How was there ever any doubt that these cameras and this access would be used in this way?
I personally blame the lack of accountability that police have in the US and the lack of public oversight into how departments operate.
tombert 1 days ago [-]
I have gotten in arguments about these Flock cameras, because people will use the "if you're not doing anything wrong you got nothing to worry about" defense.
Basically the entire point of the fourth Amendment (and sort of the Bill of Right as a whole) seems to be based on the assumption that we cannot trust the government to not abuse its power, so we purposefully limit its power. At least that's the impression I got, IANAL disclaimer I guess.
If we cannot safely assume that every cop is above-board, which we obviously cannot, then it's trivial to come up with cases of "if you got nothing to hide you got nothing to fear" defense. A bad cop could use Flock to stalk an ex-girlfriend. A bad cop could find some unsavory-but-not-illegal behavior from a politician (e.g. visiting a porn shop) and blackmail them. A bad cop could, as demonstrated by this article, simply use a Flock camera to harass someone they don't like.
I didn't think this was a controversial opinion, but I do see a lot of Flock/mass-surveillance defenders so I guess it is.
CamperBob2 1 days ago [-]
because people will use the "if you're not doing anything wrong you got nothing to worry about" defense
Remind them that whether they're doing something wrong or not is not their call. That sometimes shows signs of sinking in.
rvba 1 days ago [-]
A bad cop can sell your location so they can rob your house when you are out or tell the bad guys how to find you
tombert 1 days ago [-]
Agreed. I mean, there's really no shortage of terrible scenarios that can happen if we cannot assume that 100% of cops are good.
Zigurd 1 days ago [-]
Even cops that are well intended, that most people would call good, are hopelessly under trained regarding civil rights. A lot of have them have delusions of being some kind of detective and being clever about deceiving you into giving up your rights. Then they become belligerent if you don't play along.
johnnyanmac 17 hours ago [-]
>because people will use the "if you're not doing anything wrong you got nothing to worry about" defense.
The cop using the cameras to stalk his ex girlfriend really should have put an end to such argument. No, survellillance via an unregulated, private company that any "law environment" can access on a whim was never going to end well.
GymInMeCricket 1 days ago [-]
In my opinion, there was never any doubt that there would be over-policing. Rather, people doubt that they would belong to the over-policed parties. I hear similar arguments about NSF funding from my relatives: "yes, funding has been illegally cut, but it will not be cut for the people I know, only for the 'bad' researchers."
madaxe_again 1 days ago [-]
Leopards, faces, and all that jazz.
scotty79 1 days ago [-]
Calling fishing for vengance "overpolicing", that says a lot.
GymInMeCricket 1 days ago [-]
Appologies, but I don't know what you mean.
repeekad 1 days ago [-]
Being anti police is a bit of a wedge in US politics, it's privileged to say we don't need as much police because the poorest communities are often who need it most.
Abusing surveillance tools has nothing to do with legitimate policing, so "over-policing" is probably the wrong word.
wredcoll 1 days ago [-]
> Being anti police is a bit of a wedge in US politics, it's privileged to say we don't need as much police because the poorest communities are often who need it most.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say here, but it sure sounds bad. Poor communities have frequently suffered the most from police forces, since by and large police are designed and funded by the wealthy to protect their interests.
lokar 1 days ago [-]
The origin of many (or most) of the first organized police forces in the US were to control slaves and catch runaways.
The police have always been oriented towards protecting the wealthy from the poor.
repeekad 1 days ago [-]
You are not separating the vast majority of policing every day which is good and attempts to stop evil people. I’m not against transparency and reform, I’m saying these poor communities need more good policing not less.
cogman10 1 days ago [-]
> You are not separating the vast majority of policing every day which is good and attempts to stop evil people.
That's really not what policing is about even in the most charitable view. It's certainly what policing has been propagandized to be.
Besides playing candy crush in a cruiser, the vast majority of policing everyday is responding to complaints that happen after a crime happens (or someone getting nervous).
The role of police, in the most charitable framing, is to catch people suspected of committing crimes.
Evil is also something I'd quibble over. For example, the cops that are doing things like hiding in closets to catch people jumping a turnstile certainly aren't "stopping evil people". People are complex, there are few that are truly "evil".
Now, my less charitable read on cops is they have overbloated budgets, too little oversight and consequences, and they certainly don't prioritize impactful crimes to low class people. Cops, for example, very rarely try and catch/stop bike theft. Cops primarily exist to punish people that pester the rich and well connected. See, for example, BAM and reckless ben.
repeekad 7 hours ago [-]
Ever been mugged? I said this topic was a wedge, you are clearly someone who already doesn't have to deal with crime (as I said, privileged), and are projecting your own insecurities about it. In real life, good people want criminals stopped at all costs, especially when it inevitably happens to them. I'd love for police to catch the bike thief, we all hate bad policing, but being unconditionally anti-police is a great way to get normal people to disagree with your politics, and we get people like trump.
cogman10 7 hours ago [-]
> Ever been mugged?
Mugged, no. But I've certainly had someone try and pickpocket me.
> you are clearly someone who already doesn't have to deal with crime
Not in my day to day. In fact, most people don't. I've certainly known people who have been mugged and the thing they've said is universal "The police didn't do jack shit".
> and are projecting your own insecurities about it.
That's an uncharitable reading of my comment.
> In real life, good people want criminals stopped at all costs, especially when it inevitably happens to them.
In real life, police don't stop crimes. They don't stop muggings. That's not the job of cops. As I stated and you don't really want to contend with, the role of cops is catching the people that mug after the muggings happen. Unless you want to literally blanket the streets with cops, they will never have enough presence to stop a mugging because, spoiler, muggers don't tend to be blind and they don't tend to mug when cops are around.
Also here's that "good and evil" stuff again. No, good people don't have universal beliefs, you are using your own standards as "good" and classifying anyone who disagrees with you as evil. Life isn't black and white. I gave some pretty clear examples of that already (which you didn't respond to).
> but being unconditionally anti-police is a great way to get normal people to disagree with your politics, and we get people like trump.
Where, anywhere, have I stated that I'm anti-police? You are strawmanning me.
Police are a necessity that should exist. But, unlike you, I realize they aren't superheroes flying in to stop crime. The state has to have enforcement of it's laws and something like cops will always exist. The question is, how much should we fund them and how much accountability should we expect.
My standard is that cops who flagrantly abuse their authority (such as the cops in this article) should lose all ability to be cops. They are done, no more career. Do you disagree with that?
Unless you are making the argument that it's impossible for cops to not power trip, then you should be able to clearly see that I'm not advocating that we abolish the police.
Stop trying to play armchair psychologist and actually address my comment in your next response. It's annoying that you decided to put forward so many bad faith and misrepresentations of my argument in just a few sentences.
Bud 1 days ago [-]
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Brian_K_White 1 days ago [-]
They are saying that the problem isn't the quantity of policing but the quality.
The poorest communities need good policing the most, and suffer from bad policing the most. Both things are true at the same time.
wredcoll 5 hours ago [-]
Why would poor communities need police more than anyone else?
jknoepfler 1 days ago [-]
They have suffered from abuse because of unregulated police. They have not suffered because of police simpliciter.
Police perform an important function. Unregulated, unchecked, untrained, militarized police taught that they are immune from prosecution for crimes against citizens do not.
Drawing an equivalence between these two muddies the waters in an extremely unhelpful way.
A well-regulated police force drawn from the population it is sworn to protect is a good thing. It's a hard, important job.
And yes, it's obvious Flock was going to be abused and no I don't think a well-regulated police force should have access to pervasive surveillance. But that doesn't mean I want to do away with police in general.
The whole ACAB narrative is one of the most deeply unpopular views of the American left, polling at something like 80% disapproval. I guess ACAB people think my friend who went to the police to report sexual abuse by her step father (leading to his arrest and incarceration) should have hired a... community councilor? A mercenary? Gotten out the community pitchforks? Because that ends well as a mechanism for justice? I genuinely don't know, but I think people who want less policing (as opposed to accountability, transparency, and demilitarization) aren't thinking very clearly.
wredcoll 19 hours ago [-]
> They have not suffered because of police simpliciter
They also suffered from a lack of point to point teleportation. Or, I mean, they would if that existed.
The point being that it's not terribly useful to talk about things that only exist in theory.
Police, rather by definition are regulated by the people with money because they can afford it. The people in "poor neighborhoods" can't afford to pay for police.
> Drawing an equivalence between these two muddies the waters in an extremely unhelpful way.
Says the person trying to change the topic of discussion to hypothetical ideal instead of the world we actually live in.
As for ACAB and its polling, well, that's like saying "socialism polls badly", it probably does, but also nobody answering the polls actually agrees on how to define it.
There is an absolutely massive amount of (american) propaganda devoted entirely to portraying police in the best possible light and influencing people towards that end. We have endless movies and tv shows and books and cable news shows and radio talk shows and on and on.
> I guess ACAB people think my friend who went to the police to report sexual abuse by her step father (leading to his arrest and incarceration) should have hired a... community councilor?
No, literally nobody thinks that and it's a pretty sad attempt at rhetoric to suggest it.
> but I think people who want less policing (as opposed to accountability, transparency, and demilitarization) aren't thinking very clearly.
I'm not sure why you're trying so hard to draw a distinction here, if you actually look at americans, you can pretty easily divide them into two groups, one of which that wants "transparency and demilitarization" and one of which wants a police force with more military style weapons and equipment, and if you are on the side of demilitarization, then guess what, you're on the same side as everyone yelling acab.
You aren't some kind of special person who can some how see the perfect compromise between all positions that everyone else has missed.
"Police should be monitored by a complete separate agency with no chain of command in common with the police force, answerable to voters in a more direct way, as well as trained to de-escalate situations and held accountable for their crimes" doesn't fit on a placard and it's hard to chant. ACAB is a lot shorter.
Also, as a final takeaway, the phrase is "a few bad apples SPOILS THE ENTIRE BARREL" not "a few bad apples are perfectly fine and nobody minds them".
I'm sure most police aren't actually committing crimes and abuse of power. But they also refuse to hold the ones that do accountable and are therefor 100% complicit with all the abuses.
decremental 1 days ago [-]
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AngryData 1 days ago [-]
The poorest communities are the punching bags for police. It is the wealthy communities that don't care because they have money for lawyers to make charges disappear and connections to make cops play nice in their communities, poor people with public defenders don't and cops and courts know it and use them as easy funding/extortion.
mohamedkoubaa 1 days ago [-]
Associating the term policing with legitimacy is not something every person defaults to
9x39 1 days ago [-]
Overpolicing is the term used by one side that claims that any disparities in crime rates along demographic lines are due to an excess of police activity rather than any other factors.
