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Comment by bob1029 | Hacker News Reader

I find it amusing how ineffective all of this stuff becomes if you simply leave your phone at home. No one is doing the hard kind of police work anymore.

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Most criminals are dumb, some of them not only carry their phones with them, they even post their crimes on social media. With that and Flock I would think police work has never been easier.

> Most criminals are dumb

You mean most criminals who get caught?

I think both can be true.

Both can be true but it’s unclear if both are true, and it also depends on what one considers “dumb”

It also depends on what you consider to be “criminal.” I’d wager most shoplifters are dumb. Most supervisors who engage in wage theft aren’t dumb. But that’s not the kind of person who comes to mind when we think “criminal.”

There are two kinds of people in the world. Criminals, and criminals with plausible deniability.

Now we're getting somewhere.

Cops are lazy and dumb as well. They use flock to find people in the area and accuse them of crimes they didn't commit.

They also use flock to find and accuse people who did commit crimes and accuse them of having done so.

They also find and accuse people of crimes they didn’t commit without using Flock.

They also use Flock to skip accusing people who they might have suspected if it weren’t for Flock evidence that exonerates them.

It seems like any meaningful analysis needs to consider the rates of all four combinations of {true|false} {accusations|exonerations}, and compare that matrix to the matrix for the status quo techniques.

I've read enough of your comments here to know to disregard your opinion. You just want a surveillance state.

The police almost never use any available evidence to exonerate anyone.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-7o9xYp7eE

> With that and Flock I would think police work has never been easier.

“A policeman's job is only easy in a police state.” — Touch of Evil (1958), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfgNNfnNAa8

They don't care about catching criminals. They can use real police work for that. They care about being able to profile everyone going back some arbitrary amount of time so that when someone who isn't homeless with nothing the state can steal gets out of line they can come up with a short list of who done it.

Another story in the same publication is about one of their writers being arrested because of Flock cameras (falsely IDing their test-drive car).

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