We shouldn't be wasting time figuring out how to make these tools usable. A healthy society requires privacy and a healthy society leads to long term safety trends. Mass surveillance as a tool, fundamentally, even if perfectly implemented and used, is fundamentally flawed and unfixable since it destroys the long term health of society. That is why I am against Flock and similar technologies.
You should read Normal Accidents. "Human error" is an excuse. It isn't really actionable. Instead of trying to fix the "human error", you must design the system such that it does not permit life-threatening errors.
Sometimes that means a tradeoff in terms of efficiency, cost, or something else. Often this tradeoff is not one that people in charge of the system are willing to make, unless they are forced to do so by a larger institution or force.
To really drive this home:
1. What steps did Flock Safety take to ensure this warrant was valid and current, and that the plate number was correctly entered?
2. What steps did the police officers take to validate the warrant against the APB hit from the camera?
3. What process is in place to ensure incorrect warrants are not entered or mistakenly kept live for longer than intended?
My guess is that the answer to all three of these is basically "none".
A human must always be held responsible, but a tool must expose its limitations to enable human judgement. I put this in the same basket as Autopilot, which already fails with its name.
I’ve seen too many cases where people intuitively trust the magic technology instead of verifying it. The tool shouldn’t not present itself as magic or AI or whatever the current term is.
1. I for one do not want "Flock Safety" in the loop for this at all. Police departments can flag a license plate in the system; that's on them. Flock is just a tool for departments to communicate what would previously have been an APB and have better detection than relying on chance sightings.
2. The vehicle was correctly identified by Flock as being the one flagged, and verified by the local PD that it was the one that was flagged. That said, they could have verified that the flag was still meaningful before converging on the vehicle.
3. This is a real problem and this is really the core of the oversight.
When the lawsuit over this is filed, it seems like 80% of the liability should attach to #3, and 20% to #2, and essentially none to #1. It's hard for me to see why Flock is even relevant to this discussion except to drum up outrage.
"But for" Flock Safety, this would never have happened. Similar to saying that Tesla is responsible for designing a safe AutoPilot even though there's still a driver in the loop who is responsible.
No, this is like saying that we should hold the fax machine liable for one PD faxing an APB to another one, or the concept of radio waves responsible when a PD dispatcher announcement for a a BOLO.
American police have no obligation to protect, serve, or tell the truth. The police steal more money than all petty thieves every year.
Qualified immunity makes accountability a distant mirage.
The police operate exactly as they are allowed and encouraged, by the system they labor within, to behave.
Your words 'sloppy' and 'error' imply that a 'careful, correct' approach fixes these ills. History and experience shows us that this hypothetical good will not be produced until laws and incentives more broadly, change.
It's a failure on all fronts. I think it's an indictment of Flock in the same way that full body scans are a scam. If you are always scanning for illnesses/crimes you will inevitably find tons and tons of false positives without ever meaningfully improving outcomes. The juice isn't worth the squeeze. Flock has been around long enough that if it had a meaningful benefit to safety, they'd be able to prove it in numbers. Instead we just have a long list of instances where it has made the world worse.
Product, technology, implementation, police department, policing method, workflow. These aren't discreet. Incidents involve all of them.
Responsibility is on people.Technologies cannot be "found guilty." But... this isnt' a trial. There are consequences to doing policing any particular way, and that's the subject.
Doing it this way... using baby skynet for command and control has advantages, like response time. It has disadvantages, like false positives. "Law enforcement error" is technically correct, but not informative about the matter at hand. The error
No this is bad logic. Flock is absolutely responsible and they should not be releasing or selling products that are this poorly made.
Saying that the responsibility is only on the user is extremely myopic. It's also dismissing the role Flock has in how they make and design their software.
If they can't handle this maybe they should be disbanded as a company or nationalized for better public control.
"Flock is absolutely responsible and they should not be releasing or selling products that are this poorly made."
I am not a fan of flock, nor police surveillance state, but what could they have done better here?
"Milwaukee police later admitted the alert should have been cleared out of the system days earlier, but an employee simply forgot to remove it. "
The system seemed to work as intended - that numberplate was flagged for investigation with homicide - and gave the alarm as intented, nothing more. The problem was wrong data given to them by humans.
> I am not a fan of flock, nor police surveillance state, but what could they have done better here?
We'd need to take a look at what they have access to and how they're ingesting that info. I'd start with caring greatly about false positives and not automating department onboarding.
Working with various counties I've seen situations where someone needs to tell you a specific table dump exists to get an accurate count because that's how they published deletions back in 1983. There are no standards and the people who created these systems are all dead.
> The problem was wrong data given to them by humans.
This is always a problem. It's never not a problem. The question is how Flock chooses to address the problem.
don't worry, Axon wants to put all 90,000 CCTV cameras into a database for dragnets, too. And i'm sure there will be startups, possibly even mentioned here, that want the same thing.
There's a lot of money in cyberstalking and real stalking. see: Facebook's valuation
They can design a system that doesn't enable these behaviors. Good grief these excuses are pathetic. This is a purposely made system with specific outcomes, these are the outcomes.
Saying there is nothing we can do is pathetic behavior and just shows that maybe you (nor Flock) should be in charge of these things if these are the outcomes they find acceptable.
Then you should design systems to ensure this type of user error doesn't happen. I'm sorry but this is software and all these excuses are straight up pathetic.
If you don't know how to design a system to prevent this, DON'T MAKE IT!
Good grief our industry is absolutely pathetic with these excuses.
If a human had spotted the license plate that had been flagged with an All Points Bulletin or an Amber Alert the same outcome would have occurred. It's hard to see why Flock is even mentioned in this except for clickbait purposes. From the article, it appears that the vehicle was not misidentified; it was correctly identified but incorrectly flagged.
I parked in a mall when someone stole my plate and replaced it with one from a stolen car. The next day, my brother, brand new in the country, borrowed my car to go to his first job. He was surrounded with dozens of LAPD cars, held at gun point in the middle of a boulevard and dragged through the mud in his first day work clothes.
He tells me the only thing that saved him that day for not getting shot was not having the vocabulary to ask questions or explain himself. He was kneed, arms twisted, humiliated, then tossed in the back of a cruiser. Our car was a white infiniti. The stolen car was a black honda.
When the cops get information there is zero investigation. It's "we got him!" And act immediately. It's like having a giant llm generated PR and you just comment "lgtm" and merge, only someone's life is on the line.
This is my biggest fear for the law enforcement officers. They're becoming overdependent on these technology tools and forgetting to do actual police work. I say this as a former police officer myself.
This is exactly why we took our cameras down in nearby Oak Park in Chicagoland.
People talk online as if this is a Flock technology issue, but it only peripherally is. The core problem is that the hotlist systems states set up were never intended for real-time enforcement; there's a great deal of imprecision in them that tends not to matter in human-scale enforcement, but matters a great deal when enforcement is automated.
This distinction is important because there's basically not much Flock can do about it. The source of truth about which cars should be curbed isn't Flock's and can't be Flock's; it's core law enforcement data that belongs to and is the responsibility of the state. Companies like Flock can presumably rig up Rube Goldberg devices to double-check and cross-check hotlist data, but their goals are in tension: they have a window of just minutes to detect and interdict a car. Our police department pledged to do voice confirmations on these hits, and everyone knew that wasn't going to work.
In our specific case, we curbed more innocent vehicles than stolen ones (though not at gunpoint). In each bogus case, Illinois LEADS had left a car recorded "stolen" weeks after it had been "recovered"; "recovered" in scare-quotes because many (most?) of these cars were never stolen to begin with, but rather driven off by a relative without notice. More context on why these data sources are unsuited for real-time enforcement!
Unfortunately, every law enforcement ALPR deployment in the country is a dragnet for all curb-able offenses, from stolen cars to failure-to-appear warrants (the plurality of arrests under our system, which turned our police force into municipal debt collectors for neighboring suburbs). The starting point for mitigating this problem would be to drastically reduce the set of offenses you alert on --- and that's tricky, because your instinct is to reduce them to the most serious offenses, but what you really need is the set of offenses least likely to result in false positives. We settled on "stolen license plate" (no innocent explanation) before giving up on the endeavor entirely.
The outrage level and desire to stop tech being used this way ought to be reaching a fever pitch rather than being a kind of unfortunate documentary of how it isn't working right.
Most people don't care as long as it doesn't affect them. You'd probably have to get to 10% affected for it to start mattering. Most people are happy to be ignorant.
Facebook is flooded with Anti-Flock content and encouragement to cut them down right now. And the comments are overwhelmingly in support aside from the usual "if you have nothing to hide..." comments.
This happened while I was up in Maine - friend had purchased a used vehicle with all the paperwork earlier in the day. Both parties happy, somehow flock wrongly flagged the vehicle as "stolen" and dispatched police without any probable cause or ask from the buyer or seller. This is completely NOT ok.
Why did they need to have guns drawn and that many cops, even if the flag had been correct? A car involved in a homicide investigation doesn't mean it's even being driven by the suspect. It's not a positive ID at all
Same reason why so called "Swatting" is largely a non-issue outside the US: Police in the US are trained to respond to the hilt by default, and then lower their heavy-handed response later if they warrant it. Contrast that with most other countries, where police are trained to respond and only escalate based on the findings/as the situation unfolds.
This training is supposedly for "officer safety." But being a police officer in the US isn't even in the top-10 most dangerous fields, and the vast majority of deaths are from traffic accidents or health issues while on the job (e.g. heart attack/stroke), not gun-related. So it is more likely a cultural issue within the profession.
Devils advocate here but your argument is that they should change their safety policy because the job has great safety statistics? What if they change tactics and danger goes up?
This would probably be both expected and preferable. The way they currently act often puts the public at huge risk in exchange for officer safety. Given the police are trained professionals who chose their own occupation any added risk should fall on them.
This is a statistical question that can be checked by looking at other countries. The data is exceptionally clear that per-capita the US sees an order of magnitude more police killings than the majority of the world [1] [2] (side note, don't make Brazilian police mad) but I couldn't find an easy source for comparing per-capita police mortality rates due to violence. They are honestly pretty low in the US but the quick, un-cited, articles I found discussing it said the US rates were higher than most countries. This implies that not only do we kill more people with our policing tactics, but those tactics are leading to even higher policing deaths. So, loose loose. But, again, I don't have good sources for this. Everyone tracks police killings. Not many track police deaths because, I suspect, it isn't a dramatic number in reality.
That's not Devil's advocate, that's just foolishness. First of all their job is "protect and serve" not threaten people with summary execution. Second, their instant escalation does nothing to keep them safe. If anything it makes them less safe.
> First of all their job is "protect and serve" not threaten people with summary execution
Fun fact; apparently that's just like a local police force's motto (LAPD's originally), and not a national policy for all law enforcement in the US. While reading about this some days ago, I came across this:
> The phrase “To Protect and to Serve” originated as the motto for the Los Angeles Police Department before being adopted by departments throughout the country. The popular phrase has turned out to be quite misleading. Through a series of former decisions, the courts have affirmed that the police have no legal obligation to prevent harm except under specific circumstances [...] The Supreme Court upheld the precedent set in DeShaney and affirmed that State actors, in this case police departments, have no legal duty to protect - https://guulr.com/2021/05/10/a-review-of-to-protect-and-serv...
