the cameras from any county-owned infrastructure.
I mean, all this is pretty silly, though, because what you really do is just turn the cameras off.
Joe Arpaio was not removed from office. He was charged with contempt but was never incarcerated. He was pardoned and then lost his next election.
or just start fining Flock per camera per day for a brazillion dollars. Sheriff compliance or not, that's still in their power.
And then get a order to take the camera to satisfy the debt
This is all very silly. Flock is not a scheme to install forever-cameras. They get paid primarily by municipalities. If your muni votes to shut the cameras off, they will shut the cameras off. If it votes to take the cameras down, nobody is going to stop public works from doing that.
The problem is that the First Law Of Message Board dictates that the most interesting narrative wins, and the narrative where Flock has deviously come up with a surveillance "forever chemical" to attach to every municipal road is much more interesting than "this is a service and if you stop paying for it it goes away".
I thought what was going on was they would keep them up after the local contract as they could still get value from them as part of the national network.
I don't doubt that they will, if all your muni cares about is "not paying anymore", they'll take advantage of the easement or whatever. Kind of the same way DirecTV was happy for you to leave the dish installed.
> If your muni votes to shut the cameras off, they will shut the cameras off.
That's simply not true: there are numerous instances of municipalities having to fight flock to get cameras removed or shut off, and instances where local governments pass ordinances that local law enforcement refuses to enforce because the cameras, which have been banned, are not off, as you allege is what happens, and law enforcement continues to use the data the cameras provide despite the contract being terminated.
Just google e.g. "flock trash bag" to see how cities are having to deal with Flock.
There are links elsewhere in this thread to a few of the many instances where this happens but I'll link to something that hasn't been mentioned yet, where flock cameras are turned back on and used by law enforcement in Springfield after contracts are cancelled, and cameras are left up that flock pinky swears are off that turn out to be on and accessible by law enforcement:
https://www.kezi.com/news/local/stolen-car-found-in-springfi...
And again, that is just talking about the instances where the municipality actually wants the flock cameras turned off or removed, there are many instances, like TFA, where the local government wants them on or doesn't care, and they remain on and used by other agencies, despite the termination of the contract with one of the client agencies.
When a municipality passes an ordinance prohibiting ALPRs, and the municipal police force refuses to shut off the ALPRs, and the municipality does not then fire the chief (or the muni executive, if needed), then the muni was full of shit about being opposed to the ALPRs in the first place.
I'm deeply involved in municipal politics and was for many years involved in national politics (and, more to the point, discussions of national politics online) and I see this all the time: people crossing the streams between the two, as if the levels of responsibility and accountability were comparable. A municipal sworn law enforcement official that ignores a duly passed ordinance that has gone into effect is breaking the law and their contract and can trivially be fired, not after a long drawn-out procedure but immediately.
I watched us shut our cameras down. As I said: there was no drama, at least procedurally. If our chief had tried to prevent the cameras from coming down, she'd have been out on her ass the next day. I'm sure there are places where there was drama, but I'd need to see the full story before drawing the conclusion that you're drawing. What I see here is the more interesting narrative ("the cameras are impossible to take down, they're a virus!") asserting itself in its natural habitat, the online message board.
I don't know what this story about a misconfigured camera (it strobed an "outage" alert after being deactivated) being reactivated by a technician is supposed to tell me. The theory here is that Flock is running a scam where they're rolling trucks to surreptitiously enable individual cameras?
Flock's value proposition is having a national surveillance network, local PD are not their only customers, here is yet another instance where oops, a camera that they promised was off, turned out to be on in Eugene:
https://www.klcc.org/crime-law-justice/2025-12-09/eugene-pol...
And here is flock getting caught installing cameras in Cambridge after contract termination:
https://www.cambridgema.gov/news/2025/12/statementontheflock...
Here is flock getting caught installing cameras in Evanston after contract termination:
https://www.chicagotribune.com/2025/09/29/after-evanston-fir...
And obviously these are only the cases where they were caught making convenient mistakes, there is very little incentive for the likeliest parties to know (Flock, law enforcement) to bring to light the fact that flock cameras are still on, being serviced, and the data is still accessible despite local ordinance.
I don't know what you think these links are accomplishing for you. I'm not talking about Flock in the abstract; I have firsthand experience with it. I'm part of a group of people who ultimately got the cameras taken down in my municipality, and before that, I spent years helping craft local rules and ordinances limiting them.
There are tens of thousands of Flock cameras all over the country. It would be weird if there weren't misconfigurations. The Evanston story is a great example: the reinstallation of cameras happened the week the contract was expired, and Flock notified the city of Evanston (which, for what it's worth, is our twin sibling city in Chicagoland), at which point Evanston said "you've made a mistake" and Flock said "ok we'll take them down".
You seem a bit distracted by the links instead of the content that can be accessed by clicking on them, they show that in tens of instances, your personal anecdote about how flock removal went don't hold. Flock drags their feet, makes legal threats to cities that cancel, forgets to turn cameras off, turns cameras back on, claims cameras are shut off when they are on, installs new cameras after cancellation, leaves cameras up after promising to take them down, etc. etc.
And you are representing the situation in Evanston disingenuously here's the timeline AFAICT:
- Aug 26, 2025 Evanston issues a termination notice to Flock, effective Sep. 26 2025 after it learns that Federal law enforcement and immigration enforcement are able to access license plate data from the Flock cameras in Evanston, something the city claims Flock lied about. (https://evanstonroundtable.com/2025/08/26/evanston-shuts-dow...)
- Aug 27, 2025 Flock writes a reply letter claiming that Evanston has no legal basis to terminate the contract. (https://evanstonroundtable.com/2025/08/28/flock-challenges-c...)- Sep. 8, 2025 Flock has removed 15 of 18 cameras.
- Sep. 18, 2025 Flock reinstalls the uninstalled cameras. Evanston sends Flock a letter asserting that they are in violation of the contract and Illinois law. (https://evanstonroundtable.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/25...)
- Sep. 23, 2025 Flock says that they are willing to remove the cameras (https://evanstonroundtable.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/Ha...)- Sep. 24, 2025 The city issues a cease-and-desist to flock. (https://evanstonroundtable.com/2025/09/24/flock-safety-reins...)
- Sep 25, 2025 Evanston covers the cameras with plastic bags (https://evanstonroundtable.com/2025/09/25/city-covers-up-flo...)- Mar 3, 2026 Journalists notice that two of flock's cameras are still up in Evanston and contact Flock asking for comment, Flock does not reply but removes the cameras.
Again, not sure what you're trying to prove here. By your own timeline the cameras were inactive by the deadline in the termination notice. But even if they weren't, what do you think the plot was? That they were just going to keep the cameras up forever, come what may from Evanston? I take it you don't live in Evanston, so let me fill you in: that's not plausible.
They'll never do it because Flock has the money and lawyers to fight it and friends in high places. Textbook "high risk of setting precedent you don't like" situation. They don't want to lose the ability to do the same to hundreds of dollars per violation per day routine (something that's constitutionally kind of sketchy to begin with) to normal people.
They'll never do what? Flock has taken cameras down all over the place. They're a company we don't trust, but they're not Bond villains.
Again: if it's one commissioner, he doesn't have any options. The only power a county commissioner has that you don't is voting on motions.
re: the commisioner:
> In January of 2024, the Camden County Commission passed a county ordinance banning the use of all automated license plate readers in the county (a 2023 ordinance had banned all static license plate readers, but the 2024 ordinance expanded that to include all automated license plate readers). In that ordinance, commissioners cited "numerous complaints" about the cameras "and the potential of unwarranted/inappropriate monitoring of its citizens [sic] freedom of movement and travel in violation of their right of privacy, unreasonable search and seizure and other constitutionally protected rights[.]"
> The ordinance also stated, "Any Automated License Plate Readers currently in violation of this Ordinance shall be immediately removed. If identification of ownership is listed on any such device, the listed owner shall be notified to remove said device. Any device not removed within 30 days of notification to remove said device may be removed by Order of the Camden County Commission."
My understanding of this case was that the commissioner was charged with theft because even though the county had an ordinance requiring flock to take the cameras down, and they had failed to do so, it was not lawful for him to remove them himself and then take possession of them because they were the property of Flock.
https://www.lakeexpo.com/news/politics/felony-charges-droppe...
Re: zero drama taking down cameras, there has been quite a bit of drama:
https://www.wmtv15news.com/2026/06/05/dane-county-covers-flo...
https://www.cnet.com/news/privacy/cities-covering-flock-surv...
https://dailynorthwestern.com/2025/09/28/top-stories/flock-c...
https://www.newsfromthestates.com/article/verona-has-waited-...
And final re: in many if not most of these cases the jurisdictions don't actually want to take the cameras down, they just want public pressure to let up a bit, and agencies are known to share flock data between each other, so law enforcement, the public, and lobbyists are all made happy by terminating the contract without removing the cameras, it is the smart thing to do politically.
I don't know much of anything about any other jurisdictions. I'm saying that my municipality took the cameras down with zero drama. I'm on one of its commissions with oversight on this.
(More precisely: there was drama, but it was all public drama from residents who didn't want the cameras taken down.)
Curious. Why didn’t they want them taken down?
They do have a legitimate purpose and help to solve crimes. The network effect, funded by federal grants to make a surveillance infrastructure nationally is the biggest issue.
This is the part that upsets me. They really could help solve crimes without sacrificing privacy.
How? Whatever the system is now is clearly not preserving privacy
Closed loop systems that require explicit consent to share outside the organization. Flock is like 50x worse than NSA stuff like PRISM that everyone freaked out about.
The Feds have full access to search everything, are no doubt exempt from any transparency on the platform, and ICE is already using it to abuse and intimidate political enemies.
It’s a nationwide surveillance system posing as a local police tool.
They're pretty comparable in that the people most het up about them tend not to know what either actually was. The feds do not have full access to search everything on Flock's platform except through the same mechanism by which they'd have access to search literally anything (a court order).
Fair. I’d argue that lack of friction is meaningful.
Also, the Feds are creative in their application of the law. Things like HIDTA designated areas led to Flock-predecessors - scaled infrastructure deployed decades ago. One of the “drug corridors” is the I-95 corridor from Miami to Maine.
Have an independent non-profit with strong oversight manage the data. Grant access with a warrant.
The police should show that a crime has likely been committed, and get access to just the data that probably has evidence.
You still have people with very tempting access to a whole lot of data. I don't see how this is different from the current situation other than it's just different (corruptible) people with access.
I think motivations matter. Putting a for-profit company hired by the police, and the police in charge is just the worst.
There are many other contexts where we trust properly supervised people who lack an immediate and obvious incentive to abuse the system. Combined with good overall software design, auditing and transparency almost all of the harms could be mitigated. And the tech does have some pretty major benefits.
Every piece of technology deployed by the police is provided by a for-profit company.
I’m against flock the company. I’m in favor of a narrower form of plate recorders.
How do you do a warrant for a device that alerts when a car on a hotlist transits an intersection?
Record the plates. Don’t alert, search. And just for a specific crime.
