[flagged]
Previously, we had some balance between privacy and accountability. A bystander or a victim of a collision could remember license plate numbers and give them in a police report. The police could tail you (but only you, because $$$) to discover your movements. But government agents couldn't track the movements of all the people, all the time. Now they can.
The societal balance of power has shifted and is now seriously lopsided in favor of the rulers. And cheerleaders like you don't mind, as long as you can purchase a little temporary safety...
EDIT: Rather then downvote, offer an example of a masked, unidentified person abducting someone who is neither a kidnapper nor secret police.
You're right: because I do not want illegal immigrants in my country I haven't "read a single history book."
Cell phones are ripe for abuse...do you carry one?
The poster above asked why you personally support total surveillance, despite it being ripe for abuse. How inevitable something may or may not be is completely irrelevant to whether you personally choose to support it. Acknowledging that it can be abused means you have to make that logical connection and say why something being ripe for abuse doesn't preclude you from cheering on for it.
Crime per capita could be completely static and this statement would always be true simply because there are more people.
Yes, we are. You brought it up.
Overall crime rates are up from pre-COVID, but nowhere near all-time highs.
Or, if you mean specifically traffic-related deaths and injuries, again, trending the wrong way, but also nowhere near all-time highs.
In either case, you still haven't indicated how pervasive surveillance will help...
I do agree that we have heavy crime (though HN will say it's all anecdotal and the stats show we're in a period of remarkable peace).
I just don't know that greater enforcement around vehicle use will have the outsized effect that you're claiming.
I wish there was a way to implement this sort of “surveilance” in such a way that it only impacts criminals or would be criminals and only them.
We have that too here, the issue seems to be more that it's a catch and release crime. The police not only knew who was doing it on our street, they had caught them multiple times and released them immediately. I'm guessing if they're not caught with stolen guns on them here it's not enough of a charge to bother with. I really doubt Flock would matter.
I was specifically asking about the GP's focus on vehicles (larger plates, unregistered vehicle enforcement) and how they thought that would reduce crime so much.
Then the question is, why don't they do that? Why do we need a surveillance state to enable police to do what residents might consider the bare minimum?
At the end of the day, avoiding accusations of racism is behind much of modern policing's foibles (like the near-total relaxation of traffic law enforcement in some cities).
Where I am, police officers get paid healthy 6-figure salaries plus crazy OT to boot. $300k total comp is absolutely not unheard of. I think the police have basically figured out that the best way to stay on the gravy train is to do as little as possible. Certainly stop enforcing traffic laws entirely, as those are the highest risk interactions. Just rest n' vest, baby. So you get to hear about "underfunded" and "overworked" police departments while observing overpaid police officers who are structurally disincentivized from doing their jobs.
The bottom line is: People want policing, but adding more police officers won't deliver results and anyway is too expensive. What to do?
Enter mass surveillance and automated policing. If we can't rely on police to do the policing, we'll have to do it some other way. Oh, look at how cheap it is to put cameras up everywhere. And hey, we can get a statistical inferential model (excuse me, Artificial Intelligence!) to flag "suspicious" cars and people. Yeah yeah, privacy risks blah blah blah turnkey totalitarianism whomp whomp whomp. But think of all the criminals we can catch! All without needing police to actually do anything!
While police are expensive and practically useless at doing things people want, this technology can actually deliver results. That makes it irresistible. The problem is that it's turning our society into a panopticon and putting us all in great danger of an inescapable totalitarian state dominated by a despot and his AI army.
But those are abstract risks, further out and probabilistic in nature. Humans are terrible at making these kinds of decisions; as a population we almost always choose short-term benefit over abstract long-term risks and harms. Just look at climate change and fossil fuel consumption.
Your efficiency gain in the size and complexity of the policies and procedures handbook would be unparalleled.
But why might the crime rate shoot up on day two of your short tenure as police chief?
Hint: a metric is distinct from a target.
I am concerned about the lack of follow through after police intervention. Lack of prosecution and convictions, light sentences, repeat offenders being released, etc.
If judges would simply keep someone with 3+ felonies in jail, crime would drop 80%.
...they'd get called racist. Let's be real. The tint thing in particular gets filed as "bullshit excuse for racial profiling", never mind that illegal tint can be empirically measured.
Might feel that way, but objectively, violent and property crime are on the decline in the USA.
I've also heard many stories where a person gets high def footage of someone committing a crime (usually burglary, smash and grab, or porch snatching) and the cops are basically like "eh we'll get to it when we get to it"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States
edit: can someone explain what is objectionable about this comment?
All of this was caught on high definition video.
However, he also left his phone and State ID (he was also unlicensed) in the car.
Did the cops drive the 2 blocks to the address listed on his ID to arrest him for leaving the scene of the accident, or to give him any kind of blood alcohol test? No, no they did not.
Did the cops follow up in any way whatsoever? No, no they did not. How do I know this? Because a few days later, I walked the two blocks to the house to inquire whether the car was insured. It was not.
---
What is objectionable about your comment is the same thing that eventually plagues every social media that has downvoting/flagging: you violated someone's strongly-held priors.
In those statistical roundups homicide is treated as a proxy for crime in general, so the best we can rigorously say is that homicide rates have decreased - which is, obviously, great. Researchers treat homicide as a proxy because they know not all crimes are reported.
