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Comment by nceqs3 | Hacker News Reader

The anti ALPR narrative is not based in reality. I for one support using tech to automatically flag when a stolen car is spotted. With the sky high cost of car insurance in CA, which disproportionately impacts low income drivers, you would think liberal legislators would be in favor of reducing one of the largest reasons insurance is expensive. Restricting tech used by police just means more LE time spent on easily automatable tasks, and forces LE to use their own judgement (which many would argue has bias). The ACLU and EFF are so discredited on tech issues. They simply support criminals. The ACLU is fighting DUI laws in CA right now for instance. SF is a hell-hole because of these crime loving activist groups.

Thank you, Flock!

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I can't wait for the day when Flock's "proactive AI" flags the way you are driving or your vehicle movements as suspicious and alerts LE to just ... "check in on you".

Or when they enable the mics in their devices to just start recording your conversations with your friend in a public place and does the same. "AI didn't like what you were talking about, so alerted the local PD".

> alerts LE to just ... "check in on you".

This is currently an epidemic. Drivers are targeted for “random” checks by police for a number of non-falsifiable factors (e.g. the evergreen “your license plate light was out…huh, looks fine now”) that overwhelmingly correlate with driver income and race.

That’s not whataboutism; I am genuinely not sure if ALPR/automated policing systems stand to make that situation worse or better. Are Flock and friends likely to be abused in the same way that human police traffic stop reasons are?

I have every reason to believe so.

Flock's founders belief is that he wants to eliminate all crime (literally) with Flock.

So in his eyes, false positives are inherently acceptable, and preferable to false negatives.

And I feel that (actually, I know that, though I wasn't in Sales, but I did work at Flock) one of their selling points to agency is almost a "whitewashing" of such practices. "Oh, our PD wasn't targeting anyone, we were just acting on the recommendations of the Flock surveillance system".

I am not anti ALPR. They do have merits on flagging things like stolen vehicles and human trafficking. What I do dislike is a private company owning up the entire market share and has little to no obligation to behave.

Why can't cities hire good software developers to create custom solutions that are safe and secure rather than paying a startup thousands of dollars in taxpayer money. Austin City Council spent 1.2 MILLION dollars on just a handful of cameras. Texas already ruled that red-light cameras cannot issue tickets or citations so why are we allowing cameras to creep into the same space. It's just another tax on people

>The ACLU is fighting DUI laws in CA right now for instance. SF is a hell-hole because of these crime loving activist groups.

Not sure what you are referring to here but if you do find the news stories be sure to post the article and I will read the cases on PACER to see what its all about

>Not sure what you are referring to here but if you do find the news stories be sure to post the article and I will read the cases on PACER to see what its all about

https://calmatters.org/investigation/2025/12/california-road...

We don’t need flock to track stolen or flagged vehicles, there is already a national patchwork of cameras (typically on intersections) that do this, bullet type, dome type, and the very old IR ALPR type. Been this way a long time.

All flock gets you is more of that except also every petty theft gets run and then they harass an old lady. It almost certainly costs more, too.

https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/colorado/news/flock-cameras-lead...

I would be surprised it costs more. I am sure there are false positives but flock is generally pretty effective for local pd. I for one would rather have them to save police resources. This can also help in not pursuing folks that run. You get the license plate and you will see it soon enough.

There are no reliable studies. There have been multiple demonstrated examples that user data has been shared, and systems have been hacked.

We have plenty of evidence of harm and no good evidence for effectiveness. We don't need to "save police resources" we need more well-trained capable police officers who are doing good police work AND good community work

"Austin spent $1.2 million on Flock cameras. They scanned 113 million license plates and got 165 arrests. That's $7,300 per arrest"

7300 per arrest sounds cheap so I am not sure if you are for or against.

I agree there needs to be better safe guards. I still believe it’s worth figuring out a balanced path forward, I like having cameras track public streets.

>7300 per arrest sounds cheap so I am not sure if you are for or against.

think about what a police officer's salary is. think about underpoliced areas.

how many arrests would a trained, qualified police officer make in a high crime area of a major city in the timeframe it takes for them to earn $7300?

this is a bad deal.

Maybe? But the bigger problem is this number of 7300 is being made up in thin air. It’s bad math because it’s conflating too many things in the underlying audit.

I had to go back and look. The quote you have does not seem correct. That 165 is coming from an audit for a trial of both flock and axon patrol car cameras. Only 40 flock cameras. Flock has pretty transparent pricing it’s about $3k per camera for cities. So let’s call it $150k for that test. They installed patrol car cameras in 500 cars. On volume alone the cost is with the cars not flock.

Again I don’t know where that 1.2 million number is coming from. That should get you over 300 cameras deployed in the first year.

> SF is a hell-hole because of these crime loving activist groups.

the cost per arrest in austin while these cameras were up was over $7000/arrest.

From an anti-crime perspective, spending $7000 on police salaries & having the police patrol high crime areas is a much more effective use of funds. It also doesn't violate the 4th amendment.

I am personally not a fan of the taste of leather. But to each their own.

Has this tech lowered car theft rates and insurance rates?

Nope.

Should mention, stealing nearly any car is extremely easily, and quite fast, too.

The reason more cars aren’t stolen is because they are registered to an owner, and the resale value of a stolen cars is on the order of a couple hundred bucks USD for a brand new vehicle. It simply isn’t worth the time.

Essentially nobody is stealing cars except for a few chop shop operations who concentrate in specific areas.

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