I think overall the motto is simply a marketing term today.
I agree with all of this, but I'm not the biggest fan of the way it gets framed. There are reasons for this beyond the common Internet sentiment that police are just evil bullies who became police solely so they can bully people. There was a shootout broadcast on live television in 1997 in North Hollywood between heavily armed and armored bank robbers and police, nearly an entire precinct and a SWAT team, in which the two robbers held out for nearly an hour in a parking lot, mostly because they so severely outgunned the police. They fired over 2000 rounds in the span of scarcely 20 minutes. It became pretty famous for being so similar to what happend in the movie Heat. This was only five years after the LA Riots, in which 63 people were murdered and the National Guard had to occupy the City of Los Angeles because the police couldn't handle the mayhem. Combining all the various criminal escalation of the 80s and 90s, major city police kind of started vowing that they might fail for other reasons, but they weren't going to fail simply because they were being outgunned by the criminals. This wasn't just police doing it of their own accord, either. Thanks to all of these events being televised and terrifying people, plenty of ordinary citizens and talking heads demanded the police do something. This wasn't like the American of today, when protesters block a street or throw a brick through a window and crazies of the Internet start talking about running them over with trucks and accusing them of rioting. These were real riots, with completely innocent people being pulled out of their cars in broad daylight and getting beaten to death with bricks on live television.
Then 9/11 happens a few years later and we end up with 1) police being trained in counterinsurgency tactics and antiterrorism response by the FBI, and 2) an ongoing military surplus program where the Army dumps all of its used weapons, armor, and armored vehicles on the police every time they upgrade.
As far as I'm personally concerned, all of these things were mistakes, but I'm not going to sit here and act like they were completely unjustified responses to nothing. My own experiences having been in the Army during the Iraq and Afghanistan years is suck it up. You volunteered for a job knowing you'd get shot at every now and again, but you're not a hostile occupying force. Your job is ultimately to serve the people, which does mean protecting them from some extremely violent criminals out there, but the bar for action should be a lot higher than it is. The overwhelming majority of the time I served, the rules of engagement stated you can't shoot unless fired upon first. It is legal to open carry in the countries we were in, so it was never acceptable to shoot someone simply because they were carrying or because you felt your life was in danger. I never understood why the police couldn't be held to the same standard.
These things ebb and flow in a series of counterveiling overreactions, but the Internet of today does a poor job of remembering just how violent the 80s and 90s actually were.
If it comes down to it, I would prefer an officer die compared to an innocent civilian mistakenly die because a cop was scared or already had their finger on the trigger. Their job is to serve the public, accepting some level of risks is part of this.
"About as risky as low paid delivery work" doesn't seem unreasonably high to me basically. Most cops die in car crashes, not being shot by potential suspects as it stands.
More police are shot and killed every year than people who were accidentally shot by police. Imagine if they didn't approach every high-risk situation with guns drawn. There would be orders of magnitude more officers killed.
This is not correct. to the best of my memory, no year since the 90s has had more than 100 or 200 total officer fatalities in the line of duty. Police routinely kill 3 people a day.
it's a pretty high bar to say that all three people the police kill every day were warranted.
most line of duty deaths involve not wearing a seatbelt.
Most police in the US don't overreact to the presence of a weapon during traffic stops or pther routine interactions. Many states could have around 10% of people carrying a gun, making armed interactions quite common.
Yes, firearms themselves present a clear and present danger by themselves. I'm sure once you make laws to control them, the firearms learn to stop being dangerous.
Why does this always have to be binary when any amount of gun control is suggested? It's simple math: if me didn't manufacture so many guns and didn't make them so readily available then there will inherently be less danger... this isn't even debatable!
That is obviously true... but also a fairy tale hypothetical, and we are in the real world. So the question is, what's the solution, right now? Not 200 years ago.
A fairy tale? The UK, Australia, and Brazil all have something to say about that claim. In developed countries, the United States is an extreme outlier so why pretend this is a completely unapproachable problem?
Our constitution itself gives us a blueprint because it states, in no uncertain terms, a "well-regulated militia"; not "each individual citizen".
Yes and in the meantime, respond with all available resources?
(pretending my parents, wife, children are police officers and posting from that perspective, but do not like taste of boot nor Flock - just thinking logical on the ground procedure accounting for broken larger system)
Try pretending your wife and children are in a car being pulled over for a drug inspection and think from that perspective. Or to have their papers checked to make sure they're not illegal aliens, whichever you prefer.
Great point, not fair for them to need a lifetime of therapy. So there’s a happy medium.
I don’t know why the first thing that comes to mind is calling in for backup and having a cop in a mascot costume get out, with body armor and a completely concealed weapon at the ready underneath. They cheerfully chat up the adult driver, say hi to the kid & give a sticker, and once they assess it’s safe they can move onto the next call while the uniformed officer comes to discuss the situation. Doesn’t help the adult much though I guess, we’d know about the concealed weapon. … btw maybe sending a drone or a robot actually came to mind first, but those solutions are uncomfortable - OK w/a million caveats maybe
(Instead of posting something so stupid I could’ve left it at I hope there’s a happy medium!)
I am currently in the countryside, outside of the USA.
I speak to folks about the USA sometimes, and guns come up. We are known for that. They think they want them. I get it... they do sound cool.
I try to explain that in the USA, the ratio of guns to people is far above 1:1. Therefore, if I was a police officer approaching any car, I would assume that the driver had a gun. That reality increases the chances of bad things happening due to human factors. "Do you really want every speeding pull-over to become a twitchy wild-west situation? Maybe your kids are in the car!"
Sometimes, this seems to wake people up to the reality of ubiquitous firearms. Please note, I am not making judgements here. These just seem like facts.
> I try to explain that in the USA, the ratio of guns to people is far above 1:1. Therefore, if I was a police officer approaching any car, I would assume that the driver had a gun.
Except that majority of households (58%) do not have a firearm:
and when it comes to individuals, it is the majority (70%) that do not own one. The numbers are 'skewed' by a few individuals that own a lot of them. Statistically you'd be more correct to assume the person in the car does not have one (unless, perhaps, they're a white guy):
Uh, if you had a 30% chance of encountering an armed individual as a cop, you'd damn well assume they were armed every time. That's one in three traffic stops, and you probably do a lot more than three as a cop. Keep in mind that number will be a lot higher depending on your locality.
If I'm ever elected God Emperor of the United States I'm going to make beating XCOM 2 a high school graduation requirement just to impart some basic statistical intuition into the population. Everyone needs the experience of having a 99% chance to hit and missing the shot, let alone 70%.
> Uh, if you had a 30% chance of encountering an armed individual as a cop, you'd damn well assume they were armed every time.
I understand that thinking (see also 'would you play Russian roulette with those odds?'), but the "(>)1:1" comments hides the underlying distribution, which I think colours how people think about the (alleged) pervasiveness of firearms in the US.
As another example of perception versus reality, most people probably don't think of Canada as 'gun country', but we're in the top ten per capita (probably because of the history/culture of hunting up here):
Whether or not the people being investigated have guns or not, won't showing up with guns up escalate the situation rather than defuse?
I would be absolutely terrified if people with guns came up to me, whether they're cops or not, and if I had a gun with me, I'd be much more likely to go for it in that scenario compared to a normal human interaction. But IDK, maybe I'm an outlier?
"Do you really want every speeding pull-over to become a wild-west situation? Maybe your kids are in the car!"
That sort of thing depends on what is "normal". Many states in the US could have around 10% of the population carrying a firearm. Armed interactions with the police are common and the vast majority are a non-issue. The typical police response to "I have a license to carry and a firearm in the vechicle" is typically "Where is it? Just don't touch it". Happens all the time.
Now, is there a statistical difference? Maybe. It's hard to say because you would need to apply the same policing culture, legal system, and population dynamics to a lesser armed country. I don't know of any good choices for that combination.
More than half the country doesn't even require a license to carry anymore, and mentioning it in those states also doesn't typically warrant anything more than an "alright just don't touch it."
> "Do you really want every speeding pull-over to become a wild-west situation? Maybe your kids are in the car!"
Why would every speeding pull-over become a wild-west situation? If possessing a gun is a right, then mere possession is no reason to suspect criminality is afoot.
What if you assume 1 in 100 are going to be dangerous? Only rarely does the driver say “I’m not going back to jail!“ when they have warrants out.
If you inspect rollercoasters I figure you could probably be pretty lackadaisical on the average inspection. If you don’t take each one deadly seriously though and there’s no way of knowing when it’s important to, maybe it comes flying off the track, so you follow your checklist each and every time without exception.
(So glad I’m not employed to or in a position where I need to own weapons.)
When in enemy territory, the military looks at civilian populations as potential enemy combatants. Police are not supposed to view everyone this way as they are in their communities and not enemy territory.
It’s both unfortunate police are trained with videos of cops approaching motorists and getting filled with bullets, and unfortunate those are real situations. I wish there were a way to guarantee officer safety so you didn’t have to tell them “domestic violence incidents and traffic stops should scare you” (most dangerous police situations IIRC).
You reminded me of a salient line in BSG:
“There’s a reason you separate the military and the police. One fights the enemy of the state, the other serves and protects the people. When the military becomes both, then the enemies of the state tend to become the people.”
While I agree with need more and better gun control, American police officers are abhorrent for a very simple reason: lack of basic training, discipline, and practically zero screening/qualification process.
Anyone can become a cop in 6 months. Not everyone is temperamentally setup to be a great cop. That, there, lies the rub.
In general cops err on the side of protecting themselves from danger and I can't fault them for that. How would you approach a car whose driver is suspected of homicide?
Obviously someone made a mistake here but I'm not sure this has anything to do with Flock. The car had an "APB" out. We want cops to pull over "wanted" cars, right?
If I were going to approach a vehicle whose driver was suspected of homicide, I would do so in a very obvious, slow, and non-threatening manner, probably without obviously being a cop. The last thing I would want to do if someone is potentially a hair trigger threat is give them a surprise and cause them to start shooting.
Police could solve a ton of these issues if they investigated before they tried to apprehend. If we're going to live in a surveillance state, use the damn surveillance for situational awareness. Right now, the cops just get a hit like "APB - Homicide" with no retrospective analysis or attempt to verify. It's essentially an unverified tip - they should use some expertise and tools to try to validate it before they commit.
But they don't, because there's no cost or penalty to them for overreacting, and there's a risk if they underreact. It's really an incentives problem. I don't know if the right spot to address it is with the individual officers or the department, but someone should have some huge liability for this mistake.
It's pretty unvarnished; there are good shootings and bad shootings, they just post everything released. There are ~2700 videos right now. Pretty big sample.
I think you might reconsider your "If I were going to approach" statement.
It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. If police treat every situation as a potentially dangerous engagement, they're actually actually increasing the likelihood that dangerous engagements occur.
I think the police should especially have guns drawn if they are pulling over a car owned by a murder suspect. It is reasonable enough to assume the driver is the suspect. If they PID the driver as not the suspect, holster up, no problem. Police always have guns drawn for any felony stop as an officer safety precaution, no reason to not when you have a high risk suspect.
The inaccuracy of our omniscient AI surveillance network isn't why I'm against it. The conclusion of this article is that we need more humans in the loop for a successful police state.
Right. A perfect surveillance state is still wrong by design.
