LAPD lets contract with surveillance giant Flock expire
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
the flock scam was engineered to be resilient to political pressure by giving departments and jursidictions this fake exit ability while the data continues to be harvested, it is a noose that only tightens; the amount of flock cameras recording only ever goes up not down.
No problem paying taxes - my entire gripe is with what what the moneys spent on
Really curious to hear more about this
Unless all of congress is included in that 100k, I’d love to hear a plausible scenario where this is actually achievable and not merely some clever edge case you found
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...
especially note figure 1.
Here is a podcast about it. https://internationalflavor.podbean.com/e/the-surveillance-s...
Sorry if this is answered in the pod, don't have time for it immediately.
In this case, the county voted for an ordinance banning them. Ike was threatened saying your going to be charged this is potentially state property, he did a sunshine request to see that they were privately owned by flock. Then he requested flock take them down but they didn't. After a few months he decided he will enforce the ordinance as the sheriff refused too.
He took them down brought them to his office. Then later 5 state officers (4 in plain clothing, one in uniform) were looking for him at his house. He brought them to the cameras and said here have them back.
Still got charged with theft somehow...
Moral of the story, that doesn't really sound like democracy to me. That sounds like kinda the opposite of democracy.
Anyway it's worth a listen if you have time. This isn't how these things should go and shows there is a little more than meets the eye here. Even if citizens perfectly execute democracy, these things may not budge. And there is a larger net of protection keeping these in place.
If nothing else, the Sunshine Request site is a good place to get form emails for these requests from.
Depending on where you're from, it's pretty easy to find a pro bono attorney. In Illinois, the plaintiff's attorneys recoup their costs on a successful win.
yeah that's basically theft then. The cameras are probably a lot of money and so the dollar number put it in felony territory.
More equal animal acting in his official capacity gets treated like less equal animal.... basically.
IANAL but based on the facts available to me, they can't. It's a sham held up by intimidating local officials. The cameras were installed on public property, that's that.
If they somehow keep this nonsense running for very long, I'd anticipate a Meigs Field-esque incident at some point.
Imagine if a power company got cleared to bury a bunch of power lines, but they left all the unused poles in the ground, on land they no longer have rights to. That's closer to the situation we're dealing with here.
Wireless and solar make some of the more visceral approaches to this problem ineffective. In the past, the city could have strongarmed Flock by severing power or data service somewhere on the public side.
I'd bet there are still tons of tricks LA can pull, though. These 1000 9-square foot patches of land have been rezoned as green space, we're clearing it for native plant life.
Or, like I said, just pull a Daley and remove them. The city owns the land. Flock can complain, they can sue, and they might even win. But once the city removes the cameras, Flock can't put them back. The city owns the land, and Flock has no rights to it.
Another option might be right of way or easement permitting, similar to how utility poles and such are regulated as private property with an allowance to be in a public space. If the provider got a permit to use the right of way separate from the contract, then the provider would retain the same right to be there as any other infrastructure.
On the other hand, it wouldn't be surprising if a single county commissioner got in trouble for just deciding by fiat to take civic infrastructure down himself. That's not a power county commissioners have. Was there a county board vote authorizing that action?
So what else are you suppose to do? I think it's reasonable to decide that if no one is enforcing the new local law, that it may be the commissioners purview and authority to enforce after exhausting all his options.
Charging the commissioner with felony theft is clearly just bullying at that point.
File a civil suit and get a court order for their removal.
Someone has to physically take it down and I'm guessing flock didn't put that in the budget.
This is much simpler in a municipality: the board simply fires the village manager and the chief. A sheriff is usually an elected though.
Before you reach the point of suing, you cancel contracts, payments, IT infrastructure, and have public works remove the cameras from any county-owned infrastructure.
I mean, all this is pretty silly, though, because what you really do is just turn the cameras off.
The problem is that the First Law Of Message Board dictates that the most interesting narrative wins, and the narrative where Flock has deviously come up with a surveillance "forever chemical" to attach to every municipal road is much more interesting than "this is a service and if you stop paying for it it goes away".
That's simply not true: there are numerous instances of municipalities having to fight flock to get cameras removed or shut off, and instances where local governments pass ordinances that local law enforcement refuses to enforce because the cameras, which have been banned, are not off, as you allege is what happens, and law enforcement continues to use the data the cameras provide despite the contract being terminated.
Just google e.g. "flock trash bag" to see how cities are having to deal with Flock.
There are links elsewhere in this thread to a few of the many instances where this happens but I'll link to something that hasn't been mentioned yet, where flock cameras are turned back on and used by law enforcement in Springfield after contracts are cancelled, and cameras are left up that flock pinky swears are off that turn out to be on and accessible by law enforcement:
https://www.kezi.com/news/local/stolen-car-found-in-springfi...
And again, that is just talking about the instances where the municipality actually wants the flock cameras turned off or removed, there are many instances, like TFA, where the local government wants them on or doesn't care, and they remain on and used by other agencies, despite the termination of the contract with one of the client agencies.
I'm deeply involved in municipal politics and was for many years involved in national politics (and, more to the point, discussions of national politics online) and I see this all the time: people crossing the streams between the two, as if the levels of responsibility and accountability were comparable. A municipal sworn law enforcement official that ignores a duly passed ordinance that has gone into effect is breaking the law and their contract and can trivially be fired, not after a long drawn-out procedure but immediately.
I watched us shut our cameras down. As I said: there was no drama, at least procedurally. If our chief had tried to prevent the cameras from coming down, she'd have been out on her ass the next day. I'm sure there are places where there was drama, but I'd need to see the full story before drawing the conclusion that you're drawing. What I see here is the more interesting narrative ("the cameras are impossible to take down, they're a virus!") asserting itself in its natural habitat, the online message board.
I don't know what this story about a misconfigured camera (it strobed an "outage" alert after being deactivated) being reactivated by a technician is supposed to tell me. The theory here is that Flock is running a scam where they're rolling trucks to surreptitiously enable individual cameras?
https://www.klcc.org/crime-law-justice/2025-12-09/eugene-pol...
