https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMIwNiwQewQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uB0gr7Fh6lY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vU1-uiUlHTo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pp9MwZkHiMQ
I recommend them.
It's that they don't have the basic strength of building alliances in the first place - something every kid is supposed to learn through the joys and pains of playing together. Bullies are not generally the popular ones, but neither are the loners.
To put it another way: castles can't survive siege forever. They are a delaying tactic until outside help can arrive.
"The Dauphin, whom of succors we entreated, Returns us that his powers are yet not ready To raise so great a siege. Therefore, great king, We yield our town and lives to thy soft mercy." -- Henry V, Act 3, scene 3
Also, I can't help but feel like I'm watching a young Dr. Emmett Brown.. Great Scott!!
There’s more of us techno anarchists out there apparently!
Benn Jordan's YouTube channel is a registered Nonprofit https://www.patreon.com/posts/nonprofit-has-82858569
It is very clearly because YouTube has a higher reach than any other platform in that space.
At least 40,990 [2] innocent people died in the US in 2023, without significant outcry - that is, on the road, in car accidents. People in the US clearly value the freedom of driving over the deaths of innocent people. In 2023, there were an estimated 19,800 [3] homicides in the US. But even if you assume surveillance like Flock could prevent a meaningful fraction of those homicides - and there's little evidence it does [4] - that's still asking people to give up their most sensitive freedom, the right to move without being tracked, for speculative gains. People are not willing to sacrifice their freedom to save 40,990 people from cars, why should our constant locations be monitored?
The abuse isn't speculative. Police have been caught stalking exes, tracking abortions, and innocent people [5] have been held at gunpoint due to a flock misread. The "safety" these cameras provide comes with a surveillance that's already being turned against ordinary people.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47690237
[2] https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/2022-traffic-deaths-202...
[3] https://bjs.ojp.gov/document/hvus23.pdf
[4] Flock can't even demonstrably reduce car break-ins. The drop in San Francisco started months before cameras were installed (https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/sf-car-breakins/). If it can't prevent car beak-ins, how can we expect it to make a dent in homicides.
[5] https://www.businessinsider.com/flock-safety-alpr-cameras-mi...
>misreads by Flock's automated license plate readers... resulted in people who hadn't committed crimes being stopped at gunpoint, sent to jail, or mauled by a police dog, among other outcomes.
If you think FLOCK is an issue, you're barking up the wrong tree. You can remove all the FLOCK camera's you want and it won't change the already overwhelming passive surveillance that's already in place.
We crossed the Rubicon decades ago when people gave up their ability to move without being tracked for speculative gains when they started using smartphones religiously.
Also, the passive surveillance has resulted in several high profile killers like LISK and Bryan Kohberger being caught. So as much bad as you think it does, there are clear cases where its helped crack decades old serial killings and put horrifically violent people in jail. I think we can both agree we don't want those people out walking freely in our society.
You can "justify" so much with that sentence, that it becomes meaningless.
Also, it won't hide the fact that this surveillance infrastructure can cause much much more harm then it prevents. We've seen what it might do in repressive states and we see today that even those states which represented the idea of individual freedom on this planet, you are only one election away from madness.
Given that we (societally, rather than like, you, I or I imagine most of the people reading this here) seem perfectly willing to sacrifice personal freedoms elsewhere (that flock was ever deployed, the past few years rollout of age gates on websites, etc), how can you conclude that with cars its unwillingness to sacrifice personal freedom rather than entrenched economic interests driving (lol) the lack of change with cars?
Im not advocating for these cameras at all, but I dont think this is a very good line of thinking. The drop started before Flock, but that doesnt mean that they arent beneficial and currently helping lower the rate even further.
But Flock tracks them on the ground when they get in their big S Mercedes after arriving at their third vacation home in Aspen.
Flock also tracks the wealthy who can't afford charter a jet, but who can afford to buy seats on the fanciest side of the curtain.
Flock tracks the doing-alright folks in business class.
Flock tracks those aspires to reach these levels: It even tracks the temporarily-disadvantaged billionaires who work soulless factory jobs and stuggle to keep up on the lease for their Black Express RAM 1500 Quad Cab, who rail against taxing the people who actually do have money as if that would ruin their own lives.
Flock tracks Joey who manages the sandwich shop down the way.
Flock tracks everyone.
By the time we get down to the point of mentioning that "everyone" includes the subset of people who are criminals, that part almost seems like a bug instead of a feature.