If you dont accept this, consider the perfect surveillance state under president N, used by president N+1 given the inevitable flipflop in party control.
Well, not by free and fair election, but unless the perfect surveillance state also solves the problem of mortality, there will probably be a successor.
Possibly at a time facilitated by the security apparatus that puts the teeth in the surveillance state, because even if they theoretically have the capability autocrats rarely are interested in running their surveillance and security systems themselves, and want to spend time doing other things—which puts a lot of power in the hands to which those tedious bits are delegated.
Unfortunately, the Trump presidency has conclusively proved the "imagine if your opponent was in power" argument doesn't work. Everybody says Trump should be impeached, nobody says the office of the president should be deprived of the powers Trump used to do the things he should be impeached for.
Exactly, the abuse of power and the everyone going along with it is the issue. The supreme court and executive now function as a complete governing body without any input from congress. Every spending bill gets passed with bipartisan support, even if the Democrats need to sacrifice a few members. Meanwhile I hear very few people complaining about colonizing Venezuela.
I think that's because he doesn't have those powers. He only wields them on behalf of Congress, which has decided not to defend that which belongs to it.
>Everybody says Trump should be impeached, nobody says the office of the president should be deprived of the powers Trump used to do the things he should be impeached for.
Because when the other side gets in they're going to use those awesome powers to do "good" things. No one believes in institutions anymore.
> Everybody says Trump should be impeached, nobody says the office of the president should be deprived of the powers Trump used to do the things he should be impeached for.
that's strictly not true. at least one person doesn't believe in absolute presidential power. a lot of us believe that the president should really be an administrative head, and very limited ability to effect policy directly at all.
People believe a lot of things, especially when the other side has power. The point is that people complain about how the power is used by the other side. When power switches sides, they don't roll that power back. They pretty much always leave it in place.
no one, including me, actually believes in democracy. its just an eternal fight between the libertarian and the authoritarian. pick your side and fight as you can. thanks for disabusing me of my illusions, you know me better than I know myself.
you can mock my beliefs, you can try to convince how misguided they are, but its really outside the minimum rules of discourse to tell me what I actually believe
People say that and maybe even believe it but, even more than they believe that, the believe that the one thing the next president is going to unilaterally do is too important to let Congress deliberate on and, possibly, not do.
While I don't think inaccuracy is the ONLY reason to be against a surveillance state, it is certainly a big part of why omnipresent surveillance is always going to lead to more problems than it will solve, and can be a good way to convince people of why we should not have it even if they don't agree with us on all the other reasons it is bad.
This case is a perfect demonstration of the Base Rate Fallacy, and shows what happens when you surveil EVERYONE hoping to find a small percentage of bad people you want to stop.
Almost every car that Flock scans is a normal, law abiding citizen. Even at very high levels of accuracy, any sort of flagging it does is going to most likely be an innocent person simply because of the Base Rate Fallacy.
There are going to be a LOT more of these types of stories than there will be where they actually find a bad guy.
> we need more humans in the loop for a successful police state.
There is enormous variance in performance between police departments. Where I live now the police have been nothing but helpful. In college our neighbor was a cop and was ten times cooler than he had any obligation to be. I've also lived in places where they were nothing but a hindrance.
In fact I was once pulled over something like three times in eight weeks by one police department and given a warning each time for "speeding". The third time it happened I told them that I wasn't speeding, had dash cam evidence, and that I knew something was up given the frequency with which it was happening (probably not a wise idea but I was pretty fed up with it). Officer went to his car and came back five minutes later with some nonsensical excuse about my "VIN number [sic] not coming back properly in the database" and said I'd stop being bothered from them on. In his defense he seemed like he knew they'd made a mistake and was stumbling over his words a bit but the whole thing made absolutely no sense. No retired LEOs I've asked about it had good theories either.
It seems like this woman dealt with a more extreme, AI-powered version of the same. She has my sympathies. This won't abate until the subset of police officers who treat their community as "civilians" stop spreading such dangerous rhetoric.
For successful policing*. Which everyone should be for.
edit: Every single thing you guys have replied with are policy/law debates, not enforcement debates. I disagree with many laws on the books today. I want the laws changed, not selective/arbitrary enforcement of them.
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
A fundamental tenet of the US Constitution is that policing should be hard, lest average citizens lose their rights.
While I merely quoted the text of the Forth Amendment, the Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth are also arguably limits on policing power, making fully half the original ten amendments about limiting policing.
Unless we change the law, selective enforcement is the default. Courts have found again and again that cops have effectively no responsibility to even try to do their job. They can enforce what they want, and ignore what they don't.
So the question isn't: "Should we take away the tools these cops use to serve the public?" but "Should we give even more powerful surveillance tools to a group of unaccountable thugs who routinely abuse what they already have?"
When I was younger, in the summer, when I had a (very dark) tan and worked a night job which involved my driving around at odd hours I would get pulled over once or twice each summer for pretty flimsy reasons which equated to me matching the profile of the sort of person the police officer in question felt should be stopped/questioned.
It should be a quick bit of data work for records to be made of such stops based on duty logs (sans personally identifying information) and compare it to actual arrest/conviction rates to verify that at a minimum the perception of the police match reality. If they don't, then the local community should exert a suitable oversight to adjust police procedure.
The arrest/conviction generally follow the pulled over stopped rates. It's pretty hard to arrest/convict people you aren't stopping. These types of biases and stereo types are often pervasive within certain groups of people, including law enforcement, prosecutors, judges, and often the subset of the local community in power. If you've ever been to court (even traffic court) you'll find the word of the officer is given tremendous weight, while the word of the defendant is almost totally marginalized (no matter what your race). Even though you are "presumed innocent", the defendant has a natural incentive to lie and the officer presumably doesn't.
To top that off there is almost no "suitable oversight" of any police departments in the US of any kind, let alone by the community.
There really are no simple solutions to this, even places not plagued by bigotry and racism have major structural power problems for the average citizen.
I'm not for “successful policing”: the term is way too ambiguous and I know that many people would have definitions in mind that I would find repugnant.
Virtually everyone is, including those who oversimplify and go too far with words like "abolish". The problem we have right now is that "successful policing" is currently defined in such a way that there's almost zero accountability for those who enforce the law.
With the so-called justice system the US has got -- which is a mixture of inane proceduralism with senseless brutality -- I'm very much not for "successful policing." I would be, as I think that every person in the abstract would be, if there were comprehensive justice reform and tort reform.
Yeah, so you fit in exactly the category I described. Assuming a better system then almost no one would argue against it, but our system is so tragically flawed that many conclude we don't need a justice system at all.
Should they? There's lots of things that are currently crimes that I don't believe should be crimes, so I have no reason to support policing in at least those cases.
The problem with rats' nests of infrastructure is that it is effectively impossible to determine what wires are structurally load-bearing in unexpected ways, and there's literally nobody in a position of authority that would be even remotely trusted by a super-majority to construct a suitable replacement system from whole cloth.
Policing is enforcement of law, which inherently lags/fails to reflect reality. "100% Successful Policing" would have even larger swaths of the population in prison for use of controlled substances, which includes you if you've ever even TRIED smoking weed.
Sure, if anyone could agree on a definition of success. Police forces don't even obey legislative bodies where their definition of success and the public's definition of success differs.
Things have drifted since Robert Peel defined successful policing as "Whether the police are effective is not measured on the number of arrests, but on the lack of crime". Civil forfeiture is a good example that would horrify him.
His insistence that "The police are the public and the public are the police" doesn't really hold up in many countries anymore.
Why should I be in favor of 100% successful policing? I don't accept the premise that all de facto law should be in line with de jure law. That sort of society is unprecedented
The one official statement I have ever seen on that was when a new Base Commander was being interviewed and was asked, "Will there be a quota on the number of speeding tickets issued by the Security Police on base?" and his response was, "Absolutely, and it will be 100% --- I expect all instances of speeding and other traffic violations which endanger public safety to caught and ticketed --- such disregard of regulations and safety is incompatible with the standards of the Air Force."
Perfekt enforcement never existed and our current laws were written for a reality where that was an impossibility. Not considering second order effects is reckless IMHO.
If policing was really "successful" there will not be a single person not charged with some crime. So fuck that. There has to be a balance. Lots of laws serve anything but "the people"
“Sir, we are coming by today because we are concerned you are insufficiently supportive of our public servants in uniform. It has come to our attention that you have been disparaging some members of our law enforcement divisions to groups as large as 100 people! This is part of our new thought policing initiatives, we need everyone to support our policing efforts!”
“Yes, I work for Flock Online. We only index statements posted at publicly accessible URLs, which in principle anyone can see. We are able to profile every person at scale for a more effective community policing database. This new thought policing initiative is being carried out as a public-private partnership with the full support of your county’s representatives, as a way to preserve our community’s harmony and enhance social cohesion.”
“Please don’t be alarmed, the AI flagged you but I assure you, this is a real human in the loop wanting to talk to you about your comments. I am here because we know you’d be home around this time. Can you please come down to the station with us?”
If your notion of good/bad policing is predicated on perfect policy, your notion of good/bad policing does not survive contact with the real world.
I expect this argument is actually a poison pill for some anarchist or libertarian fantasy of “if the laws fit onto a single sheet of paper all these problems would just go away”.
I get tired of saying this but "got misidentified by the police" is somewhere between an annoyance and a humourous anecdote in most developed countries that aren't the USA where it appears to be justifiably regarded as a near death experience.
a significant portion of police training literally teaches them to fear your regular citizen. they're taught that anybody may be armed and they face the chance of death at every traffic stop and are shown dashcam footage of the worst incidents where this did happen without the probabilistic context
The system needs built in back pressure against these events. Not just "police accountability" but also a defined system were fuckups like this are expensive organizationally so that the organization has an incentive to prevent them. Something like if you're subject to detention that turns out to be unwarranted you automatically get cash straight out of the police budget. Same deal with having weapons pointed at you.
This also helps provide restitution to victims who would otherwise just be screwed out of their time and legal defense fees
He’d love a chance to have a reason to start marketing bodycams on sticks you strap over and above your back. He gets pulled over, links the cops to his timestamped cloud-attested footage from his 24/7 third-person view cam proving his innocence, and drives to the office to promote how constantly recording everyone including ourselves just makes everything safer.
There are probably thousands of easily searchable videos showing police lying about circumstances and facing no consequence. The CEO of Flock does not need to convince people to record things for proof of their point of view, the judicial system provides plenty of motivation.
There are also plenty of videos of drivers scamming others by cutting in front of them and suddenly stopping. All the way up to organized crime. Obviously, you are going to want to spend a couple hundred dollars on cameras and memory cards to prevent yourself from being a victim.
Another common one is for dog owners to be able to prove someone else’s dog attacked theirs, so there might be a chance of recouping veterinary costs.
Finally, I don’t see why all daycares should not have cameras. As a parent, I want to know that the employees handling my kids are being monitored, at least by management, if not the parents. The kids cannot speak up for themselves, why would we not want to ensure there is proof of abuse or neglect if it happened?
There needs to be a public site that surveils and broadcasts (from public support) the private and public lives of officers, government officials, and Flock/Axon. For everyone's safety.
I just spoke at my county commission meeting this morning, against these cameras, as they're debating putting 50% more cameras up across the county. The original set went up without any news coverage or fanfare.