And here is flock getting caught installing cameras in Cambridge after contract termination:
https://www.cambridgema.gov/news/2025/12/statementontheflock...
Here is flock getting caught installing cameras in Evanston after contract termination:
https://www.chicagotribune.com/2025/09/29/after-evanston-fir...
And obviously these are only the cases where they were caught making convenient mistakes, there is very little incentive for the likeliest parties to know (Flock, law enforcement) to bring to light the fact that flock cameras are still on, being serviced, and the data is still accessible despite local ordinance.
There are tens of thousands of Flock cameras all over the country. It would be weird if there weren't misconfigurations. The Evanston story is a great example: the reinstallation of cameras happened the week the contract was expired, and Flock notified the city of Evanston (which, for what it's worth, is our twin sibling city in Chicagoland), at which point Evanston said "you've made a mistake" and Flock said "ok we'll take them down".
And you are representing the situation in Evanston disingenuously here's the timeline AFAICT:
- Aug 26, 2025 Evanston issues a termination notice to Flock, effective Sep. 26 2025 after it learns that Federal law enforcement and immigration enforcement are able to access license plate data from the Flock cameras in Evanston, something the city claims Flock lied about. (https://evanstonroundtable.com/2025/08/26/evanston-shuts-dow...)
- Notably at this point EPD believes the cameras are off: An EPD officer: "The last read on an Evanston Flock camera was logged shortly before 1:00 p.m. on August 26th, which is consistent with the City’s request for de-activation,",
- Sep. 8, 2025 Flock has removed 15 of 18 cameras.
- Sep. 18, 2025 Flock reinstalls the uninstalled cameras. Evanston sends Flock a letter asserting that they are in violation of the contract and Illinois law. (https://evanstonroundtable.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/25...)
- Flock did not inform Evanston, a technician unintentionally informed the city: "[City spokesperson] Vargas said the city learned that Flock reinstalled new cameras after a Flock technician called the Evanston Police Department to ask questions on where to find a camera’s power source." (this is from the tribune article I linked above)
- Sep. 24, 2025 The city issues a cease-and-desist to flock. (https://evanstonroundtable.com/2025/09/24/flock-safety-reins...)
- Despite the city's belief that the cameras have been off since the termination letter on Aug. 26th, RoundTable journalists show that the cameras are still on and logging locations.
- Mar 3, 2026 Journalists notice that two of flock's cameras are still up in Evanston and contact Flock asking for comment, Flock does not reply but removes the cameras.
(1) Work with other members of the legislative body to hold the executive accountable for failures, via hearings, sanctions (often, if at the same level, including removal), etc., or
(2) Work with the same body to file a lawsuit as a body to compel compliance, which has additional enforcement provisions (including contempt orders by the court for noncompliance) not available with the bare law and no court case,
(3) Taking any avenue open to the public at large (including individual lawsuits, public advocacy including including electoral advocacy against any elected executive officers involved, etc.).
What is not generally an option is unilaterally assuming the role legally assigned to the executive in inplementing the law, or simply assuming whatever other powers you imagine are best to realize the intent of the law even if they are outside of its letter.
For example, if a maintenance worker had been instructed to remove them how would this have played out?
The executive can enforce judicial orders. This is civics 101.
> The local law banning it was already equally as valid as a court order
The ban is an ex post facto law. Rights holders to property have a legitimate reason to defend those rights across policy changes.
County commissioners are generally legislative officers. While the legislative body is smaller, this really no different than a member of Congress deciding that the they don’t like the way DOJ is enforcing federal law and deciding that gives them arbitrary power to take whatever action they feel is appropriate to manifest the intent of the law.
> In January of 2024, the Camden County Commission passed a county ordinance banning the use of all automated license plate readers in the county (a 2023 ordinance had banned all static license plate readers, but the 2024 ordinance expanded that to include all automated license plate readers). In that ordinance, commissioners cited "numerous complaints" about the cameras "and the potential of unwarranted/inappropriate monitoring of its citizens [sic] freedom of movement and travel in violation of their right of privacy, unreasonable search and seizure and other constitutionally protected rights[.]"
> The ordinance also stated, "Any Automated License Plate Readers currently in violation of this Ordinance shall be immediately removed. If identification of ownership is listed on any such device, the listed owner shall be notified to remove said device. Any device not removed within 30 days of notification to remove said device may be removed by Order of the Camden County Commission."
My understanding of this case was that the commissioner was charged with theft because even though the county had an ordinance requiring flock to take the cameras down, and they had failed to do so, it was not lawful for him to remove them himself and then take possession of them because they were the property of Flock.
https://www.lakeexpo.com/news/politics/felony-charges-droppe...
Re: zero drama taking down cameras, there has been quite a bit of drama:
https://www.wmtv15news.com/2026/06/05/dane-county-covers-flo...
https://www.cnet.com/news/privacy/cities-covering-flock-surv...
https://dailynorthwestern.com/2025/09/28/top-stories/flock-c...
https://www.newsfromthestates.com/article/verona-has-waited-...
And final re: in many if not most of these cases the jurisdictions don't actually want to take the cameras down, they just want public pressure to let up a bit, and agencies are known to share flock data between each other, so law enforcement, the public, and lobbyists are all made happy by terminating the contract without removing the cameras, it is the smart thing to do politically.
(More precisely: there was drama, but it was all public drama from residents who didn't want the cameras taken down.)
The police should show that a crime has likely been committed, and get access to just the data that probably has evidence.
There are many other contexts where we trust properly supervised people who lack an immediate and obvious incentive to abuse the system. Combined with good overall software design, auditing and transparency almost all of the harms could be mitigated. And the tech does have some pretty major benefits.
The Feds have full access to search everything, are no doubt exempt from any transparency on the platform, and ICE is already using it to abuse and intimidate political enemies.
It’s a nationwide surveillance system posing as a local police tool.
