As the article notes, in some cases a locality might try to switch to a competitor, but the competitive community pressure here is still useful. Seems like a rare time where it creates an actual direct incentive to consider what will be popular amongst the people all over, even if certain LEAs etc personally might want more.
So I guess that's a win as that first camera is not very useful. And this is a good thing? I don't see your point.
Luckily the person you’re about to make an offer to lives within the flock network so you quickly get pings from the last week that they shopped at Whole Foods and dropped by a dispensary on the way home. Yeah this person probably has disposable income, let’s charge them the 30% increased rate.
Or maybe you’re a future employer - oh this guy stopped at a dispensary 12 years ago? The algorithm will give him +4 risk points before we make our hiring decision. Plus he regularly goes to this bad neighborhood (which is where his sister lives that he visits to help clean up), that’s another +9 risk points.
Your pro-flock argument is fine on its own. Delete the second paragraph and make your argument independently of the GP.
You did not address the primary argument against Flock cameras - the erosion of civil liberties (privacy) is not worth the higher rate of prosecution / conviction.
Loads of those just fall through the cracks of the system.
"solving the case" is mostly keeping all documented until they stumble on to something obvious, like already known perp having your stuff hidden in his stashing place while they go grab him for something unrelated.
People hate all kinds of things police do until they need the police to do something.
If you don't have video evidence the vast majority of non violent crimes go unsolved. How many manhours is a car break in worth, or a break in? Especially when the end result more than likely is still not enough to convict someone on.
Although there is (allegedly) a fun feedback loop that cops more and more expect their jobs to be like police procedurals and try to solve crime as if reality was shaped by Dick Wolf.
Imagine coding like it’s shown in the Matrix, or Grandma’s Boy.
You know full well that stopping a know car fleeing the robber and profiling are two massively different actions. They are not the same thing at all.
Also, it would be nice if people stopped fantasying about crime and basing their arguments on cool movies scenes.
So you have presented (amongst other things) a very black & white false dichotomy. You're claiming a bad, prone to abuse system is the only possible way to respond to your stated threat scenario. But it's just not. And you do actually need to win the public's approval not just browbeat them.
Moving on:
>It's like if you're trying to catch someone who robbed a home
It's notable how you didn't say "trying to catch someone who had gay sex" (a felony in some states until 22 years ago), "trying to catch someone who had an abortion" (back as a felony all of a sudden), "trying to catch someone brought as a child to the US who is in the green card process", "trying to catch someone who had a state reported stolen because the car dealership reported the car missing 6 months ago but it was found 2 months ago but the databases were never designed to get real time updates so there's a lag" and so on and so forth. Or more straight forwardly "it's like if you're a cop trying to catch your ex-girlfriend who said mean things about you on social media". You're on HN, you've been part of plenty of this, I don't think it's good faith discussion on your part to reach for an emotional tug and a lot of people here recognize and resent the technique.
And again see the first thing: in this case, why could the police not get a proper narrowly tailored warrant? They have plenty of clear, straight forward probable cause do they not?
>So you follow the car, and then you enter a dead zone [...] You're now at a dead end.
Wait, you said you were following the car? Police can do that you know, without massively networked surveillance nets, they have cars too, and they can follow cars. They can also put out an alert to keep an eye out. You'll need to quantify the gain here vs the cost.
>So I guess that's a win as that first camera is not very useful. And this is a good thing? I don't see your point.
I truly don't think you're making a good faith effort to see anyone's point at all.
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0: I'm using scarequotes there and giving it a footnote because I also want to emphasize that part of our suspicion is that, precisely because of obvious improvements, the "stop the robber!!", like "think of the children1!!!!", is primarily a cover story for far... less popular things that elite powers want to do to us. Meaningful checks and balances are possible, implementation importance aside that they haven't even bothered to try from the start tells a story of absence all by itself.
The Flock cameras, on the other hand, upload all data to Flock which stores all video forever. They also do image recognition to identify license plates as well as other identifiable information (they've claimed to not do facial recognition but the implication is they can).
They then make this searchable so any cop with a flock login can put, say, your license plate into a flock search and it will give him a complete record of all your movements all across the country.
Playgrounds with flock cameras allow folks I don't know to watch children live.
even https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flock_Safety#Controversies is a good start
If it were a single camera or location, there is much less ability to track and attempt to coerce a large population.
However, most tools available to police are designed to be responsive; they help catch a criminal that has already done something bad. This is not crime prevention. Nothing was prevented. Anyone living in an American city knows these cameras don't prevent much.
It is also (unfortunately) a very vendor driven industry. IACP is a big deal each year, and Flock / Axon / Motorola go all out on spending to influence decision makers.