Looks like I have two serious opponents to privacy on the commission to deal with, and the commissioner seems to at least want to end the contract. I have no idea where the other two members sit.
1) I love your argument, and I'm really impressed you were able to step up and do this. 2) It's wild that you, and everyone else, broadcast your name and address on live cam, while also arguing against the surveillance state.
Also, my sheriff's department isn't exactly known for respecting constitutional boundaries. We had the whole predictive policing national story a few years ago.
Hell, go for a stroll on Google maps in my neighborhood and maybe 1/4 of the neighbors are cops.
Is what it is. Can't be too scared to speak out when it matters.
How do you feel about people like me who own a home (multiple homes actually), have dozens of cameras around it, with license plate readers, and work with local police? As I enter retirement I plan on starting an open source style project where others can join a network of home owners that can upload video/data (with license plate number, bluetooth identifiers, etc) and have this publicly accessible and free. Cars have dashcams that we can integrate. Ring doorbells, etc. I made a fortune off of big tech at a relatively young age, now it's time to apply what I've learned toward my passion projects
I’d be happy to contribute to this effort, be it financial or technical or just uploading my video sources (home camera feeds and Teslas). I’m retired with young kids and community safety is a top priority for me. Some local police departments here (Orange County) would probably appreciate this as well.
I’ve always thought millions of camera-equipped cars on the road combined with AI/ML would be an excellent tool for catching criminals.
Find their campaign donors, that’s almost always a fun reveal. Downballot candidates don’t really expect many people to look into their funding so it’s sometimes less opaque than big name campaigns.
Way too much money gets spent on local elections in this area, and just about everybody there is a legacy name of one sort or another. I'm also in the middle of my second startup, with a toddler. I can raise some hell though.
Edit: I just (had claude) looked up how much was spent on each elected seat across the candidates, and for each of the 5 county commissioner's seats, the election spend between the candidates for that seat was an average of 250k.
When's the next election for county commissioners, where are candidates running against them likely to come from, and is there any local vibe on the issue?
Running yourself would be a whole lotta work. Fear that they'll soon be out of office should be ample incentive for the anti-privacy commissioners to suffer sudden changes of heart. Or if not - are there any energetic local reporters, who might dig up some evidence of Flock greasing palms?
Like many things in American policing, this could easily be fixed by ensuring real consequences and penalties for fuckups like this. Incentives guide actions, and there is no incentive not to keep repeating the same negligent mistake.
What officer in Milwaukee left a dead notice in the system even after there was one false positive, and what happened to him (I would be willing to bet actual money that the answer is nothing). Who set up the system in Brookfield that allows them to accidentally pull a gun on someone innocent for the exact same reason they pulled a gun on that exact same person a few days earlier.
There is no other profession where you can get away with repeated identical negligence like this. The reason for that is in almost every other profession, negligence is a liability for the parties involved. In policing it is a liability, but not for the negligent person or department.
The institution of police has run its course and is time to deprecate.
Flock cameras... I mean, look: our society, without any central organization at all, has the capacity to record nearly every crime that occurs, just by dint of our camera phones and private surveillance systems. So Flock really just gives the police more information, creating a an asymmetry with the rest of society.
Given that we can already record all that we need to, and call for help from each other at a moment's notice, what good can police do for the next few centuries? And what possible hope is there that it will outweigh the bad?
> Technology is supposed to make police work faster and safer.
Not sure I agree with the premise...
> Most of the time it does.
Citation needed
> But every so often, a computer system hiccups, and an ordinary person ends up staring down the barrel of a gun for no reason at all.
"Aww shucks, you know, bugs happen and sometimes guns get pointed at people because of them". Pardon my language but: What the actual fuck? How does a site write that with a straight face?
Just absolutely trash reporting and the site doesn't allow for copy/paste to top it off.
EDIT: And after reading further I can confirm this publication and author are not good at their jobs. The ending paragraph is absolutely absurd.
This isn't reporting, this is just saying what the police and the victim said while throwing in line at the end saying maybe we need more oversight.
This is bottom-of-the-barrel reporting and it make my blood boil for them to just shrug this off and make excuses for how the police acted here.
This is a broad, broad statement about journalism that's just... untrue. Local investigative journalism is wonderful and you should consider donating to a local newsroom to see more like it.
>> But every so often, a computer system hiccups, and an ordinary person ends up staring down the barrel of a gun for no reason at all.
> "Aww shucks, you know, bugs happen and sometimes guns get pointed at people because of them". Pardon my language but: What the actual fuck? How does a site write that with a straight face?
At the end of the day, the worst bug I could write might delete an object from a bucket. No bug I create will ever cause physical harm or death to the end user or anyone. No bug I create will ever cause a medical device to give erroneous results causing a patient to be misdiagnosed. This is by design. I don't want to ever be responsible for anything like that. Do people working on these kinds of products just dissociate their work from the potential negative effect their work could have?
Nope. Like people working in all sorts of safety-critical jobs around the world, we exercise care and (hopefully good) judgement.
I always find it interesting that everyone outside the industry focuses on the downside and completely ignores the positives like, you know, actually keeping people alive.
Regardless of the number of people kept alive, having one person not because of a bug I created would not sit well with me. Sure, you can hand wave it away by saying nobody down stream caught it either, but it wasn't their fingers that created the bug. Some people can dissociate that kind of thing. I don't want to find out if I can because I won't work in the fields that require me to need that ability. This isn't a military mindset where "if I don't get them they will get me". This is I fucked up regardless of intent or how complicated the process was. I'm happy you can and are okay with it. Medical equipment is necessary and a good thing so I can appreciate those willing to do it. Flock cameras are not necessary and while maybe not a bad thing they aren't a great thing either. Those that work on shit like Flock are no better than the waste of space and resources those that work in adtech are.
This is the most damning part of the ALPR rollout for me. If cops were successfully using this technology they'd be beating that drum loud and proud at all hours.
> If cops were successfully using this technology they'd be beating that drum loud and proud at all hours.
See also anti-terrorism efforts. "Supporters" will argue they keep quiet about their successes for opsec-type reasons or to hide their methods. But we are perfectly happy to publicise blowing fishing boats out of the water so I don't believe that for a second. These people can't help but brag.
No, these cameras are used to erode our rights and let police stalk their ex's/women/etc without consequences.
I used to know some govvies who were FBI analysts. There are more foiled terrorism plots than get reported for sure. That is the word at least at the FBI as of maybe 15 years ago.
Equally likely is that your friends were trying to make themselves sound more important and made unverifiable statements and let your existing trust relationship do the lifting.
That kid in middle school didn't have a girlfriend in Canada, and the FBI (documented on multiple occasions to have fabricated and entrapped people into "terror plots") didn't quietly stop a ton of terrorist plots.
Includes an example of a Flock camera flagging a number plate that the police pulled over, a family car SUV believing it to be stolen, but the stolen vehicle was actually a motorcycle with the same plate number but a different state!
I am sure the government will not abuse this powerful technology. I actually believe SCOTUS will eventually try to reign in although not eliminate the scope of what this tech can do under the constitution
We shouldn't be wasting time figuring out how to make these tools usable. A healthy society requires privacy and a healthy society leads to long term safety trends. Mass surveillance as a tool, fundamentally, even if perfectly implemented and used, is fundamentally flawed and unfixable since it destroys the long term health of society. That is why I am against Flock and similar technologies.
Hear hear.
That's not a Flock error. That's a law enforcement error. Flock isn't responsible for a bogus warrant in the system.
The woman probably has a good case for damages from the police department for doing it twice. That's sloppy police work.
You should read Normal Accidents. "Human error" is an excuse. It isn't really actionable. Instead of trying to fix the "human error", you must design the system such that it does not permit life-threatening errors.
Sometimes that means a tradeoff in terms of efficiency, cost, or something else. Often this tradeoff is not one that people in charge of the system are willing to make, unless they are forced to do so by a larger institution or force.
To really drive this home:
1. What steps did Flock Safety take to ensure this warrant was valid and current, and that the plate number was correctly entered?
2. What steps did the police officers take to validate the warrant against the APB hit from the camera?
3. What process is in place to ensure incorrect warrants are not entered or mistakenly kept live for longer than intended?
My guess is that the answer to all three of these is basically "none".
A human must always be held responsible, but a tool must expose its limitations to enable human judgement. I put this in the same basket as Autopilot, which already fails with its name.
I’ve seen too many cases where people intuitively trust the magic technology instead of verifying it. The tool shouldn’t not present itself as magic or AI or whatever the current term is.
1. I for one do not want "Flock Safety" in the loop for this at all. Police departments can flag a license plate in the system; that's on them. Flock is just a tool for departments to communicate what would previously have been an APB and have better detection than relying on chance sightings.
2. The vehicle was correctly identified by Flock as being the one flagged, and verified by the local PD that it was the one that was flagged. That said, they could have verified that the flag was still meaningful before converging on the vehicle.
3. This is a real problem and this is really the core of the oversight.
When the lawsuit over this is filed, it seems like 80% of the liability should attach to #3, and 20% to #2, and essentially none to #1. It's hard for me to see why Flock is even relevant to this discussion except to drum up outrage.
"But for" Flock Safety, this would never have happened. Similar to saying that Tesla is responsible for designing a safe AutoPilot even though there's still a driver in the loop who is responsible.
No, this is like saying that we should hold the fax machine liable for one PD faxing an APB to another one, or the concept of radio waves responsible when a PD dispatcher announcement for a a BOLO.
American police have no obligation to protect, serve, or tell the truth. The police steal more money than all petty thieves every year.
Qualified immunity makes accountability a distant mirage.
The police operate exactly as they are allowed and encouraged, by the system they labor within, to behave.
Your words 'sloppy' and 'error' imply that a 'careful, correct' approach fixes these ills. History and experience shows us that this hypothetical good will not be produced until laws and incentives more broadly, change.
It's a failure on all fronts. I think it's an indictment of Flock in the same way that full body scans are a scam. If you are always scanning for illnesses/crimes you will inevitably find tons and tons of false positives without ever meaningfully improving outcomes. The juice isn't worth the squeeze. Flock has been around long enough that if it had a meaningful benefit to safety, they'd be able to prove it in numbers. Instead we just have a long list of instances where it has made the world worse.
IDK. This can be a banal point.
Product, technology, implementation, police department, policing method, workflow. These aren't discreet. Incidents involve all of them.
Responsibility is on people.Technologies cannot be "found guilty." But... this isnt' a trial. There are consequences to doing policing any particular way, and that's the subject.
Doing it this way... using baby skynet for command and control has advantages, like response time. It has disadvantages, like false positives. "Law enforcement error" is technically correct, but not informative about the matter at hand. The error
How often are police actually held accountable for anything?
Likely never again with this Supreme Court.
The municipalities that employ them are held accountable (and often prevented by unions from firing them).
This behavior would not be possible at scale without Flock's technology.
There's enough blame to go around to hit Flock and the PD both.
Plenty of blame to distribute.
Flock amplifies existing bugs. Sounds like Flock is the error.
No this is bad logic. Flock is absolutely responsible and they should not be releasing or selling products that are this poorly made.
Saying that the responsibility is only on the user is extremely myopic. It's also dismissing the role Flock has in how they make and design their software.
If they can't handle this maybe they should be disbanded as a company or nationalized for better public control.
"Flock is absolutely responsible and they should not be releasing or selling products that are this poorly made."