Also, the Feds are creative in their application of the law. Things like HIDTA designated areas led to Flock-predecessors - scaled infrastructure deployed decades ago. One of the “drug corridors” is the I-95 corridor from Miami to Maine.
The cameras apprehend criminals. I can show with evidence that the juice isn't worth the squeeze, and in fact that the cameras had the effect of tasking our police force with doing municipal debt collection for Melrose Park and Maywood, at the cost of 5-7 hours of sworn officer time per "failure to appear warrant" arrest. But supporters of the cameras will point to multiple stolen car interdictions and recovered firearms.
If you go into these kinds of things assuming that the median resident of a municipality is anti-policing, you're already way, way off. And I find when I talk to anti-Flock advocates (that is: people who have "anti-Flock" as part of their personal identity, not just a person chosen at random who would happen to answer "no" to "should we ALPR") that many of them are operating from anti-policing premises, and so these kinds of responses are very surprising to them.
(Totally reasonable for your reaction to this to be "whoah, that was a lot more than I asked for", I just feel like I've been in these kinds of conversations a lot. It's not personal.)
A commissioner can easily mess things up and get sued trying do work on their own. Say they try to “repair a playground” by replacing a missing bolt. Well, were they qualified to do that? Do they have insurance? Was the action approved by a properly filed motion? Etc etc etc
I learned this is why it costs my town egregious sums to do simple maintenance work; the only companies willing to put up with all the red tape of working with the government have to charge a premium.
The part about him being a commissioner smells like a simple publicity stunt.
Publicity for what?
The publicity comes from a elected government official getting charged with felonys for stealing when he didn't steal anything.
The playground analogy doesn't really hold up here I don't see the connection between the two.
You don't get to rob a bank and then say "oopsie! my mistake, here's the bag of cash" when the police come knocking.
This article seems to confirm what I stated above - he took the cameras, and was later confronted by law enforcement about it.
And even if your telling is correct, that's still theft. Similarly, I can't just take your car, drive it around, and call you later to tell you where it is.
Especially if the propellant tank is pressurized using a solar powered compressor.
(Theoretically, of course. I wouldn’t advocate destroying private property.)
Would you take the knife out of your robber? Or is that stealing private property?
Surveillance endangers society/democracy and it's a threat too
Flock cameras are public property?
Almost.
SCOTUS could hand down another surprise decision:
This is more likely to lead to making them ubiquitous; people will demand a camera network linked to a database of valid faces of US nationals.
But if it's not tied to that, does that mean that anyone can install cameras anywhere? What grounds would they have to give permits to Flock while refusing them to other interested parties, like StalkingMyEx LLC. and CopTrack Corp.?
On the other side, I've read they operate a considerable number of private installations, too. Even that is suspect, too, in that there is existing case law affirming that people have a reasonable expectation of privacy in "the whole of their public movements."
People with electric saws love pulling them down.
They're only as permanent as their protection.
People shouldn't expect privacy in public, sure. They should expect they may be overheard or witnessed. But that's not really equivalent to mass surveillance and long-term recording
"You should not expect privacy in public" does not imply "you should expect no privacy and you should expect everything you do is recorded and stored forever"
I think everyone’s threat model is severely miscalibrated if they are threatened by being recorded driving somewhere via Flock, yet use a phone or social media account. There’s way more meaningful threats to actual private matters than Flock.
You are seriously clueless if you think otherwise
Furthermore, if you’re worried about that, have you considered that “they” could get even more comprehensive tracking data just by requesting it from a data-broker? There’s no divide between the online and real world if you have a phone or an online presence.
Yeah, but a national license plate surveillance system that lets a single police officer observe all of the movements you and your family members make every day for the past few years is not a single police officer making a plainview observation of you driving down the road.
And it's clearly a power that threatens liberties, you cannot have a free society when a government has that power.
"Palantir, what are the names and home addresses of all of the people that were at the pro-Mamdani rally, show me places that many of them go to in common, I want to find where these criminals are having their secret meetings."
Probably not in voice-to-text form, but this power is already in the hands of some US agencies, in part thanks to the national ALPR system.
The divide is that someone can't murder you by knowing your online activity
I think the general idea is that if you could (legally) go stand in that public space (sidewalks, roads, parks) and watch something happen then you're allowed to record what you see.
This is probably good - I think it's the basis of being able to record misbehavior (by private citizens and/or the police), for example.
In contrast you're generally not allowed to record stuff happening in a private space unless everyone's been informed that this will happen.
This is why you'll see signs saying "Warning - this place is under surveillance" signs on every single door going into a corporation that wants to use security cameras.
For example, you could photograph or record the dance floor in nightclub since dance floor is very public. However, the bathroom would not be allowed. Of course, the venue could make up rules and eject you for doing so.
Most of "Warning signs" are deterrence, maybe someone will behave better if they know cameras are watching. Also, it's cheap insurance dictate by the lawyers who think "Signs are 100 bucks total but someone filing privacy lawsuit is thousands, put up the signs."
The part about "depending on the situation and state you are in." is doing _a_lot_ of work there. Here in WA state, for example, if you go into a private meeting and record the thing without getting folks consent first then you're guilty of a misdemeanor.
Another example: in my old neighbor we had a nuisance neighbor who we all thought was engaged in Crimes, Plural. The immediate neighbor wanted to put up a video camera to catch them in the act but was told that they can't film the neighbor's yard directly. Filming their own yard and the field of view happens to catch something in the adjacent yard might get by a judge, maybe. So even if you can stand on the sidewalk and see past the trees into someone's backyard that doesn't mean you can film it.
(To be clear - I think this probably a good rule. I don't want folks filming me in my backyard :) )
Clearly, the tl;dr is that if this really matters to someone then they should check with a lawyer first.
I submitted a CCPA request to them to give me and delete everything they had on me.
Their response is that they own no data, and I have to make the request to their customer, whomever that may be.
If they're retaining any identifying data about me and then selling it to new customers, they are explicitly violating CCPA.