> Flock has recently expanded into other technologies... Most concerning are the latest Flock drones equipped with high-powered cameras. Flock's "Drone as First Responder" platform automates drone operations, including launching them in response to 911 calls or gunfire. Flock's drones, which reach speeds up to 60 mph, can follow vehicles or people and provide information to law enforcement.
Tomorrow a police officer will suggest that these drones (that we are already using successfully) could be very useful for checking up on that "dangerous" neighborhood.
It will absolutely happen in corrupt departments, or those involving an officer with those skills and access. But data that is uploaded is infinitely harder to erase than simply turning off the camera in the first place.
Because it's a social problem, not a technology problem.
At the same time, just because these instances of "missing" tape happen, does not mean that body cams and jailhouse CCTV are useless. We would not take those away. Likewise for the future drone footage
Remember, oppression and invasion of privacy is still bad even if it isn't currently happening to you. If you think you can't be a target, you're sorely mistaken.
With their drones they now have cameras roaming freely everywhere.
Possible: Perhaps crash into someone? Or worse.
That's unconstitutional. Use a regular camera and it's fine for some reason.
If EMS has to "search you out" so does the drone.
At least in my County, we actually get very good triangulation info from 911. It was very rare that Dispatch told us they only had Level 2(IIRC) location info (which might be to several hundred feet).
FAR more common was people who actually told us the -wrong- location. Car accidents that were several miles up the road from their location. Saying Blah St SE when they meant Blah Rd NE, etc.
Drones don't solve for that problem. They're going to the wrong location, too.
The point is that the drone is fast enough to arrive first, and do the searching so that you don't have to. It's just one of many possible scenarios.
I totally understand the argument that this might not be the most effective use of money, but I honestly don't understand the lack of appreciation for the number of places this could be used effectively.
Yes, the drones should be secure. Yes there should be measures to make sure that they're not abused. But none of that takes away from anything i've said, which is ONLY to point out the situations where they could be useful. And people seem to be having a very negative visceral reaction to even considering the possibility.
Also, i'm not recommending or supporting Flock, just the concept of drone use in general.
I'm sure you can come up with a lot more ideas using your imagination.
When our parties got called in, the spotlight would be the warning that the cops were a few minutes away and it was time to run.
Lots of cities have manned aircraft loitering during busy times that will respond to a call before ground units
Scan complete. Please do not move or attempt to leave the area until you have been notified via the 'GovernmentForYou' app that you are cleared to leave the area.
Because you have been identified in the active area police have been granted legal probable cause to search your home. Please unlock your homes doors via any smart home app you have to prevent the authorities from forcibly removing your door onsite
Notification. Citizen because of your scan you have been identified as committing a bank fraud case in North Dakota and will be detained and transported (the move process takes 2-4 weeks). Once in North Dakota your right to a speedy trial will start if you are held more than the reasonable 60 day administration period.
Have a good day citizen and thank you for your cooperation."
I’m not a fan of Flock but I would welcome anything that knocks out some of the ghetto birds’ budget.
Most places in America don't have problems that surveillance solves. They have problems they already know about and won't act on. Cameras don't fix homelessness or addiction or underfunded services. They just make life harder for regular people.
But that's the whole appeal for bureaucrats. Buying a product looks like doing something without having to do any of the actual work.
In what way do cameras make life harder for regular people? If anything rampant crime (and progressive legal systems' unwillingness to lock up repeat offenders for a long time or at all) makes life much harder for regular people than a camera just sitting there.
Additionally, the surveillance apparatus enables parallel reconstruction. When law enforcement gathers evidence via illegal means, they can then use the drag net to find cause to detain/search unrelated to the original crime, in order to have cover to gather evidence they illegally gathered prior, aka a loophole for civil rights.
https://academic.oup.com/nc/article/2024/1/niae039/7920510?l...
Foucault used to distinguish between models of authority that operate on "make die and let live" vs "let die and make live". China's the former, the US with its moral busybodies both in progressive and religious flavors the latter.
The US now is a society of public disorder and personal policing, China is a society of public order and largely indifference in private life. Of course the former creates anxiety. American Beauty, a film about permanent surveillance without any state, would make no sense in China.
I'm not saying that it couldn't be true, but we have no way of concluding that from just comparing such rates. There are many differences in daily life and thresholds for reporting beyond surveillance levels.
That requires a specific example, which you were provided with. This reads to me as a pithy response that doesn't want to wrestle with the ways this can be misused.
> In what way do cameras make life harder for regular people?
I provided an example. Are you only accepting peer-reviewed studies?
1a) Review will take time / resources which could be spent on human policing, harming the community.
