Right. When presented with evidence of someone selling upwards of 50-100 stolen Macbooks and a similar number of phones, including my own, my police department's first reaction was:

"Well, he probably didn't steal them himself"

And when I, somewhat confused, asked, "isn't knowingly selling stolen goods also a crime?", "How do you know he is doing it knowingly?" "Hmmm, the fact that none of them have chargers or accessories and that the IMEI of every phone has the last two digits swapped so people can't search for them, but so they look legit?"

"We're not going to investigate this."

Great. Thanks for your concern.

Many cities have removed cameras before their contract was up (though that didn’t stop Flock from putting them back up in Evanston!). You can also target the next time the contract is up for renewal - gathering community support takes time anyway. You can focus on removing some or all cameras, or on the contract language (ACLU has a good resource on this that I can’t find right now). Municipalities should care about the liability they’re being exposed to - some states like Illinois have laws against sharing data with the federal government, and there’s a federal case going through the courts now.

I think that the only way is to stop shopping at places that do this, and to tell those stores that you're doing so.

smashy smashy.

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