This allows them to promise that they don't keep any data and have strict retention policies etc. to jurisdictions that are on the fence or where the contract-purchasers are constrained by law in some way, but they can transfer identifying information at any point in the future to any customer, by mixing raw data and a model.
How could this seriously hold legal weight? The data is identifiable. Just because it’s gated by some transformation doesn’t mean they are magically not holding my identifiable information.
1798.140 (v)
> “Personal information” means information that identifies, relates to, describes, is reasonably capable of being associated with, or could reasonably be linked, directly or indirectly, with a particular consumer or household. Personal information includes, but is not limited to, the following if it identifies, relates to, describes, is reasonably capable of being associated with, or could be reasonably linked, directly or indirectly, with a particular consumer or household."
The phrase "reasonably capable of being associated with" seems like it would apply against this transformation argument, but later:
> (2) (A) “Personal information” does not include publicly available information or lawfully obtained, truthful information that is a matter of public concern.
> (B) (i) For purposes of this paragraph, “publicly available” means any of the following:
> (II) Information that a business has a reasonable basis to believe is lawfully made available to the general public by the consumer or from widely distributed media.
So I think the above comment was wrong, this might be the actual way around it, AIUI courts have long established that individuals don't have a reasonable expectation of privacy from being photographed or recorded when in public, so it seems like public surveillance footage is actually exempt from CCPA even if it can be reasonably linked with personally identifying information.
"With the contract set to expire on May 31st, the Sheriff’s Office informed Flock Safety that all 26 cameras must be removed by that date. When removal did not occur, the Sheriff’s Office took steps to ensure the cameras were not in use and placed covers over them."
https://www.lakeexpo.com/news/politics/felony-charges-droppe...
https://www.wmtv15news.com/2026/06/05/dane-county-covers-flo...
https://www.cnet.com/news/privacy/cities-covering-flock-surv...
https://dailynorthwestern.com/2025/09/28/top-stories/flock-c...
https://www.newsfromthestates.com/article/verona-has-waited-...
And these are just the cases where the municipality wants the cameras taken down, GP also talks about the cases where they just want to sate the public while keeping law enforcement and lobbyists happy. LA is a great example, the inaction of letting the contract expire in no way means that the cameras will be taken down, if no further action is taken, those cameras stay up, and law enforcement will continue to have access to all flock's alpr data.
And further it's unclear if the "data" governed in these contracts applies to the CCTV footage or the data produced for the customer by transforming the footage with models into identifying information. Given that flock has a profit incentive, it's reasonable to assume these contracts are written adversarially to maximize Flock's ability to persuade jurisdictions to sign the contracts and Flock's ability to use all of the data they harvest to maximize profit, we have enough examples of this in the 21st century to know this isn't paranoid, this is the basic playbook of all surveillancetech/adtech companies and they have all used language in contracts that is confusing to nonexperts that affords them maximum leverage to store all the data they harvest permanently and use it however they want.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
Can they? Does anyone know the terms of these contracts? Does flock just look the other way if a licensee just gives away the data to some other entity without getting a fee for it? I can see arguments on both sides from flock's perspective, i.e., revenue vs lock-in.
https://www.kut.org/crime-justice/2026-02-12/austin-tx-apd-f...
The network effect value far outweighs the lost revenue from a single local contract.
if the cameras continue recording, LA can subpoena those recordings on an as needed basis.
Flock may own the camera and the physical pole, but I find it hard to believe that they own the ground the poles are installed in. Almost definitely owned by the Department of Transportation.
What's the point in helping the police catch criminals when they don't do anything after the fact!
You're going to need to back that claim up with statistics
Everyone has an annecdote. "it's common enough to be recognized as a trend" is equally justification for racial profiling, and at least racial crime statistics are easily citable. And you still haven't even put forth that modicum of effort.
I'd appreciate it if you wouldn't put words in my mouth. I never once suggested racial profiling as acceptable, and I wasn't insinuating it either. I know you were just using it as an adjacent example, but I don't appreciate that.
I'm just giving my experiences man, I lived in Los Angeles for years. Have you ever been here or lived here? There is very little respect for the law because the law is not enforced. I'm not saying I have all the answers, it's just what I've noticed.
I'm not trying to be rude, and I'm not a stupid bot. Am I not allowed to have a point of view and express it?
It's totally fine if those talking points resonate with you, but it makes me sad that you don't have the mental capability to actually think about what the career path of a judge entails, what kind of room for decision making they have, and what kind of trade-offs they might need to consider in order to adjust the punishments.
Ignorance is bliss.
I'm just saying there's a predictable result when you express it with the level of detail and amount of effort that you _did_. And frankly, your comments are no better than pre-reasoning era LLM rage-bait.
What level of engagement are you looking for here; support for your lack of citations, or "yeah that's also my personal experience rah rah"?
I'm having a meta-level discussion, if you can't tell. I'm not "putting words in your mouth", I'm trying to discuss: the quality of your discussion. I'm discussing the quality of your arguments and your evidence. If you think that "racial profiling" is too hot, substitute in something else; that's not the point.
California enacted a law in 2014 that turned all theft under $950 into a misdemeanor instead of a felony (reverted last year). Theft became so common that police wouldn't even respond to theft calls unless it was over $950, which enboldened theives. During covid especially, entire stores would be looted and robbed constantly.
When people were caught, the judges would often give them minimal sentences, and release them over and over. Then the same people would commit more crimes because they knew the judges were lienent.
I'm not saying every single person fits into this box, but it's common enough to be recognized as a trend that happens in liberal areas. Los Angeles, Oakland are prime examples.
So all states with $1000 Felony cutoffs or higher should have this issue, right?
So why don't they?
You know the National Retail Federation had to stop posting their annual shrink numbers after they demonstrated that shoplifting was not meaningfully higher than previous years.
Those other places are just lying they don't have clean streets and stores without bars over the windows they're secretly just like us we have the numbers to prove it!