Malfeasance is the $10 word that's probably more appropriate here for the actions of officers intentionally abusing the systems their authority grants access to.
GymInMeCricket 1 days ago [-]
By "over-policing" I meant something like "fishing for a crime."
overfeed 1 days ago [-]
i.e. if some crazy, cartoon villain scientist were to create the perfect tool to enable fishing for crimes, the Flock cameras and drones would be the first.
joquarky 1 days ago [-]
Even Sim City implemented this concept decades ago. If you overfunded the police, you would get "complaints" about tickets for jaywalking and lose approval.
wlesieutre 1 days ago [-]
It’s a tweet from 10ish years ago
‘I never thought leopards would eat MY face,’ sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party
IIRC originally posted in reference to anti-trans women who voted Republican and were shocked to find out that women’s rights weren’t a priority
I think he's saying fishing for evidence is not "policing", since fishing for evidence is illegal, and therefore not within the bounds of the job.
GymInMeCricket 1 days ago [-]
Thank you. Then he and I are probably in agreement, and my choice of words was incorrect. Illegal searches/stalking is a subset of the harmful actions I had in mind.
Hikikomori 1 days ago [-]
Its a fair bit more than overpolicing. If you don't think it is hope that boot is tasty.
bko 1 days ago [-]
> Rather, people doubt that they would belong to the over-policed parties
I don't think the people recording regular police interactions and refusing police instructions when stopped ever had any doubt about being over-policed.
> NSF funding from my relatives: "yes, funding has been illegally cut,..."
How is a cut illegal? Does any additional dollar in funding have to persist for all of eternity. For reference:
| FY | NSF appropriation |
| 1952 | $4M |
| 1960 | $153M |
| 1970 | $440M |
| 1980 | $992M |
| 1990 | $2.08B |
| 2000 | $3.91B |
| 2010 | $6.87B |
| 2020 | $8.21B |
| 2024 | $9.06B |
| 2025 | $9.06B |
| 2026 | $8.75B |
mullingitover 1 days ago [-]
> How is a cut illegal?
If the Office of Management and Budget follows a president's order to cut NSF funds and they violate the Anti-Deficiency Act, it's literally a crime. If the president orders the violation in order to achieve some political outcome, that's also bribery and extortion.
In this mafia regime it's a case of 'throw it on the pile,' but it doesn't change the fact that this stuff is wildly illegal. The president's job is to be the dumb unthinking agent of Congress and to execute the laws they pass on behalf of the people. Budgets are laws.
Supermancho 1 days ago [-]
> The president's job is to be the dumb unthinking agent of Congress
Execution will never be as simple as the textual content of a bill, so I'm not sure 'mindless' is a useful term.
While the POTUS is expected to be a bureaucrat, functionally and conceptually that is only one aspect of their responsibilities. Military oversight and diplomatic coordination as head of state, comes to mind.
mullingitover 1 days ago [-]
I'm oversimplifying, but when it comes to the budget I'm pretty accurate: the president can't just decide they won't spend the money because they don't like where it's going or who it's going to. They certainly can't extort the lawful recipients of the money.
blooalien 14 hours ago [-]
I'm not 100% sure about your usage of the word "can't" since it's been actively happening. Maybe "shouldn't" might apply better to the reality of the world we now find ourselves living in.
mullingitover 10 hours ago [-]
It’s evident from the context, but to spell it out: can’t legally.
ipython 1 days ago [-]
If you feel there should be cuts to nsf, then congress should do so (as enshrined by law). Not executive fiat by the president. Per the constitution the congress has the power of the purse.
blooalien 14 hours ago [-]
> If you feel there should be cuts to nsf, then congress should do so (as enshrined by law). Not executive fiat by the president. Per the constitution the congress has the power of the purse.
Yes, exactly, and if someone don't like what the Constitution says, then you either do the proper patriotic thing and gather enough folks who agree with you to change or amend it, or you (as the MAGA loons are so fond of telling folks) move to a different country with rules you can agree with.
Sadly, that's not the world we now live in. We've let psychotic narcissists overun our government to a dangerous degree, making it near impossible to change those things that need changed, because they have all the money, power, and weapons, and they're not afraid to use them against "We The People". At this rate, I half-expect I'll see Trump out on 5th Avenue one day soon, testing his theory about him shooting someone without consequence.
odo1242 1 days ago [-]
Government funding must be approved by Congress. If Congress already approved funding the NSF, then it has to be Congress that removes the funding.
bko 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
GymInMeCricket 1 days ago [-]
Appologies, but I don't see how this supports your point. It actually seems to support the claim that the reduction in NSF awards is illegal because it states that the request was explicitly rejected by Congress
1 days ago [-]
oh_my_goodness 1 days ago [-]
Your link confirms that the cuts are illegal.
bko 1 days ago [-]
Wrong again. Read it, feed it to your LLM, but you're wrong.
GymInMeCricket 1 days ago [-]
Your pasted quote explicitly says that Congress did not allow the cuts. I do not know what point you are trying to make.
For good measure, I pasted it into Gemini as you requested, and this is what it said:
Lets me help you since you seem confused, i put the parts you should pay close attention to
> > The request PROPOSES $4 billion for NSF, a 54% cut from the fiscal year 2026 enacted level. The amount echoes last year’s proposal of $3.9 billion, which Congress soundly rejected, FUNDING THE AGENCY at $8.75 billion.
The current FUNDING is $8.75b, not the $4b he PROPOSED. Here's the wikipedia. Hope this helps.
Your statement is irrelevant to the fact that, on the executive branch's insistence, NSF has distributed far fewer funds this year (approximately 30%) than were required by Congress. We know and have repeatedly stated that the amount of money that Congress ALLOCATED TO the NSF has not changed. It is the amount of money DISTRIBUTED BY NSF that has been restricted. I don't know why you insist that allocations and disperment are the same thing. Repetition does not make it so. If you wish to present convincing evidence for your position, you must provide evidence that DISPERSEMENTS FROM the NSF have not changed. Otherwise, I see no point in continuing this circular conversation.
1 days ago [-]
bdangubic 1 days ago [-]
file this under definition of self-own in Webster’s :)
GymInMeCricket 1 days ago [-]
My understanding is that congress chooses how much money should be distributed to each organization (e.g. NSF) each year, and preventing that money from being distributed is not legal. If I understand correctly, your table is of appropriation from Congress, not distribution[1]. I am open to being corrected if I am wrong.
The cuts can be illegal if one doesn’t have the authority to cut it and/or violates the procedures required.
bko 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
Forgeties79 1 days ago [-]
> You're trying to back into a position that you read in some article and trying to come off as just an impartial judge who cares about procedure and rule of law.
Excuse me?
I was answering the question, I didn’t say anything beyond that. Ease off the gas.
Also, based on your other comment chain it looks like Congress did not approve it. But I don’t know enough about the specific cut to say either way.
You came in here with a clear ax to grind and decided I was going to be your target. Don’t project your anger at some caricature on to me. Take a beat.
AtlanticThird 1 days ago [-]
Are you aware of any current country or any country throughout history that has granted the government powers like this and hasn't been abused? I think you're mistaken to blame lack of accountability and lack of public oversight. I think it's simply not possible.
tene80i 1 days ago [-]
To some extent, the U.K. They’ve had flock-style cameras for years, and while there is of course police abuse there’s far greater accountability. Brits are more comfortable with the idea of police having those powers - but of course that’s partly to do with the fact their police don’t have guns, so are generally less terrifying.
2b3a51 1 days ago [-]
UK police officers are not routinely armed, but there armed response units, and under certain circumstances in e.g. railway stations and airports you will see pairs of officers walking about with machine guns on a regular basis.
Accountability: misuse of cctv or bodycam footage can lead to disciplinary action of various kinds including being sacked. The link below will give you an idea of the volume of formal complaints and the 'pipeline' from complaint to potential dismissal and criminal proceedings against officers;
The next step would be blunt "fuck you and your constitutions and amendments, we're in charge here, we own the guns (both police and army), the media, the businesses, and we won't go away peacefully regardless of your elections". It is already happening here in Serbia which used to be a civilized country.
oh_my_goodness 1 days ago [-]
Seems clear that's begun in the US now.
AtlanticThird 9 hours ago [-]
Yeah the BLM riots were crazy
piloto_ciego 1 days ago [-]
Most people don’t realize that yet here in America. The fascists are still in our OODA loop.
bko 1 days ago [-]
There was an audit trail for improper access using the technology and a lawsuit. How is this "lack of accountability" and "lack of public oversight"? Here are the 100 instances:
Because the cops that did this won't face any real consequences. Will they be fired? Maybe. But will they stop being cops? Almost certainly not. Will they face criminal or civil penalties? Almost certainly not. Will they keep all benefits related to being a cop? Yes.
That's what's meant by a lack of accountability. Cops abusing their authority to pester people they don't like has been happening for nearly as long as there has been cops. But in modern America they have extra protections and one of the most powerful unions in the US which shield them from all real punishments.
Just being caught abusing the system is meaningless.
bko 1 days ago [-]
Why don't you see how the lawsuit plays out? What do you think it should be? Post a compelling TikTok and put the bad cop in jail? This is due process.
> Cops abusing their authority to pester people they don't like has been happening for nearly as long as there has been cops.
I think on net cops are good. We grant them power and put in reasonable guards for them to not abuse that power. And when they do there are remedies, like this guy is pursuing.
cogman10 1 days ago [-]
> Why don't you see how the lawsuit plays out?
Because these lawsuits all play out the same. The city pays out, the cop is maybe fired and they go get a job in the next city over as a cop.
> What do you think it should be?
At a minimum every cop involved should lose the right or ability to be a cop anywhere.
> I think on net cops are good. We grant them power and put in reasonable guards for them to not abuse that power.
I think cops are necessary, I wouldn't call them good. I don't think we have reasonable guards because cops abuse their power all the time and face few consequences. More than a few cops have gotten away with murder.
> And when they do there are remedies, like this guy is pursuing.