The whole pitch for the cameras is alerting! The point is to interdict the cars right after they pass the camera.
That may be what police like, but in my town it’s sold to residents on solving crimes.
A stolen car is a crime though.
Sure. So file a request with a judge including evidence that the car has been stolen, and a reasonable time window and location.
Everybody is filter-bubbled and people on HN are profoundly filter-bubbled. Wait'll you find what a huge number of ordinary people think about NSA surveillance.
The cameras apprehend criminals. I can show with evidence that the juice isn't worth the squeeze, and in fact that the cameras had the effect of tasking our police force with doing municipal debt collection for Melrose Park and Maywood, at the cost of 5-7 hours of sworn officer time per "failure to appear warrant" arrest. But supporters of the cameras will point to multiple stolen car interdictions and recovered firearms.
If you go into these kinds of things assuming that the median resident of a municipality is anti-policing, you're already way, way off. And I find when I talk to anti-Flock advocates (that is: people who have "anti-Flock" as part of their personal identity, not just a person chosen at random who would happen to answer "no" to "should we ALPR") that many of them are operating from anti-policing premises, and so these kinds of responses are very surprising to them.
(Totally reasonable for your reaction to this to be "whoah, that was a lot more than I asked for", I just feel like I've been in these kinds of conversations a lot. It's not personal.)
Sounds like his only recourse was to sue the county as a private citizen for failing to enforce their laws? Or something like that. Going vigilante, as much as I like it in this case, is still illegal.
My thing with this story is that no part of it has anything to do with him being a county commissioner; it's just added to the narrative because it makes it sound like he should have been authorized to do this.
I share the same thing. In fact, being a commissioner he was probably explicitly warned against taking any action into his own hands.
A commissioner can easily mess things up and get sued trying do work on their own. Say they try to “repair a playground” by replacing a missing bolt. Well, were they qualified to do that? Do they have insurance? Was the action approved by a properly filed motion? Etc etc etc
I learned this is why it costs my town egregious sums to do simple maintenance work; the only companies willing to put up with all the red tape of working with the government have to charge a premium.
The part about him being a commissioner smells like a simple publicity stunt.
I think the interview goes in good depth in all the details of the scenario it doesn't sound like you listened..
Publicity for what?
The publicity comes from a elected government official getting charged with felonys for stealing when he didn't steal anything.
The playground analogy doesn't really hold up here I don't see the connection between the two.
Except he did steal the cameras. He only returned them when confronted by law enforcement.
You don't get to rob a bank and then say "oopsie! my mistake, here's the bag of cash" when the police come knocking.
Yeah I don't think you understand the full context. He took them down and told flock to come pick them up. And obviously didn't deprive flock from their property in any form.
https://www.ky3.com/2025/08/20/camden-county-presiding-commi...
This article seems to confirm what I stated above - he took the cameras, and was later confronted by law enforcement about it.
And even if your telling is correct, that's still theft. Similarly, I can't just take your car, drive it around, and call you later to tell you where it is.
If Flock can put them up, can I/my city just decide to put signs or lasers in front of the cameras?
There's instagram stories of people riding around destroying them, so yes, it's possible.
Or just cut the power?
They have little solar panels.
plastic bag!
Eww, plastic. A bird feeder right above the camera would do the trick just fine. Flock doesn’t own the pole, right?
What gives them the right to install and operate those cameras? I would have assumed that the license for placing them on public property was inherently linked to the services they provided to the local government.
But if it's not tied to that, does that mean that anyone can install cameras anywhere? What grounds would they have to give permits to Flock while refusing them to other interested parties, like StalkingMyEx LLC. and CopTrack Corp.?
I don't have the answer, but I wonder if they are considered a utility and operate on utility easements. Then we have to look at the county and state, too.
On the other side, I've read they operate a considerable number of private installations, too. Even that is suspect, too, in that there is existing case law affirming that people have a reasonable expectation of privacy in "the whole of their public movements."
They’re not utility. But you don’t have to be a utility to construct in the right-of-way.
Good point. Then, if the contract lapses, who is responsible for that infrastructure? Does flock have to tear it down?
Probably some legal question that won’t get answered until there is a strong pressure to do so.
And what's standing in the way of cleaning them up as litter?
No, the right-of-way is not anything-goes. The property is legally owned by the deed holder of the real property thru which it passes, but practically the right-of-way is managed and maintained by the jurisdiction claiming the right-of-way, i.e. municipal, county, state government agencies. Installations need to be permitted by the agency.
Dane County, Wisconsin Sheriff's Office took steps to prevent unauthorized surveillance.
"With the contract set to expire on May 31st, the Sheriff’s Office informed Flock Safety that all 26 cameras must be removed by that date. When removal did not occur, the Sheriff’s Office took steps to ensure the cameras were not in use and placed covers over them."
https://www.danecounty.gov/PressDetail/11899
IANAL but if this is actually true then they're violating California law.
I submitted a CCPA request to them to give me and delete everything they had on me.
Their response is that they own no data, and I have to make the request to their customer, whomever that may be.
If they're retaining any identifying data about me and then selling it to new customers, they are explicitly violating CCPA.
That’s nice you got a response from them. I did not.
IANAL, but making some assumptions to fill in gaps, it seems they are avoiding having to comply with CCPA and other privacy laws like this: they harvest camera data and retain the images probably forever, but only turn it into identifying data on demand for customers. So you really do have to go talk to the customer, because Flock never "has" any identifying data about anyone, they just have anonymous images that when mixed with a model happen to produce identifying data.
This allows them to promise that they don't keep any data and have strict retention policies etc. to jurisdictions that are on the fence or where the contract-purchasers are constrained by law in some way, but they can transfer identifying information at any point in the future to any customer, by mixing raw data and a model.
> but only turn it into identifying data on demand for customers.
How could this seriously hold legal weight? The data is identifiable. Just because it’s gated by some transformation doesn’t mean they are magically not holding my identifiable information.
Reading the definition of personal information from CCPA (https://cppa.ca.gov/regulations/pdf/ccpa_statute.pdf), I'll produce the relevant parts:
1798.140 (v)
> “Personal information” means information that identifies, relates to, describes, is reasonably capable of being associated with, or could reasonably be linked, directly or indirectly, with a particular consumer or household. Personal information includes, but is not limited to, the following if it identifies, relates to, describes, is reasonably capable of being associated with, or could be reasonably linked, directly or indirectly, with a particular consumer or household."
The phrase "reasonably capable of being associated with" seems like it would apply against this transformation argument, but later:
> (2) (A) “Personal information” does not include publicly available information or lawfully obtained, truthful information that is a matter of public concern.
> (B) (i) For purposes of this paragraph, “publicly available” means any of the following:
> (II) Information that a business has a reasonable basis to believe is lawfully made available to the general public by the consumer or from widely distributed media.
So I think the above comment was wrong, this might be the actual way around it, AIUI courts have long established that individuals don't have a reasonable expectation of privacy from being photographed or recorded when in public, so it seems like public surveillance footage is actually exempt from CCPA even if it can be reasonably linked with personally identifying information.
Is there any realistic road to having them outlawed nationwide? Eg, ignoring probabilities here, could a wildly successful grassroots program where it became an issue as politically salient as immigration or abortion eventually lead to legislation banning them?
A national ban is unlikely to happen. Big companies like Flock are incredibly experienced at paying off enough of the Congress to stop legislation they don't like. You're better off trying to focus your efforts on your local municipalities and the state.
This is true for almost every issue, for what it’s worth.
Almost.
> an issue as politically salient as immigration
This is more likely to lead to making them ubiquitous; people will demand a camera network linked to a database of valid faces of US nationals.
Probably? Would be easier to develop drones to rip off the solar panels.
Black spray paint is less effort
Paintballs are even better, environmentally and effort-wise.
Especially if the propellant tank is pressurized using a solar powered compressor.
(Theoretically, of course. I wouldn’t advocate destroying private property.)
Destroying public property is bad in a general sense, but not enough to describe the situation here.
Would you take the knife out of your robber? Or is that stealing private property?
Surveillance endangers society/democracy and it's a threat too
Paintballs are destroying public property?
Flock cameras are public property?
Hypothetically, of course, it would be even easier to just sneak up from behind and drop contractor bags over them.
There is no sneak up from behind in this system, or at least it can be very hard to target. You must know the full extent of the network, emerge from the blind spots, dismantle pieces, then return to the blind spots. Faster than they repair the machines.
Ride there on an e-bike with a full motorcycle helmet. Cut down the pole. Cut off the camera. Throw the camera head in the river. GoFundMe if they catch you.
> Is there any realistic...
SCOTUS could hand down another surprise decision:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chatrie_v._United_States
If phone companies' geofence info requires a warrant, it makes zero sense that flock info does not.
The Flock contract I read from Oak Park, where we designed what I think are the country's most restrictive ALPR rules and ultimately took our cameras down, did not allow Flock to continue running, recording, and selling data after we turned the cameras off. In fact: they explicitly didn't allow them to sell the data at all. Can I ask where you got this idea from?
Thank you for pointing this out, I would just assumed the parent commenter was correct.
We didn't really negotiate the contract, either; these were just their stock terms. Does someone have a Flock contract that says something else? A reminder: for most munis deploying Flock, these contracts are public record; you can just ask for them.
reproducing the same links as above:
https://www.lakeexpo.com/news/politics/felony-charges-droppe...
https://www.wmtv15news.com/2026/06/05/dane-county-covers-flo...
https://www.cnet.com/news/privacy/cities-covering-flock-surv...
https://dailynorthwestern.com/2025/09/28/top-stories/flock-c...
https://www.newsfromthestates.com/article/verona-has-waited-...
And these are just the cases where the municipality wants the cameras taken down, GP also talks about the cases where they just want to sate the public while keeping law enforcement and lobbyists happy. LA is a great example, the inaction of letting the contract expire in no way means that the cameras will be taken down, if no further action is taken, those cameras stay up, and law enforcement will continue to have access to all flock's alpr data.
And further it's unclear if the "data" governed in these contracts applies to the CCTV footage or the data produced for the customer by transforming the footage with models into identifying information. Given that flock has a profit incentive, it's reasonable to assume these contracts are written adversarially to maximize Flock's ability to persuade jurisdictions to sign the contracts and Flock's ability to use all of the data they harvest to maximize profit, we have enough examples of this in the 21st century to know this isn't paranoid, this is the basic playbook of all surveillancetech/adtech companies and they have all used language in contracts that is confusing to nonexperts that affords them maximum leverage to store all the data they harvest permanently and use it however they want.
Please don't paste walls of links into threads, especially not when they're copies from the same thread.
You made the same claim based on a personal anecdote in multiple places in this thread, giving it the same reply seems reasonable, but I'll grant there's probably a better way than a wall of links.
It is never reasonable to copy and paste on threads.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
With Marc Andreessen, the boy from rural Wisconsin, major investor and ambassador of Flock Safety, now part of the federal government, expect the number of Flock civil surveillance systems to increase even more.