People who are “soft on crime”, practically speaking, are the people and politicians so committed to dehumanizing others that they’d rather watch their neighbors wallow in poverty or rot in jail than to actually do something to address the root causes (the foremost of which being the aforementioned societal dehumanization of the poor).
There's an old saw: A Scandinavian economist once said to Milton Friedman, ‘In Scandinavia, we have no poverty’. Milton Friedman replied, ‘That’s interesting, because in America, among Scandinavians, we have no poverty, either’ [0]
0: https://iea.org.uk/sites/default/files/publications/files/Sw...
N.B.: there was selection for the worse-off in those coming to the U.S.
That's an exceedingly weak defense for a country that imprisons 4x more people per-capita than China.
China's murder rate is about 0.5 murders per 100,000 people per year, while South Africa's is 44 per 100,000 people per year (assuming both countries report honest statistics). That's an 88x difference between two large countries. [0]
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...
This is exactly the false dichotomy that people engaging in this like to play up. It's not an either/or situation... we can and should _both_ address root causes to avoid crime where we can _and_ punish crime when we must.
I cannot take these words seriously since Trump tweeted that the Pope is weak on crime, and it’s the most retarded thing I’ve ever heard.
The US is not a serious country any more.
Ask yourself: why do public defenders have a tiny fraction of the budget of prosecutors?
It’s used for surveillance in the truest sense
Heaven forbid you are on someone’s watchlist, they will just track your movement across the city
This isn’t some fake CSI pop dream - this kind of tech isn’t used to catch the people breaking into your house
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/05/she-got-abortion-so-te...
So without proper charges judge cannot do anything but release. Police cannot do anything but arrest.
Prosecutors are the main line of defense (defending public from criminals).
DAs used to go after particularly egregious offenders and throw the book at them. This creates incentive effects for all the other would be criminals. It doesn’t take all that much enforcement before criminals get the idea and stop or are put in jail for decades.
Instead we have prosecutors going after all the wrong kinds of crime. Murderers are getting no cash bail while guys who cut down a tree in their yard are getting visits from the police and court summons for non-crimes.
This is intentional policy from DA offices. Pay attention next time your DA is up for reelection, they impact your quality of life far more than your representatives.
> "Some locals have taken matters into their own hands by dismantling Flock cameras and covering them with trash bags"
This techcrunch article incorrectly characterizes this need and required behavior as something done by random citizens. But it is actually the cities themselves having to resort to it, totally officially and legally, because of Flock behaving badly.
https://highways.dot.gov/safety/local-rural/maintenance-sign...
I do not want to live in a society that is under 24/7 surveillance. Of course, if the cops can watch everything you do all the time, there will be less crime. But that is not a sacrifice I’m willing to make.
I disagree there. If cops watch us at all times then more crimes will be prosecuted, think they'll just sit bored with nothing happening? They will find things, real or not.
The reality is that crime is way down, we do not need more enforcement. Leave us alone already. https://www.opencrime.us/years
If you think cops like cracking heads and dealing with petty crime that they'll just invent otherwise and use to harass people, you're out of your mind. You really need to get out more.
>If you think cops like cracking heads
They adore getting to crack heads. That's the entire reason they became cops. They love being able to use their power, rightfully or not, they don't really care.
Cops themselves say this!
The second is not. There are absolutely people who take pleasure in the bullying behavior cops are often associated with. They're the ones who want the cushy jobs in Greenwich but don't get them (probably for the aforementioned reasons in many cases) and wind up being doubly punitive and cruel to people in Bridgeport.
Bridgeport ~393 ~1,700
Greenwich ~9.4 ~867
More cops, more crime! In other news, wet sidewalks cause rain.
What I was saying is that there are absolutely cops who do _like cracking heads_. I (very personally!) know cops and they're often attracted to the job primarily for the benefits (retire with a pension after ~20 years; the part they'll tell anyone) and because they get to treat people like they did ants on the playground or freshman on the football team with impunity (the part they'll tell whoever is around after 10+ drinks).
I've never seen this. Instead I see cops taking abuse more often than not. Crazy person in the street screaming at the cop and the cops just waiting to see if he starts attacking someone. Seeing them navigate literal drugged out zombies and decide whether they really want to call the medics this time as it's a monthly occurrence with this exact individual. Things like that.
I feel like you get your impression of police from TV show and movies rather than real life.
You can enjoy your "freedom", but based on the real estate prices, I think more people have my preference.
We cannot just wave this away when the vast majority of people cannot take off time from work or afford to hire attorneys when their rights are violated.
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety" - Ben Franklin
Flock is essentially a private loophole that creates a nationwide dragnet.
Most crime is spontaneous. Plenty of examples from across the world that installing cameras or other checks at best shifts crime to other areas.
Camera's 100% prevent crime because you catch the bad guy, and in a sane society lock the person up so he can no longer commit crime. See how that works?
It obvious this should be the case, but when you dump billions of dollars getting around 4th amendment protections, lets just say it takes awhile to close the loopholes.
Thats the loophole that flock capitalized on.
Reference: https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2021/06/scale-new-yor...
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/20645486-re_-externa...
HB 4006 nullifies the entire purpose of obtaining Tollway information in an active investigation by requiring promptnotification to the subject of a search warrant and potential criminal actor. This information can be incredibly usefulin a multitude of criminal investigations, including homicides, kidnappings, and interstate trafficking of contraband.With this provision, law enforcement would not proceed with seeking a search warrant if it could jeopardize the abilityto apprehend the suspect, result in the destruction of evidence, or even worse result in harm to a victim.
Additionally, the proposed bill forecloses the possibility of obtaining information about a person traveling through aTollway pursuant to a subpoena, including license plate information or photographs of the driver, where a knownsuspect may not be identified but the route of travel could be useful to generate leads. A warrant is not required toobtain this information. Placing such a requirement that creates greater protections beyond those required under theFourth Amendment creates an unnecessary limitation on law enforcement's ability to investigate crime. The currentrequirement to obtain a subpoena is sufficient to ensure that law enforcement has a documented investigative purposeand criminal predicate tied to Tollway information.