I am not a fan of flock, nor police surveillance state, but what could they have done better here?
"Milwaukee police later admitted the alert should have been cleared out of the system days earlier, but an employee simply forgot to remove it. "
The system seemed to work as intended - that numberplate was flagged for investigation with homicide - and gave the alarm as intented, nothing more. The problem was wrong data given to them by humans.
> I am not a fan of flock, nor police surveillance state, but what could they have done better here?
We'd need to take a look at what they have access to and how they're ingesting that info. I'd start with caring greatly about false positives and not automating department onboarding.
Working with various counties I've seen situations where someone needs to tell you a specific table dump exists to get an accurate count because that's how they published deletions back in 1983. There are no standards and the people who created these systems are all dead.
> The problem was wrong data given to them by humans.
This is always a problem. It's never not a problem. The question is how Flock chooses to address the problem.
Yeah I'm confused. The title of the article is wrong. There was no "Flock Camera Glitch" according to the article.
The human in the loop did not properly delete an invalid license plate number from one of the databases the flock system checks against.
The issue issues are with:
1. Human in the loop
2. Third party database police use for homicide info
3. Police response
I don't see what the license plate reading technology has to do with any of this. It seems like the only thing working reliably.
> I am not a fan of flock, nor police surveillance state, but what could they have done better here?
Flock should stop existing. I hope people help them with that, enthusiastically.
don't worry, Axon wants to put all 90,000 CCTV cameras into a database for dragnets, too. And i'm sure there will be startups, possibly even mentioned here, that want the same thing.
There's a lot of money in cyberstalking and real stalking. see: Facebook's valuation
Legislation is how that happens. There is no other way. And these stories are what help get that ball rolling in the direction we want.
> Legislation is how that happens. There is no other way.
There are plenty of ways if you are creative enough.
Somebody could start putting Flock executive license plates in with erroneous police data.
Which would not have been acted on if those charges were ever in the flock system to begin with.
Which means they wouldn't have flagged the car and pulled it over.
A couple of days go by and the error is out of the system.
They can design a system that doesn't enable these behaviors. Good grief these excuses are pathetic. This is a purposely made system with specific outcomes, these are the outcomes.
Saying there is nothing we can do is pathetic behavior and just shows that maybe you (nor Flock) should be in charge of these things if these are the outcomes they find acceptable.
The flock cameras were clearly misused. Misuse is 100% user error.
Then you should design systems to ensure this type of user error doesn't happen. I'm sorry but this is software and all these excuses are straight up pathetic.
If you don't know how to design a system to prevent this, DON'T MAKE IT!
Good grief our industry is absolutely pathetic with these excuses.
Them is flock responsible for reducing auto thefts and should be counted too?
If a human had spotted the license plate that had been flagged with an All Points Bulletin or an Amber Alert the same outcome would have occurred. It's hard to see why Flock is even mentioned in this except for clickbait purposes. From the article, it appears that the vehicle was not misidentified; it was correctly identified but incorrectly flagged.
I parked in a mall when someone stole my plate and replaced it with one from a stolen car. The next day, my brother, brand new in the country, borrowed my car to go to his first job. He was surrounded with dozens of LAPD cars, held at gun point in the middle of a boulevard and dragged through the mud in his first day work clothes.
He tells me the only thing that saved him that day for not getting shot was not having the vocabulary to ask questions or explain himself. He was kneed, arms twisted, humiliated, then tossed in the back of a cruiser. Our car was a white infiniti. The stolen car was a black honda.
When the cops get information there is zero investigation. It's "we got him!" And act immediately. It's like having a giant llm generated PR and you just comment "lgtm" and merge, only someone's life is on the line.
This is my biggest fear for the law enforcement officers. They're becoming overdependent on these technology tools and forgetting to do actual police work. I say this as a former police officer myself.
This is exactly why we took our cameras down in nearby Oak Park in Chicagoland.
People talk online as if this is a Flock technology issue, but it only peripherally is. The core problem is that the hotlist systems states set up were never intended for real-time enforcement; there's a great deal of imprecision in them that tends not to matter in human-scale enforcement, but matters a great deal when enforcement is automated.
This distinction is important because there's basically not much Flock can do about it. The source of truth about which cars should be curbed isn't Flock's and can't be Flock's; it's core law enforcement data that belongs to and is the responsibility of the state. Companies like Flock can presumably rig up Rube Goldberg devices to double-check and cross-check hotlist data, but their goals are in tension: they have a window of just minutes to detect and interdict a car. Our police department pledged to do voice confirmations on these hits, and everyone knew that wasn't going to work.
In our specific case, we curbed more innocent vehicles than stolen ones (though not at gunpoint). In each bogus case, Illinois LEADS had left a car recorded "stolen" weeks after it had been "recovered"; "recovered" in scare-quotes because many (most?) of these cars were never stolen to begin with, but rather driven off by a relative without notice. More context on why these data sources are unsuited for real-time enforcement!
Unfortunately, every law enforcement ALPR deployment in the country is a dragnet for all curb-able offenses, from stolen cars to failure-to-appear warrants (the plurality of arrests under our system, which turned our police force into municipal debt collectors for neighboring suburbs). The starting point for mitigating this problem would be to drastically reduce the set of offenses you alert on --- and that's tricky, because your instinct is to reduce them to the most serious offenses, but what you really need is the set of offenses least likely to result in false positives. We settled on "stolen license plate" (no innocent explanation) before giving up on the endeavor entirely.
The outrage level and desire to stop tech being used this way ought to be reaching a fever pitch rather than being a kind of unfortunate documentary of how it isn't working right.
People are vandalizing and tearing down Flock cameras. There is absolutely a strong response happening right now, not just documentation.
Most people don't care as long as it doesn't affect them. You'd probably have to get to 10% affected for it to start mattering. Most people are happy to be ignorant.
Facebook is flooded with Anti-Flock content and encouragement to cut them down right now. And the comments are overwhelmingly in support aside from the usual "if you have nothing to hide..." comments.
I wish e.g. browser fingerprinting were implemented with little red-eyed robots that physically watched your screen.
Make software as creepy as you want, intangibly creepy, and there’s not enough for normal people to latch on to.
(If I could only permaban one not sure whether I would choose Facebook or Flock)
This happened while I was up in Maine - friend had purchased a used vehicle with all the paperwork earlier in the day. Both parties happy, somehow flock wrongly flagged the vehicle as "stolen" and dispatched police without any probable cause or ask from the buyer or seller. This is completely NOT ok.
Why did they need to have guns drawn and that many cops, even if the flag had been correct? A car involved in a homicide investigation doesn't mean it's even being driven by the suspect. It's not a positive ID at all
Same reason why so called "Swatting" is largely a non-issue outside the US: Police in the US are trained to respond to the hilt by default, and then lower their heavy-handed response later if they warrant it. Contrast that with most other countries, where police are trained to respond and only escalate based on the findings/as the situation unfolds.
This training is supposedly for "officer safety." But being a police officer in the US isn't even in the top-10 most dangerous fields, and the vast majority of deaths are from traffic accidents or health issues while on the job (e.g. heart attack/stroke), not gun-related. So it is more likely a cultural issue within the profession.
The problem is, this behaviour and training fails the legal standard of a presumption of innocence which should guide such.
it's not exactly a great time in American history for the 14th amendment
Devils advocate here but your argument is that they should change their safety policy because the job has great safety statistics? What if they change tactics and danger goes up?
This would probably be both expected and preferable. The way they currently act often puts the public at huge risk in exchange for officer safety. Given the police are trained professionals who chose their own occupation any added risk should fall on them.
Do we take into account the people they handle in those safety statistics? I'm pretty sure we don't.
A guy got shot after being swatted not so long ago and that would be a data point with no injuries for officers, masking the real victims.
This is a statistical question that can be checked by looking at other countries. The data is exceptionally clear that per-capita the US sees an order of magnitude more police killings than the majority of the world [1] [2] (side note, don't make Brazilian police mad) but I couldn't find an easy source for comparing per-capita police mortality rates due to violence. They are honestly pretty low in the US but the quick, un-cited, articles I found discussing it said the US rates were higher than most countries. This implies that not only do we kill more people with our policing tactics, but those tactics are leading to even higher policing deaths. So, loose loose. But, again, I don't have good sources for this. Everyone tracks police killings. Not many track police deaths because, I suspect, it isn't a dramatic number in reality.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_with_annual_...
[2] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/police-ki...
Then that danger is going to have to be balanced against the reduced danger to the general public
That's not Devil's advocate, that's just foolishness. First of all their job is "protect and serve" not threaten people with summary execution. Second, their instant escalation does nothing to keep them safe. If anything it makes them less safe.
> First of all their job is "protect and serve" not threaten people with summary execution
Fun fact; apparently that's just like a local police force's motto (LAPD's originally), and not a national policy for all law enforcement in the US. While reading about this some days ago, I came across this:
> The phrase “To Protect and to Serve” originated as the motto for the Los Angeles Police Department before being adopted by departments throughout the country. The popular phrase has turned out to be quite misleading. Through a series of former decisions, the courts have affirmed that the police have no legal obligation to prevent harm except under specific circumstances [...] The Supreme Court upheld the precedent set in DeShaney and affirmed that State actors, in this case police departments, have no legal duty to protect - https://guulr.com/2021/05/10/a-review-of-to-protect-and-serv...
I think overall the motto is simply a marketing term today.
I agree with all of this, but I'm not the biggest fan of the way it gets framed. There are reasons for this beyond the common Internet sentiment that police are just evil bullies who became police solely so they can bully people. There was a shootout broadcast on live television in 1997 in North Hollywood between heavily armed and armored bank robbers and police, nearly an entire precinct and a SWAT team, in which the two robbers held out for nearly an hour in a parking lot, mostly because they so severely outgunned the police. They fired over 2000 rounds in the span of scarcely 20 minutes. It became pretty famous for being so similar to what happend in the movie Heat. This was only five years after the LA Riots, in which 63 people were murdered and the National Guard had to occupy the City of Los Angeles because the police couldn't handle the mayhem. Combining all the various criminal escalation of the 80s and 90s, major city police kind of started vowing that they might fail for other reasons, but they weren't going to fail simply because they were being outgunned by the criminals. This wasn't just police doing it of their own accord, either. Thanks to all of these events being televised and terrifying people, plenty of ordinary citizens and talking heads demanded the police do something. This wasn't like the American of today, when protesters block a street or throw a brick through a window and crazies of the Internet start talking about running them over with trucks and accusing them of rioting. These were real riots, with completely innocent people being pulled out of their cars in broad daylight and getting beaten to death with bricks on live television.
Then 9/11 happens a few years later and we end up with 1) police being trained in counterinsurgency tactics and antiterrorism response by the FBI, and 2) an ongoing military surplus program where the Army dumps all of its used weapons, armor, and armored vehicles on the police every time they upgrade.
As far as I'm personally concerned, all of these things were mistakes, but I'm not going to sit here and act like they were completely unjustified responses to nothing. My own experiences having been in the Army during the Iraq and Afghanistan years is suck it up. You volunteered for a job knowing you'd get shot at every now and again, but you're not a hostile occupying force. Your job is ultimately to serve the people, which does mean protecting them from some extremely violent criminals out there, but the bar for action should be a lot higher than it is. The overwhelming majority of the time I served, the rules of engagement stated you can't shoot unless fired upon first. It is legal to open carry in the countries we were in, so it was never acceptable to shoot someone simply because they were carrying or because you felt your life was in danger. I never understood why the police couldn't be held to the same standard.