The remedy is that the city pays, not the cops. That's not accountability. The city doesn't even have to fire the cop, just pay out.
malwarebytess 1 days ago [-]
A lawsuit does not solve a systemic problem. This is not a "a few people abuse a tool" situation.
People suck. The tool shouldn't exist.
I genuinely do not understand the boot-licking. Bizarre. It show's a complete and utter lack of foresight.
bko 1 days ago [-]
Of course lawsuits solve a problem. Reduce the incentive to do it. Remove the bad actors.
The tool absolutely should exist. It has literally helped solve 10k kidnappings. Here are a few examples:
"Kidnappings", such as someone being a few hours late on exchanging custody of the kids with zero danger to them.
jst1fthsdys 1 days ago [-]
> Of course lawsuits solve a problem. Reduce the incentive to do it. Remove the bad actors.
No they don’t. This is an ignorant statement to make knowing the history of lawsuits against police and how little to no effect that’s had on police abuse of power.
It’s just like gambling: who gives a shit if you’re playing with someone else’s money.
rvba 1 days ago [-]
The cops used this 100 times over this one person. Will they be punished no?
Has someone checked if they didnt abuse their power over 100 other people? Very likely no.
pstuart 1 days ago [-]
Who pays for the lawsuit? When do cops actually have skin in the game?
Qualified immunity is a joke. They have absolute immunity with the exception of when it is too politically hot and the cops were stupid enough to leave a trail that worked to convict them.
Policing in America is effectively a state-sanctioned mob. I get the need for the law to have teeth in its enforcement, but when the law doesn't apply to those that enforce it then the system is inherently broken.
Until this current regime, my assumption was a simple hierarchy of oversight up to the federal level but the current regime itself has no oversight and is absolutely fine with the system as it is.
rvba 1 days ago [-]
You are one of those people who will never learn unless this abuse happens to you.
bastawhiz 1 days ago [-]
1. It's lack of accountability because nobody involved seems to have been fired or even disciplined.
2. It's lack of public oversight because an attorney filing a complaint about an unlawful arrest noticing a suspicious photograph from a month after the incident and then compelling the police to turn over evidence isn't oversight.
Accountability would have started with the officer, who knew very shortly after arresting the victim that the arrest was unlawful, being placed on leave almost immediately. But since it progressed to this point, accountability would look like literally any administrative action being taken whatsoever once the improper use was discovered.
Public oversight would have looked like that audit trail actually being read internally to determine whether there was a legitimate use for the searches in the first place. An audit trail that never gets looked at unless you're getting subpoenaed isn't "oversight".
hammock 1 days ago [-]
Same thing with FISA abuse. Nothing materially changes
Zigurd 1 days ago [-]
Try FOIAing a body cam, and filing a complaint. You might get action before the next Ice Age. Record a cop doing something blatantly illegal and try finding a willing prosecutor. In practice there's no accountability.
bko 1 days ago [-]
This guy seemed to do it. I also have better things to do than record police and refuse instructions.
> Record a cop doing something blatantly illegal and try finding a willing prosecutor.
The cop wasn't doing anything illegal, from the article: While standing in a private parking lot in Sussex, Wisconsin, on May 4, 2025, Napoleon Jones witnessed a traffic stop made by an out-of-county police officer. "It just didn't sit right with me,"
Yeah dog, "just didn't sit right" doesn't really hold up.
hvb2 1 days ago [-]
An out of county police officer, in general, can't conduct a traffic stop? There's a few exceptions but none of those seem to apply?
ibejoeb 1 days ago [-]
It doesn't hold up? What the implication, then? That the recording was illegal and the post-arrest investigation yielded the wrong result?
throwaway894345 1 days ago [-]
> Yeah dog, "just didn't sit right" doesn't really hold up.
Can you cite the law that requires more than “it doesn’t sit right” to record police officers in public?
bastawhiz 1 days ago [-]
He didn't foia anything. The article is about discovery in a lawsuit.
joquarky 1 days ago [-]
What dog? There was no dog involved in the article or preceding conments. You seem to have a problem with reading comprehension and/or are suffering from some kind of delusion.
rvba 1 days ago [-]
To quote your other post... where you wrote: "Its a camera bro"
Why citizens cannot record cops?
ggreer 1 days ago [-]
I'm pretty sure license plate readers and other surveillance tech have been abused constantly in the past, but we see more articles about Flock because they have better logging & auditing compared to smaller competitors or government-owned cameras.
ipython 1 days ago [-]
Flock also has the advantage of scale and centralization where previous solutions had neither
hammock 1 days ago [-]
> How was there ever any doubt that these cameras and this access would be used in this way?
Strawman. I have never heard of one single ingenuous person that believed these would only be used appropriately.
The main issue is that our government has too much power as to be unstoppable.
bediger4000 1 days ago [-]
There wasn't for anyone who paid attention. That "logic of surveillance" article a few years ago got it 100% correct: surveillance is immediately used against those who object to its use.
bigyabai 1 days ago [-]
I personally blame Y Combinator for looking at Flock and going "Well, there is potential for abuse, but that's a risk we're willing to impose on society to make some money."
solenoid0937 1 days ago [-]
Not enough people blame VCs and the people that fund evil things. They are accessories. They knew this would happen, let's not pretend they didn't.
They are just shameless because making money has been canonized as a greater moral good than being a decent human being. We need to bring back name and shame.
matsemann 1 days ago [-]
Sooo many will tout something along "fiduciary duty to shareholders" to explain why evil must happen. Just search for it in comments here on HN, and you will see it again and again, as if everyone's hands are twisted.
jtbayly 1 days ago [-]
You are confused. Yes, lots of people say that here, but the intention is almost never to justify immoral behavior. Rather the goal is to delegitimize capitalism by blaming it for the immoral behavior.
mafuy 1 days ago [-]
No, the parent is exactly right. I've seen it countless times and I am so sick of it. The poor, poor CEO has to be evil, it is his duty.
eecc 1 days ago [-]
Well, doing the most immoral and reprehensible thing on the edge of what’s lawful is a guaranteed “blue ocean” strategy so it’s inevitable that the most sociopathic will take the opportunity
01284a7e 1 days ago [-]
They are the reason these companies exist. When it comes to the creation of large for-profit technology companies, they decide what comes about and what doesn't. The blame is on them.
Zigurd 1 days ago [-]
They also fit startup logic in a peculiarly perverted way: try all the nasty stuff compartmentalized into a low stakes stealth mode start up, then become an acquisition target once you've got the perverted PMF of having a benign looking product that hides the evil within. Clean hands for the acquirer.
notnullorvoid 1 days ago [-]
They are more than a accessory. You wouldn't say someone who funds a contract killing is merely an accessory to murder. VCs should likewise be considered as principal offenders, unless there is proof that the company was not transparent with the VCs.
bigyabai 1 days ago [-]
They're more than accessories, that nearly writes them off as being innocent looped-in bystanders. Y Combinator has a vested stake, they want to encourage a maximalist Flock-centric police force. They directly profit off police that are incapable of doing their job without extreme, abusive tools at their disposal.
You could argue that YC has more of a conscience than other investors like A16Z. But I'm not sure how much I believe that seeing Gary Tan's moral indifference towards startups that are the incarnate equivalent of the Torment Nexus.
Jtarii 1 days ago [-]
Blaming people trying to make money is so pointless. Change the law if you don't like what is happening.
lokar 1 days ago [-]
The law is properly a limit on behavior, not a grant for acceptable behavior. It defines in which situations the state will ultimately employ its monopoly on violence to compel compliance.
This is a vastly smaller set of situations compared to what a health society would consider acceptable.
a2ff6eeb0 1 days ago [-]
You're right. People trying to make money should be held legally accountable for the impact of their investments.
solenoid0937 1 days ago [-]
> Change the law
There is a huge gulf between what the law allows, and what being a decent person requires, and that gulf is called "being a scumbag."
We should not alter the law to prohibit everything in that gulf, because it would create an authoritarian society ripe for abuse, relying on controls like mass surveillance and the erasure of civil liberties.
However, we can and should name, shame, and socially/commercially outcast people who gleefully engage in the art of being a scumbag.
> trying to make money
It is indeed possible to make money without funding evil things.
catlover76 1 days ago [-]
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ipython 1 days ago [-]
Don’t know why you’re downvoted but this venture funding is exactly what makes the scale and centralization of surveillance possible. You can’t build this sort of system out without the debt financing provided by the vc industry.
For example - I don’t have links to substantiate this yet - but I’d bet the same playbook that’s always used was used here as well. Flock cameras were provided to cash strapped police departments at a very low cost - unsustainably low for any other non vc funded company to compete with - in order to juice growth and build the scale/network effect to make the system valuable.
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bko 1 days ago [-]
Its a camera bro, reading the same license plates your can read with your eyes. If you care about your precincts policies go take it up with them. You may as well go after companies selling firearms to police.
patrickmay 1 days ago [-]
There is a massive difference between a human making observations and 120,000 cameras (at last count) coordinated through a single company's computer systems. This surveillance state enablement is as anti-American as it gets.
bko 1 days ago [-]
They take pictures of cars in certain intersections and register their license plates and keep them between 0 and 30 days typically (usually 7). It can be queried and logged. So if someone gets kidnapped and they're looking for someone its easy to track them.
There have been 1m “cases supported” and helping to locate approximately 10k missing persons. If you don't believe that look at a few real cases. Every example of a bad case is basically cops keeping tabs on ex-girlfiends or wives. Yes, that's bad but I prefer to save kids from kidnapping.
Saying its "anti-American" isn't an argument. I think it's very pro-American in that it protects law abiding Americans from criminals.
Agreed. Which is why I’m in favor of recording all conversations within earshot of any public location. Those can be tagged for keywords related to child endangerment. After all, who would argue against protecting kids?
In fact, we should take the pictures from public school districts and feed them into this system. Facial recognition immediately available on any kid that happens to walk on any public street. Why would anyone want to opt out of such a system?
(/s if it isn’t obvious)
bko 1 days ago [-]
Or how about we have a license plate camera in some intersections, that records license plates that can be queried by police officer to try to find perpetrators of crime. Pretty much the same thing right?
jst1fthsdys 1 days ago [-]
200k kids are kidnapped each year (overwhelmingly by family) but hey they stopped a small percentage so we should all give up our rights to the government. You’re a fool.
bko 1 days ago [-]
I agree, we should let "a small percentage" of 200k kidnapped kids go missing because a police officer might track his ex-wife during a 7 day window.
bigyabai 22 hours ago [-]
You certainly do. If you're not willing to wear a camera and microphone 24/7 for the good of the police, then you're helping the kidnappers hide their crimes and legitimize their privacy.