1b) Some jurisdictions may prefer "broken windows as policy", the notion that they can construct a "reasonable suspicion", given enough garbage (some of it outright garbage, the point being there is so much of it nobody cares; don't need to do an accurate drug test until trial, right?).
2) False surveillance hits will make it through human review and result in injury to innocent humans.
3) Police forces already lack the money / manpower to investigate potential crimes.
4) Police forces already "prioritize" other matters than the mentally ill setting their houses on fire or releasing plagues of rabbits into their neighborhoods (actual things that have happened to me!).
Increasing the quality of the panopticon has all the downsides we talk about regularly on HN, and if you can't do anything useful for society with the data, it only ends up hurting people.
"Making life harder for people [in the other tribe]" has become a core platform for a great many politicians. There's growing movement advocating that one of the major purposes of government is to grief people you don't like. Looked at through that lens, blanketing small towns with these things, with a plan to use them against "Those People," makes complete sense.
It's gross but I think the cohort of America that watches Fox News all day probably loves these things because they've been brainwashed with crime reports that are disproportionate from reality.
I live just outside Seattle. I worked for Flock.
Flock is a company based in Atlanta GA.
Both Seattle and SF have lower violent crime rates than Salt Lake City.
N.b. property crime is different and is a much less reliable metric. Both cities are ranked higher for property crime, but still below the famously dangerous Salt Lake City.
I don't think it's the bureaucrats. You should hear the Flock CEO talk. They have made it very public that their direct intent is to influence government policy in sweeping and total fashion to enable their service to be the mass surveillance tool of the near future. They sincerely believe that people will look back on them as the saviours of mankind.
Flock's headquarters and largest offices are in Atlanta. They also have an office in Boston.
Ring's headquarters were in Santa Monica until post-acquisition they moved to Hawthorne, CA.
Arlo's offices are in Carlsbad and San Jose. Ok, finally an office in the Bay Area (one of two main offices), but still not San Francisco.
His only advantage is that the cops are on his side and won’t let go of these cameras without a fight.
But sadly lots of people want everyone else subject to it, and some are willing to submit to it themselves to get it. It's not a foregone conclusion.
I agreed that there could be benefits but that the downside is that they know when and where you go to church, or the grocery, or where you get your hair done, or even when you go on vacation. Her eyes lit up and I she replied that she would have to think about that a bit.
I'm not saying that I changed her mind, but that bringing the consequences down to something she could understand was much better than yelling from the rooftops. Mentioning church is especially impactful with a lot of older folks.
Good job talking to your community. The first step is that people are aware of the cameras - for my neighbors, most did not know about them, and immediately found it creepy.
These systems were largely disliked bipartisanly because of those factors.
Which isn't necessarily where the most incidents are.
This statistically defendable study found crash effects that were consistent in direction with those found in many previous studies, although the positive effects were somewhat lower that those reported in many sources. The conflicting direction effects for rear end and right-angle crashes justified the conduct of the economic effects analysis to assess the extent to which the increase in rear end crashes negates the benefits for right-angle crashes. This analysis, which was based on an aggregation of rear end and right-angle crash costs for various severity levels, showed that RLC systems do indeed provide a modest aggregate crash-cost benefit.
The opposing effects for the two crash types also implied that RLC systems would be most beneficial at intersections where there are relatively few rear end crashes and many right-angle ones. This was verified in a disaggregate analysis of the economic effect to try to isolate the factors that would favor (or discourage) the installation of RLC systems. That analysis revealed that RLC systems should be considered for intersections with a high ratio of right-angle crashes to rear end crashes, higher proportion of entering AADT on the major road, shorter cycle lengths and intergreen periods, one or more left turn protected phases, and higher entering AADTs. It also revealed the presence of warning signs at both RLC intersections and city limits and the application of high publicity levels will enhance the benefits of RLC systems.
The indications of a spillover effect point to a need for a more definitive study of this issue. That more confidence could not be placed in this aspect of the analysis reflects that this is an observational retrospective study in which RLC installations took place over many years and where other programs and treatments may have affected crash frequencies at the spillover study sites. A prospective study with an explicit purpose of addressing this issue seems to be required.
tl;dr - it's complicated. There are places RLCs make sense and places they don't. Expecting local government to know the difference... good luck with that.
1 - https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/publications/research/safety/05049/
And the real root problem isn't you or what you believe. The problem is that you don't feel responsible for the side effects that would happen if you got your way any more than a lone piece of litter feels responsible for ruining the park. Nor does society hold you responsible, "it's nobody's fault". So you and everyone else are free to peddle bad solutions to small problems without consequence.