These things ebb and flow in a series of counterveiling overreactions, but the Internet of today does a poor job of remembering just how violent the 80s and 90s actually were.
> But being a police officer in the US isn't even in the top-10 most dangerous fields
You don't think that has something to do with the exact policies you are objecting to? They call them "high risk stops" for a reason.
You'd have a point if any other western country had police work in their top-10 most dangerous fields, but they don't.
Like Mexico, our immediate neighbor to the south?
Policing in Mexico is ~100 deaths per 100,000 compared to 11.3 deaths per 100,000 in the US.
100 deaths/100,000 is on par with logging workers in the US, which is the #1 most dangerous field.
Do better research.
> Police in the US are trained to respond to the hilt by default, and then lower their heavy-handed response later if they warrant it.
Citation needed.
Police in the US should respond to the hilt because the likelihood of the suspect being armed is significantly higher than any other country...
They still die less often than pizza delivery drivers even with that. I think they could eat the extra risk in traffic stops.
I would prefer less people die, actually.
If it comes down to it, I would prefer an officer die compared to an innocent civilian mistakenly die because a cop was scared or already had their finger on the trigger. Their job is to serve the public, accepting some level of risks is part of this.
"About as risky as low paid delivery work" doesn't seem unreasonably high to me basically. Most cops die in car crashes, not being shot by potential suspects as it stands.
More police are shot and killed every year than people who were accidentally shot by police. Imagine if they didn't approach every high-risk situation with guns drawn. There would be orders of magnitude more officers killed.
This is not correct. to the best of my memory, no year since the 90s has had more than 100 or 200 total officer fatalities in the line of duty. Police routinely kill 3 people a day.
it's a pretty high bar to say that all three people the police kill every day were warranted.
most line of duty deaths involve not wearing a seatbelt.
can you show me those numbers please
Most police in the US don't overreact to the presence of a weapon during traffic stops or pther routine interactions. Many states could have around 10% of people carrying a gun, making armed interactions quite common.
I completely agree. My point was that they should always be prepared for the worst.
If it’s so dangerous, perhaps we should find a way to better control the danger of firearms.
Yes, firearms themselves present a clear and present danger by themselves. I'm sure once you make laws to control them, the firearms learn to stop being dangerous.
Why does this always have to be binary when any amount of gun control is suggested? It's simple math: if me didn't manufacture so many guns and didn't make them so readily available then there will inherently be less danger... this isn't even debatable!
That is obviously true... but also a fairy tale hypothetical, and we are in the real world. So the question is, what's the solution, right now? Not 200 years ago.
A fairy tale? The UK, Australia, and Brazil all have something to say about that claim. In developed countries, the United States is an extreme outlier so why pretend this is a completely unapproachable problem?
Our constitution itself gives us a blueprint because it states, in no uncertain terms, a "well-regulated militia"; not "each individual citizen".
I notice you put a semicolon there. You forgot to put the rest:
> the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
what does "the people" mean to you?
Yes and in the meantime, respond with all available resources?
(pretending my parents, wife, children are police officers and posting from that perspective, but do not like taste of boot nor Flock - just thinking logical on the ground procedure accounting for broken larger system)
Try pretending your wife and children are in a car being pulled over for a drug inspection and think from that perspective. Or to have their papers checked to make sure they're not illegal aliens, whichever you prefer.
Great point, not fair for them to need a lifetime of therapy. So there’s a happy medium.
I don’t know why the first thing that comes to mind is calling in for backup and having a cop in a mascot costume get out, with body armor and a completely concealed weapon at the ready underneath. They cheerfully chat up the adult driver, say hi to the kid & give a sticker, and once they assess it’s safe they can move onto the next call while the uniformed officer comes to discuss the situation. Doesn’t help the adult much though I guess, we’d know about the concealed weapon. … btw maybe sending a drone or a robot actually came to mind first, but those solutions are uncomfortable - OK w/a million caveats maybe
(Instead of posting something so stupid I could’ve left it at I hope there’s a happy medium!)
I am currently in the countryside, outside of the USA.
I speak to folks about the USA sometimes, and guns come up. We are known for that. They think they want them. I get it... they do sound cool.
I try to explain that in the USA, the ratio of guns to people is far above 1:1. Therefore, if I was a police officer approaching any car, I would assume that the driver had a gun. That reality increases the chances of bad things happening due to human factors. "Do you really want every speeding pull-over to become a twitchy wild-west situation? Maybe your kids are in the car!"
Sometimes, this seems to wake people up to the reality of ubiquitous firearms. Please note, I am not making judgements here. These just seem like facts.
> I try to explain that in the USA, the ratio of guns to people is far above 1:1. Therefore, if I was a police officer approaching any car, I would assume that the driver had a gun.
Except that majority of households (58%) do not have a firearm:
* https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/07/24/key-facts...
and when it comes to individuals, it is the majority (70%) that do not own one. The numbers are 'skewed' by a few individuals that own a lot of them. Statistically you'd be more correct to assume the person in the car does not have one (unless, perhaps, they're a white guy):
* https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2017/06/22/the-dem...
Uh, if you had a 30% chance of encountering an armed individual as a cop, you'd damn well assume they were armed every time. That's one in three traffic stops, and you probably do a lot more than three as a cop. Keep in mind that number will be a lot higher depending on your locality.
If I'm ever elected God Emperor of the United States I'm going to make beating XCOM 2 a high school graduation requirement just to impart some basic statistical intuition into the population. Everyone needs the experience of having a 99% chance to hit and missing the shot, let alone 70%.
> Uh, if you had a 30% chance of encountering an armed individual as a cop, you'd damn well assume they were armed every time.
I understand that thinking (see also 'would you play Russian roulette with those odds?'), but the "(>)1:1" comments hides the underlying distribution, which I think colours how people think about the (alleged) pervasiveness of firearms in the US.
As another example of perception versus reality, most people probably don't think of Canada as 'gun country', but we're in the top ten per capita (probably because of the history/culture of hunting up here):
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated_number_of_civilian_g...
And if you're going to teach people about odds and statistics, perhaps it will help people understand that guns tend to make people's homes less safe:
* https://www.rand.org/pubs/commentary/2013/03/guns-in-homes-a...
Whether or not the people being investigated have guns or not, won't showing up with guns up escalate the situation rather than defuse?
I would be absolutely terrified if people with guns came up to me, whether they're cops or not, and if I had a gun with me, I'd be much more likely to go for it in that scenario compared to a normal human interaction. But IDK, maybe I'm an outlier?
"Do you really want every speeding pull-over to become a wild-west situation? Maybe your kids are in the car!"
That sort of thing depends on what is "normal". Many states in the US could have around 10% of the population carrying a firearm. Armed interactions with the police are common and the vast majority are a non-issue. The typical police response to "I have a license to carry and a firearm in the vechicle" is typically "Where is it? Just don't touch it". Happens all the time.
Now, is there a statistical difference? Maybe. It's hard to say because you would need to apply the same policing culture, legal system, and population dynamics to a lesser armed country. I don't know of any good choices for that combination.
More than half the country doesn't even require a license to carry anymore, and mentioning it in those states also doesn't typically warrant anything more than an "alright just don't touch it."
> "Do you really want every speeding pull-over to become a wild-west situation? Maybe your kids are in the car!"
Why would every speeding pull-over become a wild-west situation? If possessing a gun is a right, then mere possession is no reason to suspect criminality is afoot.
What if you assume 1 in 100 are going to be dangerous? Only rarely does the driver say “I’m not going back to jail!“ when they have warrants out.
If you inspect rollercoasters I figure you could probably be pretty lackadaisical on the average inspection. If you don’t take each one deadly seriously though and there’s no way of knowing when it’s important to, maybe it comes flying off the track, so you follow your checklist each and every time without exception.
(So glad I’m not employed to or in a position where I need to own weapons.)
When in enemy territory, the military looks at civilian populations as potential enemy combatants. Police are not supposed to view everyone this way as they are in their communities and not enemy territory.
It’s both unfortunate police are trained with videos of cops approaching motorists and getting filled with bullets, and unfortunate those are real situations. I wish there were a way to guarantee officer safety so you didn’t have to tell them “domestic violence incidents and traffic stops should scare you” (most dangerous police situations IIRC).
You reminded me of a salient line in BSG:
-Adama, Battlestar GalacticaThat is indeed what I had in mind when writing my comment!
While I agree with need more and better gun control, American police officers are abhorrent for a very simple reason: lack of basic training, discipline, and practically zero screening/qualification process.
Anyone can become a cop in 6 months. Not everyone is temperamentally setup to be a great cop. That, there, lies the rub.
What if we just didn't have as many police interactions? They love pulling people over because it let's them run everyone for warrants.
We don't the details of the flag.
In general cops err on the side of protecting themselves from danger and I can't fault them for that. How would you approach a car whose driver is suspected of homicide?
Obviously someone made a mistake here but I'm not sure this has anything to do with Flock. The car had an "APB" out. We want cops to pull over "wanted" cars, right?
If I were going to approach a vehicle whose driver was suspected of homicide, I would do so in a very obvious, slow, and non-threatening manner, probably without obviously being a cop. The last thing I would want to do if someone is potentially a hair trigger threat is give them a surprise and cause them to start shooting.
Police could solve a ton of these issues if they investigated before they tried to apprehend. If we're going to live in a surveillance state, use the damn surveillance for situational awareness. Right now, the cops just get a hit like "APB - Homicide" with no retrospective analysis or attempt to verify. It's essentially an unverified tip - they should use some expertise and tools to try to validate it before they commit.
But they don't, because there's no cost or penalty to them for overreacting, and there's a risk if they underreact. It's really an incentives problem. I don't know if the right spot to address it is with the individual officers or the department, but someone should have some huge liability for this mistake.
I invite you to spend a few hours watching this channel:
https://www.youtube.com/@PoliceActivity
It's pretty unvarnished; there are good shootings and bad shootings, they just post everything released. There are ~2700 videos right now. Pretty big sample.
I think you might reconsider your "If I were going to approach" statement.
It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. If police treat every situation as a potentially dangerous engagement, they're actually actually increasing the likelihood that dangerous engagements occur.
I agree, but "this car was used in a homicide" is pretty unambiguously a high-risk stop.
That's what their training requires and if they don't engage that way, they will be reprimanded.
Not to mention fake and stolen plates are a thing.
We've given a bunch of people hammers and impunity for using the hammers and ask why they keep hitting people with them.
The process is the punishment
I think the police should especially have guns drawn if they are pulling over a car owned by a murder suspect. It is reasonable enough to assume the driver is the suspect. If they PID the driver as not the suspect, holster up, no problem. Police always have guns drawn for any felony stop as an officer safety precaution, no reason to not when you have a high risk suspect.
Police were like this before glitches
I agree. Legal protections and policy changes would be needed to reduce incidents like this, regardless of mass surveillance.
The inaccuracy of our omniscient AI surveillance network isn't why I'm against it. The conclusion of this article is that we need more humans in the loop for a successful police state.
Right. A perfect surveillance state is still wrong by design.