Some case law background explaining why a warrant is not required for this type of Tollway information:
"This court has not previously addressed in a published opinion the question of whether an individual has areasonable expectation of privacy in his license plate. In two unpublished decisions, however, this court has agreedwith the other circuits that have decided this issue by holding that no such privacy interest exists. The reasoning ofthese opinions, as well as that of the Supreme Court in related cases, leads us to agree that a motorist has noreasonable expectation of privacy in the information contained on his license plate under the Fourth Amendment.No argument can be made that a motorist seeks to keep the information on his license plate private. The very purposeof a license plate number, like that of a Vehicle Identification Number, is to provide identifying information to lawenforcement officials and others."And, lol, yes the 4th amendment extends to driving on a public roadway... roads aren't international waters. Probable cause and such are still important. I recognize what you're saying but -- details matter, dammit.
Furthermore, just being recorded on a public roadway doesn’t constitute a search or seizure.
The strongest evidence in support of your position is that Boston aerial surveillance case, which is frankly a stupid extension of the idea of viewing = searching, and I’d like to see it or another case reach the Supreme Court for clarification.
Again, details matter: how is it stupid.
The courts have repeatedly upheld far more invasive searches and encroachments of vehicles, but now confusingly consider simply observing the outside of your vehicle to constitute an excessive search.
The Baltimore decision is stupid because it contradicts 50 years of case law over what constitutes a search and what degree of privacy you expect to have on a private roadway.
Is your definition of "stupid" anything that contradicts 50 years of case law? That seems.... tautologically limp.
Do you mind providing your position? Do you think being observed on a public roadway constitutes a search or seizure in the context of the 4th amendment?
Some example: Chicago Police Department accidentally sent me the ALPR XML data from the state's system (LEADS). The data included about a thousand social security numbers, many credit cards, the fingerprint hashes. This happened during FOIA litigation and when we raised it to them, instead of freaking out, they asked us if wanted them to actually redact. We said yes, they came back later and the XMLs still had many SSNs and credit card numbers. Third time was better, but it's still awful. Thousands of pages.
Another example: City of Chicago has given me the license plate records for millions of vehicles through FOIA. You can read about it at the end here: https://mchap.io/losing-a-5yr-long-illinois-foia-lawsuit-for...
Another example: Cook County Sheriff's Office's electronic monitoring program was using a 20 year old webserver that was exposed to the internet, leading to this: https://www.vice.com/en/article/contractor-exposed-the-movem...
Another example: City of Seattle accidentally sent me 30 million emails (including police): https://mchap.io/that-time-the-city-of-seattle-accidentally-...
The town I grew up in was a target of Bovino's ICE. A FOIA request for the usage of Flock in that town returned back the longest FOIA denial I've ever received, and I've done thousands, including over a dozen lawsuits. The friends that I graduated with, who think of this country as their home are being targeted. It's hard to express the grief of that. https://www.muckrock.com/foi/waukegan-11153/flock-safety-alp...
Another example: Recently I even found an S3 bucket used by police to share photos of people across state lines. Just... on the internet. Facial recognition, flock, etc.
I think you're hyper-focusing on the 4A public space stuff honestly. The 4A issue that I specifically research is about the extent of exculpatory information given to defense attorneys during criminal prosecution. Of the 150 arrests done by Chicago Police that I found in Flock audit lots, only one arrest report actually mentioned Flock. People have a 4th amendment right to have access to the exculpatory information about their arrest in order to make a proper defense.
This is all just stuff that I've found in my research and I feel like I've barely scratched the surface.
if they didn't get to have cameras everywhere, they wouldn't have as much to sell.
The problem with Flock is not who owns the data, it's the potential for abuse.
Same basic reason I'd rather have the cops after me than have the environmental/zoning/whatever civil enforcement jerks after me. There's just sooooo much more scrutiny (which really says a lot considering how bad the cops are).
Nearly your rights go out the window when it's non-criminal prosecution. The organizations also aren't nearly as robustly structured to limit damage by "bad apples" as real police departments are.
I know this sounds insane in light of how bad the cops are. That's because it is. Civil enforcement is essentially 50yr behind policing when it comes to transparency and accountability.
do they have the power to assault you and then have it be your fault?
How many people get shot by cops because something civil escalated into a bench warrant?
Walter Scott's child support comes to mind.
The profession attracts individuals who are willing to abuse power for their own purposes. That's not to say that every cop is in the job to abuse power, but many are, and we have to build our law enforcement structures in a way that directly acknowledges and addresses this fact.
It requires better access controls.
Even invasive ideas like automated license plate scanning city-wide can have its data only accessible to an API to eg, track a stolen car across the city to avoid a dangerous high-speed chase in populated areas.
I think to throw the baby out with the bathwater around networked security cameras is failure around designing robust and secure APIs and systems (including audit trails).
Try to get something out of the CEO of Bank of America or some other faceless corporation
(Yes, I know that shareholders have the ability to vote on board proposals as well, but even if you think those mechanisms are equivalent, there's a pretty huge difference between "if you buy stock, you get the right to vote" and "you have inherent human rights including but not limited to the ones enumerated by a written constitution")
I have. It's easier than you think.
As opposed to their mayor/governor/president, who they not only can easily find out who it is if they don't already, but can also vote out (and who often will have term limits)?
Nationally, I trust a system where the data are split up between siloes more than a single, privately-owned database.
Also, once crime does cross state lines the local FBI gets involved and they have a lot more resources than a small-town police force
Or just technology. Almost every “50 year old cold case solved” I see is because advancements in DNA processing .
Unless you'd rather prioritize liberty over safety. I want crimes to be harder to solve if the alternative is a panopticon.
I get that it helps solve crimes, but solving crime is not the end-all-be-all of improving society. If anything, it's a highly symptom-oriented solution, and we absolutely have plenty of levers we could be trying to pull if we wanted to prevent crime instead.
Forget whether one global surveillance network is more trustworthy than another global surveillance network for a minute. Do we want this at all?