This is why the human life arithmetic has to be dropped if you want to genuinely steelman your point, it's a tortured statistic that we can use to justify any number of outlawed practices. If you can defend your point sincerely without the use of hysteric examples, then please walk us through the logic and authority that convinces you Flock is good. If you can't, then I'm going to have to agree with the people dogpiling on you, this is a ridiculous opinion.
bko 22 hours ago [-]
1. find two things that are different in nearly every possible way
2. find one superficial similarity between them (this proves they are actually identical)
3. "why are you against one but not the other"
bigyabai 22 hours ago [-]
It's sarcasm. It only offends you because we're reusing your justification for a more extreme encroachment of privacy.
Can we drop the human life arithmetic and discuss the pros/cons like normal people? Do you understand why your stance is being repeatedly mocked in the same exact way?
"It's a camera bro, taking the same pictures of your daughter that anyone can take with their phone. If you don't want there to be a log of the route she walks home, take it up with the police."
nmeagent 23 hours ago [-]
Why hold back? Clearly we should install live-feed cameras in every home so we can solve most domestic crimes; surely a little police abuse shouldn't prevent such a profound reduction of crime. It's not like any of these people have rights or anything like that. /s
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jmward01 1 days ago [-]
When people believe they are being watched they act differently. Essentially you are coercing them. People need a reasonable sense of privacy to be able to act freely so, to me, this means that privacy is a central requirement of freedom.
There are legitimate reasons for some ability to conduct surveillance, but without a cost any surveillance method becomes mass surveillance. That cost must be human, it must scale in human time, or it turns into mass surveillance since without a human cost all it takes is one person and one button to watch one or a hundred thousand people.
Technologies like flock have no human scaling cost. They run 24/7/365 and make surveilling one person or hundreds of thousands of people as easy as pushing a button. There is no human scaling cost to them. That means that all it takes to abuse a massive portion of the population is one person and one action. The probability of abuse, abuse which harms a population as a whole, therefore approaches 100% no matter how 'good' the controls are on it. All mass surveillance technologies have this fundamental flaw. The consequence of that abuse is that people, rightfully, will believe that they are being watched, legitimately or not, 24/7/365. The harm here is clear. A society that is under mass surveillance is a society that is having its basic freedoms continuously attacked.
Mass surveillance, surveillance without a direct human cost that scales with the level of surveillance, is not compatible with any definition of 'freedom'. Or, to sum all this up, every argument about how a system like this could be made better to limit harm is a red herring because technologies like Flock have a fundamental flaw that is incompatible with any definition of a free society.
ventana 1 days ago [-]
Cops love Flock. I'm subscribed to some of the local police department accounts in social networks, and Facebook shows me more of those across the country, and I see a lot of posts like “a serious crime happened, we tracked the car using the Flock license place reader and the suspect is now in custody”.
I think it's true that Flock indeed helps with the actual policing, no doubt about that. But it also seems like police departments across the country really try to promote the view that Flock is a good technology that helps safety, because some cities ultimately voted to disable Flock [1], and I'm sure police are just mad about this and don't want this to happen.
I can't wait until this finally reaches the Supreme court and they hopefully decide that those cameras are unconstitutional.
Was just reading into this and it’s infuriating. He was recording another person’s traffic stop in a parking lot. Once the stop was done, he walks to his car. The same officer goes to his car and “pulls him over.” The vet says that you can’t pull someone over in a private parking lot, that’s not a legal stop. Doesn’t matter, he’s arrested and car towed.
He’s kept in jail for 5 hrs before being released for it not being a legal stop just like the vet said. Then that officer tracked him thru flock over 100 times for some personal vendetta.
buzer 1 days ago [-]
> Then that officer tracked him thru flock over 100 times for some personal vendetta.
That's not quite accurate according to the article. It was actually worse: There were over 100 searches and some of them were done by officer in question, but some were done by other officers. This was due to lieutenant's order in connection with Jones' citizen complaint. So it wasn't just one officer abusing the system.
zapataband1 1 days ago [-]
so it was a department wide surveillance. almost like officers choose to engage in illegal behavior constantly to support each other.
aftbit 1 days ago [-]
This is disgusting, and I continue to argue that we should not excuse Flock Safety for this kind of misbehavior. They created the tech and marketed it to police departments without providing good protections against this kind of thing. Making something cheap and automatic changes how people use it. If this cop had to tail the guy around himself, maybe he wouldn't have done it.
But the far worse problem IMO is that this cop is dirty, corrupt, untrustworthy, and should be punished for stalking this man, and yet he surely will not be. Worst case, he might catch some administrative sanction or maybe be fired - he won't go to jail like he should for this misbehavior.
If you have 1 dirty cop and 100 who ignore his bad behavior, you actually have 101 dirty cops. We need a way to deal with this in our society without resorting to the absolutes of "defund the police" or "back the blue".
edoceo 1 days ago [-]
We have a way. Diligently prosecute the offender. Unclear why it's not used here.
aftbit 22 hours ago [-]
Broadly speaking, you will only rarely find police properly prosecuted for their misdeeds. Usually, the worst that happens is dismissal, if even that. Of course there are outliers - cops who wrongly kill people have been prosecuted from time to time, but even then, their chances of escaping justice are higher than for an individual citizen in their place.
There are many reasons for this, but in my humble opinion, the worst one is the "thin blue line" - the idea that police are a brotherhood holding back the darkness of crime and evil, which leads to the idea that their misdeeds are somehow excusable by people "on their team", which includes other cops and citizens who are aligned with them.
In my opinion, police should be held to a higher standard by society to match the higher level of trust, protection, and presumption of regularity that we give them. If they commit crimes, they should be prosecuted even more zealously and reliably than laypeople, rather than only rarely.
Zigurd 1 days ago [-]
Prosecutors are insufficiently independent from cops. The job of prosecutor is often as political steppingstone. Prosecuting cops isn't compatible with that.
braum 1 days ago [-]
sounds like an easy win for a prosecutor for felony stalking.
there needs to be more separation from prosecutors and cops. I know a lot of places now have prosecutors who are actively against cops, that is not what I mean.
the prosecutors are supposed to be unbiased and make decisions on evidence. we know they don't regardless of their political leaning. but that is the standard we (citizens) should hold them accountable. unfortunately there are too may bootlicking voters who just want to feel "safe" and have zero courage of their own even in the voting booth.
we need to stop giving agencies money based on stats. that is one cause to a lot of these problems. then the cops and agencies get all twisted and in a tissy when a tool that made stat pumping easier like right now the flock cameras.
FeepingCreature 1 days ago [-]
> we need to stop giving agencies money based on stats.
I think you just need to stop giving agencies money based on bad stats. Goodhart's Law is an extremely well-established effect. At the very least, crime rate should be monitored by a separate department.
iamnothere 1 days ago [-]
Sorry, but as we are a nation incapable of moderating its emotions in favor of higher thought, your only policy choices are “back the blue under any circumstances” or “defund the police and empty the jails”.
colechristensen 1 days ago [-]
Pretty cut and dried civil liberties case there
bastawhiz 1 days ago [-]
I'm glad this guy will get his payout, but infuriated that the perpetrators will likely face no consequences, and the burden will fall on the public.
Toutouxc 1 days ago [-]
Infuriating, yes, but apparently getting shot for no reason is also quite popular. This sounds like the better deal.
what surprises me is that flock has not started a commercial service, where you can have the system surveillance anybody for a daily fee and have it compile a need report for you.
Use cases: stalk woman, collect evidence against your enemies, collect dirt for blackmail, etc. Maybe flock is already offering this, but only for the Enterprise customers and 0.1% ....
venusenvy47 1 days ago [-]
How can we find more information about when we can refuse police requests as is mentioned here? It seems like the public needs to know about when we can legally do this.
"Shayhorn's supervisor informed him shortly after the arrest that he'd, in fact, illegally stopped Jones, and he therefore could not compel Jones to produce his identification"
hammock 1 days ago [-]
Really only three or four things you ought to say during a stop
“( Name and address, or license registration and insurance if in a vehicle)” -required by law pretty much everywhere.
“I’m exercising my right to silence. I will not answer questions without a lawyer”
“I do not consent to any searches”
“Am I being detained, or am I free to go”- say this one anytime you think the officer might be done with the reason he stopped you, because it “starts a clock” of unlawful extension
Pick whichever one makes the most sense at any given moment. Don’t say anything else. If the officer says you are free to go, leave.
As for what you can refuse, you really can’t during the stop. You have to fight in court. LISTEN CAREFULLY to the words of the officer and do not respond to QUESTIONS, only ORDERS. They are trained to ask you to do things that might be unlawful if they were orders, like can you step out of the car for me please, can you follow my flashlight for me, can you roll down your window all the way. If you are unclear, ask “are you ordering me, officer?”
If any part of the stop was unlawful your defense attorney can iron that out later in court (and if so, typically everything occurring after the unlawful gets thrown out)
If you want to go a step further and be polite etc, know that many police won’t give you brownie points for it, but if they ask you questions like “where are you coming from” or “where are you going” or “who are/were you with” redirect your answers only to plainly obvious facts about YOURSELF ONLY and the PRESENT time, e.g. “I am out for a drive officer”
Caveat: IANAL, this is not legal advice
Source: SWIM has extensive experience in this area
venusenvy47 41 minutes ago [-]
That's interesting about the questions that sound like orders. I'll have to read up on that and keep it in mind.
wateralien 1 days ago [-]
Surely access to footage can be gated behind some sort of expedited digital court warrant?
I always think of that scene in Minority Report where 3 judges are conferenced in live when a “vision” arrived.
Because if used properly and lawfully these cameras can be useful to keep people safe. Including from the cops.
bastawhiz 1 days ago [-]
You don't need a special speedy system. A regular warrant is just fine. A warrant in this case would never have been granted because there was no suspicion of wrongdoing. There's already processes for expedited search warrants outside of business hours, the problem is that warrants are simply never required to use these services.
sampullman 1 days ago [-]
Using minority report as an example of a good policing system is a bit unsettling.
hammock 1 days ago [-]
> Surely access to footage can be gated behind some sort of expedited digital court warrant?
