Hacker News Reader

Comment by jonway | Hacker News Reader

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...

View on HN

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com