Edit: Perhaps this is just part of a longer arc of societal progress. We used to categorize bad people worthy of being ignored based on group membership they mostly couldn't control, religions, races, stuff like that. As society got better at measurement we realized this was wrong and somewhat stopped doing it. Now we struggle holding groups accountable. All sorts of evil can be done without consequence as long as the responsibility is diluted enough. Maybe something in the future will solve this.
I don't see how removing the cameras is compatible with the first amendment, but if you have the right of "speech" to record me in public chasing every place I go in a manner that is the envy of any stalker, I ought to have the right of "speech" not to "say anything" (compelled speech of showing my plate).
https://www.oyez.org/cases/2017/16-402
> The government's warrantless acquisition of Carpenter's cell-site records violated his Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable searches and seizures. Chief Justice John Roberts authored the opinion for the 5-4 majority. The majority first acknowledged that the Fourth Amendment protects not only property interests, but also reasonable expectations of privacy. Expectations of privacy in this age of digital data do not fit neatly into existing precedents, but tracking person's movements and location through extensive cell-site records is far more intrusive than the precedents might have anticipated.
Or in United States v. Jones (cited in https://www.ca4.uscourts.gov/opinions/201495A.P.pdf):
> Although the case was ultimately decided on trespass principles, five Justices agreed that “longer term GPS monitoring . . . impinges on expectations of privacy.” See id. at 430 (Alito, J., concurring); id. at 415 (Sotomayor, J., concurring). Based on “[t]raditional surveillance” capacity “[i]n the precomputer age,” the Justices reasoned that “society’s expectation” was that police would not “secretly monitor and catalogue every single movement of an individual’s car for a very long period.”
It seems clear these cameras can hit some kind of threshold where they're common enough and interlinked enough to amount to unconstitutional surveilance. We don't know exactly where that threshold is yet.
Precedent is often crap and wrong until someone can find a good case paired with good lawyers to rectify.
Edit: Throttled so editing to reply
Precedent is randomly set by whoever gets there first often with a random case and a defendant with zero funds desperate to minimize their situation (for example without the funds to challenge the legality of polygraph/flock versus polygraph/flocks paid 'experts'). Although now political people are trying to game the system and shop very thought out cases to specific friendly courts to help put their finger on establishing precedent. After building enough such cases in lower courts, moneyed interests then shop it to the next level. Then with enough at the next level, to the Supremes.
It's a pretty awful, unintentional by design and fairly random 'legal system' with a huge bias towards those with more money and or the huge disparity in power of the Federal government, it's prosecutors, trial tax and the ridiculousness of 'if you exercise your constitutional rights you risk an additional 20-50 years in prison' versus someone broke, whose life has already been ruined by time in jail (and their fight beaten out of them), just wanting to go home as soon as possible.
And when those disempowered have the courage to risk the trial tax and do happen to stumble upon a win you get the strategic use of either pleas bargains or dropping the case by prosecutors to prevent precedent, or the abuse by judges of 'as applied' rulings in order to again prevent precedent from being set even when the case was won.
One side has all the power. One side has huge threats (in the form of trial tax). One side literally holds in you prison and has 100% control over every aspect of your life as you try to fight them and uses things like diesel therapy or the many other ways the have to apply to break you down for 'being difficult'. One side has the power to just drop cases it if risks precedent they don't like. And one side has the power to label a case 'as applied' to prevent precedent they don't like. It's a pretty crap system if you want fair unmanipulated precedents to come out of it. It's a great system if you want money/federal prosecutors/judges to be able to put their finger on the scale and set the outcome.
"Precedent is often crap" isn't really the basis for any cohesive judicial philosophy or legal thought process.
I'm not aware of any precedent anywhere that approaches "ALPRs violate 4A" territory, it's when other stuff happens that's beyond simply "$lp_id was seen by $camera on $datetime" that I've seen courts start to talk about reasonableness and privacy.
Trying to interpret viewing and recording the plate as speech but not displaying it as speech is trying to have your cake and eat it too. If the camera can stalk my car everywhere and record it under auspices of 'speech', it's only logical I can hide it as 'speech.'
Automated mass surveillance of license plates should also be illegal.
Guess what, all the roads around me are private easements, all privately owned, and they are that way 90% to town. A good portion of my trips never touch a publicly owned road yet I'm still required to display my plate on them. We don't even have public, tax maintained roads where I live (I literally have to bring out a tractor and fix them myself when they wear down). Yet the compelled 'speech' of displaying the license plate is required even then while driving your car on your privately owned non-gated road.