If you dont accept this, consider the perfect surveillance state under president N, used by president N+1 given the inevitable flipflop in party control.
In the scenario where president n achieves a perfect surveillance state, I don’t see us getting a president n+1.
Well, not by free and fair election, but unless the perfect surveillance state also solves the problem of mortality, there will probably be a successor.
Possibly at a time facilitated by the security apparatus that puts the teeth in the surveillance state, because even if they theoretically have the capability autocrats rarely are interested in running their surveillance and security systems themselves, and want to spend time doing other things—which puts a lot of power in the hands to which those tedious bits are delegated.
Also correct!
The Christians have to vote just once more, right?
Unfortunately, the Trump presidency has conclusively proved the "imagine if your opponent was in power" argument doesn't work. Everybody says Trump should be impeached, nobody says the office of the president should be deprived of the powers Trump used to do the things he should be impeached for.
Exactly, the abuse of power and the everyone going along with it is the issue. The supreme court and executive now function as a complete governing body without any input from congress. Every spending bill gets passed with bipartisan support, even if the Democrats need to sacrifice a few members. Meanwhile I hear very few people complaining about colonizing Venezuela.
I think that's because he doesn't have those powers. He only wields them on behalf of Congress, which has decided not to defend that which belongs to it.
>Everybody says Trump should be impeached, nobody says the office of the president should be deprived of the powers Trump used to do the things he should be impeached for.
Because when the other side gets in they're going to use those awesome powers to do "good" things. No one believes in institutions anymore.
> Everybody says Trump should be impeached, nobody says the office of the president should be deprived of the powers Trump used to do the things he should be impeached for.
I've been shouting this from the mountaintops.
Not that many people on the mountain. Shout it at the McDonalds. Of course, you'll be arrested.
that's strictly not true. at least one person doesn't believe in absolute presidential power. a lot of us believe that the president should really be an administrative head, and very limited ability to effect policy directly at all.
People believe a lot of things, especially when the other side has power. The point is that people complain about how the power is used by the other side. When power switches sides, they don't roll that power back. They pretty much always leave it in place.
no one, including me, actually believes in democracy. its just an eternal fight between the libertarian and the authoritarian. pick your side and fight as you can. thanks for disabusing me of my illusions, you know me better than I know myself.
you can mock my beliefs, you can try to convince how misguided they are, but its really outside the minimum rules of discourse to tell me what I actually believe
Now I feel stupid for writing my comment, because complaining about your use of "no one" would make me a hypocrite.
People say that and maybe even believe it but, even more than they believe that, the believe that the one thing the next president is going to unilaterally do is too important to let Congress deliberate on and, possibly, not do.
While I don't think inaccuracy is the ONLY reason to be against a surveillance state, it is certainly a big part of why omnipresent surveillance is always going to lead to more problems than it will solve, and can be a good way to convince people of why we should not have it even if they don't agree with us on all the other reasons it is bad.
This case is a perfect demonstration of the Base Rate Fallacy, and shows what happens when you surveil EVERYONE hoping to find a small percentage of bad people you want to stop.
Almost every car that Flock scans is a normal, law abiding citizen. Even at very high levels of accuracy, any sort of flagging it does is going to most likely be an innocent person simply because of the Base Rate Fallacy.
There are going to be a LOT more of these types of stories than there will be where they actually find a bad guy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy
> we need more humans in the loop for a successful police state.
There is enormous variance in performance between police departments. Where I live now the police have been nothing but helpful. In college our neighbor was a cop and was ten times cooler than he had any obligation to be. I've also lived in places where they were nothing but a hindrance.
In fact I was once pulled over something like three times in eight weeks by one police department and given a warning each time for "speeding". The third time it happened I told them that I wasn't speeding, had dash cam evidence, and that I knew something was up given the frequency with which it was happening (probably not a wise idea but I was pretty fed up with it). Officer went to his car and came back five minutes later with some nonsensical excuse about my "VIN number [sic] not coming back properly in the database" and said I'd stop being bothered from them on. In his defense he seemed like he knew they'd made a mistake and was stumbling over his words a bit but the whole thing made absolutely no sense. No retired LEOs I've asked about it had good theories either.
It seems like this woman dealt with a more extreme, AI-powered version of the same. She has my sympathies. This won't abate until the subset of police officers who treat their community as "civilians" stop spreading such dangerous rhetoric.
Brookfield's police chief has defended his officer's, saying they responded appropriately given the information in front of them.
This meant there were no humans in the loop.
arguably you could say we always could use more humans in the loop even when it is only humans in the loop.
You mean the humans that are stalking their ex-girlfriend’s and ex-boyfriend’s? You are more of them between AI and us?
If AI isn’t working, why use it at all?
as if the other, 20th century surveillance states were so accurate and effective
For successful policing*. Which everyone should be for.
edit: Every single thing you guys have replied with are policy/law debates, not enforcement debates. I disagree with many laws on the books today. I want the laws changed, not selective/arbitrary enforcement of them.
While I merely quoted the text of the Forth Amendment, the Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth are also arguably limits on policing power, making fully half the original ten amendments about limiting policing.
I invite anyone and everyone to peruse the contents of https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/
Things not protected by the constitution:
* Driving a stolen car
* Driving a car used in a recent homicide
Unless we change the law, selective enforcement is the default. Courts have found again and again that cops have effectively no responsibility to even try to do their job. They can enforce what they want, and ignore what they don't.
So the question isn't: "Should we take away the tools these cops use to serve the public?" but "Should we give even more powerful surveillance tools to a group of unaccountable thugs who routinely abuse what they already have?"
When I was younger, in the summer, when I had a (very dark) tan and worked a night job which involved my driving around at odd hours I would get pulled over once or twice each summer for pretty flimsy reasons which equated to me matching the profile of the sort of person the police officer in question felt should be stopped/questioned.
It should be a quick bit of data work for records to be made of such stops based on duty logs (sans personally identifying information) and compare it to actual arrest/conviction rates to verify that at a minimum the perception of the police match reality. If they don't, then the local community should exert a suitable oversight to adjust police procedure.
The arrest/conviction generally follow the pulled over stopped rates. It's pretty hard to arrest/convict people you aren't stopping. These types of biases and stereo types are often pervasive within certain groups of people, including law enforcement, prosecutors, judges, and often the subset of the local community in power. If you've ever been to court (even traffic court) you'll find the word of the officer is given tremendous weight, while the word of the defendant is almost totally marginalized (no matter what your race). Even though you are "presumed innocent", the defendant has a natural incentive to lie and the officer presumably doesn't.
To top that off there is almost no "suitable oversight" of any police departments in the US of any kind, let alone by the community.
There really are no simple solutions to this, even places not plagued by bigotry and racism have major structural power problems for the average citizen.
I'm not for “successful policing”: the term is way too ambiguous and I know that many people would have definitions in mind that I would find repugnant.
Virtually everyone is, including those who oversimplify and go too far with words like "abolish". The problem we have right now is that "successful policing" is currently defined in such a way that there's almost zero accountability for those who enforce the law.
With the so-called justice system the US has got -- which is a mixture of inane proceduralism with senseless brutality -- I'm very much not for "successful policing." I would be, as I think that every person in the abstract would be, if there were comprehensive justice reform and tort reform.
Yeah, so you fit in exactly the category I described. Assuming a better system then almost no one would argue against it, but our system is so tragically flawed that many conclude we don't need a justice system at all.
Go get successfully policed and then come back here.
Should they? There's lots of things that are currently crimes that I don't believe should be crimes, so I have no reason to support policing in at least those cases.
Yeah imagine a purely efficient state that actively enforced all written laws. We would need to rescind a lot of them.
Yes, this sounds amazing. Enforce all the laws and rescind the bad ones! There are tons!
Unfortunately we’re not real good at rescinding bad laws, so you just get tyranny (and a lot of mysteriously voided tickets for cops and politicians)
Exactly:
The problem with rats' nests of infrastructure is that it is effectively impossible to determine what wires are structurally load-bearing in unexpected ways, and there's literally nobody in a position of authority that would be even remotely trusted by a super-majority to construct a suitable replacement system from whole cloth.
Policing is enforcement of law, which inherently lags/fails to reflect reality. "100% Successful Policing" would have even larger swaths of the population in prison for use of controlled substances, which includes you if you've ever even TRIED smoking weed.
Sure, if anyone could agree on a definition of success. Police forces don't even obey legislative bodies where their definition of success and the public's definition of success differs.
Things have drifted since Robert Peel defined successful policing as "Whether the police are effective is not measured on the number of arrests, but on the lack of crime". Civil forfeiture is a good example that would horrify him.
His insistence that "The police are the public and the public are the police" doesn't really hold up in many countries anymore.
Why should I be in favor of 100% successful policing? I don't accept the premise that all de facto law should be in line with de jure law. That sort of society is unprecedented
The one official statement I have ever seen on that was when a new Base Commander was being interviewed and was asked, "Will there be a quota on the number of speeding tickets issued by the Security Police on base?" and his response was, "Absolutely, and it will be 100% --- I expect all instances of speeding and other traffic violations which endanger public safety to caught and ticketed --- such disregard of regulations and safety is incompatible with the standards of the Air Force."
And that's fine (ish) when the centralized authoritarian socialist organization consists solely of members who joined voluntarily.
Maybe there should be less de jure law then...
Successful policing looks like directing funding away from police and towards solutions better tailored to problems they do a poor job of handling.
Perfekt enforcement never existed and our current laws were written for a reality where that was an impossibility. Not considering second order effects is reckless IMHO.
Turns out if you let private company do it, then its totally possible and constitutional.
> I want the laws changed, not selective/arbitrary enforcement of them.
Flock does not force cops to be less arbitrary/selective any more than bodycams do.
If policing was really "successful" there will not be a single person not charged with some crime. So fuck that. There has to be a balance. Lots of laws serve anything but "the people"
Or else!
“Sir, we are coming by today because we are concerned you are insufficiently supportive of our public servants in uniform. It has come to our attention that you have been disparaging some members of our law enforcement divisions to groups as large as 100 people! This is part of our new thought policing initiatives, we need everyone to support our policing efforts!”
“Yes, I work for Flock Online. We only index statements posted at publicly accessible URLs, which in principle anyone can see. We are able to profile every person at scale for a more effective community policing database. This new thought policing initiative is being carried out as a public-private partnership with the full support of your county’s representatives, as a way to preserve our community’s harmony and enhance social cohesion.”
“Please don’t be alarmed, the AI flagged you but I assure you, this is a real human in the loop wanting to talk to you about your comments. I am here because we know you’d be home around this time. Can you please come down to the station with us?”
This is not an issue with bad policing, but bad policy.
If your notion of good/bad policing is predicated on perfect policy, your notion of good/bad policing does not survive contact with the real world.
I expect this argument is actually a poison pill for some anarchist or libertarian fantasy of “if the laws fit onto a single sheet of paper all these problems would just go away”.
The policy is: Everyone should be for successful policing.
We just want the enforcement of this policy to be maximally successful! What’s wrong with that :-)
I get tired of saying this but "got misidentified by the police" is somewhere between an annoyance and a humourous anecdote in most developed countries that aren't the USA where it appears to be justifiably regarded as a near death experience.
a significant portion of police training literally teaches them to fear your regular citizen. they're taught that anybody may be armed and they face the chance of death at every traffic stop and are shown dashcam footage of the worst incidents where this did happen without the probabilistic context
see https://revealnews.org/podcast/what-cops-arent-learning/
To touch on the probabilities, they're probably more likely to die getting side swiped by a car, than getting shot by the person they're stopping.