I think that's a fair question for each local jurisdiction to make on its own.
The one who owns the data is the one who should be responsible to provide proper guardrails in certain cases if not all, specially like these ones. It comes down to the fine line around business, rules and regulations. The motivation of business is to make most profit with least cost and implementing regulatory mechanisms are cost. Abuses are natural to happen in the absence of guardrails and audits.
I'm not sure what a realistic solution is for Flock to try and manage data they do not own nor if it makes sense for them to deny access to data they are not the owners of.
Since they are all unionized and replacing them is crazy slow and expensive, nothing happens.
Of course it does. You dissolve the police department and create a new one. New York did it twice, first replacing the city-controlled Municipals with the state-controlled Metropolitans [1], and then in 1870 creating the NYPD [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_Police_riot
[2] https://www.nyc.gov/site/nypd/about/history/history-timeline...
They also have months or years of cop training, not weeks.
The government isn't hiring cosmeticians or plumbers or whatever in bulk. It's hiring cops. So it wants them to be cheap. The fact that they're scary thugs who could potentially be dumb and hot headed is a feature. Scares the peasants into compliance. It's a force multiplier basically.
On the flip side the government is happy to enforce supply constraints for any random trade so long as it's not so absurd that it hurts the legitimacy of the government by making it look corrupt and making people resist it.
If a police department reuses to accept accountability, and dig in their heels by refusing to work, "just" dissolve it. And while at it, half the calls could be handled by folks without guns.
In practice that obviously would not go over well, people are too attached to the status quo. We just lack the political will to rethink and retool the system (despite most Americans favoring police reform).
This can't be emphasized enough. A lot of enforcement and "civil order" work does not require guns, and in many cases (e.g., mental health crises), they're the wrong people to be engaged to resolve.
I think one of the biggest issues with policing is that they are supported by the "law and order" crowd, which is a euphemism for keeping "others" in their place.
I swear to god that "Defund the police" was an inside job to discredit police reform by turning it into an all or nothing proposition and that's not gonna fly.
Oakland CA has serious crime problems because there's "not enough" policing and a lot of people are emboldened to do all the crime they want because nobody's there to stop them. One of many articles on this: https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/oakland-business-o...
I believe there are some fundamental changes to the system that could correct a lot of this:
1. End the War on Drugs. It's literally designed to create crime and it's low hanging fruit for cops to focus on rather than real crime.
2. Legalize and regulate sex work. Like drugs, this is a moral issue and by driving it underground it's designed to create more crime. Regulate and monitor the fuck out of it to minimize opportunities for sex trafficking. It's also a favored low-hanging fruit for cops to bust.
3. Use social workers for mental health emergencies and have the cops notified for possible backup
4. Invest in housing/mental health/rehab services and get the homeless off the streets
5. Revisit the legal system to avoid catch and release scenarios (though most of it is #1 and #2). If the cops are busting the same people over and over again that disincentives them to even bother
6. Fix qualified immunity and put some teeth into it. We should never simply take the officer's word for anything without some sort of proof (like leaving their body cams on).
7. Make the police self-insured backed by their pension fund. They have no skin in the game and municipalities pay out vast sums of money for the misdeeds of officers.
Easy peasy!
Prisons are expensive and we would be better served helping keep people out of prison in the first place. It doesn't help that the private prison industry has extensive influence with legislators (as do the police and prison guard unions).
More so, just shoving people out the gates after time served is almost like planned recidivism. Investing in rehabilitation, training, and guidance for those released would pay off for the public purse.
Let me point out that you must know which half before the fact for this to be of any use.
Sometimes you might be 95% sure no guns are required. Is that good enough? What does that buy you? 10% of calls?
Now there’s plenty of loopholes where you can craft “unique defenses” based on nearly identical underlying offenses. But it’s important to have the distinction
But I do think the nuance of "who/what should we point our finger at" is important. Because like we see in this thread, the finger is being pointed at qualified immunity when it almost never is the actual issue for a given injustice, and fixing it will not get rid of the thing you are mad about. Fixing it would go a long way to resetting some cultural precedence though in my opinion.
The solution is not making humans more virtuous but reducing the capability and the harm done that unethical humans can do.
> If we cannot trust them with the very basics of ethical behavior they are absolutely in the wrong job and there need to be very clear consequences.
Police should not be trusted because they are police. There should be audits and controls that prevent abuse and unethical behavior. Small unethical behaviors should result in corrective measures but not termination, since when the punishment becomes too great you create incentives for cover ups or scapegoats. A small number of minor punishments, that catch people as soon as they step over the line, functions better as a deterrent than a large scale punishments that are unlikely to be actually enforced. Granted if a police officer does a major crime, they should face serious consequences, but the goal should be to creating a system that makes major crimes by police less likely. If they know they will get caught for minor crimes, they are less likely to commit bigger crimes.
From what it sounds like, it’s likely not on any sizable group’s top 10 priority list in LA.
The LAPD doesnt operate in some fantasy legal environment, but in the real world.
Society is not starting at zero right now, it has developed for 10.000 years with many genocidal wars. As a result, 1% of the population has achieved generational wealth due to some sort of "value creation" by their ancestors.
Through trial and error and a lot of violence, humanity has noticed that with free trade and free enterprise, the welfare of everyone else can significantly improve (toilets, food, entertainment), while the overall amount of violence significantly decreases.
Because when people put their money where their mouth is, capital can be allocated much more efficient than through other means (e.g. the King of England forcing a levy and centrally deciding what industry to invest it).
The only problem with this model is deflation, because if there is no incentive to deploy capital, then the overall pie shrinks and people start fighting about keeping their shares. That's why central banks talk about target inflation rates of 2%, because purchasing power of your hoarded capital needs to shrink in order to incentivize you to use your capital in a productive way, which also increases the overall pie for society.
The main thing one can criticize about generational wealth such as Trump, Epstein, Musk or Thiel is the fact that they have to lie about its existence, and keep up a charade of "I'm self-made" due to their low self esteem.