Many farmers have plateless farm trucks, people who live in the woods have plateless UTVs that they drive on private dirt and gravel roads, etc.
You shouldn't pin your ideals on anything as flawed as the Constitution of the US. It was barely a workable system to begin with, and who knows how long it can last now.
When was that? Because in 1977 they defended Nazi's free speech to demonstrate in a town that had jewish people as half its population so it tried to block them, and I don't recall them doing anything nearly that controversial since.
https://www.aclu.org/news/free-speech/the-skokie-case-how-i-...
Alternative framing: Given limited resources and lots of things to care about, they pick the specific cases that best improve the freedoms they're interested in protecting.
In the case of the Second Amendment, they decided to let the NRA handle it, as that seems to be working just fine.
The ACLU should defend people who suck ass and another group should defend the heroes who beat their ass for saying awful shit.
So maybe you pick the anti-ICE protester instead of the Nazi to help out. Both got shot with pepper balls, both had their rights infringed upon. Why not pick the one who isn't a complete ass to establish the same precedent with?
They've explicitly said the opposite.
https://www.aclu.org/news/civil-liberties/defending-speech-w...
2023: "We joined Young Americans for Freedom, the Cato Institute, and other unlikely partners in filing an amicus brief on behalf of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression in its challenge to New York’s new law regulating 'hateful conduct' in social media."
The Second is probably the amendment least in need of defending by the ACLU. It's well covered, and pretty much a third rail of American politics.
2018: the ACLU supports the NRA's First Amendment challenge to Governor Cuomo's attempt to convince NY financial institutions not to do business with the NRA.
2019: they defended a conservative student magazine which was denied funding by UCSD.
2020: they filed a brief supporting antisemitic protestors picketing a synagogue on the Sabbath. They also supported a Catholic school's religious right to make religious-based choices in hiring and firing teachers.
I'm just quoting the fruits of five minutes of research here, so I won't go on (but there's more). Is it possible that you're reacting to the radical conservative stereotyping of the ACLU rather than the actual actions of the organization?
0: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/06/us/aclu-free-speech.html
I think this is particularly noted as a post-2022 shift
The only problem with the license plate readers is that the "teens" drive cars with fake tags. They deliberately copy the plate numbers from some granny with the same model. Makes it fun when the SWAT team knocks on Granny's door.
- is trivially defeated by teenagers
- is used by police departments as evidence to legally justify violent raids for property damage
- whose data is mishandled by law enforcement agencies who don't do due diligence
... should have more widespread adoption and support?
Cops -did- show up. "Did you have a green light" "I did." Less than 30 seconds of questions. Goes to the other driver, same, is back in under a minute. "Well, he said he's absolutely sure he had a green light, so I'm citing you for failing to obey a traffic signal".
There were no cameras in the area, no witnesses, just the two drivers. But the other driver was a 50 something male, and my step daughter was 17 and upset because it was our car. So the cop took his word and cited her.
Hmm, vehicle black box? If that showed that she had come to and been at a stop, and then accelerated, that would at least imply she had been at a red light, and gone when it turned green, as she said.
No, no interest there. Even the insurer (fine, whatever), said "unless we're facing a six digit payout, we're not pulling the black box".
Don't even start me on the fact that after our insurance denied liability, the other driver sued her in small claims court for $10,000 for a car that had a KBB of $1,450. And the small claims judge noted that he technically couldn't sue a minor in small claims, but required us to go to mandatory arbitration, where the arbitrator said, quote, "I don't understand why, as a decent human being, if insurance will pay out, you don't just accept the claim." (Yeahhhh, filed a complaint about that, too. And here I stop, because I feel my blood pressure rising lol).
It's not just auto insurance. Every government, government adjacent and highly regulated process is just like that.
It's not about right and wrong or fairness or making the responsible party pay or saving the children or protecting the environment or preventing sub-prime loans or enforcing building code or or whatever the alleged pretext is. It's about having an efficient process turn the subjective into the quantifiable and/or assign financial responsibility and do so in a manner that's not flagrantly wrong so often that a "large enough to be a problem" amount of people seek recourse outside the system (like smoking the CEO on the sidewalk or armoring a bulldozer or whatever).
But of course, marketing the system as though it's about right and wrong or fairness or whatever is what they do as a means toward what the point actually is so it's easy to understand why you think it failed instead of worked perfectly.
The Bay Area is objectively safe, for example, yet I constantly run into neighbors in affluent neighborhoods who are afraid of venturing various places, letting their kids play outside or bike to school, or just generally exploring around.