These are police-owned cameras filming public areas. A better solution would be to require court approval to buy and vote these cameras, or where they can be pointed.
jonahx 1 days ago [-]
In practice, the odds overwhelmingly favor abuse. And even if the "proper and lawful" version was somehow achieved, it would require constant maintenance, security, and expensive oversight that would also be at risk of degenerating back into abuse.
wateralien 1 days ago [-]
If abuse can’t be eliminated then it’s about what ratio of abuse to crime reduction is tolerable I guess. If we find 100 taken children while a dirty cop stalks his ex - is that tolerable? I’d say yes. If it became more abused I guess that’s when society needs to decide.
bastawhiz 1 days ago [-]
Abuse can be eliminated. It's called requiring a warrant. What's tolerable doesn't matter: we don't need to litigate how willing we are to bend the fourth amendment.
NetMageSCW 1 days ago [-]
If you think judges who are unaccountable and regularly abuse their powers are a solution for oversight of surveillance, I have a bridge to sell you. (I don’t have a bridge.)
JKCalhoun 22 hours ago [-]
Flock has become something like the Tantalus Field from the original Star Trek's “Mirror Mirror” episode.
I think Flock could be very useful to track actual criminals. However, any queries to the system must require a warrant and publicly available track record.
hightrix 1 days ago [-]
It would be even easier to track criminals if we required all people* in the country to wear always on devices with GPS, always on cameras, always recording audio that are illegal to disable or turn off.
But that would be OK as long as a warrant was required to access it, right?
* - All people unable to pay the government to disable the device.
mrluckysmith 1 days ago [-]
Personal space intrusion doesn't equal monitoring public roads.
arealaccount 1 days ago [-]
Considering how ubiquitous public roads are it sorta does
NetMageSCW 1 days ago [-]
And how impossible public roads are to avoid and live.
patrickmay 1 days ago [-]
Requiring a warrant would be better than the status quo, but the very existence of the data is too high a risk, in my opinion.
malwarebytess 1 days ago [-]
The tool shouldn't exist, period.
That people defend this is shocking. Absolutely zero foresight.
mrluckysmith 1 days ago [-]
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Grombobulous 1 days ago [-]
If oligarchs can opt-out it shouldn't exist.
They can live in gated communities, travel by chauffeured cars owned by contracted businesses multiple LLCs deep, fly in private airports on private jets, or just go live on a yacht in international waters.
mrluckysmith 1 days ago [-]
Oligarchs can always opt out and they do opt out. It's almost the definition of having power: rules for thee but not for me.
spongebobstoes 1 days ago [-]
surveillance technology is not going away. we need to mitigate the downsides
what systems could be changed or created to prevent abuse of power?
Zigurd 1 days ago [-]
Anything can be made to go away.
NetMageSCW 1 days ago [-]
Look at the rights of Us citizens when confronted by ICE.
whynotmaybe 1 days ago [-]
Maybe have something on the plate that prevents reading from certain angles? There was a ticket dismissed in Quebec a few years ago for an "unreadable plate" because the car had a bike rack hiding the plate but the ticket had the plate number on it so it was not unreadable
mohamedkoubaa 1 days ago [-]
They are being removed from hundreds of municipalities, what do you mean?
spongebobstoes 8 hours ago [-]
we have some pushback against Flock, but technology does not regress
there are many people who want to use surveillance to deter and catch criminals
surveillance also helps combat certain abuses of power, like cops shooting black people
we should build an accountability system to balance against additional state power and surveillance. defense in depth. the best of both worlds?
Henchman21 1 days ago [-]
I know if you douse these cameras with flammable liquids they burn up pretty well. I’m in support of the same for the people pushing these Flock cameras. Because if you’ve elevated yourself above the rest of us, well then we don’t need you anymore. Tie whomever voted for these cameras to the mast and light them the fuck up.
zapataband1 1 days ago [-]
We need an actual democracy(not rich people's puppets). In this country almost 75% of voting population are against the war in Iran and yet most of congress supports that war.
colechristensen 1 days ago [-]
Surveillance tech very much can be and is going away in plenty of places
A good question to ask is if those locations are just switching to an alternative ALPR system.
AlienRobot 1 days ago [-]
Why is it not going away?
matheusmoreira 1 days ago [-]
Human nature itself.
PunchyHamster 1 days ago [-]
not installing them. Voting out anyone that does
wateralien 1 days ago [-]
Video is useful in keeping people safe. Including from the cops. It’s about remaking the system to require court permission every time they access it, process and transparency.
eks391 1 days ago [-]
This. I don't understand why something can only be used in the wrong way. Either
A. there is nothing a good person needs to hide (including cops, at least good ones), therefore it should be openly public to everyone and all usage logged and public (to catch abuse), or
B. privacy is important so it should be protected, and while data is collectible, nonetheless cannot be shared without consent or a court order. And none of this fake content that companies claim you gave by walking outside, setting up your phone/account/etc after buying it and being forced to sign so you didn't just buy an expensive brick, etc.
SaucyWrong 23 hours ago [-]
Hmm, I wonder if, as a plaintiff that wished to file a complaint against a police department, would the records be gone by the time I got far enough through the courts to force evidence discovery. All of the Flock-lovers I talk to love to bring up the short-lived nature of the data (7 or 30 days depending on who you talk to).
postalrat 1 days ago [-]
No big deal is it was just video. It's really about the data that can be extracted from the video such as who you meet, when you are home or not and who is at your house, etc. all in realtime.
wateralien 1 days ago [-]
Yes that should all require a court warrant based on probable cause.
NetMageSCW 1 days ago [-]
Because that will never be abused.
wateralien 12 hours ago [-]
I hope sarcasm is working well for you. To clarify: it would be abused without systems, therefore add court warrants to access any personal information. Criminals are already abusing society by knowing that most of their crime will never be caught.
colechristensen 1 days ago [-]
Give me freedom or give me death.
Police wearing body cameras has nothing to do with universal mass surveillance devices.
AlienRobot 1 days ago [-]
You are conflating extremely different things, and that is dangerous.
Somehow we went from:
1. People can see and hear your in public
2. Therefore public places are not private
3. Therefore people can record you
4. Therefore it's okay to build a network of cameras that can track and query every place you have ever been
The problem has always been on step 2. The assumption that "public places are not private" anymore just because everyone can record you and post it on TikTok. In reality before smartphones public places were extremely private compared to being broadcast to the entire planet.
atemerev 1 days ago [-]
Not enough. Preemptively passing laws that forbid this kind of mass surveillance. Like in Switzerland and other nice places.
NegativeK 1 days ago [-]
Making the possession of data this either illegal or too horribly cumbersome.
Flock is just an iteration, and getting rid of that brand won't fix it. And camera tracking of normal citizens is just an iteration -- not the underlying systemic issue that isn't being addressed.
The EU has GDPR. At this point, I want something stronger than that.
GiorgioG 1 days ago [-]
Flock is the most successful and well-known company doing this, however they’re not the only one. We need to be really careful to push back against the use of this technology as a whole and not fixate only on Flock. My town doesn’t use Flock, it uses another company’s tech…it’s no better! Don’t give the politicians an out.
edoceo 1 days ago [-]
Does that company also have three pounds of copper in their cameras, like Flock?
layer8 1 days ago [-]
The fact that the victim is a Navy veteran should be immaterial here. People shouldn’t be any less upset if he wasn’t.
CobaltFire 1 days ago [-]
As a veteran I agree, with a significant caveat:
Generally those who support the police in general (especially those with the thin blue line American flag displayed somewhere) espouse support for veterans. The clash of a veteran operating legally with police operating illegally helps foster cognitive dissonance and disentangle these two institutions in their mind.
In other words these types of articles are helpful for causing those individuals to confront the issues in their belief structure.
I use them this way all the time with my parents, as they continue to insist that I (a retired Navy vet) should mindlessly support the police. They are not interested in the LONG history of those two populations clashing.
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jmclnx 1 days ago [-]
Hopefully he gets a big enough payment that makes other jurisdictions remove these cameras.
fhdkweig 1 days ago [-]
Hopefully they remove cops who abuse their powers. While I agree that victims require compensation, ultimately these payouts only hurt the taxpayers who have to cover for these cops who at worst just move to another town to do it again.
sershe 1 days ago [-]
Should we also have separate posts for every individual case when camera helped catch someone? What's the point of continuously posting what amounts to single anecdotes without any statistical context? Should we ban every technology and shut down any government program that has small amount, but rage-bait-able form of, abuse?
spenrose 1 days ago [-]
My mental model:
1. Policing is yet another example of Baumol’s effect[1]; sectors where automation lags become expensive
2. Policing can be automated effectively, including via Flock:
> Hunters Point rapper Dreamllife Rizzy described how police tech has made it more difficult to get away with bipping and other crimes.
“Crime in San Francisco, period, that shit over with, brother,” the rapper said. “They got drones, hella shit.” He described how Flock cameras clock the plates on a stolen car and send an alert to police stations, which send drones to follow the vehicle.[2]
3. Policing, like major surgery, ambitious construction, military invasions, and other high-consequence endeavors, is not immune to perfidy, incompetence, or other human weaknesses.
4. Argument by implicit synecdoche (here is an example of an abuse, therefore the general behavior is abusive) is ubiquitous and invalid; you need to actually collect wide evidence and weigh major tradeoffs. How does Flock affect total crime rates? Total abuse rates? That only matters if you think that we should be open to the possibility that widespread use of Flock cameras might be good.
5. WRT privacy and policing-the-police in particular, there is a small but highly vocal community of libertarians whose perspective is sharp, detailed, and not reflective of broader society’s perspective except in motte-and-bailey form, and who will never be persuaded by evidence because for them what matters are the principles (n.b.: this observation is not per se a criticism — sometimes principles should trump evidence around tradeoffs).
6. HN’s 10^5 (?) active commenters include 10^4(?) members of that libertarian vanguard
7. Everyone has heard all the libertarian and contra-libertarian arguments going back decades; no one is learning from yet another go-round
A way to think of the Baumol effect in more local terms:
High-productivity organizations have increased revenue and reduced expenses, almost by definition. These profits can be "spent" in various ways like charging customers less, paying workers more, paying investors more, and blue-sky research. (I'm remembering the early days of Google here.) Or it could fund various forms of corruption.
