Hacker News Reader

Comment by sublinear | Hacker News Reader

I don't have stats, but most police have made it pretty clear that they're used for investigations that would otherwise have very little to go on.

I don't think anyone other than the manufacturers have made claims of cameras reducing crime. You can put all the AI bells and whistles on them, but they're still just cameras.

They're a fallback option, not a dragnet. The police are generally reactive to reports of crime, not proactively trying to piece together the details of everyone's lives and nail them the moment their dog poops on the sidewalk. No AI can even do that anyway and it would be a waste of money.

There are two vocal camps of people on these threads that are eroding HN: fearmongerers and grifters. I don't understand how it got this bad, but that's the real crisis here.

View on HN

You are absolutely correct but you won't get anywhere here.

I have relatives who are cops and lawyers and city councilmen. No cop is sitting in a back room somewhere tracking all the cars on every street trying to do, uh, whatever it is people here are claiming they are going to do to them.

I also wonder what makes people think the cops are going to trust AI any more than anyone else. A mistake on bad information is even more dangerous for them and often makes national news.

Judging by the number of news stories in which they have done just that, they will happily trust AI. A certain relatively small percentage will generate national news and that kind of blowback, but by and large, they have the guns, the SWAT teams, and the local prosecutors, and the consequences are minimal.

How do you know what a "relative small percentage" is if there are alleged unreported incidents? What would even allow anything to go unreported vs just ignored (because nobody cares)? Why would having a large capability to respond with force be relevant to whether the cops are going to listen to the slop machine?

I'm trying to understand what makes you so sure of your opinion. Unless you're living in a third-world country, from the perspective of anyone who has barely even known a cop, this sounds wildly out of touch. There already is a ton scrutiny on everything they do. Picking apart the long tail of debatable outcomes you don't like is not evidence of corruption. Corruption would be no debate at all.

An obsessive stalker police officer that's angry at their ex girlfriend moving on and finding a new partner will probably not be interested in EVERY car, just the one she drives and the one her new boyfriend drives.

I won't speculate as to what your law enforcement family members may or may not be capable of when it comes to this technology, but I will speculate on what they will likely do if they found out about an obsessive stalker police officer that's watching their ex-girlfriend and her new partner using this tech: they will likely assist in hiding it so as to ensure that the optics of the justice system are not marred.

The reason I suspect they will behave in this way is not because they're bad people - but because they're likely normal people who are subject to normal influences and incentives. There will be no personal benefit, and significant personal risk associated with whistleblowing on this hypothetical officer, and so they will find rationalizations for why they shouldn't. Why it's fine to let this "one bad apple" go for the greater good of the optics of the justice system.

So it goes.

Except for of course, the more than a dozen known cases where cops have been using Flock to stalk people [0]. Realistically, it's very likely that most of these cases do not become known.

[0] https://www.404media.co/cops-keep-getting-arrested-for-using...

If they don't reduce crimes what do they do? Oh right they track inconvenient people

Solving crime is still valuable even if it doesn’t reduce crime.

Bingo. Value is the operative word here. Money and privacy are valuable too, and I'm assuming that there must be some pitch deck somewhere that is presumably good and selling city councils on this. Where is it? What is the value we're supposed to get from this?

There's clearly another vocal camp that's eroding HN: surveillance capitalists acting like everything's well and good, in the face of evidence that the opposite is widespread [0].

[0] https://www.404media.co/cops-keep-getting-arrested-for-using...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com