I was at a BayFC match last weekend, for example, and ran into the family of an acquaintance from my elementary daughter's school. They have an 8th grader and are trying to get an intra-district transfer approved for high school so she doesn't have to go to the neighborhood school where a student brought a ghost gun on campus 3 years ago (he was arrested and successfully prosecuted, and no one was hurt)... and instead go to the local school where a handful of kids arranged their bodies in a swastika pattern on the football field (and photographed it!) several months ago. My point isn't that either of these crimes is acceptable, but that people tend to be irrational and ignorant of statistical analysis. Both of these are good schools with better than average student outcomes, but families consistently bring their own prejudices into analysis and it creates mild chaos & havoc across the system overall.
but also imagine thinking the richest city on the entire planet should just be fine with 3x the homicide rate of other comparable cities and 20-30x worse than Beijing or Tokyo. I mean its just embarrassing that you think your comment is defensible.
We've completely resigned ourselves to living in the most dangerous developed country by a long shot for no good reason.
Reminds me of this classic: https://static.poder360.com.br/2020/11/2020-11-07-22.31.49.j...
Yeah, I'm all for public safety in theory but seems like these days that's just a dog whistle for "go hard on whatever sort of petty deviance I don't like" and so I'm unwilling to support things like that in the default case. It's all just so tiresome.
[1]: I imagine this includes things like mental heath help, housing, and other related social safety nets.
Giving away food to homeless is a crime in many places. Bad capitalism.
Feelings of insecurity are manufactured relative to the danger posed:
https://ourworldindata.org/does-the-news-reflect-what-we-die...
How is this due to capitalism?
I mean, I can maybe see how you can tie it to NIMBYism, and from there to capitalism through the desire to maintain or increase property values. But that's a stretch, and only one mechanism
There are many drivers for this type of regulation, some more well-meaning than others. Most of them would not go away simply because we ceased private ownership of the means of production
And here they are telling you that you cannot use your own property to help alleviate issues in your community. That sounds more like an exaggeration of Communist attempts at division of labor and to 'organize' a civilization.
Drawing an equivalence is foolish.
Flock's stats are very misleading too. If there was a Flock query in the course of investigating a crime, even if it leads nowhere or isn't relevant to the arrest or conviction, still, Flock was queried, so "Flock solved a crime".
It was sad. I had significant ethical questions when I joined, but all through recruitment and week one, everything was all about controls and restraints and auditing and ethics. After that, nope, a free for all. Selling our products in states that don't allow the use of certain functionality? Not our problem. We're not disabling it. That's up to you to decide whether you're using it or not.
In this context, we're talking about SF, not the US at large. Yes, SF is well known for coddling criminals. This is, obviously, a qualitative characterization -- it cannot be proven empirically. But we can point at characteristic examples:
https://ktxs.com/news/nation-world/san-francisco-ends-5m-alc...
https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/s-f-start-allowing-ev...
https://www.denvergazette.com/2024/01/27/california-finally-...
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/yes-its-ok-to-be-mad-about-cri...
(There's some hope it's improving very recently or in the near future.)
> The united states locks up more of their people than pretty much any other nation...
We (the US) have more criminality than many peer nations. We either lock them up, or let them be free despite doing crimes.
Do you have any empirical evidence to support this claim?
In other words: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSVqLHghLpw
First to match the graph you make sure you pick 'Larceny - From Vehicle' only (there are some others one might argue matter) and ensure you're only counting incidents once (many rows reference the same incident). That lets us recreate the original graph.
When looking at many things I like to look at seasonal effects just to see, and it doesn't look like they are significant here (but you can see the Mar 2020 drop to the next year quite easily which I like): https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/images/2/2e/SFPD_Vehicle_Bre...
I also tried overlaying various line charts but that's useless for visually identifying the break.
One thing I thought would be fun is to run a changepoint algorithm blindly https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/File:SFPD_Vehicle_Break-Ins_...
I like PELT because it appeals to my sensibilities (you don't say ahead of time how many changepoints you want to find - you set an energy/cost param and let it roll) and it finds that one changepoint. You can have some fun with the other algos and changing the amount of breakpoints or changing the PELT cost function. And then you can have even more fun by excluding 2020 or excluding Mar 2020 onwards or replacing it by estimates from the previous years (quite suspect considering what we're trying to do but hey we're having fun - a bunch of algos all flag Nov 2023 as some moment of truth)
Anyway, anyone curious should download the data. It's pretty straightforward to use and if I goofed up with off-by-one or whatever, you can go see for yourself.
And "While our data extends only to 2018" is... important, yeah?
