Pump the brakes on your police’s use of Flock (YC17)’s mass surveillance | Hacker News Reader

Pump the brakes on your police’s use of Flock (YC17)’s mass surveillance

aclu.org

93 pointsmhb28 comments

> Since 2017, our technology has played a critical role in making communities safer. >70% reported reduction in crime

I’m sorry, but this has to be pure fabrication. There is just no way it’s even remotely plausible that this privacy invading startup affected crime to such a degree.

I would be willing to bet that the statistic is actually: In 70% of communities with flock installed, there has, at some point, been a lower crime rate than at the time of installation.

Either way, it's either BS, or pure non-causitive correlation. Their technology is something that can only help solve crimes, not prevent it.

Solving crimes is huge part of prevention though. Most crime is done by all very small set of criminals. The sooner you can catch some of those people the more crime is prevented.

Gon need some citations there boss. Most studies I've seen of this show no or only a very weak link between enforcement and crime rates. There are a ton of confounding variables & broader trends and it's very difficult to make confident assertions about it. It is mostly only the police and police affiliates who release "studies" that strongly correlate these.

What you're saying makes intuitive sense but it turns out people are not for the most part destined for criminality or not. It's a social phenomenon that responds to social pressures and incentives. If you arrest all the criminals in an area, the pressures that created them will create a new batch of criminals, in fact are already creating them.

And if you don't arrest them, not only will they commit crimes, but a new batch of criminals will also commit crimes. This is not a question of enforcement or prevention, this is a question of doing both.

That's another way of saying about the same thing. Which, again, is intuitive and sounds correct. But again, most studies I've seen of this show no or only a very weak link between enforcement and crime rates. Except those issued by the police themselves. Where have you gotten this information?

We don't need a study to prove that policing is effective at stopping or preventing crime. I don't actually know what you're suggesting we do instead. But until you can show me a study that shows a community with zero crime based on some "social pressure" solution I'm not listening.

That's certainly a... stance.... Personally I'd like to know that the force we put hundreds of billions of dollars towards every year does have an effect.

Why is the burden here zero crime? Are you showing me a community that does have police and has zero crime? Our current solution is expensive and terrible, an alternative needs to be merely better not perfect.

I know in advance you're not listening because you told me so, and because it's what I expect from people who are happy with the current atrocities and human rights violations we call policing.

I found this https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2021/04/20/988769793/when... an excerpt about a study by Morgan C. Williams Jr. that states their study shows more police does reduce crime in an area. In looking for this I ran into a lot of statistics especially those that show crime has largely dropped since the early 90's but peoples perception of non-local crime has gone up. I blame the media.

Do some first hand research. Pick 5 recent murder arrests in your area and look up there other arrests. Look at the records of people that were just processed through your local jail.

Yes it's typically police that release these reports because it's their business.

Police in Atlanta found that 1000 people out of the whole city were responsible for 40% of crime in one year. And these 1000 people were repeat offenders that already had at least 3 felony convictions.

Like that is wild, but it's not remotely even surprising if you are in any way involved in street level crime.

I guess one hand-picked "community" that installed their cameras had 4 break-ins in the year before and only 1 in the year after. That's probably the same effect as when you put a really good lock on your bike - the bike thieves will simply steal the bike next to yours that's not so well secured...

Or just normal statistical variance.

IIRC, it's https://www.wired.com/story/flock-safety-license-plate-reade...

and friends.

Oh, actually, the 70% was in Marino, CA, and 40% was in Dayton, OH.

This is a different one.

I've heard about it because Flock has lots of folks in Atlanta. I have no tie to them or view (though there were flock cameras in my part of the neighborhood and we chose not to renew)

I believe there is even an official report/study pdf somewhere, but i can't find it at the moment. I remember it coming up in various council/civic meetings.

They definitely have run partnerships/studies with police departments and the statistics are not completely obvious nonsense.

But at the same time, proving anything like the quoted statement in a methodologically sound way is obviously remarkably difficult, and i have doubts it was done to that degree.

I know at least one place did a randomized, controlled trial, but it was of cameras attached to police cars as well as fixed cameras:

https://www.theiacp.org/sites/default/files/2018-08/March%20...

NIJ did a study a decade ago and found nothing for mobile ALPR: https://nij.ojp.gov/library/publications/license-plate-reade...

Why is it illegal for a the police to use dragnet surveillance but it's ok for a private company to provide dragnet surveillance and then for the police to just buy it? Isn't the just obscuring the origin of the data for the same effect?

If you obscure your finances through the same kind of redirection we often consider that fraud. Why is this not fraud?

Surveillance laundering.

Because the government doesn't care whatsoever about the 4th amendment except when it applies to gov't representatives and their puppeteers.

4th-Amendment-Violations-as-a-Service doesn't exactly roll off the tongue. I guess the money is probably good though.

If Flock is providing a service to the police, does blocking / destroying their cameras count (legally) as obstructing the police?

More generally, I'm curious if this paradox exists:

- Flock get the legal benefits of helping the police, but

- The police get the legal benefits of Flock not being part of the police.

I’m imagining taping a laser pointer to shine into the camera. Can’t count as obstruction of justice?

If you're interested in submitting a Freedom of Information Act request to determine if your local jurisdiction is contracting with Flock Safety, examples of previous requests can be found at https://www.muckrock.com/search/?q=flock+safety | https://www.muckrock.com/search/?page=1&per_page=100&q=flock

If you craft a superior template for making such a request, please reply to this comment with it so others may scale it up. Muckrock also supports crowdfunding campaigns for performing these requests at scale.

https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2017/nov/02/crowdfund...

Flock safety might be the most ethically questionable Y Combinator start up.

This is just the CCP system, but privatised (worse).

Law enforcement won't be happy until every last one of us is under 24h surveillance at all times.

Times like these that I appreciate living in Germany with Datenschutz!

It's rather surprising to me that at least some of the US states aren't more data protection–oriented on this stuff.

I completely agree, but a lot of people in the US reflexively take a very negative stance on tech regulations. Look at discussion even here on HN about tech regulations like GDPR and proposed AI rules.

It's because the US only has two parties, and both parties have priorities that override privacy concerns: pro-police and anti-regulation on the one hand; pro-tech and pro-federal govt on the other.

The company in question:

https://www.flocksafety.com/

The surveillance state is nearly upon us. I, for one, don't welcome our new overlords.

Good for the ACLU. Not so good that they are so desperate for donations that it's beginning to turn me off. Full screen modal on page load? Really?

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