In the UK the government put up ANPR cameras to enforce a clean air zone.
People with electric saws love pulling them down.
They're only as permanent as their protection.
Just out of curiosity: doesn't the US have any laws against private surveillance of public spaces? As a European I find this quite irritating (not saying we do not have problems as well with more and more cams installed and risks related to an increasing number of e.g. parking lot cams)
I'm not a lawyer and I think this varies state by state, but I think that in general anyone is allowed to record in public spaces.
I think the general idea is that if you could (legally) go stand in that public space (sidewalks, roads, parks) and watch something happen then you're allowed to record what you see.
This is probably good - I think it's the basis of being able to record misbehavior (by private citizens and/or the police), for example.
In contrast you're generally not allowed to record stuff happening in a private space unless everyone's been informed that this will happen.
This is why you'll see signs saying "Warning - this place is under surveillance" signs on every single door going into a corporation that wants to use security cameras.
In Germany we have the concept of informational self-determination for a long time, so that I am not able to follow those scaling laws easily. The problem is not the single image or video (which can be legal), but the extension over space and time. This creates a situation where you can create information profiles. I as a subject have the right to control this information (actually the same goes for the pure online stuff).
You are allowed to record stuff happening in private spaces depending on the situation and state you are in.
For example, you could photograph or record the dance floor in nightclub since dance floor is very public. However, the bathroom would not be allowed. Of course, the venue could make up rules and eject you for doing so.
Most of "Warning signs" are deterrence, maybe someone will behave better if they know cameras are watching. Also, it's cheap insurance dictate by the lawyers who think "Signs are 100 bucks total but someone filing privacy lawsuit is thousands, put up the signs."
"You are allowed to record stuff happening in private spaces depending on the situation and state you are in."
The part about "depending on the situation and state you are in." is doing _a_lot_ of work there. Here in WA state, for example, if you go into a private meeting and record the thing without getting folks consent first then you're guilty of a misdemeanor.
Another example: in my old neighbor we had a nuisance neighbor who we all thought was engaged in Crimes, Plural. The immediate neighbor wanted to put up a video camera to catch them in the act but was told that they can't film the neighbor's yard directly. Filming their own yard and the field of view happens to catch something in the adjacent yard might get by a judge, maybe. So even if you can stand on the sidewalk and see past the trees into someone's backyard that doesn't mean you can film it.
(To be clear - I think this probably a good rule. I don't want folks filming me in my backyard :) )
Clearly, the tl;dr is that if this really matters to someone then they should check with a lawyer first.
No, you don’t have an expectation of privacy on a public roadway, public parking lot, etc.
This norm around privacy was kinda set before the concept of mass surveillance became a thing, though. Maybe we should revisit it and rethink what privacy means.
People shouldn't expect privacy in public, sure. They should expect they may be overheard or witnessed. But that's not really equivalent to mass surveillance and long-term recording
"You should not expect privacy in public" does not imply "you should expect no privacy and you should expect everything you do is recorded and stored forever"
I don’t see why you should expect any privacy in the middle of a public road. What are you doing there that is private?
I think everyone’s threat model is severely miscalibrated if they are threatened by being recorded driving somewhere via Flock, yet use a phone or social media account. There’s way more meaningful threats to actual private matters than Flock.
People tracking your in-person movements and behaviors is way more threatening than people tracking your online behaviors
You are seriously clueless if you think otherwise
The police observing your car driving down a road is not threatening, and acting as if it is is hysteria.
Furthermore, if you’re worried about that, have you considered that “they” could get even more comprehensive tracking data just by requesting it from a data-broker? There’s no divide between the online and real world if you have a phone or an online presence.
> The police observing your car driving down a road is not threatening, and acting as if it is is hysteria.
Yeah, but a national license plate surveillance system that lets a single police officer observe all of the movements you and your family members make every day for the past few years is not a single police officer making a plainview observation of you driving down the road.
And it's clearly a power that threatens liberties, you cannot have a free society when a government has that power.
"Palantir, what are the names and home addresses of all of the people that were at the pro-Mamdani rally, show me places that many of them go to in common, I want to find where these criminals are having their secret meetings."
Probably not in voice-to-text form, but this power is already in the hands of some US agencies, in part thanks to the national ALPR system.
> There’s no divide between the online and real world
The divide is that someone can't murder you by knowing your online activity
I miss the old style small government conservatives that understood the threat that mass surveillance is.
[dead]
>LAPD can just call them and access the data
Can they? Does anyone know the terms of these contracts? Does flock just look the other way if a licensee just gives away the data to some other entity without getting a fee for it? I can see arguments on both sides from flock's perspective, i.e., revenue vs lock-in.
There are dozens of ways for it to be done, but here's an example of how Austin PD worked around contract termination:
https://www.kut.org/crime-justice/2026-02-12/austin-tx-apd-f...
The network effect value far outweighs the lost revenue from a single local contract.
Do they have the resources to consistently clear camera obstructions, or are they relying on police to do that? The wind can be just devilish in its ability to coincidentally tangle opaque films up with cameras and solar panels.
> lock owns the cameras and the poles
Flock may own the camera and the physical pole, but I find it hard to believe that they own the ground the poles are installed in. Almost definitely owned by the Department of Transportation.
If this is the case then people can pressure their representatives to make this against the law. The people have agency here.
City can eminent domain those pole locations to put up their own solution.
Does the city own the land the poles are on?
I didn’t know this but it’s the kind of stuff our tax dollars pay for and ultimately why I’m so disgruntled about the high taxes we pay - especially in the middle class
No problem paying taxes - my entire gripe is with what what the moneys spent on
The US has below average middle class tax rates. But luckily we can just choose what our tax dollars are spent on through democracy! The main problem is nobody agrees about anything and lots of people are really dumb and can't handle the responsibility of electing competent people into government.
This is naïve. The US government is less democratic than advertised, and there are many factors for that. Not going to write a tome, but if you're going to point a finger at one group, it shouldn't be private citizens.
This is a common coping mechanism, but the US is quite democratic and almost any objection you have about corporate control or whatnot can be easily overridden by getting like 100,000 more people to agree with you.
>Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...
especially note figure 1.
Can you explain here without an LLM?
Really curious to hear more about this
Unless all of congress is included in that 100k, I’d love to hear a plausible scenario where this is actually achievable and not merely some clever edge case you found
It would be a mistake to assume that people who don’t agree with you are really dumb.
No, no, almost everyone is really dumb, including the people who do agree with me.
True sometimes, but not always. It's unlikely dumb people are equally split between political parties.
Im not sure I agree that a two party system for 400 million people allows us to choose what our taxes are spent on.
It does exactly that.
Would love to see someone vibecode an explorer for seeing how their jurisdiction spent their taxes. Denver has a decent explorer here: https://www.denvergov.org/transparency/checkbook#/home?year=...
Why do you need to vibecode an explorer when financial analysis tools are a dime a dozen?
Palantir ?
Is that legal though? Usually the poles stand on public ground, so there is no way, in my opinion, that the ground on which the poles stand are owned by that company.
>The best part is that flock owns the cameras and the poles so even when the contract expires the cameras keep running and recording data that flock can sell
if the cameras continue recording, LA can subpoena those recordings on an as needed basis.
What prevents another group from installing a sign directly in front of a flock camera.
I don't understand flock cameras in high crime areas. Every time somebody commits a heinous crime it's always like "they were arrested 72 times and were well known by the police"
What's the point in helping the police catch criminals when they don't do anything after the fact!
Maybe the police are part of the problem.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_LASD_deputy_gangs
Main article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gangs_in_the_Los_Angeles_Count...
Definitely, but they represent the opposite problem. The thing about the LASD and LAPD is that they are... extrajudicial. It's not "They catch a gang member and do nothing", but rather "They arrest a gang member with no valid reason to do so, and tortured/killed them over some street shit." Sometimes it's not a gang member at all. The end of the CRASH unit started when an officer thought he'd flash gang signs and try to kill a plainclothes officer, all in a fit of road rage. Who knows how many times that happened to a random civilian and it got blamed on gangbangers (who happened to not be police)
The problem GP is describing is mostly with the courts, not the cops.
Friend, that's a.... deep, deep mischaracterization of how the courts work. The cops, prosecutors and judges have deep relationship with each other. Yes, these are "courts problems", but you can't have these courts problems without cops, without prosecutors, without judges, etc.
Ask yourself: why do public defenders have a tiny fraction of the budget of prosecutors?
Police don't do anything after the fact. The problem is with attorneys general and/or judges either not prosecuting people or giving them too light of sentences. All police do is arrest and collect evidence, and they're generally even more frustrated by the problem than most people.
Because this kind of stuff is used for way beyond this
It’s used for surveillance in the truest sense
Heaven forbid you are on someone’s watchlist, they will just track your movement across the city
This isn’t some fake CSI pop dream - this kind of tech isn’t used to catch the people breaking into your house
Also used by repo men to track people behind on payments
Just going to leave this here as an example use-case:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/05/she-got-abortion-so-te...
Too few prosecutors. Police only arrests, but the real job is done by prosecutors. However, there's a global shortage of them, and cities don't hire more. I don't know whether that's a popular job nowadays.
So without proper charges judge cannot do anything but release. Police cannot do anything but arrest.
Prosecutors are the main line of defense (defending public from criminals).
I don't believe at all this is from a lack of funds. The only thing that lacks here is the desire to put criminals in prison.
No, it’s not a quantity issue, it’s a quality issue.
DAs used to go after particularly egregious offenders and throw the book at them. This creates incentive effects for all the other would be criminals. It doesn’t take all that much enforcement before criminals get the idea and stop or are put in jail for decades.
Instead we have prosecutors going after all the wrong kinds of crime. Murderers are getting no cash bail while guys who cut down a tree in their yard are getting visits from the police and court summons for non-crimes.
This is intentional policy from DA offices. Pay attention next time your DA is up for reelection, they impact your quality of life far more than your representatives.
And public defenders are the main line of defense against prosecutors yet prosecution budgets are significantly higher.
Have you ever looked in who is the police? How they become police in first place? Like how police even started to be police in the first place. Is quite a ride and I can see many similarities to organized gangs.
These high crime areas are predominantly in blue counties/states, and liberal judges are typically soft on crime.
The US has the highest per-capita rate of imprisonment I think we’re plenty “hard on crime”. What we lack is a principled stance that Americans deserve basic dignity and access to things that make people live less violent lives. It’s no secret that poverty is the key contributor to one’s likelihood of being in prison.
People who are “soft on crime”, practically speaking, are the people and politicians so committed to dehumanizing others that they’d rather watch their neighbors wallow in poverty or rot in jail than to actually do something to address the root causes (the foremost of which being the aforementioned societal dehumanization of the poor).
> the people and politicians so committed to dehumanizing others that they’d rather watch their neighbors wallow in poverty or rot in jail than to actually do something to address the root causes
This is exactly the false dichotomy that people engaging in this like to play up. It's not an either/or situation... we can and should _both_ address root causes to avoid crime where we can _and_ punish crime when we must.