Paying employees more helps drive up local wages. Also, wealthier people want higher-end services and are price-insensitive, so they're inevitably going to be charged more. They'll bid more for houses and pay more to eat in fancier restaurants.
People discount the "trickle-down" effect but everyone notices when the cost of living goes up because there are a lot of rich people around who will pay more.
icantevenhold 1 days ago [-]
Not only is policing not immune against perfidy, but I would argue perfidy is built into the police system as a core tenet.
There is a lot of widely available evidence
basilikum 1 days ago [-]
> Everyone has heard all the libertarian and contra-libertarian arguments going back decades; no one is learning from yet another go-round
People are generally massively uninformed if not misinformed. People have not heard real arguments or data for most issues in general.
iJohnDoe 20 hours ago [-]
> "Shayhorn's supervisor informed him shortly after the arrest that he'd, in fact, illegally stopped Jones, and he therefore could not compel Jones to produce his identification"
Can we get Shayhorn’s supervisor a medal? Perhaps a parade in their honor? Usually corruption or coerced corruption is so bad in any precinct that this type of proper behavior is shocking. Surprised they didn’t all conspire to put a drop gun on Jones.
jauntywundrkind 1 days ago [-]
If only there was a more general way to find the lying sneaking power tripping police officers. Flock is turning out to be quite useful for society, in this one very specific way. Data to watch the watchmen.
ksudb 1 days ago [-]
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johnmlussier 1 days ago [-]
Don't remove the cameras - make sure they're used legally and bad apples don't ruin a good thing:
Four different places, four different children rescued by use of Flock cameras.
Why not the other way around? First make sure the police department is capable of using them legally and reliably investigating abuse, then we can consider allowing them.
basilikum 1 days ago [-]
Don't remove freedom from society - Be kind to people and give them equal opportunities to make sure they use their freedom for good. Prosecute bad apples with actual police work and don't let them ruin a good thing.
Absolutely. First let's install an extreme surveillance state and give them full police power unlimited by the Constitution. Then, later, if we have any regrets, no problem. Just restore democracy.
aprilthird2021 1 days ago [-]
But we decided as a country long long long ago that we wouldn't abet abuse, unwarranted search and seizure, and would treat people as innocent until proven guilty even if that meant elevated crime was the price to pay for that
zapataband1 1 days ago [-]
"bad apples" = one rotten apple ruins the bunch.
There are no "good apples" the article itself shows that other "apples" were helping him illegaly surveil. The "good apples" thought it was a good idea to give every apple access to a problematic system.
There are no good apples if there's a rotten in the bunch, we need public oversight of the only people that are allowed to enact violence on behalf of the state.
kotaKat 1 days ago [-]
Nice shitty astroturfing campaign, bro. How much does Flock provide in payola? Five figures and I'll start singing the praises, too, bro.
chuckadams 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
wateralien 1 days ago [-]
> make sure they're used legally and bad apples don't ruin a good thing
The unedited comment shows he used it correctly using “and” to mean “so that”.
chuckadams 1 days ago [-]
Ah, indeed that is the more likely reading. I stand by the boot bit.
Rendered at 23:14:28 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
I personally blame the lack of accountability that police have in the US and the lack of public oversight into how departments operate.
Basically the entire point of the fourth Amendment (and sort of the Bill of Right as a whole) seems to be based on the assumption that we cannot trust the government to not abuse its power, so we purposefully limit its power. At least that's the impression I got, IANAL disclaimer I guess.
If we cannot safely assume that every cop is above-board, which we obviously cannot, then it's trivial to come up with cases of "if you got nothing to hide you got nothing to fear" defense. A bad cop could use Flock to stalk an ex-girlfriend. A bad cop could find some unsavory-but-not-illegal behavior from a politician (e.g. visiting a porn shop) and blackmail them. A bad cop could, as demonstrated by this article, simply use a Flock camera to harass someone they don't like.
I didn't think this was a controversial opinion, but I do see a lot of Flock/mass-surveillance defenders so I guess it is.
Remind them that whether they're doing something wrong or not is not their call. That sometimes shows signs of sinking in.
The cop using the cameras to stalk his ex girlfriend really should have put an end to such argument. No, survellillance via an unregulated, private company that any "law environment" can access on a whim was never going to end well.
Abusing surveillance tools has nothing to do with legitimate policing, so "over-policing" is probably the wrong word.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say here, but it sure sounds bad. Poor communities have frequently suffered the most from police forces, since by and large police are designed and funded by the wealthy to protect their interests.
The police have always been oriented towards protecting the wealthy from the poor.
That's really not what policing is about even in the most charitable view. It's certainly what policing has been propagandized to be.
Besides playing candy crush in a cruiser, the vast majority of policing everyday is responding to complaints that happen after a crime happens (or someone getting nervous).
The role of police, in the most charitable framing, is to catch people suspected of committing crimes.
Evil is also something I'd quibble over. For example, the cops that are doing things like hiding in closets to catch people jumping a turnstile certainly aren't "stopping evil people". People are complex, there are few that are truly "evil".
Now, my less charitable read on cops is they have overbloated budgets, too little oversight and consequences, and they certainly don't prioritize impactful crimes to low class people. Cops, for example, very rarely try and catch/stop bike theft. Cops primarily exist to punish people that pester the rich and well connected. See, for example, BAM and reckless ben.
Mugged, no. But I've certainly had someone try and pickpocket me.
> you are clearly someone who already doesn't have to deal with crime
Not in my day to day. In fact, most people don't. I've certainly known people who have been mugged and the thing they've said is universal "The police didn't do jack shit".
> and are projecting your own insecurities about it.
That's an uncharitable reading of my comment.
> In real life, good people want criminals stopped at all costs, especially when it inevitably happens to them.
In real life, police don't stop crimes. They don't stop muggings. That's not the job of cops. As I stated and you don't really want to contend with, the role of cops is catching the people that mug after the muggings happen. Unless you want to literally blanket the streets with cops, they will never have enough presence to stop a mugging because, spoiler, muggers don't tend to be blind and they don't tend to mug when cops are around.
Also here's that "good and evil" stuff again. No, good people don't have universal beliefs, you are using your own standards as "good" and classifying anyone who disagrees with you as evil. Life isn't black and white. I gave some pretty clear examples of that already (which you didn't respond to).
> but being unconditionally anti-police is a great way to get normal people to disagree with your politics, and we get people like trump.
Where, anywhere, have I stated that I'm anti-police? You are strawmanning me.
Police are a necessity that should exist. But, unlike you, I realize they aren't superheroes flying in to stop crime. The state has to have enforcement of it's laws and something like cops will always exist. The question is, how much should we fund them and how much accountability should we expect.
My standard is that cops who flagrantly abuse their authority (such as the cops in this article) should lose all ability to be cops. They are done, no more career. Do you disagree with that?
Unless you are making the argument that it's impossible for cops to not power trip, then you should be able to clearly see that I'm not advocating that we abolish the police.
Stop trying to play armchair psychologist and actually address my comment in your next response. It's annoying that you decided to put forward so many bad faith and misrepresentations of my argument in just a few sentences.
The poorest communities need good policing the most, and suffer from bad policing the most. Both things are true at the same time.
Police perform an important function. Unregulated, unchecked, untrained, militarized police taught that they are immune from prosecution for crimes against citizens do not.
Drawing an equivalence between these two muddies the waters in an extremely unhelpful way.
A well-regulated police force drawn from the population it is sworn to protect is a good thing. It's a hard, important job.
And yes, it's obvious Flock was going to be abused and no I don't think a well-regulated police force should have access to pervasive surveillance. But that doesn't mean I want to do away with police in general.
The whole ACAB narrative is one of the most deeply unpopular views of the American left, polling at something like 80% disapproval. I guess ACAB people think my friend who went to the police to report sexual abuse by her step father (leading to his arrest and incarceration) should have hired a... community councilor? A mercenary? Gotten out the community pitchforks? Because that ends well as a mechanism for justice? I genuinely don't know, but I think people who want less policing (as opposed to accountability, transparency, and demilitarization) aren't thinking very clearly.
They also suffered from a lack of point to point teleportation. Or, I mean, they would if that existed.
The point being that it's not terribly useful to talk about things that only exist in theory.
Police, rather by definition are regulated by the people with money because they can afford it. The people in "poor neighborhoods" can't afford to pay for police.
> Drawing an equivalence between these two muddies the waters in an extremely unhelpful way.
Says the person trying to change the topic of discussion to hypothetical ideal instead of the world we actually live in.
As for ACAB and its polling, well, that's like saying "socialism polls badly", it probably does, but also nobody answering the polls actually agrees on how to define it.
There is an absolutely massive amount of (american) propaganda devoted entirely to portraying police in the best possible light and influencing people towards that end. We have endless movies and tv shows and books and cable news shows and radio talk shows and on and on.
> I guess ACAB people think my friend who went to the police to report sexual abuse by her step father (leading to his arrest and incarceration) should have hired a... community councilor?
No, literally nobody thinks that and it's a pretty sad attempt at rhetoric to suggest it.
> but I think people who want less policing (as opposed to accountability, transparency, and demilitarization) aren't thinking very clearly.
I'm not sure why you're trying so hard to draw a distinction here, if you actually look at americans, you can pretty easily divide them into two groups, one of which that wants "transparency and demilitarization" and one of which wants a police force with more military style weapons and equipment, and if you are on the side of demilitarization, then guess what, you're on the same side as everyone yelling acab.
You aren't some kind of special person who can some how see the perfect compromise between all positions that everyone else has missed.
"Police should be monitored by a complete separate agency with no chain of command in common with the police force, answerable to voters in a more direct way, as well as trained to de-escalate situations and held accountable for their crimes" doesn't fit on a placard and it's hard to chant. ACAB is a lot shorter.
Also, as a final takeaway, the phrase is "a few bad apples SPOILS THE ENTIRE BARREL" not "a few bad apples are perfectly fine and nobody minds them".
I'm sure most police aren't actually committing crimes and abuse of power. But they also refuse to hold the ones that do accountable and are therefor 100% complicit with all the abuses.
Malfeasance is the $10 word that's probably more appropriate here for the actions of officers intentionally abusing the systems their authority grants access to.
‘I never thought leopards would eat MY face,’ sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party
IIRC originally posted in reference to anti-trans women who voted Republican and were shocked to find out that women’s rights weren’t a priority
I don't think the people recording regular police interactions and refusing police instructions when stopped ever had any doubt about being over-policed.
