AI startup Flock thinks it can eliminate all crime in America | Hacker News Reader

AI startup Flock thinks it can eliminate all crime in America

forbes.com

34 pointsanigbrowl44 comments

This is not a new startup. It predates the AI era. This is the company that installs cameras in public places and wires them all together with data sharing arrangements that circumvent those pesky jurisdictional separations of power. And guess which neighborhoods have the most cameras?

It’s a pre-crime company and data broker that sells to police forces and corporations (while sharing all the data between them). It’s one of the most regressive and heinous business models someone could spend their time building.

Basically, get around those pesky amendments by third-partying evidence collection, then manufacture (parallel construction) cases.

It's also entirely unnecessary. It's essentially a conduit to feed "criminals" into the prison system to support whats basically the oldest form of disaster capitalism.

It's all so neat and tidy, it's almost like theres' no difference between government and business operatives.

>It's all so neat and tidy, it's almost like theres' no difference between government and business operatives.

Quoted for truth.

I once read an article about a company that was using low flying planes and cameras. The goal was to be able to record and rewind video and then follow robbers back to their homes. Robberies are a big problem in LATAM. It could be very useful.

You're likely thinking of Persistent Surveillance Systems: https://www.pss-1.com

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorgon_Stare

Of course a crime-fighting company "sells to police forces and corporations". Who else would you sell crime-fighting tools to?

Flock reminds me of Replit: they both predate the modern era of AI, and in some sense they were lucky to be well-positioned when advances in AI enabled their core product to become much more powerful. Of course, the harder you work, the luckier you get....

They’re a surveillance company, not a crime-fighting company.

>And guess which neighborhoods have the most cameras?

The ones with highest amount of crime?

But it could also be the opposite: the neighbourhoods of the well off, who are willing to pay for this kind of service.

I really don't know, since both options seem likely.

The ones that police want to arrest the most citizens of.

As much as I dislike the police and the government in general I don’t think the police cares much about that.

It seems to be the opposite near me. There's a few well off neighborhoods that I've noticed have cameras all over, but the area near my work where there's new piles of broken glass every morning has nothing (not that I want more surveillance, but it makes the intent clear).

The neighborhoods that are less well off I spend less time in, so maybe I just haven't seen them, but usually surveillance there seems to be in the form of parking lot camera trailers.

No, not the ones with the highest crime but the poor/black/brown neighborhoods, at least in my city. I know, I live in a majority brown neighborhood and I've mapped the flock cameras in my city. There are more cameras in my neighborhood by about 3:1. To me this really shows the bias in my local PD because while there are pockets of high crime in my neighborhood, it is a huge neighborhood and the crime rate outside of those pockets is about the same as the rest of the city nevertheless, the cameras are not concentrated in the high-crime pockets but throughout the entire neighborhood.

The weakest link of the proposed technology like this is guaranteed fallibility of the folks using it, ie the judicial system and the asymmetric power dynamic against those it supposedly serves.

This is a very common scenario: a sheriffs deputy holds a biased belief against an individual. Said deputy selects and overfits data from systems like this to obtain a warrant against said individual. Individual is arrested and enters the meat grinder that is the justice system where hundreds of experienced indifferent agents and millions of dollars are put to work to support that deputies biased accusation. That original bad actor can now disengage and go about their life. Meanwhile, our Individual must spend a fortune on legal defense to prove their innocence. Individual loses time, money, peace, and reputation pursuing the best case realistic scenario—having charges dismissed (though indefinitely tainting their record). The more realistic scenario is individual is unjustly punished to some degree through plea agreements or trial (if they can afford it) which could easily ruin the rest of their life.

I’m not on the ACAB extreme, I just personally know many law enforcement officers and work in the industry adjacent to the justice system.

> Said deputy selects and overfits data from systems like this to obtain a warrant against said individual.

Or no warrant at all, the chief just wants to stalk his ex: https://www.kansas.com/news/politics-government/article29105...

> A Sedgwick, Kansas, police chief used Flock Safety license plate readers to track his ex-girlfriend and her new boyfriend’s vehicles 228 times over four-plus months and used his police vehicle to follow them out of town, according to a city official and a report released this week by the agency that oversees police certifications.

> Nygaard’s reasons included “suspicious” and “missing child” and “drug investigation” and “drugs” and “narcotics investigation” and “suspicious activity” and “drug invest” and “drug use,” according to the KSCPOST order.

> Nygaard won’t face any charges, but he did lose his police certification.

Even if true, it would only be for one of the narrowest possible definitions of "crime". What can Flock do about mail fraud? About domestic violence? About wage theft? About falsified studies that lead to substances being misclassified as harmless? About price fixing? Does the majority of criminal activity even take place in "public" spaces?

It's common for people to talk about "crime" when what they really mean is something like "street crime" or "stranger crime" - some random person I don't know hurting me or taking my stuff. It's true that other kinds of crime are common, but the solutions to them probably look pretty different than the solutions to let me safely walk around anywhere in my city after dark.

> safely walk around anywhere in my city after dark

For that use case, the crimes to worry about the most would be speeding or distracted driving. But people are usually more focused on e.g. someone doing drugs on the sidewalk than speeding cars; in fact speeding is hardly considered a crime at all despite the danger to pedestrians.

I just don't understand the point of this kind of argument. I suspect you and I would agree on the reason why people focus this way - they see the guy doing drugs on the sidewalk (or the shooting on the news, or their friend who got mugged, or...), think it's spooky, and decide without looking up any numbers that it shouldn't happen again. It's true that a statistical analysis of mortality or injury risk would focus on other things, but they didn't run that analysis and don't agree that it should dictate their focus.