Populations across the world are not comparable in a variety of ways, including in a "best-case" base criminality rate. So you can't compare per-capital rates of imprisonment and go, "Gee, that's high in Country X compared to Country Y and Country Z".
There's an old saw: A Scandinavian economist once said to Milton Friedman, ‘In Scandinavia, we have no poverty’. Milton Friedman replied, ‘That’s interesting, because in America, among Scandinavians, we have no poverty, either’ [0]
0: https://iea.org.uk/sites/default/files/publications/files/Sw...
N.B.: there was selection for the worse-off in those coming to the U.S.
> So you can't compare per-capital rates of imprisonment and go, "Gee, that's high in Country X compared to Country Y and Country Z".
That's an exceedingly weak defense for a country that imprisons 4x more people per-capita than China.
It isn't.
China's murder rate is about 0.5 murders per 100,000 people per year, while South Africa's is 44 per 100,000 people per year (assuming both countries report honest statistics). That's an 88x difference between two large countries. [0]
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...
Judges are not soft, it's just liberal cities don't hire enough prosecutors. So judges never receive properly investigated charges, and can do nothing but acquit. Prosecutors defend public (us) from criminals, but for some reason are neglected.
> soft on crime
I cannot take these words seriously since Trump tweeted that the Pope is weak on crime, and it’s the most retarded thing I’ve ever heard.
The US is not a serious country any more.
>liberal judges are typically soft on crime.
You're going to need to back that claim up with statistics
Easily disproved. So much inaccurate malarky on this thread. I would assume it's bots AstroTurfing, if American zeitgeist wasn't already so demonstrably poisoned.
I've lived in California my whole life, and I'm just basing it off my experiences over the years.
California enacted a law in 2014 that turned all theft under $950 into a misdemeanor instead of a felony (reverted last year). Theft became so common that police wouldn't even respond to theft calls unless it was over $950, which enboldened theives. During covid especially, entire stores would be looted and robbed constantly.
When people were caught, the judges would often give them minimal sentences, and release them over and over. Then the same people would commit more crimes because they knew the judges were lienent.
I'm not saying every single person fits into this box, but it's common enough to be recognized as a trend that happens in liberal areas. Los Angeles, Oakland are prime examples.
>California enacted a law in 2014 that turned all theft under $950 into a misdemeanor instead of a felony (reverted last year)
So all states with $1000 Felony cutoffs or higher should have this issue, right?
So why don't they?
You know the National Retail Federation had to stop posting their annual shrink numbers after they demonstrated that shoplifting was not meaningfully higher than previous years.
The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.
Those other places are just lying they don't have clean streets and stores without bars over the windows they're secretly just like us we have the numbers to prove it!
Someone is spending $500M per month on AI to generate grassroots support...
I'm not AI, but thanks for the rudeness.
My man, if your comments can't be distinguished from a bot's, you're no better than one. Also if you can't tell that your comment's unsubstantiated bait, you really need to go touch grass.
Everyone has an annecdote. "it's common enough to be recognized as a trend" is equally justification for racial profiling, and at least racial crime statistics are easily citable. And you still haven't even put forth that modicum of effort.
Hi Alex,
I'd appreciate it if you wouldn't put words in my mouth. I never once suggested racial profiling as acceptable, and I wasn't insinuating it either. I know you were just using it as an adjacent example, but I don't appreciate that.
I'm just giving my experiences man, I lived in Los Angeles for years. Have you ever been here or lived here? There is very little respect for the law because the law is not enforced. I'm not saying I have all the answers, it's just what I've noticed.
I'm not trying to be rude, and I'm not a stupid bot. Am I not allowed to have a point of view and express it?
No one is saying you can't have an opinion and you can't express it.
I'm just saying there's a predictable result when you express it with the level of detail and amount of effort that you _did_. And frankly, your comments are no better than pre-reasoning era LLM rage-bait.
What level of engagement are you looking for here; support for your lack of citations, or "yeah that's also my personal experience rah rah"?
I'm having a meta-level discussion, if you can't tell. I'm not "putting words in your mouth", I'm trying to discuss: the quality of your discussion. I'm discussing the quality of your arguments and your evidence. If you think that "racial profiling" is too hot, substitute in something else; that's not the point.
The way you're using the word "liberal" is technically wrong and your comment was basically a cheap fox news talking point aimed at below-average TV viewers.
It's totally fine if those talking points resonate with you, but it makes me sad that you don't have the mental capability to actually think about what the career path of a judge entails, what kind of room for decision making they have, and what kind of trade-offs they might need to consider in order to adjust the punishments.
Ignorance is bliss.
This is good. But unfortunately it doesn't mean the Flock cameras will be removed because the city doesn't own them. Flock does. And Flock will likely want to keep them there. In other cities when the contract is canceled or let expire Flock prevented those cities from removing the cameras. Some had to resort to covering them with trash bags because they could not legally remove them. This happened in Dayton, Ohio and many other cities. https://www.cnet.com/news/privacy/cities-covering-flock-surv...
> "Some locals have taken matters into their own hands by dismantling Flock cameras and covering them with trash bags"
This techcrunch article incorrectly characterizes this need and required behavior as something done by random citizens. But it is actually the cities themselves having to resort to it, totally officially and legally, because of Flock behaving badly.
Aren't the cameras on city's land or did city lease the land to Flock? If they are on city's land couldn't city require that Flock removes their stuff from city's property or city will do it on Flock's expense?
I've seen videos of flock cameras installed improperly (missing a breakaway device) right next to roads. The city must be able to remove unsafe devices!
https://highways.dot.gov/safety/local-rural/maintenance-sign...
Presumably the license to surveil the city is extended to flock by the city? Presumably they should be able to compel them to disable them, and provide proof of this (whether they’re trusted or not…)
I think the problem is that people are allowed to set up cameras of public spaces without requiring any “license to surveil”.
are they on land flock owns though? I don't think I could go put up a camera on city infrastructure like traffic lights without their permission. does flock buy a lot of little permissions to install and power their cameras or something?
I assure you that if I slapped a camera on city infrastructure they would absolutely find some license or permission that I don't have and threaten me with a million+ dollar fine over it.
Making recording in public require a license is a very easy way to cut free speech and document wrong-doing of a system.
Thanks !! It is so easy to assume that ending contract means turning off the cameras. Hopefully ciities can fight back harder for them to remove them, specially when people don't want that surveillance.
It could also mean "we get the cameras for free now ..."
I don't know, I'd prefer cops have access to technology that helps them apprehend criminals and enforce the law. Better audits and accountability are the solution, not removing technology.
I do know.
I do not want to live in a society that is under 24/7 surveillance. Of course, if the cops can watch everything you do all the time, there will be less crime. But that is not a sacrifice I’m willing to make.
> if the cops can watch everything you do all the time, there will be less crime
I disagree there. If cops watch us at all times then more crimes will be prosecuted, think they'll just sit bored with nothing happening? They will find things, real or not.
The reality is that crime is way down, we do not need more enforcement. Leave us alone already. https://www.opencrime.us/years
What planet do you live on? Go to a low crime neighborhood. Cops are super friendly and basically spend their day happily helping old ladies cross the street or getting cats down from trees.
If you think cops like cracking heads and dealing with petty crime that they'll just invent otherwise and use to harass people, you're out of your mind. You really need to get out more.
You're right and wrong. The first paragraph is absolutely accurate -- I live near some of these areas (SW Connecticut) and the contrast is stark.
The second is not. There are absolutely people who take pleasure in the bullying behavior cops are often associated with. They're the ones who want the cushy jobs in Greenwich but don't get them (probably for the aforementioned reasons in many cases) and wind up being doubly punitive and cruel to people in Bridgeport.
Violent crime / property crime per 100k people:
Bridgeport ~393 ~1,700
Greenwich ~9.4 ~867
More cops, more crime! In other news, wet sidewalks cause rain.
I actually don't disagree with that aspect of it.
What I was saying is that there are absolutely cops who do _like cracking heads_. I (very personally!) know cops and they're often attracted to the job primarily for the benefits (retire with a pension after ~20 years; the part they'll tell anyone) and because they get to treat people like they did ants on the playground or freshman on the football team with impunity (the part they'll tell whoever is around after 10+ drinks).
> they get to treat people like they did ants on the playground or freshman on the football team with impunity
I've never seen this. Instead I see cops taking abuse more often than not. Crazy person in the street screaming at the cop and the cops just waiting to see if he starts attacking someone. Seeing them navigate literal drugged out zombies and decide whether they really want to call the medics this time as it's a monthly occurrence with this exact individual. Things like that.
I feel like you get your impression of police from TV show and movies rather than real life.
I could show you 10,000 yt videos that show there are plenty of cops that abuse power and harass.
Police body cameras have completely dispelled this notion and are a god-send to the vast majority of police officers that want to do good work. So much so the left has turned against them
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jP4_2soVZe0
>Go to a low crime neighborhood. Cops are super friendly and basically spend their day happily helping old ladies cross the street or getting cats down from trees.
>If you think cops like cracking heads
They adore getting to crack heads. That's the entire reason they became cops. They love being able to use their power, rightfully or not, they don't really care.
Cops themselves say this!
Cool, I choose to live in a highly policed neighborhood with well funded police. Essentially a gated community.
You can enjoy your "freedom", but based on the real estate prices, I think more people have my preference.
Yeah, right. That's why the rich were the first to have the city install Flock cameras on their lawns and driveways, right?
Thats not necessary. They have the loving embrace of Nest cameras connected directly to Google. Gladly share footage when there's a string of property crimes. Whats your point?
Why not live in China? It’s even safer!
What is a dragnet? Why are dragnets illegal?
Flock is essentially a private loophole that creates a nationwide dragnet.
Cameras don't prevent crime, they just increase the cost of doing so (or the cost of preparing for it).
Most crime is spontaneous. Plenty of examples from across the world that installing cameras or other checks at best shifts crime to other areas.
I'll take shifting crime as long as it's away from me.
Camera's 100% prevent crime because you catch the bad guy, and in a sane society lock the person up so he can no longer commit crime. See how that works?
C'mon, you aren't going far enough. Catching someone after the crime was committed is not preventing the crime. You need AI to watch the cameras non stop and alert you before someone commits a crime ;-)
> I'm cool with zero privacy if it means cops can arrest people more easily since they have perfect judgement
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety" - Ben Franklin
Grant me the liberty to camp out on a public sidewalk and use hard drugs in a children's playground or give me death!
I think you should have the liberty to do both but there should be no reason for anyone to do so. Your two instances are happening because that's what available for them.
Lets make it not available to them, deal?
No.
while cops are impossible to hold accountable, id prefer to give them fewer capabilities rather than more
I don't think this is true. With the advent of body cameras, cellphones with cameras and FOIA requests you can build a good case if someone violates your rights. The bigger issues are that there is little to no consequence of a flagrant violation of rights because the police union is VERY protective over its members.
The ability to make a case is directly related to how much free time you have and how much money you are able to spend.