Anecdotally, living in [big city] between 2014 and 2021 my street-parked car was broken into ~10 times, and stolen once (though I got it back). I never reported the break-ins, because [city PD] doesn't care. In [current suburb] a drive by shooting at the other end of our block received no police response at all, and won't be in the crime stats.
Are those types of crimes increasing? I don't know! I'd had my car broken into before 2014, and I witnessed (fortunately only aurally - I was just around the corner) a drive-by in the nineties. But... That's the point: no one knows! These incidents aren't captured in the statistics.
Personally, I think the proxies are broadly accurate, and crime in general is lower, and I shouldn't trust my anecdotal experiences. However, I think the general lack of trust in the quality of American police-work (much of it for good reason, sadly) biases most people towards trusting anecdotal experience and media-driven narratives.
I am more skeptical of homicide rate stats than you are, given the garbage data I see for crime in general, but even I am willing to admit they're much more robust than the rest.
Also I believe my eyes and when I see crimes happening in my neighborhood I don't rush to "the stats" to ask them what I saw.
Stats only get worse from there: at neutral they contain no information, at worst they are dis-info.
How else do you condense down myriad and often conflicting datapoints of this complex human existence in order to get trends you can make decisions on?
Longer answer: this is a fundamental problem across many domains. I don't think anyone has solved it.
I think of a story of Bezos being told by his Amazon execs that customer support wait times were meeting X service levels. In the meeting room with his execs, Bezos dials up customer service, gets some wait time of >>>X and makes the point that service levels are not up to his expectations.
I don't think that story is a great analogy for running society but is interesting nonetheless.
Have you tried electing moderate prosecutors who don't drop charges just because the habitual offender has a heartbleed sob story?
Drive around Kansas City sometime, particularly on the Missouri side. Tons of temporary paper license plates that are a year past expiration. Any member of law enforcement could pull the person over and enforce a penalty for it.
They just... don't. I don't know exactly why that is. Are they afraid that doing so opens them up to the chance of being shot or engaging in a high-speed pursuit? The former definitely happened in North Kansas City a few years ago (not to be confused with KC North) but having a massive network of cameras tracking license plates and how they move across town doesn't help. At the end of the day, you have to send someone a fine, and if they don't pay it and don't show up for court, you are again faced with having a police officer try to interact with them one-on-one, this time to enforce a bench warrant for their arrest.
In the meantime, you now have an absolutely massive data set of citizen movements being collected without a warrant by an increasingly authoritarian American government.
But long-expired temps are everywhere. So confusing. How?
A car is a necessity in most of Missouri. Kansas City has more highway miles per capita than any other major city in the country (and maybe in the world); IIRC St. Louis is fourth-most highway miles per capita. Public transit has major gaps. Inability to drive is such an encumbrance that those convicted of DUI are allowed to petition courts for a hardship license allowing them to drive to work and other essential places because not allowing for this could fail under the Eighth Amendment.
All of this is to say that if you are able to pay for a car, but not the sales tax for the car, and you get pulled over for not registering after your temp tags expire, you are essentially under house arrest until you can put together the money to both pay the fine and to pay the tax on the car, which is now exponentially harder since you can't drive anywhere. Since that'd put disadvantaged people at an even greater disadvantage, it might be a "community relations" move by the PD to look the other way on these cases, at least until another blatant violation occurs.
Do you, reader, want to have to confront a bunch of scary people for a $? Oh, you think having a gun makes it a bit less scary?
Almost no one wants to confront dangerous people day in and day out. Once in a while to flex the hero complex, maybe. But a few times of that will cure you of any particular desire to seek it out.
The people that want to do that are one in a thousand types. Basically criminals themselves, just on the right side of the law who use the 'criminal' mentality for good. Most police are not that.
They want to do a job, collect a paycheck, and do it in an easy way. Like how I like to drive to work rather than do a handstand and walk 5 miles on my hands and wrists. They get little to nothing for making their job harder.
The people with the most motivation to stop the criminal is the victim themselves. You are pretty much on your own. The state won't be coming to save you.
I'm sure there are exceptions, but I think most folks (including criminals) believe crime is, generally speaking, bad. Folks commit crimes to survive, to enrich themselves, out of retribution, out of lapse of judgment, or lack of self control. Almost all some flavor of unmet needs. You put money into tackling those challenges, address why people are stealing, why turf wars break out, why addiction ruins lives and puts people in terrible positions, why poor nutrition and family support and mental health care lead to so many folks slipping through the cracks.
In other words, the main problems with schools have little to do with schools. But they’re complicated and expensive problems with distant payoff, so we keep monkeying around with schools instead.
My sense is that such systems are rather less consistent at reading temp tags, and that temp tag issuance tends to be decentralized/dealer-based, rather more ad hoc, and thus rather less legible for semi-automated enforcement purposes.
These cameras only punish law-abiding citizens. Fake plates and out-of-date temp tags effectively render these people invisible to the ALPRs.
Famously, excellent Dutch record keeping was bad for jewish people in the Netherlands in May 1940.
Also, an unlicensed-plated car and your dream enforcement, my first thought was of "illegal" cases I have done include moving a vehicle to a neighboring property a couple blocks away. How strict would you like it? Should I be forced to use an expensive tow service to move an unregistered car across the street on some slow residential street?
False premise
You have fallen for political talking points.