Hacker News Reader

Comment by nikkwong | Hacker News Reader

Even with all this said, surveillance like this is certainly going to be one of the best ways to catch criminals and reduce crime over the long term. I hope the misgivings that we have around Flock won't close the door to us ever using this type of technology, in some way, in the future.

View on HN

I spent 3 years in Korea, and that's probably where I will go back to retire after I exit. Crime there is extremely low - partially because of the cameras, but mainly because they're on top of it. They're able to spend time on every criminal, which deters anyone from breaking the law.

Contrary to SF, where I've called the police and provided evidence for an open and shut case, and the cops shrugged their shoulders. Flock cameras won't fix that.

I used to live in china, which is by all means the dystopian surveillance state that we're all afraid that this could lead to. Don't misinterpret this as an advocation for that type of living; but it's simply interesting to note that when you ask any chinese if they would like to go back to the world of 30 years ago in terms of surveillance, essentially 100% of them will say no; they like it the way things are and not having to be afraid of being victim to any crime. Yes yes, a bird born in a cage thinks flying is an illness. I realize the irony in bringing this up. Yet it's just hard to ignore when you see delivery drivers leaving packages outside of buildings on the street in the most insecure manner and not having a single soul daring to touch it if they are not the intended recipient.

At the same time, on HN we are not even having a conversation about what a sort of tradeoff between surveillance and safety. I live in Seattle, actually just had ~$400 in buckets of paint stolen off my porch just yesterday. Yes, buckets of paint. I had a break in 2 months ago, and that was one of many over the years. This is in U-District, a high crime, but also oddly affluent neighborhood. I absolutely detest the fact that criminals run around the city with impunity committing crime after crime. It makes everyone's life here just a bit more miserable—there are so many people that don't want to move to the city because of the crime; there are all these invisible costs we are paying because of it.

So to think that cameras are such a no-go just doesn't make sense to me. Certainly there are ways to do it ethically. I think south korea is a great example, as well as many european countries. Honestly, I think it's just bizarre that every time Flock gets brought up on HN we all flip the bird to the supposed surveillance state without even discussing the tradeoffs.

In China the pact (true or not is irrelevant) is that the State has this power and enacts it for the benefit of everyone. In the US surveillance doesn’t have the same role, it’s just another figment of extreme profit making. Flock has no role in the social pact, it’s just a dystopian company profiting from the current situation.

This is a mischaracterization. Flock helps solve around 700k crimes in the US per year and is involved in ~10k missing person cases (this claim comes from Gemini). It's reported to assist in around ~10% of crimes. To call what they're doing "dystopian" is ignoring the upside: it's certainly saved many lives, that's undebatable.

To me the fact tha policing through profiling all citizen is already a dystopia. The fact that a private company gets paid to do it and collect the data is even worse.

What about the upside though? Is that worth ignoring? There are so many crimes that can't be solved without having a camera watching the street. There is the potential for the government profiling, but cities have governance over their own Flock data and don't share it with the federal government, unless they explicitly opt-in.

It's more complicated in China not just because of people want a more safer environment, but also because of the culture and the social formation built by history.

Chinese were taught to grow in honesty and integrity explicitly for thousand years and it's becoming common consensus when more and more people are educated. When the bar raises and the gov is not given more freedom to the people, it's just nature to let the surveillance cameras grow to each and every inch of the land.

Me personally would chose safety over privacy though.

American police seem to be a uniquely bad combo of false positives and false negatives. Failing to go after actual crime while also capable of using disproportionate violence in incidents that don't warrant it.

Do you also want to install some surveillance software on your phone and laptop so it can watch what you do 100% of time?

You know in future it will really help to catch some criminals stealing copyrighted IP, watching some illegal types of porn or using some sanctioned Chinese LLM.

You will never find anyone who is against these cameras saying that they don’t reduce crime. Of course they do. The problem is what you give up to have that is far, far more valuable and we can point to the “Ben Franklin” quote here about those who would give up freedom for safety deserve neither.

The problem is the negative feedback between crime (and crime visibility through media), and the acceptance of surveillance in order to stop crime.

People really don't like public safety crime. Not only will they vote for surveillance, they will vote for public safety authoritarians like Bukele just to stop it.

They are thinking: What good is your abstract notion of freedom if I cannot leave my house at night, and I have to be hyper vigilant of violence?

I don't know the solutions to this. The media clearly plays a big role in this, but regulation of media and social media is its own can of worms.

One thing I am quite confident about is that actually stopping public safety crime without surveillance must be a priority, otherwise it's cart before horse.

  You will never find anyone who is against these cameras saying that they don’t reduce crime. Of course they do.

Debatable. This is the first data I’ve seen that wasn’t paid for by Flock. https://atlpresscollective.com/2026/07/28/flock-cameras-atla...

This assumes the police even want to solve crimes. I'm not convinced they do. Everything I've seen points to them wanting to do the absolute bare minimum to not be disbanded, and that's it. Their primary goal is to get paid and go home. Well, solving crimes interferes with the "go home" part, so they don't. Normally, in a free market, you would fail if you can't do your primary purpose. Police have zero accountability to anyone, including the voter. They're systemically allowed to fail, and encouraged financially to fail.

No surprise then when they fail.

I think this relies on anecdata rather than real data. Police obviously do solve crimes, if they didn't, the US would look a lot more like Haiti. They could be solving more, with better technology, but that doesn't seem like a discussion that we're willing to have on HN.

They are already militarized, they have the best technology in the world. Better than most nation’s militaries. It doesn’t help much, because the incentives are such that they don’t get rewarded in any way for solving crimes.

It’s not anecdata, it’s analyzing the incentive structures of our institutions. You have to do that analysis because nobody is going to be a hero. Yes, there are some heros, but there’s no systemic way to make people heros. You need structure.

Is it? In the UK we have a huge density of CCTV cameras and often you can barely get the police to write a crime report, let alone look at the CCTV. It doesn't really seem like the bottleneck.

A society glued together with cameras rather than people, is shallow.

Catching a few criminals is not worth taking everyone's privacy by force.

> Catching a few criminals is not worth taking everyone's privacy by force

This drifts into truism with "few," "criminals," "everyone" and "by force" left so vaguely defined.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com