We cannot just wave this away when the vast majority of people cannot take off time from work or afford to hire attorneys when their rights are violated.
Time you have also directly bounded by how alive you are after the event
I don't know, I'd prefer the cops do their jobs and solve crime without the state having intimate knowledge of my whereabouts and activities any time I enter the public sphere.
it needs to be illegal for the government to buy data or intelligence that it could not otherwise legally collect itself.
Thats a perfect statement to close the loophole.
It obvious this should be the case, but when you dump billions of dollars getting around 4th amendment protections, lets just say it takes awhile to close the loopholes.
Why do you think the government couldn’t collect this information themselves? ALPRs are legal, cameras covering a public roadway are legal, and the 4th amendment doesn’t extend to driving on a public roadway.
Could the government set up 80,000 cameras to spy on everyone? No, they are not aloud to create dragnets or conduct mass surveillance. They need warrants.
Thats the loophole that flock capitalized on.
How many highways and bridges charge tolls via license plate reading cameras? A lot, it's legal, and I would be surprised if that data was used only for processing tolls.
It's definitely not. For example, police in Illinois have warrantless access to ipass scans.
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/20645486-re_-externa...
There is no expectation of privacy in public. Look at NYC, the government most certainly has setup a network of cameras without a warrant. Flock cameras are all (to my knowledge) in public as well
Reference: https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2021/06/scale-new-yor...
Of course they can and of course they do. It gets much more complicated when you consider that each state has different laws about records sharing.
And, lol, yes the 4th amendment extends to driving on a public roadway... roads aren't international waters. Probable cause and such are still important. I recognize what you're saying but -- details matter, dammit.
Details do matter: extensive case law supports a very low standard for privacy in cars and searches on the roadway. Pat downs, being ordered out of the car, free air sniffs via drug dogs, DUI or immigration checkpoints, etc.
Furthermore, just being recorded on a public roadway doesn’t constitute a search or seizure.
The strongest evidence in support of your position is that Boston aerial surveillance case, which is frankly a stupid extension of the idea of viewing = searching, and I’d like to see it or another case reach the Supreme Court for clarification.
You really sully your position when you call it a "stupid extension of the idea of viewing = searching."
Again, details matter: how is it stupid.
See the two paragraphs before? That lays out my position.
The courts have repeatedly upheld far more invasive searches and encroachments of vehicles, but now confusingly consider simply observing the outside of your vehicle to constitute an excessive search.
The Baltimore decision is stupid because it contradicts 50 years of case law over what constitutes a search and what degree of privacy you expect to have on a private roadway.
No need for snark; I'm genuinely interested in your position. From my re-read and re-read, you've provided a conclusory statement without actually explaining the details.
Is your definition of "stupid" anything that contradicts 50 years of case law? That seems.... tautologically limp.
I’m saying it’s stupid to equate viewing = searching for multiple reasons. 1) A lay understanding of a search would require way more than just seeing and recording the license plate of a car on a public roadway. 2) Courts have extensively and repeatedly upheld the idea that cops can examine your car, your house, your trash can, your curtilage, and more without it constituting a search. To backpedal and now claim being observed driving on a public roadway is a search creates a huge contradiction in the law that will need to be resolved by either kneecapping basic police investigation or rightfully reversing the idea that you can’t be observed on a roadway displaying a government issued license plate without a warrant.
Do you mind providing your position? Do you think being observed on a public roadway constitutes a search or seizure in the context of the 4th amendment?
This wouldn't even help anyway. Flock sells to law enforcement, sure, but they also sell data to everyone else who wants to know everything about everyone.
they don't just sell to law enforcement, they install surveillance equipment under contract to law enforcement.
if they didn't get to have cameras everywhere, they wouldn't have as much to sell.
Are there any privacy-first security camera provider where it's the city that manages data access and uses it purely for local law enforcement purposes?
Why would you trust the city more than Flock. One of the common claimed abuses of Flock data is city cops using it to stalk exes and crushes.
The problem with Flock is not who owns the data, it's the potential for abuse.
I wonder why we aren't addressing the real problem which seems to be cops behaving completely unethically. Their job is about enforcing the system that codifies our societies agreed up and codified rules of ethics. They should be obsessed with this the same way people here obsess over system performance, correctness, etc! If we cannot trust them with the very basics of ethical behavior they are absolutely in the wrong job and there need to be very clear consequences.
Because finding people that are 100% ethical is extremely difficult. Even if we are wildly optimistic and say 20% of the population is 100% ethical. You aren't likely to weed out unethical people, so you are hiring people, training them, and then firing them 4 out of 5 of them. There are many cases where an experienced but occasionally unethical worker is better than an unexperienced but ethical worker. When faced with this dilemma it is likely that more police debts would simply cheat or cover up police abuses to retain valuable staff or staff at all.
The solution is not making humans more virtuous but reducing the capability and the harm done that unethical humans can do.
> If we cannot trust them with the very basics of ethical behavior they are absolutely in the wrong job and there need to be very clear consequences.
Police should not be trusted because they are police. There should be audits and controls that prevent abuse and unethical behavior. Small unethical behaviors should result in corrective measures but not termination, since when the punishment becomes too great you create incentives for cover ups or scapegoats. A small number of minor punishments, that catch people as soon as they step over the line, functions better as a deterrent than a large scale punishments that are unlikely to be actually enforced. Granted if a police officer does a major crime, they should face serious consequences, but the goal should be to creating a system that makes major crimes by police less likely. If they know they will get caught for minor crimes, they are less likely to commit bigger crimes.
So revealed preferences of voters is that they just dont care that much about weeding out bad apples?
From what it sounds like, it’s likely not on any sizable group’s top 10 priority list in LA.
It's not possible. Whether it's a city government, judges, cops, schoolteachers, or clergy... some number of people are unethical. Trying to pretend otherwise is a source of a lot of problems. The best way to avoid it is to make it impossible, i.e. in this case don't collect the camera data in the first place. Once it is collected, it will eventually be abused no matter who has control of it.
Exactly! Assume that you will have bad apples and build a system that protects against them and minimizes the harm they do.
This seems to imply a vast expansion of paperwork…?
The LAPD doesnt operate in some fantasy legal environment, but in the real world.
They do, but unethical people don't announce themselves. In fact an ethical person is probably more likely to admit their faults, which usually doesn't play well in elections.
Police are extended 'good faith' all the time simply for the fact that they are police. Including in situations such as loss of chain of custody for evidence, etc. We have the appearance of what you outline, with a blanket 'good faith' exemption that allows quite a bit of bad behavior/breaks the systems/rules the public believes to exist/be enforced.
The problem is simple: qualified immunity has become a blank check. The officer can simply claim they didn't know the law. They somehow can't be expected to understand basic constitutional protections.
Qualified immunity is more nuanced. It allows the first offense to be absolved but it works like legal precedent where future offenses by _any law enforcement officer_ is not covered.
Now there’s plenty of loopholes where you can craft “unique defenses” based on nearly identical underlying offenses. But it’s important to have the distinction
How many instances of are there of qualified immunity actually resulting in an officer being found liable because of past precedent where someone else was considered to have had qualified immunity in the same circumstances? If it's not anywhere close to the number of times when they were found to be immune, then the distinction is theoretical only, and it's arguably more misleading to emphasize it as if it's a real limitation.
Well, I didnt bring it up but the other element of qualified immunity is that its purely for civil suits. So it would only show up if an officer was basically sued personally. It doesnt apply to criminal prosecution. Thats another can of worms though.
Sure, the issues there are also not particularly nuanced; prosectors rely on cops to arrest people and provide evidence for them to do their job, so they're incentivized to keep a good working relationship with them (i.e. by not prosecuting them, especially for things that end up helping them secure convictions, even if they're illegal)
I agree. The issues arent super nuanced (and are pretty "blatant")
But I do think the nuance of "who/what should we point our finger at" is important. Because like we see in this thread, the finger is being pointed at qualified immunity when it almost never is the actual issue for a given injustice, and fixing it will not get rid of the thing you are mad about. Fixing it would go a long way to resetting some cultural precedence though in my opinion.
Fair enough. My instinct is that qualified immunity is such a common target because it's not an emergent property of the system that would potentially require structural changes to fix, and that lawsuits are often the only remedy people have for the structural problems like the ones we're talking about. Being able to "have your day in court" is at least theoretically the way that regular people can get justice when the system fails them, so when the system adds another layer of protection onto itself to prevent that with virtually no constitutional basis via judicial review (and therefore could also theoretically be removed in the same manner by a future court more sympathetic to victims of injustice perpetrated by law enforcement), it's kind of hard not to fixate on that.
If you hold police accountable, they respond by refusing to work. That's a problem that, at this time, has no solution.
> If you hold police accountable, they respond by refusing to work. That's a problem that, at this time, has no solution
Of course it does. You dissolve the police department and create a new one. New York did it twice, first replacing the city-controlled Municipals with the state-controlled Metropolitans [1], and then in 1870 creating the NYPD [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_Police_riot
[2] https://www.nyc.gov/site/nypd/about/history/history-timeline...
> they respond by refusing to work. That's a ~~problem~~ solution that, at this time, has no ~~solution~~ problem.
If a police department reuses to accept accountability, and dig in their heels by refusing to work, "just" dissolve it. And while at it, half the calls could be handled by folks without guns.
In practice that obviously would not go over well, people are too attached to the status quo. We just lack the political will to rethink and retool the system (despite most Americans favoring police reform).
>half the calls could be handled by folks without guns.
Let me point out that you must know which half before the fact for this to be of any use.
Sometimes you might be 95% sure no guns are required. Is that good enough? What does that buy you? 10% of calls?
> half the calls could be handled by folks without guns
This can't be emphasized enough. A lot of enforcement and "civil order" work does not require guns, and in many cases (e.g., mental health crises), they're the wrong people to be engaged to resolve.
I think one of the biggest issues with policing is that they are supported by the "law and order" crowd, which is a euphemism for keeping "others" in their place.
I swear to god that "Defund the police" was an inside job to discredit police reform by turning it into an all or nothing proposition and that's not gonna fly.
Oakland CA has serious crime problems because there's "not enough" policing and a lot of people are emboldened to do all the crime they want because nobody's there to stop them. One of many articles on this: https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/oakland-business-o...
I believe there are some fundamental changes to the system that could correct a lot of this:
1. End the War on Drugs. It's literally designed to create crime and it's low hanging fruit for cops to focus on rather than real crime.
2. Legalize and regulate sex work. Like drugs, this is a moral issue and by driving it underground it's designed to create more crime. Regulate and monitor the fuck out of it to minimize opportunities for sex trafficking. It's also a favored low-hanging fruit for cops to bust.
3. Use social workers for mental health emergencies and have the cops notified for possible backup
4. Invest in housing/mental health/rehab services and get the homeless off the streets
5. Revisit the legal system to avoid catch and release scenarios (though most of it is #1 and #2). If the cops are busting the same people over and over again that disincentives them to even bother
6. Fix qualified immunity and put some teeth into it. We should never simply take the officer's word for anything without some sort of proof (like leaving their body cams on).
