flock is the most heinous reflection of the ills of our current socioeconomic structure. absolutely nobody should be okay with mass surveillance, much less mass surveillance enabled by a private company.
If you find yourself sympathetic to Flock, you should ask yourself: do we have a right to any kind of privacy in a public space or is public space by definition a denial of any sort of privacy? This is the inherent premise in this technology that's problematic.
In Japan, for instance, there are very strict laws about broadcasting people's faces in public because there is a cultural assumption that one deserves anonymity as a form of privacy, regardless of the public visibility of their person.
I think I'd prefer to live in a place where I have some sort of recourse over when and how I'm recorded. Something more than "avoid that public intersection if you don't like it."
The necessary and sufficient steps to stop property crime are:
1. Secure the stuff.
2. Take repeat criminals off the street.
Against random 'crime of opportunity' with new parties nothing but proactive security is particularly effective because even if you catch the person after the fact the damage is already done. The incentive to commit a crime comes from the combination of the opportunity and the deterrence-- and not everyone is responsive to deterrence so controlling the opportunity is critical.
Against repeated or organized criminals nothing but taking them out of society is very effective. Because they are repeated extensive surveillance is not required-- eventually they'll be caught even if not in the first instance. If you fail to take them off the streets no amount of surveillance will ever help, as they'll keep doing it again and again.
Many repeat criminals are driven by mental illness, stupidity, emotional regulation, or sometimes desperation. They're committing crimes at all because for whatever reason they're already not responding to all the incentives not to. Adding more incentives not to has a minor effect at most.
The conspiratorially minded might wonder if the failure to enforce and incarcerate for property crime in places like California isn't part of a plot to manufacture consent for totalitarian surveillance. But sadly, life isn't a movie plot-- it would be easier to fight against a plot rather than just collective failure and incompetence. In any case, many many people have had the experience of having video or know exactly who the criminal is only to have police, prosecutors, or the court do absolutely nothing about it. But even when they do-- it pretty much never undoes the harm of the crime.
Low clearance rates for property crime are significantly because nothing is even done much of the time -- police just take a report and often won't even follow up on an obvious lead (including stuff like "find my phone says my thousand dollar phone is in that house over there").
But in any case to more directly answer your question: If the clearance rate is 15% then they have a 90% chance of being caught after ~14 crimes.
Do you mean that all the people who are installing Flock cameras now do that not because they think there is not enough surveillance but for some other reason? Like help a YC company to raise more money? Or help LEOs to stalk their exes? Or some other crazy reason mentioned in these threads?
Do you have a neighborhood social network (NextDoor and its kind)? If you do, check out reports of theft, they rarely have any surveillance and ones that have are very poor quality, usually not showing the perp enough to ID.
> But in any case to more directly answer your question: If the clearance rate is 15% then they have a 90% chance of being caught after ~14 crimes.
This does not follow. If your math had been valid we'd have to agree that hunting elk in a forest where 15% of animals are bears would result in 90% chance that every 15th elk would turn out to be a bear.
The argument for these cameras is that they save lives. The argument against them is that they destroy freedom.
That's why these cameras are so prevalent, the case for them is extremely obvious and easy to make (give police more tools to stop bad guys), while the case against them is a lot more subtle (human freedom, government abuse, expectations of privacy, risk of data breaches, etc).
It's a good steelman/devil's advocate of their position, but I wonder if proponents realize how much wishful thinking drives those supposed outcomes.
The question isn't whether these cameras help law enforcement. Of course they do. The question is whether that's sufficient justification for continuous government surveillance of the public movements of millions of law abiding citizens.
Helping to solve a crime after the fact is certainly a thing, and that discussion has merit, but I think you’re taking creative license again with stopping a serial killer or spree killer “before they kill again.” That’s not really how murders play out, which is why there are special names for them.
It would be helpful for discourse, and for making your own argument, if the discussion was grounded in the reality of the sour world we live in now.
I think my example of helping police catch a murderer "before they kill again" is not only "grounded in reality" but has, in fact, quite plausibly already happened thousands of times throughout the course of Flock's existence.
Now, whether I think that justifies mass surveillance is another matter entirely.
Your assertions in every comment so far have been fully balanced on what you ‘feel like’ should be the case, not on known facts. I’ll give you an example:
“quite plausibly already happened thousands of times throughout the course of Flock's existence.”
‘ FBI monograph, July 2008: "Serial Murder: Multi-Disciplinary Perspectives for Investigators"
https://www.fbi.gov/file-repository/reports-and-publications...
Introduction on page 1: "Serial murder is a relatively rare event, estimated to comprise less than one percent of all murders committed in any given year." ‘
The FBI used to classify serial murder as 3+ murders with a cooling off period between them, but that resulted in too few cases to bother studying, so by the time of the quoted statement they had reduced it to 2+ separate murder events. Seems like it fits our discussion.
In 2008 there were 16,465 homicides, so if we take “less than 1%” to be a healthy 0.5% that would be ~82. Even if you assume every year spawns a fresh new set of 82 serial murderers then Flock would have needed to contribute to catching every single one this century in order to meet the minimum requirements for “thousands.”
Of course there’s no way of telling if the murderer you caught would have become a serial murderer if not caught, so here’s where your intuition can be helpful. Take the 82, spread them around the country in densities that you ‘feel’ are appropriate. Do the same for the density of Flock cameras. Then use the same rigor when guessing at how many of the 82 just got witnessed committing a murder, and their license plate was noted, and they happen to transit an area with Flock camera license plate readers in the future while still driving the same car. Feel your way through to how many of them might be caught, then intuit what it would take to catch “thousands.”
If you really want to split hairs over the exact number, maybe also consider the number of murderers who committed other crimes prior to their first murder, and whether getting caught sooner in their criminal career might have prevented such escalations, plus the larger society-wide deterrent effect of the increased clearance rates of crimes in all categories.
You don't need to run any numbers to see my original comment was obviously correct, I'm not sure why you're contesting this so hard.
I concede. You have “won” this discussion, as I’m sure was decided years ago, and you may add me as another defeated foe in your flawless record.