There's an enormous drop in edit: late 2019, and the second drop starts in 2023.
https://www.sanfranciscopolice.org/your-sfpd/policies/depart...
> Starting on March 19, 2024, Flock Safety began installing ALPR cameras in various strategic locations across San Francisco. This rollout is expected to take place over the next 90 days. Per 19B ALPR policy, the administration of the Flock ALPR system is the responsibility of the Investigations Bureau.
How did the Flock cameras cause two crime drops before their installation?
The article's note about 2018 is talking about extending backwards, not forwards. It's entirely accurate, and a direct quote from your link.
The chart is trending down by January 2020, changes directions (upwards) right around the March 2020 spot, and again around (down) the July 2023 spot.
The fact that they only have data going back to 2018 means it's hard to say if the pre-COVID stuff was the norm or unusual.
To be super-clear, here's the chart annotated to show that 90 day window (black rectangle) in which the cameras were installed. https://imgur.com/a/i00Gna0
"that drop is obviously in early 2020", to reemphasize, is several years before the cameras got installed.
The cameras were added where the black rectangle is here: https://imgur.com/a/i00Gna0
• Meta-analyses (studies that average the results of multiple studies) in the UK show that video surveillance has no statistically significant impact on crime.
• Preliminary studies on video surveillance systems in the US show little to no positive impact on crime.
https://www.aclu.org/sites/default/files/images/asset_upload...
https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/sf-car-breakins/ has a chart of the car breakins.
It shows the drop starting in September of 2023.
https://www.sanfranciscopolice.org/your-sfpd/policies/depart...
> Starting on March 19, 2024, Flock Safety began installing ALPR cameras in various strategic locations across San Francisco. This rollout is expected to take place over the next 90 days.
In other words, the cameras were added where I've annotated the chart with a black rectangle here: https://imgur.com/a/i00Gna0
To my knowledge, Flock doesn't have a time machine offering.
If there is evidence this is related to cameras, then the onus is on companies making these cameras and claims to provide the data. Not on others to prove that they don't stop crime.
There's a reason you always start with the null hypothesis.
Are there reports or studies released which explains how the flock system influenced these reductions?
It would be easy to create a camera network that is locally owned and operated by public agencies, and if any place in America could so that it should be SF.
https://consumerrights.wiki/w/Flock_license_plate_readers
And more about the company behind the cameras:
I have not done any research if that's out of the frying pan and into the fire or an improvement
The Axon contract is smaller than the Flock one, 50 cameras instead of >100, but that's because it's all they could get budget for, and they want to expand. DPD owns the data and is theoretically not supposed to share it with federal agencies, but there are lots of legal ways to make them comply. They're setting a 21-day retention period for data that's not part of an ongoing investigation, but I think that's missing the point, and it's not codified into law. The Axon cameras can be switched into a mode where DPD can view live feeds. Most of the contract provisions that the mayor's office added because of significant public outcry I would call "token." They're not addressing the real issues, and it's still contributing heavily to the development of the surveillance state.
Overall, it's an improvement, in the sense that breaking your leg is better than breaking both your legs. But don't get me wrong, they're coming for the other one as soon as they can.
https://open.spotify.com/episode/2V5m4J0tjYg1shWXWrOG8k?si=k...
I don't know if it's criminal in any EU country, but it would be something that you could complain to DPA about. Or initiate civil lawsuit against the controller.
Worth noting is that in some cases the camera vendor might also be (joint) controller as they can determine means & purposes of the processing. If they are simply storing the video then it's unlikely, but if they for example use it for AI training that would likely bring them controller territory.
The brutal reality is everyone is doing this and there's nothing you can do about it. National Security trumps all other concerns (even the GDPR exempts governments who argue their data collection is done for National Security reasons), especially in a world as unstable as today.
[0] - https://www.japan.go.jp/kizuna/2024/06/japans_ai-based_crime...
[1] - https://www.tc.u-tokyo.ac.jp/en/ai1ec_event/10769/
Maybe not me personally, but society can.
The world is the most stable and peaceful it's been in decades if not longer. What is your evidence that the world is unstable?
That’s a big misconception, flock is a car identification system not a license plate one. I have seen many videos of some crime documentaries where flock was used to ID cars with no license plates, and weeks later they still have them in the system to track, coupled with phone tracking, they know exactly all the details needed.
Soon after the cameras were installed, some thieves stole a gift my brother had sent me. Thanks to license plate data and images of their faces, Vancouver PD had little trouble catching the perpetrators. It turned out that in addition to stealing Amazon/UPS/Fedex packages, they were stealing USPS mail and using it to commit identity theft. IIRC they ended up getting a decade in federal prison.