7. Make the police self-insured backed by their pension fund. They have no skin in the game and municipalities pay out vast sums of money for the misdeeds of officers.
Easy peasy!
I like this general list and I would add a shift from harder punishment to increased likelihood of getting caught. This means more cops, more prosecutors, more judges, more public defenders, less jail. Studies have shown that higher likelihood of getting caught and getting punished is more significant than a harsher punishment. However, I understand that right now incentives and finances are misaligned for accomplishing this. Much of the catch and release happens because there are not enough public prosecutors or jails are full.
Oh yeah that belongs too. The current "justice system" is really just a legal system that is designed to punish.
Prisons are expensive and we would be better served helping keep people out of prison in the first place. It doesn't help that the private prison industry has extensive influence with legislators (as do the police and prison guard unions).
More so, just shoving people out the gates after time served is almost like planned recidivism. Investing in rehabilitation, training, and guidance for those released would pay off for the public purse.
In other countries, cops may carry guns, but if those guns are ever fired, there is an investigation to ensure it was fired for a very good reason. Those places still have cops.
They also have months or years of cop training, not weeks.
They also teach the cops the law and ensure they're morally sound instead of unofficially endorsing breaking the law
It's crazy to me that becoming a police officer almost everywhere in the US is quicker than becoming a licensed cosmetician.
Think about who's harmed by supply side constraints and artificially high prices.
The government isn't hiring cosmeticians or plumbers or whatever in bulk. It's hiring cops. So it wants them to be cheap. The fact that they're scary thugs who could potentially be dumb and hot headed is a feature. Scares the peasants into compliance. It's a force multiplier basically.
On the flip side the government is happy to enforce supply constraints for any random trade so long as it's not so absurd that it hurts the legitimacy of the government by making it look corrupt and making people resist it.
The government has had no qualms in the past using the army or national guard to break strikes.
They don't strike, they just respond really slowly, pretend they didn't see something or just take reports and barely solve anything.
Since they are all unionized and replacing them is crazy slow and expensive, nothing happens.
Yup, we saw it happen after the George Floyd/BLM protests. An undeclared work to rule action.
So you're saying that the solution is RICO, because they're operating as a protection racket?
Robots!
There is so much rot in law enforcement. LASD still has deputy gangs.
Police actually exist to protect capital. At least in the USA.
When you get robbed who else are you going to call when you need someone to show up 7 hours later and shrug their shoulders.
Hey now! If your black they might just shoot your dog
Also to reduce capital murder...
Correct. There is no actual obligation to protect and to serve, according to SCOTUS.
It's easy to say these anti-capitalistic platitudes, but do you really want to live in a society where the concept of private ownership is not supported by the state?
Society is not starting at zero right now, it has developed for 10.000 years with many genocidal wars. As a result, 1% of the population has achieved generational wealth due to some sort of "value creation" by their ancestors.
Through trial and error and a lot of violence, humanity has noticed that with free trade and free enterprise, the welfare of everyone else can significantly improve (toilets, food, entertainment), while the overall amount of violence significantly decreases.
Because when people put their money where their mouth is, capital can be allocated much more efficient than through other means (e.g. the King of England forcing a levy and centrally deciding what industry to invest it).
The only problem with this model is deflation, because if there is no incentive to deploy capital, then the overall pie shrinks and people start fighting about keeping their shares. That's why central banks talk about target inflation rates of 2%, because purchasing power of your hoarded capital needs to shrink in order to incentivize you to use your capital in a productive way, which also increases the overall pie for society.
The main thing one can criticize about generational wealth such as Trump, Epstein, Musk or Thiel is the fact that they have to lie about its existence, and keep up a charade of "I'm self-made" due to their low self esteem.
The alternatives are always worse for the common person. I'd rather have Trump, Epstein, Musk and Thiel than even bigger capital concentration like it was with the British crown and the Catholic church in their full bloom.
Ideally, those figures would also follow the moral code of the rest of society, but still it's much better than their parents who did crazy shit in Africa only 50 years ago, or the crown and the catholic inquisition a couple hundred years ago.
It would be fine if they protected property rights if they also protected human rights.
I agree. Society needs to be intolerant against intolerance.
But there is no better way to overcome old money than inflation.
Any violence is basically a struggle between different factions of old money, and it's overall impact is net negative for the majority of people. That's why certain factions of old money bring in their religious beliefs in order to justify violence - but in the end the normal people suffer from it.
> It's easy to say these anti-capitalistic platitudes, but do you really want to live in a society where the concept of private ownership is not supported by the state? >
There is a country that allows police to just take your stuff and then demands you to prove it wasn't illegal. Also such property can be used/sold/spent by police force it was stolen by. Does it sound like private ownership is supported by the state? BTW. It's called civil forfeiture and country is named USA.
I know. I'm not saying it is good, it is just the best system that humanity has found so far. Because back in the day any representative of the monarch could rob you blind at will.
Realistically civil forfeiture only affects small fish because old money first sets the tariffs, then uses their legal invincibility to circumvent them for maximum profit, all while flying in their product directly to US military bases because some racists think it's a good idea to feed drugs directly to black people in order to derail their civil rights movement. Profits are moved through offshore accounts in the financial system overseen by the British monarch and managed by people like Epstein.
That's the system, we won't be able to change it, our only option is to get a small slice of the pie by creating a win/win situation for an heir of old money who claims to be self-made billionaire.
Cameras do address that problem. We live in a country where people go to jail for life because two witnesses they swear they saw pookie shoot dee dee. Where cops beat the hell out of citizens and say they were resisting arrest.
That Pookie can show a video from a flock camera showing him somewhere else is a massive boost to his civil liberties. Same with whatever poor sap gets beat by the cops.
> That Pookie can show a video from a flock camera showing him somewhere else is a massive boost to his civil liberties. Same with whatever poor sap gets beat by the cops.
Not even remotely. The US is already at the stage where citizens can be brutally murdered, have said murder filmed at multiple angles, and have the officers involved get away with it.
Your civil liberties are irrelevant when we can just redefine and expand what it means to endanger a police officer. Or have the officers bypass the judicial system entirely.
Camera footage will only be used against you, not for you.
Of course that's not true.
It seems that making government union members accountable is an intractable problem in the current political landscape.
The government is not a monolith. Being owned by the city doesn't have to mean the cops are in control. The municipality can determin by law exactly who operates the infrastructure, who has access to what, what process they must follow, and how that all will be monitored and enforced. "The government didn't handle this well, therefore they can't be trusted for anything like it again" is a misunderstanding of how governments are constructed and how power can be separated between legislatively mandated structures. Find the source of the abuse, then build a structure to check that abuse.
The structure that prevents abuse is, don't do mass surveillance
> Why would you trust the city more than Flock
Nationally, I trust a system where the data are split up between siloes more than a single, privately-owned database.
Do we genuinely, really need a mass surveillance network? Isn't the expansion of surveillance through increasing prevalence of technology already way too much? Police can real-time track almost anyone if they have a warrant as it is, thanks to the magic of modern cell phones. We didn't even have time to discuss whether that was a good status quo before it became normal. Are we really sure we want to expand this to a massive network of cameras?
I get that it helps solve crimes, but solving crime is not the end-all-be-all of improving society. If anything, it's a highly symptom-oriented solution, and we absolutely have plenty of levers we could be trying to pull if we wanted to prevent crime instead.
Forget whether one global surveillance network is more trustworthy than another global surveillance network for a minute. Do we want this at all?
> Do we genuinely, really need a mass surveillance network?
I think that's a fair question for each local jurisdiction to make on its own.
Hmm. Personally, I disagree; I'd prefer to outlaw it explicitly. That's just my opinion, but I think that regulation has failed to keep up with the pace of technology and we've essentially lost the effect of some constitutional protections.
Sadly this was the entire lesson of Marbury v Madison, and the courts are supposed to be the mechanism that brings the hammer down on things that clearly violate the constitution where legislation has not yet arrived, but the courts are completely failing to protect us from what are obviously 4th amendment violations writ large on the entire nation, absurd.
I don't necessarily disagree, but I also don't think that it makes sense to wait to address the immediate issue of a private company centralizing the surveillance until there's sufficient political will for that (which realistically might not ever happen).
The large distribution of silo'ed law enforcement across the US is one of the driving reasons why it can be so hard to solve crimes (murder, vehicular theft, etc). Once any crime has the potential to cross state or even jurisdiction lines, dealing with the inner-bureaucracy of crossed enforcement agencies adds days to weeks to solving urgent crimes. A distributed system without consideration into how to coalesce the data together is no better of a solution vs what we have today.
> A distributed system without consideration into how to coalesce the data together is no better of a solution vs what we have today.
Unless you'd rather prioritize liberty over safety. I want crimes to be harder to solve if the alternative is a panopticon.
I would like to see some evidence of this demonstrated. I feel a large majority of high-profile cases that went unsolved for a long time most often hinged on incompetence or negligence rather than lack of information sharing.
Also, once crime does cross state lines the local FBI gets involved and they have a lot more resources than a small-town police force
> often hinged on incompetence or negligence rather than lack of information sharing.
Or just technology. Almost every “50 year old cold case solved” I see is because advancements in DNA processing .
Agreed, and more than that, those siloes are governed by democratic processes. Of course, democracy doesn't preclude abuse but it's a lot better than private governance.
In other words centralization of the power is most risky end game here
I want local cameras that require physical connections to offload data. Camera access panels can be locked with a wireless system that publishes the access timestamp and details to the city’s website. Each access must correspond with signed warrant.
If my family gets kidnapped, I want a department to be able to check a camera. I’ll wait for the judge’s signature.
But that’s night & day from today’s reality. I simply cannot stand being recorded to the cloud by a creepy corporation everywhere I drive in California with just about no oversight.
Do you have a phone, modern car, or social media account? If so, I have some bad news for you…
Do you give up when faced with multiple related problems?
Longest comment ever incoming!
Cindy Cohn, EFF legend, on Hard Fork podcast:
“I think a lot of it, too, is that I don't think that there is a sense among just users of these platforms that privacy is a winnable fight anymore. I hear so much nihilism and fatalism about this when I talk to people, and they, you know, I'm, I'm, you know, asking them about their privacy practices, and they're kind of like, well, that ship has sailed. Like, the government has all my data anyway. What is the point of trying to fight? I'm sure you get this, too.