Community policing, it aint.
I watch a lot of body cam stuff. The number of videos of police executions starting with "flock cameras identified..." is rising rapidly
The system needs built in back pressure against these events. Not just "police accountability" but also a defined system were fuckups like this are expensive organizationally so that the organization has an incentive to prevent them. Something like if you're subject to detention that turns out to be unwarranted you automatically get cash straight out of the police budget. Same deal with having weapons pointed at you.
This also helps provide restitution to victims who would otherwise just be screwed out of their time and legal defense fees
Add the flock CEOs license plate to the system, lets see how he likes it
He’d love a chance to have a reason to start marketing bodycams on sticks you strap over and above your back. He gets pulled over, links the cops to his timestamped cloud-attested footage from his 24/7 third-person view cam proving his innocence, and drives to the office to promote how constantly recording everyone including ourselves just makes everything safer.
There are probably thousands of easily searchable videos showing police lying about circumstances and facing no consequence. The CEO of Flock does not need to convince people to record things for proof of their point of view, the judicial system provides plenty of motivation.
There are also plenty of videos of drivers scamming others by cutting in front of them and suddenly stopping. All the way up to organized crime. Obviously, you are going to want to spend a couple hundred dollars on cameras and memory cards to prevent yourself from being a victim.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/04/20/the-car-crash-...
Another common one is for dog owners to be able to prove someone else’s dog attacked theirs, so there might be a chance of recouping veterinary costs.
Finally, I don’t see why all daycares should not have cameras. As a parent, I want to know that the employees handling my kids are being monitored, at least by management, if not the parents. The kids cannot speak up for themselves, why would we not want to ensure there is proof of abuse or neglect if it happened?
There needs to be a public site that surveils and broadcasts (from public support) the private and public lives of officers, government officials, and Flock/Axon. For everyone's safety.
It's probably in there with a note to let him go free.
Some surveillance is necessary for justice, but it is very readily abused in the US.
I just spoke at my county commission meeting this morning, against these cameras, as they're debating putting 50% more cameras up across the county. The original set went up without any news coverage or fanfare.
https://www.youtube.com/live/1OmEmpL-7qY?t=720&is=z_mb9ZEVCs...
Looks like I have two serious opponents to privacy on the commission to deal with, and the commissioner seems to at least want to end the contract. I have no idea where the other two members sit.
1) I love your argument, and I'm really impressed you were able to step up and do this. 2) It's wild that you, and everyone else, broadcast your name and address on live cam, while also arguing against the surveillance state.
Thems the rules.
Also, my sheriff's department isn't exactly known for respecting constitutional boundaries. We had the whole predictive policing national story a few years ago.
Hell, go for a stroll on Google maps in my neighborhood and maybe 1/4 of the neighbors are cops.
Is what it is. Can't be too scared to speak out when it matters.
How do you feel about people like me who own a home (multiple homes actually), have dozens of cameras around it, with license plate readers, and work with local police? As I enter retirement I plan on starting an open source style project where others can join a network of home owners that can upload video/data (with license plate number, bluetooth identifiers, etc) and have this publicly accessible and free. Cars have dashcams that we can integrate. Ring doorbells, etc. I made a fortune off of big tech at a relatively young age, now it's time to apply what I've learned toward my passion projects
I’d be happy to contribute to this effort, be it financial or technical or just uploading my video sources (home camera feeds and Teslas). I’m retired with young kids and community safety is a top priority for me. Some local police departments here (Orange County) would probably appreciate this as well.
I’ve always thought millions of camera-equipped cars on the road combined with AI/ML would be an excellent tool for catching criminals.
Find their campaign donors, that’s almost always a fun reveal. Downballot candidates don’t really expect many people to look into their funding so it’s sometimes less opaque than big name campaigns.
How do you find the donors?
Have you thought about running against them? Go get the paperwork, stand out in front of the post office and collect signatures.
Way too much money gets spent on local elections in this area, and just about everybody there is a legacy name of one sort or another. I'm also in the middle of my second startup, with a toddler. I can raise some hell though.
Edit: I just (had claude) looked up how much was spent on each elected seat across the candidates, and for each of the 5 county commissioner's seats, the election spend between the candidates for that seat was an average of 250k.
The wonderful lady in pink (salmon?), Mrs Starkey, has a bit of sway in the area: https://photos.app.goo.gl/WBPRWMduJ15k9Aj46
Hand out pamphlets at the voting station with your name and, "I'll get Flock cameras removed." That's probably all you need to do.
It depends on where you live, but some local offices are decided by as little as a few dozen voters.
When's the next election for county commissioners, where are candidates running against them likely to come from, and is there any local vibe on the issue?
Running yourself would be a whole lotta work. Fear that they'll soon be out of office should be ample incentive for the anti-privacy commissioners to suffer sudden changes of heart. Or if not - are there any energetic local reporters, who might dig up some evidence of Flock greasing palms?
Like many things in American policing, this could easily be fixed by ensuring real consequences and penalties for fuckups like this. Incentives guide actions, and there is no incentive not to keep repeating the same negligent mistake.
What officer in Milwaukee left a dead notice in the system even after there was one false positive, and what happened to him (I would be willing to bet actual money that the answer is nothing). Who set up the system in Brookfield that allows them to accidentally pull a gun on someone innocent for the exact same reason they pulled a gun on that exact same person a few days earlier.
There is no other profession where you can get away with repeated identical negligence like this. The reason for that is in almost every other profession, negligence is a liability for the parties involved. In policing it is a liability, but not for the negligent person or department.
The FUTURE is Glitch.
Creeping normality
Literally worse than the mass surveillance system in China lmao
The institution of police has run its course and is time to deprecate.
Flock cameras... I mean, look: our society, without any central organization at all, has the capacity to record nearly every crime that occurs, just by dint of our camera phones and private surveillance systems. So Flock really just gives the police more information, creating a an asymmetry with the rest of society.
Given that we can already record all that we need to, and call for help from each other at a moment's notice, what good can police do for the next few centuries? And what possible hope is there that it will outweigh the bad?
> Technology is supposed to make police work faster and safer.
Not sure I agree with the premise...
> Most of the time it does.
Citation needed
> But every so often, a computer system hiccups, and an ordinary person ends up staring down the barrel of a gun for no reason at all.
"Aww shucks, you know, bugs happen and sometimes guns get pointed at people because of them". Pardon my language but: What the actual fuck? How does a site write that with a straight face?
Just absolutely trash reporting and the site doesn't allow for copy/paste to top it off.
EDIT: And after reading further I can confirm this publication and author are not good at their jobs. The ending paragraph is absolutely absurd.
This isn't reporting, this is just saying what the police and the victim said while throwing in line at the end saying maybe we need more oversight.
This is bottom-of-the-barrel reporting and it make my blood boil for them to just shrug this off and make excuses for how the police acted here.
Journalists have given up except for organizations like bellingcat, lighthouse reports, etc. that focus on data based reporting instead of narrative.
This is a broad, broad statement about journalism that's just... untrue. Local investigative journalism is wonderful and you should consider donating to a local newsroom to see more like it.
>> But every so often, a computer system hiccups, and an ordinary person ends up staring down the barrel of a gun for no reason at all.
> "Aww shucks, you know, bugs happen and sometimes guns get pointed at people because of them". Pardon my language but: What the actual fuck? How does a site write that with a straight face?
At the end of the day, the worst bug I could write might delete an object from a bucket. No bug I create will ever cause physical harm or death to the end user or anyone. No bug I create will ever cause a medical device to give erroneous results causing a patient to be misdiagnosed. This is by design. I don't want to ever be responsible for anything like that. Do people working on these kinds of products just dissociate their work from the potential negative effect their work could have?
Nope. Like people working in all sorts of safety-critical jobs around the world, we exercise care and (hopefully good) judgement.
I always find it interesting that everyone outside the industry focuses on the downside and completely ignores the positives like, you know, actually keeping people alive.
Regardless of the number of people kept alive, having one person not because of a bug I created would not sit well with me. Sure, you can hand wave it away by saying nobody down stream caught it either, but it wasn't their fingers that created the bug. Some people can dissociate that kind of thing. I don't want to find out if I can because I won't work in the fields that require me to need that ability. This isn't a military mindset where "if I don't get them they will get me". This is I fucked up regardless of intent or how complicated the process was. I'm happy you can and are okay with it. Medical equipment is necessary and a good thing so I can appreciate those willing to do it. Flock cameras are not necessary and while maybe not a bad thing they aren't a great thing either. Those that work on shit like Flock are no better than the waste of space and resources those that work in adtech are.
> > Most of the time it does.
> Citation needed
This is the most damning part of the ALPR rollout for me. If cops were successfully using this technology they'd be beating that drum loud and proud at all hours.
> If cops were successfully using this technology they'd be beating that drum loud and proud at all hours.
See also anti-terrorism efforts. "Supporters" will argue they keep quiet about their successes for opsec-type reasons or to hide their methods. But we are perfectly happy to publicise blowing fishing boats out of the water so I don't believe that for a second. These people can't help but brag.
No, these cameras are used to erode our rights and let police stalk their ex's/women/etc without consequences.
I used to know some govvies who were FBI analysts. There are more foiled terrorism plots than get reported for sure. That is the word at least at the FBI as of maybe 15 years ago.
Equally likely is that your friends were trying to make themselves sound more important and made unverifiable statements and let your existing trust relationship do the lifting.
That kid in middle school didn't have a girlfriend in Canada, and the FBI (documented on multiple occasions to have fabricated and entrapped people into "terror plots") didn't quietly stop a ton of terrorist plots.
They certainly do in my area! Which is why I appreciate the cameras.
Why make this comment but not include the citation now two people have asked for?
Also worth watching John Oliver’s segment on this topic on Last Week Tonight (https://youtube.com/shorts/BAEjOAe948k?si=Lfkw6prZxHk2R-I2)
Includes an example of a Flock camera flagging a number plate that the police pulled over, a family car SUV believing it to be stolen, but the stolen vehicle was actually a motorcycle with the same plate number but a different state!
I am sure the government will not abuse this powerful technology. I actually believe SCOTUS will eventually try to reign in although not eliminate the scope of what this tech can do under the constitution
I am sure the government will not abuse this powerful technology
> Flock camera, an automated system that scans license plates
> Flock cameras work by reading plates and comparing them against active alerts
False, flock cameras are car identification and fingerprinting devices, they would ID your car even if you don’t have a license plate at all.
> A tool built to keep communities safer
This should be put as a quote taken from the corporate BS, because obviously it didn’t make any community safer
> As for the rest of us, it is a good reminder that these cameras are everywhere now
Trying to normalize a police state, is this journalism now or straight up paid shills?!
The real irony is how Americans still claim to be much better off than outright authoritarian states like China.
We're speedrunning all of the worst parts of China, except privatized and we're not even going to get some nice trains or cheap housing out of it.
"an employee simply forgot to remove it."
And? That's all? This is why no one wants the gov't. to run things.
One of my favorite parts of people wanting to hand power to AI is the way that it very obviously doesn't fucking work.