> NSF funding from my relatives: "yes, funding has been illegally cut,..."
How is a cut illegal? Does any additional dollar in funding have to persist for all of eternity. For reference:
| FY | NSF appropriation |
| 1952 | $4M |
| 1960 | $153M |
| 1970 | $440M |
| 1980 | $992M |
| 1990 | $2.08B |
| 2000 | $3.91B |
| 2010 | $6.87B |
| 2020 | $8.21B |
| 2024 | $9.06B |
| 2025 | $9.06B |
| 2026 | $8.75B |
If the Office of Management and Budget follows a president's order to cut NSF funds and they violate the Anti-Deficiency Act, it's literally a crime. If the president orders the violation in order to achieve some political outcome, that's also bribery and extortion.
In this mafia regime it's a case of 'throw it on the pile,' but it doesn't change the fact that this stuff is wildly illegal. The president's job is to be the dumb unthinking agent of Congress and to execute the laws they pass on behalf of the people. Budgets are laws.
Execution will never be as simple as the textual content of a bill, so I'm not sure 'mindless' is a useful term.
While the POTUS is expected to be a bureaucrat, functionally and conceptually that is only one aspect of their responsibilities. Military oversight and diplomatic coordination as head of state, comes to mind.
Yes, exactly, and if someone don't like what the Constitution says, then you either do the proper patriotic thing and gather enough folks who agree with you to change or amend it, or you (as the MAGA loons are so fond of telling folks) move to a different country with rules you can agree with.
Sadly, that's not the world we now live in. We've let psychotic narcissists overun our government to a dangerous degree, making it near impossible to change those things that need changed, because they have all the money, power, and weapons, and they're not afraid to use them against "We The People". At this rate, I half-expect I'll see Trump out on 5th Avenue one day soon, testing his theory about him shooting someone without consequence.
For good measure, I pasted it into Gemini as you requested, and this is what it said:
> Me: Does this say that the president is allowed to prevent distribution of funds from NSF without congressional approval: https://www.aip.org/fyi/trump-proposes-deep-research-cuts-ne...
>
> Gemini: No, it does not. [etc.]
> > The request PROPOSES $4 billion for NSF, a 54% cut from the fiscal year 2026 enacted level. The amount echoes last year’s proposal of $3.9 billion, which Congress soundly rejected, FUNDING THE AGENCY at $8.75 billion.
The current FUNDING is $8.75b, not the $4b he PROPOSED. Here's the wikipedia. Hope this helps.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Science_Foundation
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-02574-6
Excuse me?
I was answering the question, I didn’t say anything beyond that. Ease off the gas.
Also, based on your other comment chain it looks like Congress did not approve it. But I don’t know enough about the specific cut to say either way.
You came in here with a clear ax to grind and decided I was going to be your target. Don’t project your anger at some caricature on to me. Take a beat.
Accountability: misuse of cctv or bodycam footage can lead to disciplinary action of various kinds including being sacked. The link below will give you an idea of the volume of formal complaints and the 'pipeline' from complaint to potential dismissal and criminal proceedings against officers;
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/police-misconduct-e...
The accountability system is 'under review' (we do this a lot, slows things down nicely and looks like action);
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/end-to-end-review...
It isn't unicorns and rainbows by any means;
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-66809642
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.wied.11...
That's what's meant by a lack of accountability. Cops abusing their authority to pester people they don't like has been happening for nearly as long as there has been cops. But in modern America they have extra protections and one of the most powerful unions in the US which shield them from all real punishments.
Just being caught abusing the system is meaningless.
> Cops abusing their authority to pester people they don't like has been happening for nearly as long as there has been cops.
I think on net cops are good. We grant them power and put in reasonable guards for them to not abuse that power. And when they do there are remedies, like this guy is pursuing.
Because these lawsuits all play out the same. The city pays out, the cop is maybe fired and they go get a job in the next city over as a cop.
> What do you think it should be?
At a minimum every cop involved should lose the right or ability to be a cop anywhere.
> I think on net cops are good. We grant them power and put in reasonable guards for them to not abuse that power.
I think cops are necessary, I wouldn't call them good. I don't think we have reasonable guards because cops abuse their power all the time and face few consequences. More than a few cops have gotten away with murder.
> And when they do there are remedies, like this guy is pursuing.
The remedy is that the city pays, not the cops. That's not accountability. The city doesn't even have to fire the cop, just pay out.
People suck. The tool shouldn't exist.
I genuinely do not understand the boot-licking. Bizarre. It show's a complete and utter lack of foresight.
The tool absolutely should exist. It has literally helped solve 10k kidnappings. Here are a few examples:
https://www.wbrc.com/2026/09/04/moody-police-woman-charged-w...
https://www.cbsnews.com/sacramento/news/galt-flock-kidnappin...
https://www.wsoctv.com/news/local/kidnapping-investigation-l...
No they don’t. This is an ignorant statement to make knowing the history of lawsuits against police and how little to no effect that’s had on police abuse of power.
It’s just like gambling: who gives a shit if you’re playing with someone else’s money.
Has someone checked if they didnt abuse their power over 100 other people? Very likely no.
Qualified immunity is a joke. They have absolute immunity with the exception of when it is too politically hot and the cops were stupid enough to leave a trail that worked to convict them.
Policing in America is effectively a state-sanctioned mob. I get the need for the law to have teeth in its enforcement, but when the law doesn't apply to those that enforce it then the system is inherently broken.
Until this current regime, my assumption was a simple hierarchy of oversight up to the federal level but the current regime itself has no oversight and is absolutely fine with the system as it is.
2. It's lack of public oversight because an attorney filing a complaint about an unlawful arrest noticing a suspicious photograph from a month after the incident and then compelling the police to turn over evidence isn't oversight.
Accountability would have started with the officer, who knew very shortly after arresting the victim that the arrest was unlawful, being placed on leave almost immediately. But since it progressed to this point, accountability would look like literally any administrative action being taken whatsoever once the improper use was discovered.
Public oversight would have looked like that audit trail actually being read internally to determine whether there was a legitimate use for the searches in the first place. An audit trail that never gets looked at unless you're getting subpoenaed isn't "oversight".
> Record a cop doing something blatantly illegal and try finding a willing prosecutor.
The cop wasn't doing anything illegal, from the article: While standing in a private parking lot in Sussex, Wisconsin, on May 4, 2025, Napoleon Jones witnessed a traffic stop made by an out-of-county police officer. "It just didn't sit right with me,"
Yeah dog, "just didn't sit right" doesn't really hold up.
Can you cite the law that requires more than “it doesn’t sit right” to record police officers in public?
Why citizens cannot record cops?
Strawman. I have never heard of one single ingenuous person that believed these would only be used appropriately.
The main issue is that our government has too much power as to be unstoppable.
They are just shameless because making money has been canonized as a greater moral good than being a decent human being. We need to bring back name and shame.
You could argue that YC has more of a conscience than other investors like A16Z. But I'm not sure how much I believe that seeing Gary Tan's moral indifference towards startups that are the incarnate equivalent of the Torment Nexus.
This is a vastly smaller set of situations compared to what a health society would consider acceptable.
There is a huge gulf between what the law allows, and what being a decent person requires, and that gulf is called "being a scumbag."
We should not alter the law to prohibit everything in that gulf, because it would create an authoritarian society ripe for abuse, relying on controls like mass surveillance and the erasure of civil liberties.
However, we can and should name, shame, and socially/commercially outcast people who gleefully engage in the art of being a scumbag.
> trying to make money
It is indeed possible to make money without funding evil things.
For example - I don’t have links to substantiate this yet - but I’d bet the same playbook that’s always used was used here as well. Flock cameras were provided to cash strapped police departments at a very low cost - unsustainably low for any other non vc funded company to compete with - in order to juice growth and build the scale/network effect to make the system valuable.
There have been 1m “cases supported” and helping to locate approximately 10k missing persons. If you don't believe that look at a few real cases. Every example of a bad case is basically cops keeping tabs on ex-girlfiends or wives. Yes, that's bad but I prefer to save kids from kidnapping.
Saying its "anti-American" isn't an argument. I think it's very pro-American in that it protects law abiding Americans from criminals.
https://www.flocksafety.com/blog/how-effective-is-flock
https://www.wbrc.com/2026/09/04/moody-police-woman-charged-w...
https://www.cbsnews.com/sacramento/news/galt-flock-kidnappin...
https://www.cbsnews.com/colorado/news/mitchell-weber-arrest-...
In fact, we should take the pictures from public school districts and feed them into this system. Facial recognition immediately available on any kid that happens to walk on any public street. Why would anyone want to opt out of such a system?
(/s if it isn’t obvious)
This is why the human life arithmetic has to be dropped if you want to genuinely steelman your point, it's a tortured statistic that we can use to justify any number of outlawed practices. If you can defend your point sincerely without the use of hysteric examples, then please walk us through the logic and authority that convinces you Flock is good. If you can't, then I'm going to have to agree with the people dogpiling on you, this is a ridiculous opinion.
2. find one superficial similarity between them (this proves they are actually identical)
3. "why are you against one but not the other"
Can we drop the human life arithmetic and discuss the pros/cons like normal people? Do you understand why your stance is being repeatedly mocked in the same exact way?
"It's a camera bro, taking the same pictures of your daughter that anyone can take with their phone. If you don't want there to be a log of the route she walks home, take it up with the police."
There are legitimate reasons for some ability to conduct surveillance, but without a cost any surveillance method becomes mass surveillance. That cost must be human, it must scale in human time, or it turns into mass surveillance since without a human cost all it takes is one person and one button to watch one or a hundred thousand people.
Technologies like flock have no human scaling cost. They run 24/7/365 and make surveilling one person or hundreds of thousands of people as easy as pushing a button. There is no human scaling cost to them. That means that all it takes to abuse a massive portion of the population is one person and one action. The probability of abuse, abuse which harms a population as a whole, therefore approaches 100% no matter how 'good' the controls are on it. All mass surveillance technologies have this fundamental flaw. The consequence of that abuse is that people, rightfully, will believe that they are being watched, legitimately or not, 24/7/365. The harm here is clear. A society that is under mass surveillance is a society that is having its basic freedoms continuously attacked.
Mass surveillance, surveillance without a direct human cost that scales with the level of surveillance, is not compatible with any definition of 'freedom'. Or, to sum all this up, every argument about how a system like this could be made better to limit harm is a red herring because technologies like Flock have a fundamental flaw that is incompatible with any definition of a free society.