Starting point is 00:57:11
[Yes. What is your response to the privacy nihilists?] I think there's a couple of things. One is that this idea that because your information is already out there, it's all over. Like, if you talk to people in intelligence or in cops, they will tell you that old information has a, it's a very short shelf life, right? So your information isn't all out there because you're continuing to live your life. And so, yes, it would have been great if 10 years ago we'd passed a comprehensive privacy law that included law enforcement as well as the commercial
Starting point is 00:57:46
entities. That's the first best time. The second best time is today. Because if we can begin to cut the knees out from under this massive data collection, the information will get less and less important and their ability to spy on us will get smaller and smaller. So it's never, I mean, if it were game over, they'd stop spying on us, right? Like, they're not like, oh, we're going to unplug the spying machine because we've got everything we need, folks. Like, that would be a different world than the one we're living in. So one of the things is, like, it's never game over. It's not game over. I mean, it's ultimately game over when you're not live anymore maybe, but as long as you're living, your data is valuable to the, to the government
Starting point is 00:58:31
and to the companies, and the minute we stop this business model, the better. The second thing I would argue is it's easy to say it's all over and there's nothing I can do if they're not sweeping up your grandma in an immigration raid. But I think it's a, it's a bit of a denial or entitled position to think that you could not care and nothing because what's what's going on there and the nihilism is I don't have to I don't care about this. It feels like too big a fight and nothing will really happen to me or anyone I love if I don't care about this. And I think we're living in a time where that's not a safe assumption anymore. We have to fight for our privacy.”
A better designed system could be driven by warrants issued by courts, without (or at least minimal) access to individual officers.
It requires better access controls.
Even invasive ideas like automated license plate scanning city-wide can have its data only accessible to an API to eg, track a stolen car across the city to avoid a dangerous high-speed chase in populated areas.
I think to throw the baby out with the bathwater around networked security cameras is failure around designing robust and secure APIs and systems (including audit trails).
Or… hear me out… no surveillance system at all.
Bars on windows and cages on retail goods, gated driveways, armed security at anything of importance, etc, etc, are a heck of a lot cheaper in the long run than a 1984 police state.
Maybe enforced small theft laws and shared cultural values… you know… what worked FOREVER…
And another common claimed abuse of Flock data is cops using it to stalk people in other cities, other states, and across the country.
The potential for abuse rises with the number of people who have access to that data, regardless of who they work for. Restricting access strictly to users in the municipality under contract reduces the number of people with access and thereby mitigates some abuse vectors.
The city doesn't run around accusing private citizens of being terrorists like Flock's CEO does.
flock shares the data with other cities and jurisdictions a little more easily, and also flock workers can see your videos. That's some amount of extra abuse potential?
Also, there's plenty of past incidents of cops abusing their access to state and federal databases for the same kinds of purposes.
The profession attracts individuals who are willing to abuse power for their own purposes. That's not to say that every cop is in the job to abuse power, but many are, and we have to build our law enforcement structures in a way that directly acknowledges and addresses this fact.
As the saying goes: A few bad apples spoil the bunch. It's a rotten profession.
The problem with Flock is its continued existence as part of the surveillance state. Like guns or bombs, these are things with one intent, and that intent is always ALWAYS bad as the resource is inevitably concentrated in the hands of a few to control the many.
Garrett would acknowledge being inspired by Minority Report, ignoring the message of it as a cautionary tale. Hell, he's even said that to him, a false positive in Flock is better than a false negative, which is a hell of a hot take in our current climate.
I'd trust a municipality I have a vote in more than a private company.
Because there's a more robust legal framework for curtailing the inevitable abuse when the government does it than when it's done via the "oops our contractor who's a private company" slight of hand.
Same basic reason I'd rather have the cops after me than have the environmental/zoning/whatever civil enforcement jerks after me. There's just sooooo much more scrutiny (which really says a lot considering how bad the cops are).
Said by someone who's clearly never had cops after them...
Said by someone who's clearly never tangled with civil enforcement.
Nearly your rights go out the window when it's non-criminal prosecution. The organizations also aren't nearly as robustly structured to limit damage by "bad apples" as real police departments are.
I know this sounds insane in light of how bad the cops are. That's because it is. Civil enforcement is essentially 50yr behind policing when it comes to transparency and accountability.
how many times does civil enforcement shoot people in a year though?
do they have the power to assault you and then have it be your fault?
Of course the civil enforcers aren't shooting people. That's the cop's job. The civil enforcers are basically threatening to send the cops after you.
How many people get shot by cops because something civil escalated into a bench warrant?
Walter Scott's child support comes to mind.
> The problem with Flock is not who owns the data
The one who owns the data is the one who should be responsible to provide proper guardrails in certain cases if not all, specially like these ones. It comes down to the fine line around business, rules and regulations. The motivation of business is to make most profit with least cost and implementing regulatory mechanisms are cost. Abuses are natural to happen in the absence of guardrails and audits.
The purchasers of the cameras, ie HOAs, law enforcement, etc, own the data. They are also the ones routinely caught abusing this. This is a real problem that should be dealt with by enforcing laws against the people improperly using the data.
I'm not sure what a realistic solution is for Flock to try and manage data they do not own nor if it makes sense for them to deny access to data they are not the owners of.
This is false. the HOAs and LEOS have access to the data. Even if the contract specifies that the data is owned by these organizations, they are not the true owners.
The difference is that the government has rules and limitations on the data they collection. Meanwhile for-profit corporations operate under an obligation to make as much money as possible for the shareholders.
Have you seen Flock's CEO?
You don't need to trust them. You can request information as allowed under FOIA and vote the mayor out in the next election if there is any sign of misuse.
With Flock? Good luck.
I think Flock is probably the worst solution besides all the rest. They seem to be the most auditable and accountable. The fact that anyone even knows the service and founder is a testament to accountability.
Lol, what totalitarian nightmare do we live in that this is your standard for acceptability when it comes to mass surveillance. “Well fellas, atleast we know whats happening and look here’s the name of the guy in charge, I mean how bad it could be?”
Knowing about the CEO of a company is the lowest bar for, "testament to accountability" I've ever seen.
You have someone in charge. You know who to question. You can even spam him on social media and a decent chance he'll reply.
Try to get something out of the CEO of Bank of America or some other faceless corporation
Yes guys if you don’t like flock please please please just send a dm to the ceo with your social media account, or you can send him a letter in the mail, just dont send some anonymous crap he doesnt like that just use your real name and address or your social media handle and just go ahead and send him a message and let him know how ya feel. Flock loves to know how it’s customers are feeling, and will definitely keep a ticket open for any unsatisfied customers with your name and how to contact you so they can fix it.
> Try to get something out of the CEO of Bank of America or some other faceless corporation
I have. It's easier than you think.
You do realize that we have "executives" in most government jurisdictions as well? And that there are actual mechanism for changing who they are that you have the ability to take part in as a citizen, which is not a privilege afforded to everyone under surveillance by these systems for the CEO of Flock?
(Yes, I know that shareholders have the ability to vote on board proposals as well, but even if you think those mechanisms are equivalent, there's a pretty huge difference between "if you buy stock, you get the right to vote" and "you have inherent human rights including but not limited to the ones enumerated by a written constitution")
If you're lucky, he might call you a domestic terrorist for questioning him and Flock's motives!
> The fact that anyone even knows the service and founder is a testament to accountability.
As opposed to their mayor/governor/president, who they not only can easily find out who it is if they don't already, but can also vote out (and who often will have term limits)?
Try going to one of flock's PR meetups and ask questions. You will not get a straight answer at all, you might even get back-talked.
Lmao not remotely. Their security is a joke. Axon's evidence system at least has concepts of security. Flock has had numerous high publicity security failures (see: Benn Jordan's work with 404 media).
Can we normalize a healthy 4th amendment posture? It’s wild that the Peter Thiel “don’t tread on me” folks are so cool with a China like police state.
It's because their actual motto is "Don't tread on me, tread on them"
It's not "don't tread on us"
A lot of the "don't tread on me" is window dressing.
Peter Thiel and his ilk absolutely adore what China has done. You have an elite - in this case, the CCP - that is entitled to their position by law. It bills itself as the "best and brightest" of society and has ideological constraints that it gets to impose on its members through the cadre system. The rest of the population labors for the benefit of this elite with little-to-no input on the operation of the ruling class.
That's what Thiel wants, just with his kind in the positions of power. It'd eliminate any opposition to what they imagine as the "right" way of doing things and reduce the friction to the creation of economic value for their holdings.
Note that "friction" in this case means things like human rights, democracy, competition, workers rights, etc.
It's almost like the American Libertarian to fascist pipeline is a real thing.
Salem, Oregon, assembled its own using OpenALPR and an on-prem server. There are plenty of reasonable criticisms of that approach too, but it's currently the farthest thing from Flock on the municipal mass-surveillance tech scale bar that I'm aware of.
"The system does not utilize facial recognition and does not have automated functions, such as automatically running license plates through the state Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) or Law Enforcement Data System (LEDS) databases. All license plates must still be verified by an investigator and then individually queried through the appropriate database."
This sounds like a lot more than your average flock installation at a local PD
https://salem.legistar.com/LegislationDetail.aspx?ID=7375982...
OpenALPR is not open source despite the open name, sigh
AGPL-licensed: https://github.com/openalpr/openalpr
(Not updated in years though.)
that's not privacy-first. There's no such thing as privacy-first surveillance. How can Americans spend so much time criticizing surveillance states only to build the world's largest
It's astonishing to me that the largest tech hubs in the world do not have the money to invest in developing a camera system that is sovereignly owned by the city. There are a lot of very talented engineers who would work on a project like this. Also simply putting a person in between the information would certainly reduce the profile for abuse with stalking and harassing people
Isn't it obvious? There's way more profit in building a Torment Nexus.
> Invest in developing a camera system that is sovereignly owned by the city.
you unrealistic expectations of a city government's ability to do anything different than it has always done.
Well according to Flock, the data is actually owned by the city and they are already responsible. This is just private sector loopholing
And in reality, it's a handwave. The city will refer you to Flock, and then Flock will cancel the contract, but leave the cameras up, so now there's no customer. Funny that.
The city can buy cameras and install them an operate them, but I don't think there's really space for an ethical SAAS play here.
Companies are either out of the loop, or they're in the loop and the only way to do right by their shareholders is to exploit that data in every way they can.
I'd say most are hosted first, Milestone, Genetec, Avigilon, etc. They all sell software to host feeds from your own standardized cams (Axis, Hanwah, Samsung, etc) via h.264/mpeg. The cloud hosted CCTV at scale is relatively recent.
if the data exists, it will be abused
There is no need for mass surveillance of public spaces. The moment data is collected, it can be misused, so it is better that nothing be collected in the first place. This is what a truly robust privacy policy looks like, unlike absurd laws like the GDPR that don't address the root of the issue.
Any number of companies sell cameras and recorders both on-premise and cloud stored which are managed entirely by the customer. Most security cameras you see on any given building work this way, and most such camera systems also support features like LPR (license plate recognition). Most of the time you're on your own to sort out connectivity and power though.
What Flock is selling is the whole package: The hardware (including power, networking, and the pole), the software, the infrastructure, the logic design, the connectivity. For someone who doesn't want to operate and support a wide area network of IoT devices, you can see why "just give them money to watch your streets" looks appealing.
What's really surprising is that it's the LAPD, of all agencies, that are making this decision while violating civil rights concerns. https://lapublicpress.org/2025/11/lapd-settlements/
> The top three payout categories totaled $345 million. Civil rights violations, police shootings, excessive use of force, and illegal searches collectively accounted for $183 million, almost half of the claim amounts.