The alternatives are always worse for the common person. I'd rather have Trump, Epstein, Musk and Thiel than even bigger capital concentration like it was with the British crown and the Catholic church in their full bloom.
Ideally, those figures would also follow the moral code of the rest of society, but still it's much better than their parents who did crazy shit in Africa only 50 years ago, or the crown and the catholic inquisition a couple hundred years ago.
But there is no better way to overcome old money than inflation.
Any violence is basically a struggle between different factions of old money, and it's overall impact is net negative for the majority of people. That's why certain factions of old money bring in their religious beliefs in order to justify violence - but in the end the normal people suffer from it.
There is a country that allows police to just take your stuff and then demands you to prove it wasn't illegal. Also such property can be used/sold/spent by police force it was stolen by. Does it sound like private ownership is supported by the state? BTW. It's called civil forfeiture and country is named USA.
Realistically civil forfeiture only affects small fish because old money first sets the tariffs, then uses their legal invincibility to circumvent them for maximum profit, all while flying in their product directly to US military bases because some racists think it's a good idea to feed drugs directly to black people in order to derail their civil rights movement. Profits are moved through offshore accounts in the financial system overseen by the British monarch and managed by people like Epstein.
That's the system, we won't be able to change it, our only option is to get a small slice of the pie by creating a win/win situation for an heir of old money who claims to be self-made billionaire.
That Pookie can show a video from a flock camera showing him somewhere else is a massive boost to his civil liberties. Same with whatever poor sap gets beat by the cops.
Not even remotely. The US is already at the stage where citizens can be brutally murdered, have said murder filmed at multiple angles, and have the officers involved get away with it.
Your civil liberties are irrelevant when we can just redefine and expand what it means to endanger a police officer. Or have the officers bypass the judicial system entirely.
Camera footage will only be used against you, not for you.
The potential for abuse rises with the number of people who have access to that data, regardless of who they work for. Restricting access strictly to users in the municipality under contract reduces the number of people with access and thereby mitigates some abuse vectors.
If my family gets kidnapped, I want a department to be able to check a camera. I’ll wait for the judge’s signature.
But that’s night & day from today’s reality. I simply cannot stand being recorded to the cloud by a creepy corporation everywhere I drive in California with just about no oversight.
Cindy Cohn, EFF legend, on Hard Fork podcast:
“I think a lot of it, too, is that I don't think that there is a sense among just users of these platforms that privacy is a winnable fight anymore. I hear so much nihilism and fatalism about this when I talk to people, and they, you know, I'm, I'm, you know, asking them about their privacy practices, and they're kind of like, well, that ship has sailed. Like, the government has all my data anyway. What is the point of trying to fight? I'm sure you get this, too.
Starting point is 00:57:11
[Yes. What is your response to the privacy nihilists?] I think there's a couple of things. One is that this idea that because your information is already out there, it's all over. Like, if you talk to people in intelligence or in cops, they will tell you that old information has a, it's a very short shelf life, right? So your information isn't all out there because you're continuing to live your life. And so, yes, it would have been great if 10 years ago we'd passed a comprehensive privacy law that included law enforcement as well as the commercial
Starting point is 00:57:46
entities. That's the first best time. The second best time is today. Because if we can begin to cut the knees out from under this massive data collection, the information will get less and less important and their ability to spy on us will get smaller and smaller. So it's never, I mean, if it were game over, they'd stop spying on us, right? Like, they're not like, oh, we're going to unplug the spying machine because we've got everything we need, folks. Like, that would be a different world than the one we're living in. So one of the things is, like, it's never game over. It's not game over. I mean, it's ultimately game over when you're not live anymore maybe, but as long as you're living, your data is valuable to the, to the government
Starting point is 00:58:31
and to the companies, and the minute we stop this business model, the better. The second thing I would argue is it's easy to say it's all over and there's nothing I can do if they're not sweeping up your grandma in an immigration raid. But I think it's a, it's a bit of a denial or entitled position to think that you could not care and nothing because what's what's going on there and the nihilism is I don't have to I don't care about this. It feels like too big a fight and nothing will really happen to me or anyone I love if I don't care about this. And I think we're living in a time where that's not a safe assumption anymore. We have to fight for our privacy.”
With Flock? Good luck.
do not have the money to invest in developing a camera system that is sovereignly owned by the city
you unrealistic expectations of a city government's ability to do anything different than it has always done.
Peter Thiel and his ilk absolutely adore what China has done. You have an elite - in this case, the CCP - that is entitled to their position by law. It bills itself as the "best and brightest" of society and has ideological constraints that it gets to impose on its members through the cadre system. The rest of the population labors for the benefit of this elite with little-to-no input on the operation of the ruling class.
That's what Thiel wants, just with his kind in the positions of power. It'd eliminate any opposition to what they imagine as the "right" way of doing things and reduce the friction to the creation of economic value for their holdings.
Note that "friction" in this case means things like human rights, democracy, competition, workers rights, etc.
This sounds like a lot more than your average flock installation at a local PD
https://salem.legistar.com/LegislationDetail.aspx?ID=7375982...
OpenALPR is not open source despite the open name, sigh
(Not updated in years though.)
What Flock is selling is the whole package: The hardware (including power, networking, and the pole), the software, the infrastructure, the logic design, the connectivity. For someone who doesn't want to operate and support a wide area network of IoT devices, you can see why "just give them money to watch your streets" looks appealing.
Companies are either out of the loop, or they're in the loop and the only way to do right by their shareholders is to exploit that data in every way they can.
(Go check the FCC docs for X4GS06009 and note that there's a Quectel KG100S sitting on the power supply board. https://fccid.io/X4GS06009)
> The top three payout categories totaled $345 million. Civil rights violations, police shootings, excessive use of force, and illegal searches collectively accounted for $183 million, almost half of the claim amounts.
Plenty of civil rights violations, but Flock is too much even for them.
That is not a non sequitur.
Police get access to software no costs (AFAIK) for BOLO alerts on tags.