Police visiting a home is form of intimidation. That's not something to brush off.
Gemini tells me it's 100% legal everywhere in the USA, to swap, modify, or conceal vehicle branding on privately-owned vehicles.
This is paired with a rather alarming but "more harmless than it appears" fad where people modify their "exhaust tune" to sound like backfire/gunshots. And they drive past all night long. I hear them everywhere. I had an LLM chat about it, and it's really something people deliberately do. I feel it is mostly to spam people with these percussive noises so that we get fatigued with them, so that "Shotspotter" is spammed with false positives, and so that boomer Karens fatigue the cops in turn with calling in "gunshots heard" when there were no gunshots at all. If you get so fatigued with hearing car exhaust backfires all night, you'll probably be duly surprised, and unlikely/unable to promptly react, when a real drive-by shooting goes down.
Is it though?
I live in a weird location, but it's not uncommon to get a couple of police visits for random things in a year.
Why would police visit people periodically?
- Altercation at a neighbor's house and they come inform us what was going on
- A neighbor called the police and they're looking for the address
- Coordinating parking for a medical incident down the road
- Welfare check on the kids because the neighbors heard screaming
Just a bunch of little stuff over the years.
In my case, IIRC, once like 15-20 years ago for some paperwork that needs an adress verified by the police, or something like that. I don't remember if it was for me or my wife. I don't remember the details.
On average over 1000 people are killed by police each year. A police officer is by far the most dangerous person you'll likely interact with on a day to day basis.
This says police killings are at about 1200 per year.
This is not a real datapoint. We quite a few cases of wrongful stops or arrests, but there is only one case where it escalated to physical damage (Brandon Upchurch).
Only about 10% of officer involved shootings come from traffic stops, which is what we're talking about when we're talking about Flock license plate readers.
That is shockingly bad. Where police officers can be identified, about 10% have shot someone before.
Citation needed.
Is there a specific (confirmed) case you're referencing?
Sure, but you haven't made the case for why the fear is anyone else's problem. If a person is too scared to be a cop there's an easy fix: stop being a cop. Unfortunately, regular citizens who can't afford to up and move to a country that has civil rights (that is, most of them) don't have the same recourse.
They 100% have not actually been tracked down and killed by people using apps like Waze
Imagine the danger and legitimate fear a stalking victim would face if there was a public real-time tracker for any license plate query you can imagine.
I am no fan of Flock but there is more than one problem here.
Has this actually happened, or is it something you made up? Because I found articles with police spokesmen saying it _could_ happen, but nothing suggesting it has.
Police are heavily indoctrinated as part of their training to be very paranoid, and are usually required to read up on (or watch) footage of every officer who dies in duty. So it should be no surprise that they are incredibly reactionary on this stuff.
Regardless of whether app assisted or not, actual ambush or unprovoked attack is actually very rare (only 5 cases last year).
>One of [the officers] took the time to specifically mention how scary it would be for them, because people would be able to find out where they lived, when they got on their shift and what they were doing throughout the day, and that that type of powerful information could put them personally at risk [from] any bad apples that might want to track them down.
This is the exact reason Flock cameras shouldn't exist. Hell even you know how there is no oversight otherwise you wouldn't have used the word "ostensibly" with italics.
BTW did you just gloss over how they came to his home to intimidate him? Cops SHOULD be tracked because American cops are simply the worst bullies on the planet.
We know about them because they were caught.
> Cops SHOULD be tracked because American cops are simply the worst bullies on the planet.
Cops are tracked. Part of the reason the above were caught because their searches were logged in Flock and used against them in criminal proceedings.
But I'm not sure where you got that I am against police being tracked?
The body cam was faulty during the interaction.
Do you have a source for that? I can only find 2 examples vaguely similar but neither are really what that statement claims. Specifically one of them was just cops making stuff up about wayze which was factually incorrect.
> police have access but at least ostensibly have oversight from the legal system
We've already seen plenty of examples of cops tracking ex-wives and such similar abuses with no real accountability - nobody's lost their job over it
Cops know exactly what they do when they show up like this, it's meant to intimidate, there are also plenty of cases where cops have repeatedly crossed the line harassing citizens breaking no laws, it's disgusting
Cops are (supposed to be) public servants. Risk is part of the job. If they don’t like it, they are free to pursue a different career.
In Texas, a sheriff's deputy utilized Flock ALPRs to locate a woman at the behest of her abusive partner.
Marin County Sheriff’s Office was sharing the sensitive location data of millions of drivers with out-of-state agencies and federal authorities, explicitly including ICE and CBP, circumventing California law.
So, yes, it's messed up that cops' fears are warranted, in your eyes, but not private citizens'.
> He was free to pursue his project
No, being intimidated by uniformed officers is not being "free".