Plenty of civil rights violations, but Flock is too much even for them.
https://archive.is/zUou2
They aren't crash compliant, aren't tagged with inspection stickers for signage, and the county/state road agencies could remove them for that alone.
One of the best sound designs ever invented was the 'you just lost' melody created for The Price is Right.
That is not a non sequitur.
Does it say how many cameras the LAPD pays for or if they are getting rid of the flock software from their org? Folks conflate this a lot but often times most regions have a substantial number of private flock deployments, city owned, rarely directly with the police.
Police get access to software no costs (AFAIK) for BOLO alerts on tags.
Fun fact: When they switch to Axon Outposts instead, just know that they have Amazon Sidewalk modules inside them, too for backdoor C2 to Axon.
(Go check the FCC docs for X4GS06009 and note that there's a Quectel KG100S sitting on the power supply board. https://fccid.io/X4GS06009)
This means that they connect to Ring and Amazon devices too right?
Honestly, if Flock forces people to enforce speed limits and follow the rules of the road, its expansion can't come fast enough. I realize how contrarian of a view this is to the mainstream, but car accidents are a leading cause of death worldwide, and it's my belief that many of them wouldn't have happened if driving rules were respected.
We've had speed cameras and red-light cameras for years. Flock cameras are not traffic enforcement cameras.
I agree with you 100% that cars are super dangerous, but that's a whole 'nother discussion
Flock has been critisized a lot. Unfortunately it seems that technology will overrule civil rights; there are a ton of youtube videos about that topic from all involved views.
Anyone know the proper ritual for summoning tptacek to this thread?
Doesn't he show up regardless
I have had my rough brushes with the mutant laureate, but I do miss his presence. Always compelling, and rarely if ever without substance. And Flock (among obviously everything else) happens to be a familiar subject to him/it. He has done local work, in his area, on surveillance and accomplished unusual things. If you have a super computer, mine his/its comment history. It's a trove.
They should hire some juniors to patch together analysis with local LLMs and do that on an as needed basis to avoid the creepiness. Networks of cameras remain a highly powerful way of holding evildoers accountable.
This is easily solved by paying homeless people to destroy the devices.
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Nonsense.
Which part?
All of it Fox News drivel. Hence if was flagged.
Can you dispute any of it with facts?
In CA: Kostas Linardos had 17 tickets — including for speeding, reckless driving and street racing — and had been in four collisions. Then, in November 2022, he gunned his Ram 2500 truck as he entered a Placer County highway and slammed into the back of a disabled sedan, killing a toddler, court records show. He’s now facing felony manslaughter charges.
In December of last year, while that case was open, the DMV renewed his driver’s license.
https://calmatters.org/investigation/2025/04/license-to-kill...
Voting in CA:In most cases, a California voter is not required to show identification to a polling place worker before casting a ballot
https://www.sos.ca.gov/elections/voting-resources/voting-cal...
3D printer regulation: A.B. 2047 goes further than any other legislation on algorithmic print-blocking by making it a misdemeanor for the owners of these devices to disable, deactivate, or otherwise circumvent these mandated algorithms. Not only does this effectively criminalize use of any third-party, open-source 3D printer firmware, but it also enables print-blocking algorithms to parallel anti-consumer behaviors seen with DRM.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/04/dangers-californias-le...
Convenient amnesia. Your very first link disproves your comment. He had a license; he was legal to drive.
An already entirely irrelevant point to make in this thread. Much like your second point, given that https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/trump-electio... as a talking point, it's, as more drivel pushed by the right to make it an issue, when it isn't https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/noncitizen-voting-is-e... for the purpose of voter suppression and she same control as Flock -- the same kind of control that you somehow seem to oppose in your final link. Cognitive dissonance.
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Civil disobedience is a civic duty when the state is tyrannical.
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Do you need flock to do this for you, though? I have cameras around my property, and they catch everyone entering and leaving my subdivision. If the police need access to the recordings, they can get a court order or ask nicely. What I don't do, is share the feeds with everyone willy-nilly so the police can cast wide dragnets and do god-knows-what-else with the data.
By the time you get a court order. The trail has gone cold at least that's what the police said at our HOA meetings. Maybe they're getting paid by big money to say these things but these were not head of police people. Low levels coming to HOA meetings.
Presumably a victim of a crime would provide the footage without a court order. A court order would be more applicable if it caught something unrelated to the actual property the camera was on.
This sort of footage is only useful after you have an arrest and need to build a case for prosecution. It's rarely useful to actually effect an arrest.
Getting the chain of footage you need - even with enthusiastic cooperation - takes days if not weeks to complete. Most folks are not great at providing this, and most consumer security cameras kinda suck. You're dealing with cops and residents who are not the most technically proficient, so a bunch of random different video files provided via e-mail, USB stick, etc. takes a lot of time.
I have direct experience with this and Chicago PD asking for my and my neighbors footage for a carjacking that happened in my alley. It took days for everyone to respond, and by that time it's pretty useless until they catch the crew responsible and just add that charge to whatever crime they actually got caught doing in real time. This can take months to years to happen. CPD is not great though, so you always need to take things with a giant grain of salt. However, the problem is legitimately difficult even if everyone is acting in good faith.
I'm not saying this in support of Flock at all. I do not support their use since it's so trivial to abuse the capability. But the capability is there and very useful if used correctly - that's why it's such a concern. Not worth the security vs. freedom tradeoff for me. Especially when you look towards the future of how an even more robust network and better technology will be used in practice.
Your big problem in Chicagoland is Illinois LEADS, which is the statewide hotlist Chicago uses. It was never intended for real-time enforcement, and it doesn't work; Flock curbs large numbers of innocent cars simply because LEADS isn't updated after "stolen" cars (which often aren't stolen, but rather borrowed by friends and family members) are recovered.
There is a difference between this situation, a targeted install in a problem situation, and hundreds of thousands of these cameras at every intersection in the country
Also, Flock cameras are not just on roads. Many institutions use them for surveillance inside buildings. There is a community center in Atlanta that has them and there is evidence that random people with access to all Atlanta area cameras, including Flock employees and police officers in other jurisdictions, were watching juveniles at the pool. More than one deputy at a suburban Atlanta sheriff's department has been fired for abusing Flock cameras to track romantic interests
Like everything else in this country we've taken something that has a useful purpose when used in a limited, controlled fashion and pushed it to the maximum extreme. We can't do anything based on nuance anymore
I agree with you; I don't want a surveillance state either but I understand why people install them in their neighborhoods
Everywhere people live is someone's neighborhood. So if everyone installs it in their neighborhood the cameras are everywhere.
There is a lot of middle ground between ">100k cameras tracking the movement of every vehicle in the country and retaining those data indefinitely" and "cameras in a private neighborhood in response to a specific crime wave".
Why couldn't the police, who you pay taxes to, do their jobs? Apparently a sophisticated robbery ring was operating with a well understood MO in a predictable location and the police couldn't figure out how to use those facts to effect an arrest?
Instead of "protecting" one neighborhood by installing privately owned surveillance devices, seems like the police could have just sat there, waited for a BMW full of Tren de Araugua gangsters to show up and arrest them.
In what world is this the reasonable course of action that was arrived at with the police.
Nothing about OP's story sounds plausible or reasonable. The criminal gangs are magically afraid of flock cameras but not any other kind of surveillance? They had footage of the crooks but it took too long to evaluate it, and yet the cops knew exactly which gang was doing it?
Glad I'm not the only one who thought this story sounded completely fabricated. It reads like a Flock ad.
the account is 3 karma, 5 months old, 1 other comment besides these flock comments
Most likely Flock astroturfing.
The world of practical realties that the police can't be everywhere at once?
Funny how Tren de Araugua is behind everything nowadays, they're like the commies in the 1950s.
Something of consideration: Flock cameras were installed after discussions across the HOA and local police department, after a multiple crimes happened in an area. So long as a discussion about the lifetime of the cameras is raised eventually, this sounds like a measured and reasonable use of surveillance.
There is still something to be said about the lack of alignment between Flock the company and the HOA as to how that data is used, but the compromise was explicit, and there was at least some coordination within the community. At the heart of the issue with automatic surveillance is the lack of accountability over those who retain the data and the lack of consent of those surveilled, and measures were taken to address one of those two within your community.
trade security for civil liberties and you wil lose both.
Catchy phrase, but having lived in places outside the US, it isn't really true.
Ironically in California you’ve already lost a number of your civil liberties, while having 0 security as a commoner, with or without Flock.
Yes, it's a nice catch phrase. Would you say that after a Tren de Aeagua gang member stole all your crap? At least I'm free you say. I don't think we've been free in the US for a long time. My tax bill says I'm in bondage.
Your tax bill says that you’re in bondage? That’s quite the tax system you have there. Or maybe you’re exaggerating?
Did the HOA Flock cams provide evidence for arrests? How did they help?
Or was this a case where a fake camera to scare people off may have been equivalent, Wile E Coyote style?
This is such a bizarre story, each detail more absurd and ridiculous than the last, that I can't believe HN is falling for it.
Honestly there are a number of incredibly weird comments like this throughout the discussion. Is Flock astroturfing every discussion about the company?
You don't have to believe it. It happens to be true, but whatever. I'm not affiliated with flock, but not every issue is black or white.
I don't believe it. I mean, you might, but the story is fantastical nonsense.
Ignoring that the police "confirmed" suspects that they didn't catch, or that you claim the police would need a "court order" to look at cameras the HOA would own (and which require absolutely zero involvement of flock, with the enormous downsides that dystopian, busted company brings), or that you cited "manually going through footage" like it's 1997 and not 2026 where every security system flags every event -- car, person, line crossing -- with instant-accessible timestamps, the biggest problem with your comment is that gangs do not care about security cameras.
The preventative effect of cameras on such activity hovers around 0%. This ridiculous tale that a flock camera was a magic no crime shield is simply nonsensical.
Again, you might actually believe this. You might have misheard some things and come away with this impression. But it's ridiculous.
I'm a big fan of privately controlled, limited access-guarded and audited cameras, understanding that they're useful post facto to figure out what happened, and sometimes to catch criminals (but catching illegal immigrant SCARY GANG NAME criminals, usually in stolen cars and with masks...lol...utterly useless), but your post is 100% selling the tiger repellent rock, and it's simply incredible if anyone actually falls for that.
Flock's effect on crime has mostly been to increase it, by allowing sexual predator cops to stalk random women.
>This ridiculous tale that a flock camera was a magic no crime shield is simply nonsensical.
I was confused as well. I thought the next beat on the story after the camera was installed was going to be "and the next time the guys struck they were found within the day" or something, not "and the camera repelled the robbers somehow".
This doesnt make sense.
Your neoghborhood cameras did not stop the thieves but the Flock cameras did? Is Tren De Iguana that up to speed on camera company specifics?
I stayed in downtown LA recently and looked like the set from the walking dead. Literally blocks of people wandering in traffic. I guess you could argue you definitely don't need flock cameras to see the problem, but also I don't know how anyone would not do everything possible to stop it.
Jay walking is the big crime here?