Flock is driving the following future:

"It’s a paradigm shift where we go from having an expectation of privacy even in public spaces to its inverse. Not only do we not have a right to privacy in public; we don’t even have a right to see ourselves as the government and police might see us — a set of still moments in place and time from which they, not us, can decide what our story is."

https://cardinalnews.org/2025/03/28/i-drove-300-miles-in-rur...

Should be titled, "AI Startup Flock Thinks It Can Eliminate All Privacy In America"

Our politics has gotten bizarre, I know Republicans are taking an anti-crime stance, but like isn’t also Republicans advocating for like diminished state capacity and a sovereign citizen type status?

January 6th, proud boys, the Malheur National Wildlife refuge occupation. Time for a multitude of Ruby Ridges I guess.

Only in the abstract / around election time, much in the same way they run on cutting taxes for the poor and middle class. There are Republican run states that do better on certain diminished state capacity things like zoning (Texas) or 2nd amendment rights, but surveillance, rights of the accused, free speech rights, right to repair, etc are largely worse under Republican governments.

See for example the Patriot Act

Well, the cameras are operated by a private enterprise, so no problem!

Paraphrasing from an Oakland police officer reflecting on the spike in crime 3 years ago to today: "Flock has been a game changer. The officers who use it are getting results. Criminals will steal a car, drive through a neighborhood and rob someone. Pretty quickly we can look up 'black BMWs driving around this location'. Maybe 10 come back, you figure out which is the likely one, and then can see where it shows up in the next few hours. Then you have officers on patrol in that area look out for it. The criminals get a police car tailing them & they ditch the vehicle. Instead of doing 5 or 6 robberies with a stolen car, they can do 1 or 2. That makes it much less worth it to do the crimes."

Through conversion to a total surveillance state.

This does not account for any crime committed outside of public spaces: White collar crime and embezzlement Murder in private places Sexual assault in private places Domestic abuse Illegal drug use Insurance fraud Wage theft

Off the top of my head

> This does not account for any crime committed outside of public space

Do you have any reason to believe that the next steps won't be surveillance in unambiguously private spaces under the cover of "AI eliminates the privacy problem with surveillance"?

Counterpoint: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pp9MwZkHiMQ

Gotta love these grandiose, attention-grabbing pie-in-the-sky mission statements. "Eliminate all crime!"

Reminds me of when I worked in the same building as Mark Zuckerberg's and his wife's health startup, whose mission statement plastered all over the building is to "eliminate all disease within our lifetimes." All disease? Really? All of them?? Every single one? Why not pick 1 disease and work on that, maybe start from there, and once you eliminate that one move on and try a few more.

more crime happens at the WH every minute than in the entire country in a year :)

The 'crypto industry' was supposed to collect and contain the manic megalomaniacs before they could build the torment nexus.

I guess instead we get Machines of Loving Grace's boot stamping on a human face-- forever.

Oh I'm VERY interested in seeing how this will eliminate white collar crimes like wage theft, embezzlement, ponzi schemes and the like. Or do they mean the kind of crimes THOSE OTHER PEOPLE do?

for every crime it doesn't eliminate, there could be 2 new behaviors they can capture that will become crimes.

Say, parking outside the lines. Just expand the really crazy laws around towing vehicles to treat it like a red curb or an expired parking meter.

My housemate's car was stolen in Atlanta, and because of Flock the police were able to get it and return it the same day he reported it missing. He was even able to get to work on time.

My step-dad's truck was stolen and the police we able to recover it in minutes as the thieves pushed it around the corner and couldn't get it started so just left it there.

Sometimes the police just get lucky...

This wasn't luck. They specifically used Flock's cameras which are all over town recording which license plates pass. They sent Flock a request, and Flock sent them the data, and then the police recovered the car.

More information: the car was stolen at night, and my housemate only saw it was gone in the morning. The police were able to return it that same morning and he was able to go to work.

We had a ring camera pointed right at the car which was parked on the street. Ring didn't record its theft as an "event" so there was no footage to work with.

My housemate also had a camera in his car which records while driving. There was footage of the thief just taking the car for a joyride. My housemate did not press charges.

85% of stolen cars have been recovered historically, 34% same day. So anecdata about a single recovery really don't tell us much of about the benefit of living in a panopticon.

I don't understand how this startup would eliminate embezzlement?

> In less than 10 years, Flock’s cameras, airborne and fixed, will eradicate almost all crime in the U.S.

It'll fit right in with the fully self driving cars we'll get in "two years" since 2012, and the manned flights to mars we'll get in "five years" since 2015

American version of capitalism and Chinese versions of socialisme seem to slowly converge, the future will be fun!

The difference being that you won't get self-driving cars any time soon (at least a decade away), while countries and cities such as China, Singapore, Dubai and London already have mass surveillance at an unprecedented scale. Personal freedoms are already being infringed upon in these countries, and saying the wrong thing publicly will land you behind bars.

Oh yeah sure they have the mass surveillance, did they "eradicate crime" though?

The US can already be defined as a surveillance state in many aspects, and it could be made muche worse for sure, what I doubt is that it'll solve criminality

No, mass surveillance will never eradicate crimes.

UK (or London) has about 99% coverage. It means jack shit without enforcement, and let me tell you, there are many streets out there with junkies smoking crack without any issues.

My girlfriend in LA is scared to go to the bus stop. There used to be two drunks around noon, and now they even set up a camp and there are more people. Cops are doing fuck all about it.

CCTVs mean nothing.

Nazi Germany, with the most repressive police state in history, couldn’t. The criminals just learned to work within the shadow of the Gestapo.

Stalin’s USSR couldn’t, but they made it illegal to admit crime existed, so maybe that “worked”?

You can eliminate many crimes by decriminalizing them, too. Let people be productive junkies as long as they pose no threat or harm to society, for one.

Cities should have a little bit of crime

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