It seems like only a few people are responsible for the majority of thefts, so catching them and locking them up drastically improves quality of life for everyone else. Obviously this technology could be abused, but that's also true for things like fingerprinting, DNA evidence, and ID requirements. Similarly to those technologies, we could have laws restricting certain uses, allowing us to reduce crime while preventing abuses. But if a private community wants to install cameras and allow law enforcement to access the data they record, I don't see any constitutional issues.
You might be shocked to discover there are subdivisions so affluent they can afford physical armed security and access control structures with far more invasive identification and logging procedures.
The sky is blue. See? I posted a fact. My comment is fully valid and you can't say anything about it. Oh? It's irrelevant to the topic?
It may be too subtle for you, but I was actually making the point that the surveillance panopticon theory was mostly triggered by the fact that Flock is cloud-based.
I'm basically making a distinction between a hypothetical non-cloud Flock vs cloud-Flock.
And it may be too complex a concept, but ex-lovers, union organizers, and journlists could use whatever camera-based ALPR existed, even if it wasn't cloud-based.
Making your comment irrelevant.
Thank you for it though.
Ex lovers (using flock): https://www.kansas.com/news/politics-government/article29105...
Protestors (using flock): https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/11/how-cops-are-using-flo...
Union organizers (not using flock): https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/may/21/amaz...
https://fedscoop.com/social-media-ai-surveillance-unions-sta...
Journalists (not using flock): https://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/local/source-leaked-documen...
Examples using flock are directly applicable, examples not using flock require a little bit of imagination to see that if they are not currently happening, they will be soon.
And a bonus i didn’t mention a woman leaving the state to obtain a legal abortion: https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/crime/te...
Government loves the product. What it doesn't like about Flock is that the peasants are aware about it and complaining.
My camera system is not connected to the cloud and it has a retention policy of 4 weeks. I took pains not to aim them anywhere where I'd be collecting data outside of my own property. There's full-disk encryption in use. The police could maintain their own surveillance network and place their own cameras in a legally compliant way and it would be fine.
Flock and Ring are awful because they enable easy surveillance and search after the fact, not a priori because they are surveillance systems. If they required proof of warrant before letting the police execute a search I think a lot of people would be more comfortable with them. A police officer stalking an ex is like the basic example you get if you ask an ALPR vendor why we need audit logging and proactive auditing of all searches. But that's not the only way these tools enable invasion of privacy.
If you want proof that that's the problem with them, you should know that people have been building wired camera systems and ALPR systems for decades before Flock and Ring came into existence. So it's solely the cloud Search-as-a-Service business model that's the problem there.
This statement rests on the belief that absolute crime rate is the only thing that matters, and is a cousin to the "I have nothing to hide!" response from people who care little for intrusions to their privacy. Are you in favor of giving law enforcement authorities a way to unlock all private electronic devices?
I'm willing to tolerate the presence of some crime in the name of personal liberty. I do not think my whereabouts should be known on demand by government actors just because I drive a car.
You’ll be even more shocked when biometric login isn’t protected by the 5th amendment. Possibly, even more shocked when you find out about XKEYSCORE.
ALPR is bad, of course, but in terms of actual invasion of privacy there are far bigger kraken sized fish to fry that we have accepted as just… completely normal and even necessary to function in our society. It’s only natural that they continue to push the boundaries. Almost like giving up rights for security has consequences we were warned about 250 years ago.
Is it, though? Crime would be super low if we were all confined to prison cells by default, too.
I think the point is that it's a tradeoff of civil liberties in exchange for safety.
I think it's an interesting discussion and it's not clear to me what the right answer is.
Given the first amendment in the USA, i think once it's cheap enough everyone will be filming everyone all the time. Just look at how many people have ring doorbells.
Physician, heal thyself!
Let’s use your example for say a concert. Is checking bags worth it? Would crime go up if there was no bag check? Why or why not?
Probably not. It's mostly there to preserve the profits from alcohol sales.
> Would crime go up if there was no bag check?
Did it go down when they added them?
It should be!
Wow.
Cleanliness and order as a cultural norm only arose because police in Singapore, Japan, and South Korea are very fine and enforcement happy.
I would think the same, crime rates would be unaffected in the short and medium term, since I don't think it prevents much crime given the short or non-custodial sentences given many criminals. Clearance rates and justice (conviction rates) would likely go down though IMO.
In the USA in 2026, "capitalism", "politics", and "evil" have all become synonymous.
Maybe I am naive, and the corruption is too deep and pervasive.