Talking to communities, in my experience, they ask for crime prevention. People want the actual incident to never have occurred in the first place. When vendors go around saying they are solving crime once and for all, but all they deliver is surveillance, it builds distrust. It feels like lying, while the companies themselves get rich on public money.
Then they go on huge PR campaigns to tell the public actually what they're feelings is wrong and they should accept the surveillance. It's silly.
In the policing communications world, people often say trust is built in drops, and lost in buckets.
I'm a bit disappointed that they didn't call out how much bullshit was in that statement. They are just changing the default settings for new customers. That's it. All the deployed cameras remain the same, and new customers can just toggle those settings off of the defaults. It is so obvious that they were attempting to get credit for doing nothing, and reporters should call that out.
Thats the only stick with carrot these companies follow, rest is just empty PR not worth anyone's time.
People go to prison for providing incorrect data without malicious intent? Are you sure? Anyway, working under contract with the police is not the same as calling in a report. Even if you wish it were.
If they’re not liable in specific circumstances, then at least they’re liable on aggregate for false claims of reliability.
Lots of forensic science is dubious, if not quackery. At least in court as the accused you can challenge such evidence with expert testimony. The uncharitable interpretation of your comment is that it would be just fine and dandy if citizens had no redress against Flock and law enforcement due to poor insights.
Bad shit has always been tolerated when done in furtherance of the state's goals.
I wouldn’t discount the role of the law enforcement industry, with prior greatest hits including Street Cop Conference, Bulletproof Warrior, Killology, etc.
Imagine all the scumminess and questionable ethics of pharmaceutical reps, but instead of a medical treatment, its ways to infringe on your civil liberties.
They're just trading one problem for another
Or... perhaps it's because Wisconsin is a hotbed of progressive politics? Especially in the Madison area.
Wisconsin is a "purple" state, but that's somewhat misleading, because the people aren't generally "centrist". Rather, the state is deeply divided between left wing and right wing, as evidenced by Wisconsin's polar opposite Senators Tammy Baldwin and Ron Johnson.
There’s also what I call the “Janesville conservative”, or people who likely worked or know someone who worked for Scott Walker and/or Paul Ryan. Their politics are much more conservative coastal elite / country club rather rural / pastoral.
Uninteresting?
> There’s also a strong union-blue presence
The largest number of union members in Wisconsin may be government workers. (Incidentally, the outgoing Governor was originally a public school teacher.)
> people who likely worked or know someone who worked for Scott Walker and/or Paul Ryan.
What do you mean by "worked for"? If you meant that literally, it wouldn't be an electorally significant number of people.
Ah, yes, Wisconsin. Famously more progressive than the bordering states of Michigan, Minnesota and Illinois (I'll give you Iowa).
Attitudes on surveillance follow economics more than anything else.
Wisconsin actually is famously progressive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisconsin_Progressive_Party
"Milwaukee is a city where socialists have found success to a greater extent than any other U.S. city" https://uwm.edu/lib-collections/mke-socialism/
Wisconsin is a hotbed of progressive politics. It's also a hotbed of regressive politics. Nowadays the urban/rural difference tends to be very stark.
No, I mean very active and influential, achieving real, significant political results. The submitted article is about how they've achieved results, not only fighting Flock but winning and getting rid of Flock.
My links about the history of Wisconsin progressivism show that they were winning elections.
"They" meaning just Wisconsinites. The only political point I can find with a quick skim of the article is
>“There are well-documented concerns about how this company operates and uses its technology to violate people’s Fourth Amendment rights [against unreasonable searches],”
which is not what I would call a progressive political stance. If anything, it's conservative in the literal sense, of maintaining existing political institutions in their present state. It'd be more progressive (again, in the literal sense) to want to embrace more unrestricted surveillance.
> It'd be more progressive (again, in the literal sense) to want to embrace more unrestricted surveillance.
> which is not what I would call a progressive political stance. If anything, it's conservative in the literal sense, of maintaining existing political institutions in their present state. It'd be more progressive (again, in the literal sense) to want to embrace more unrestricted surveillance.
1) The word "progressive" has multiple meanings. Your overly "literal" interpretation is not particularly useful in the political context.
2) The Flock cameras were already in place, so getting them removed is "progressive" even under your odd interpretation. But I don't even want to argue semantics. That seems like a silly argument to me.
Support for Trump is not crumbling. His base still supports him. What is crumbling is the alliance of "right wing" people who never really liked/supported Trump, but were willing to accept him for the alliance. This is enough to turn the next election, but the "right wing" (again, whatever that is...) is still there and mostly hasn't change positions.
Plenty if you're in charge of allocating finite resources. Look up "guns vs butter"
I'm only responding at all in hopes that someone can help me understand the confusion and perhaps explain things in a way you can understand.