[flagged]
The point is, where's the documented proof that they are helping. What we know is that people are still reporting crime in places where Flock cameras were present. Does that negate the effect? No, but it's just as valid as the point you brought. Which is to say, little to not all.
By my parents house in Vallejo there is one of these cameras near a 7/11. They can finally walk there.
Don’t:
- use the cameras to capture license plates, vehicle type/color/trim/stickers/personalization, and individual persons with clear biometric markers like faces, gait etc
- use that data to populate a commercial database of citizen movements spanning the nation, which can be used to trivially match to an identity (if that annotation isn’t present already)
- permit wide access to that commercial database to surveillance companies, guided by a terms of service authored by your company rather than by legislative bodies
- use that database to train a “pre-crime” artificial intelligence model which will be monetized
- implement an access system for law enforcement which facilitates warrantless access of citizen movements
All of the above are in place or are stated goals of flock et al.
Is this controversial?
- make sure that cameras work in all cases regardless of the social status / net worth / closeness of ties to the Prince Of This World, etc, of those who committed a crime caught on camera, or those of the victim of said crime.
I don't know about US, but in Russia it's a common trope when a judge's son / kingpin's daughter, etc, run someone over on a crosswalk and all the cameras in vicinity suddenly glitch out and die, or vice versa - cameras thought to have never worked appear working alright when a high profile scumbag is assaulted.
I can see the good in these cameras, but only in terms of "there was a crime here, play back the tapes to get evidence".
These things are ripe for abuse. This sort of mass surveillance by an unaccountable private company is what I object to.
I'm not a fan of vandalism and luckily I'm living in a country where I have the law on my side when demanding that public space is not surveilled indiscriminately, but I totally understand the urge to simply take a stick to a camera that records my every movement.
Crime is also a direct cause of poverty. There is reverse causality. For example, it depresses housing prices and it deters shops from opening in poor areas.
Also, it's important to say that Oakland is probably the safest it's been in half a century. People pretending that some emergency is occurring right now that has to be reacted to is annoying. It's sad that your bike got stolen once. I'm not giving up a single right to make sure it never happens to anyone again.
A lot of wealthy people from sparsely populated suburbs moved into cities, raised the rents, and turned the former residents desperate. Their first exposure to crime is an exposure to an elevated rate of urban crime (in their quickly gentrified neighborhoods) and worse, people know the reason that they can't afford to live is because of that dweeb with the $1K phone living in the house they grew up in.
Those new residents have a distorted sense of reality, and a distorted set of expectations. They should be paid attention to less, yet they demand attention, drive up property values, and deepen the tax base, so they aren't.
> Poverty alleviation is not a silver bullet (or anywhere close) for crime reduction
It's also important to say that we have never tried this, and the reason we say that it doesn't work (despite all historical evidence) is because we don't want to try this. We don't care about the bottom 80% of the population, except when as servants they do not live up to our expectations, or when they live in the neighborhoods that we want.
I think we should forge ahead on trying reduce poverty, and I suspect that doing so would correlate with reductions in crime.
Ok, let's get on it!
What do we do while we wait for the root causes to be addressed? It has been more than 20-30 years at least.
Can we use short-term solutions while waiting? no?
It seems to me that poverty is more likely than anything else to cause those factors though.
Plus apple watch, airpods, etc.
I’m think the average pedestrian carries more cash equivalents than at any time in history.
It also has substantially more robberies than the average city.
What evidence do you have that these cameras are preventing crime? Why would you mistake these cameras for a solution?
It seems to me that you've tacitly acknowledged that the thing you refer to as a "solution" is ineffective at best, and does nothing at all for the specific crime you called out (mugging).
What is the crime volume if these cameras are gone?
I can think of dozens. But this is the solution that allows the state to close the noose on freedom and democracy, and that's the one that you are defending with false choice argumentation.
How we should do a double negation in HTML terms? Nor //s nor /s/s fits the bill.