I think it's true that Flock indeed helps with the actual policing, no doubt about that. But it also seems like police departments across the country really try to promote the view that Flock is a good technology that helps safety, because some cities ultimately voted to disable Flock [1], and I'm sure police are just mad about this and don't want this to happen.
I can't wait until this finally reaches the Supreme court and they hopefully decide that those cameras are unconstitutional.
[1]: just a local example: https://www.mountainview.gov/Home/Components/News/News/1211/...
He’s kept in jail for 5 hrs before being released for it not being a legal stop just like the vet said. Then that officer tracked him thru flock over 100 times for some personal vendetta.
That's not quite accurate according to the article. It was actually worse: There were over 100 searches and some of them were done by officer in question, but some were done by other officers. This was due to lieutenant's order in connection with Jones' citizen complaint. So it wasn't just one officer abusing the system.
But the far worse problem IMO is that this cop is dirty, corrupt, untrustworthy, and should be punished for stalking this man, and yet he surely will not be. Worst case, he might catch some administrative sanction or maybe be fired - he won't go to jail like he should for this misbehavior.
If you have 1 dirty cop and 100 who ignore his bad behavior, you actually have 101 dirty cops. We need a way to deal with this in our society without resorting to the absolutes of "defund the police" or "back the blue".
There are many reasons for this, but in my humble opinion, the worst one is the "thin blue line" - the idea that police are a brotherhood holding back the darkness of crime and evil, which leads to the idea that their misdeeds are somehow excusable by people "on their team", which includes other cops and citizens who are aligned with them.
In my opinion, police should be held to a higher standard by society to match the higher level of trust, protection, and presumption of regularity that we give them. If they commit crimes, they should be prosecuted even more zealously and reliably than laypeople, rather than only rarely.
there needs to be more separation from prosecutors and cops. I know a lot of places now have prosecutors who are actively against cops, that is not what I mean.
the prosecutors are supposed to be unbiased and make decisions on evidence. we know they don't regardless of their political leaning. but that is the standard we (citizens) should hold them accountable. unfortunately there are too may bootlicking voters who just want to feel "safe" and have zero courage of their own even in the voting booth.
we need to stop giving agencies money based on stats. that is one cause to a lot of these problems. then the cops and agencies get all twisted and in a tissy when a tool that made stat pumping easier like right now the flock cameras.
I think you just need to stop giving agencies money based on bad stats. Goodhart's Law is an extremely well-established effect. At the very least, crime rate should be monitored by a separate department.
what surprises me is that flock has not started a commercial service, where you can have the system surveillance anybody for a daily fee and have it compile a need report for you.
Use cases: stalk woman, collect evidence against your enemies, collect dirt for blackmail, etc. Maybe flock is already offering this, but only for the Enterprise customers and 0.1% ....
“( Name and address, or license registration and insurance if in a vehicle)” -required by law pretty much everywhere.
“I’m exercising my right to silence. I will not answer questions without a lawyer”
“I do not consent to any searches”
“Am I being detained, or am I free to go”- say this one anytime you think the officer might be done with the reason he stopped you, because it “starts a clock” of unlawful extension
Pick whichever one makes the most sense at any given moment. Don’t say anything else. If the officer says you are free to go, leave.
As for what you can refuse, you really can’t during the stop. You have to fight in court. LISTEN CAREFULLY to the words of the officer and do not respond to QUESTIONS, only ORDERS. They are trained to ask you to do things that might be unlawful if they were orders, like can you step out of the car for me please, can you follow my flashlight for me, can you roll down your window all the way. If you are unclear, ask “are you ordering me, officer?”
If any part of the stop was unlawful your defense attorney can iron that out later in court (and if so, typically everything occurring after the unlawful gets thrown out)
If you want to go a step further and be polite etc, know that many police won’t give you brownie points for it, but if they ask you questions like “where are you coming from” or “where are you going” or “who are/were you with” redirect your answers only to plainly obvious facts about YOURSELF ONLY and the PRESENT time, e.g. “I am out for a drive officer”
Caveat: IANAL, this is not legal advice
Source: SWIM has extensive experience in this area
I always think of that scene in Minority Report where 3 judges are conferenced in live when a “vision” arrived.
Because if used properly and lawfully these cameras can be useful to keep people safe. Including from the cops.
These are police-owned cameras filming public areas. A better solution would be to require court approval to buy and vote these cameras, or where they can be pointed.
See also: https://dave.autonoma.ca/blog/2019/06/06/web-of-knowledge/
Who will watch the watchmen?
But that would be OK as long as a warrant was required to access it, right?
* - All people unable to pay the government to disable the device.
That people defend this is shocking. Absolutely zero foresight.
They can live in gated communities, travel by chauffeured cars owned by contracted businesses multiple LLCs deep, fly in private airports on private jets, or just go live on a yacht in international waters.
what systems could be changed or created to prevent abuse of power?
there are many people who want to use surveillance to deter and catch criminals
surveillance also helps combat certain abuses of power, like cops shooting black people
we should build an accountability system to balance against additional state power and surveillance. defense in depth. the best of both worlds?
321 down, Dallas: https://thehill.com/policy/technology/6065838-dallas-police-...
150 down, El Paso: https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/public-safe...
ALL on state roadways, Florida: https://www.tallahassee.com/story/news/state/2026/09/01/whic...
A dozen agencies cancelling Flock in Wisconsin https://www.fox6now.com/news/flock-camera-pushback-fond-du-l...
A. there is nothing a good person needs to hide (including cops, at least good ones), therefore it should be openly public to everyone and all usage logged and public (to catch abuse), or
B. privacy is important so it should be protected, and while data is collectible, nonetheless cannot be shared without consent or a court order. And none of this fake content that companies claim you gave by walking outside, setting up your phone/account/etc after buying it and being forced to sign so you didn't just buy an expensive brick, etc.
Police wearing body cameras has nothing to do with universal mass surveillance devices.
Somehow we went from:
1. People can see and hear your in public
2. Therefore public places are not private
3. Therefore people can record you
4. Therefore it's okay to build a network of cameras that can track and query every place you have ever been
The problem has always been on step 2. The assumption that "public places are not private" anymore just because everyone can record you and post it on TikTok. In reality before smartphones public places were extremely private compared to being broadcast to the entire planet.
Flock is just an iteration, and getting rid of that brand won't fix it. And camera tracking of normal citizens is just an iteration -- not the underlying systemic issue that isn't being addressed.
The EU has GDPR. At this point, I want something stronger than that.
Generally those who support the police in general (especially those with the thin blue line American flag displayed somewhere) espouse support for veterans. The clash of a veteran operating legally with police operating illegally helps foster cognitive dissonance and disentangle these two institutions in their mind.
In other words these types of articles are helpful for causing those individuals to confront the issues in their belief structure.
I use them this way all the time with my parents, as they continue to insist that I (a retired Navy vet) should mindlessly support the police. They are not interested in the LONG history of those two populations clashing.
1. Policing is yet another example of Baumol’s effect[1]; sectors where automation lags become expensive
2. Policing can be automated effectively, including via Flock:
> Hunters Point rapper Dreamllife Rizzy described how police tech has made it more difficult to get away with bipping and other crimes. “Crime in San Francisco, period, that shit over with, brother,” the rapper said. “They got drones, hella shit.” He described how Flock cameras clock the plates on a stolen car and send an alert to police stations, which send drones to follow the vehicle.[2]
3. Policing, like major surgery, ambitious construction, military invasions, and other high-consequence endeavors, is not immune to perfidy, incompetence, or other human weaknesses.
4. Argument by implicit synecdoche (here is an example of an abuse, therefore the general behavior is abusive) is ubiquitous and invalid; you need to actually collect wide evidence and weigh major tradeoffs. How does Flock affect total crime rates? Total abuse rates? That only matters if you think that we should be open to the possibility that widespread use of Flock cameras might be good.
5. WRT privacy and policing-the-police in particular, there is a small but highly vocal community of libertarians whose perspective is sharp, detailed, and not reflective of broader society’s perspective except in motte-and-bailey form, and who will never be persuaded by evidence because for them what matters are the principles (n.b.: this observation is not per se a criticism — sometimes principles should trump evidence around tradeoffs).
6. HN’s 10^5 (?) active commenters include 10^4(?) members of that libertarian vanguard
7. Everyone has heard all the libertarian and contra-libertarian arguments going back decades; no one is learning from yet another go-round
[1] https://acjsissons.medium.com/the-baumol-effect-not-a-diseas...
[2] https://sfstandard.com/2026/08/13/rest-peace-bip-city/?utm_s...
High-productivity organizations have increased revenue and reduced expenses, almost by definition. These profits can be "spent" in various ways like charging customers less, paying workers more, paying investors more, and blue-sky research. (I'm remembering the early days of Google here.) Or it could fund various forms of corruption.
Paying employees more helps drive up local wages. Also, wealthier people want higher-end services and are price-insensitive, so they're inevitably going to be charged more. They'll bid more for houses and pay more to eat in fancier restaurants.
People discount the "trickle-down" effect but everyone notices when the cost of living goes up because there are a lot of rich people around who will pay more.
People are generally massively uninformed if not misinformed. People have not heard real arguments or data for most issues in general.
Can we get Shayhorn’s supervisor a medal? Perhaps a parade in their honor? Usually corruption or coerced corruption is so bad in any precinct that this type of proper behavior is shocking. Surprised they didn’t all conspire to put a drop gun on Jones.
Four different places, four different children rescued by use of Flock cameras.
https://kfdm.com/news/local/flock-camera-teamwork-credited-w...
https://www.foxcarolina.com/2026/07/31/kidnapped-mother-son-...
https://www.whsv.com/2026/08/01/deputy-uses-flock-cameras-fi...
https://abc3340.com/news/local/moody-police-say-flock-camera...
Want to track latest on what flock cameras did? https://flockstopscrime.com
Want to track what people are doing all the time? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyeurism#Treatment
There are no "good apples" the article itself shows that other "apples" were helping him illegaly surveil. The "good apples" thought it was a good idea to give every apple access to a problematic system.
There are no good apples if there's a rotten in the bunch, we need public oversight of the only people that are allowed to enact violence on behalf of the state.
The unedited comment shows he used it correctly using “and” to mean “so that”.