Hacker News Reader

This seems kindof heroic to me. I really appreciate such conscientious diligence with this subject and the comparatively fair, well-considered compromise of privacy vs slime control.

I wish such fights and compromise were more common, rather than the furtive implementations and blind acceptance that is standard.

It is, and I am not making this up or exaggerating in the least, literally a version of HN where instead of karma you get ordinances passed. Way more people here should do it. I keep meaning to write a post about it. Also, HN is like the prison planet Salusa Secondus comparatively; if you're comfortable operating here, and you can read a room even a little bit, you may find that you're more or less unstoppable out there.

If you live inside the borders of a huge city, it's probably a different story (somebody go report it out). But I live in an inner-ring suburb of Chicago, and I think what I'm saying is probably true for basically all suburbs.

> The General Order we approved also forbade the use of Flock cameras for non-violent crimes.

What's the point of a surveillance system if you are not going to use it to solve property crimes? The biggest issues with liveability in a lot of "nice" US cities like SF are property crime and law enforcement choosing to go after "easy" white collar crime like traffic and parking violations instead of the blue collar crimes that affect safety and property.

Bunch of things.

* The privacy/safety tradeoff is different between the two kinds of crimes. There's a distinction between computers passively collecting data and humans actively investigating (and stopping) cars.

* Violent crimes are the local enforcement priority, and if you give police tools to clear non-priority crimes, you are changing their incentive structure.

* The link between the car and the crime is especially tenuous in routine property crime; it's just as likely we'd be stopping people's mothers and grandparents as that we'd be stopping actual criminal suspects. That's obviously not true with a carjacking.

* Being specific about the crimes we want to apply Flock to makes it easier for us to track (and, much more importantly, talk about) whether the cameras are successful. It's a real mixed bag right now!

Having said all that, the pro-camera contingent certainly does want Flock cameras used to catch package thieves and shoplifters. But they were up against anti-camera people who wanted no cameras at all. We took the opening and set our own terms.

Going after "easy" stuff like traffic and parking violations (neither of which can be enforced using Flock cameras here) is definitely not a problem we have. Our municipality is extraordinarily safe, but it's nestled into one of the less-safe areas in Chicagoland.

We had a stolen Porsche here in Seattle about a half a year ago, the SPD broke off its chase because of restrictive state liability rules, the kids who stole the car later went to Costco to grab purses and killed a woman (the kids were refugees, one was caught, one fled back to their home country, the woman was also a foreign national). I wonder how many murders would be prevented by more aggressive policing of stolen cars, or even just goin after people with outstanding warrants. The bar for progress is incredibly low right now.

Understand: we are policing stolen cars. I have been a broken record about stolen cars as a driver for escalating violent crime (search [kia by:tptacek]). What we're not doing is driving automatic enforcement off the Illinois stolen car hotlist, because: it doesn't work. We tried it. The false positive rate was enormous.

We really need an identifier that can’t easily be rendered useless by plate swapping, like a transponder that can’t be tampered with very easily. We could totally get the false positive rate down, but not with pointless license plate tech that is already outdated.

Traffic enforcement is down 95% in SF over the past decade https://sfstandard.com/2024/04/08/sfpd-traffic-enforcement-c...

That isn't limited to SF either: https://www.npr.org/2023/04/06/1167980495/americas-roads-are...

“The city already has more than a dozen red light cameras that automatically ticket motorists who run the red. Since 2019, those cameras have been used to issue over 56,000 citations, according to Sernoffsky. That figure, which isn’t included in SFPD’s data on traffic citations and may help explain why citation revenue hasn’t dropped as dramatically as the moving violation totals would seem to predict, will continue to grow as the city installs more cameras.”

SF is also planning to install dozens of speed enforcement cameras.

As they should. It's trivial to install these and is safer across the board for everyone, cops included. It's cheaper too. Not to mention without cops pre-occupied with simple traffic violations, they can commit to more elaborate operations. It's easy to catch someone speeding, it's a lot harder to crack down on, say, cat thefts.

> It's trivial to install these and is safer across the board for everyone, cops included.

I dont know about that. My block in NYC in a school zone had a lot of people speeding along so the city installed a speed camera. It didn't seem to do much because people instantly learned it was there, slowed down, then gas it hard the next block. And that is the story with every speed camera: people learn where they are, do the brake pedal dance, then gas it.

I honestly believe they do close to nothing except make the contractors wealthy. As for the camera on my block: the city got smart and took it down less than two years after it went up. In its place they installed all-way stop signs on two consecutive corners. A low tech solution involving a few sheet metal signs bolted to a metal pole. They work better but there are still jackasses who gas it after the second sign. Jerks going to be jerks.

A fun thing I learned only this year: in Illinois, you need a population exceeding 1,000,000 residents to install traffic enforcement cameras (the kind that automatically issue tickets).

If we could roll out red light cameras villagewide, I'd sign on.

Yeah, there's a surprising number of laws in Illinois that have that >1m barrier to make them only apply to Chicago/Cook County. I remember when the bodycams were coming in, Chicago fell under one of those >1m exemptions which I think gave them more time to implement?

A burglary isn't really a non violent crime imo. It's very invasive and if someone is home it can easily lead to violence.

If I catch a burglar in my home I will certainly be violent to them, to pre-empt them from becoming a risk to me. I've been burgled several times and I've felt very violated.

Unfortunately here in Europe the courts don't really agree with that but that's a later matter. I think it's more 'fair game' in states like Texas. I keep a huge flashlight by my bed for that reason. It's not deadly but it will be enough to submit an intruder.

It could happen because I often don't bother to answer the door when I'm home and not expecting any parcels. Because most of the callers to my door are sales trash or scummy people trying to get into the communal stairwell.

But anyway my point is these things are not that black and white. It's more like a scale.

Burglaries are UCR-standard violent crimes.

Ah that's good to know, thanks

I'm not so totally pessimistic about their chances of winning. That 4th Cir. case is interesting. Carpenter touched on this subject. So did Jones in 2012. Nobody thought that Jones would be decided the way it was because practically every court had swung in favor of the cops. Obviously the makeup of the court was different, but I'm not sure this is a partisan case?

Jones relied on the fact pattern of a physical intrusion on private property (the police placing a sensor on a car). Here, the only difference between Flock and the closed-circuit cameras that have blanketed America for decades is the fact that a computer is looking at the images.

> Forbade the police department from using Flock to stop "stolen" cars (the Illinois "hot list" of stolen cars is surprisingly bad, with months sometime passing after cars reported stolen being removed when it turned out they weren't); we instead monitor for stolen license plates

How is it identifying the car without the plate? VIN?

It's all based on plates; we just key off reported stolen license plates rather than reported stolen cars (stolen with their plates). Car thieves in Chicagoland swap plates after cars are taken, as a way to get past ALPRs; the theory is there's no innocent explanation for a car driving with reported stolen plates.