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Comment by bluefirebrand | Hacker News Reader

I think it would be kind of different if people were having cars broken into less often or bikes returned after being stolen

But it's clear that increased surveillance hasn't been leading to stolen property being recovered.

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Yea, that's the thing: I could almost get behind mass surveillance if it actually solved crime. Probably not, but almost. But it doesn't! Having a camera on every street corner doesn't do anything to solve crime if the police won't look at it and actually follow up. So we get the downsides of mass surveillance without any upside.

Same thing with things like "find my iPhone". Great in theory, but if your phone actually gets stolen and you tell the cops "Hey, my phone is at this exact address, I can prove it with Find My," they still don't give a shit and don't lift a finger to solve it, so the technology is in reality useless.

We need a police force who is actually motivated to solve crime rather than just find black people to beat and show up in force when someone protests something.

> Same thing with things like "find my iPhone". Great in theory, but if your phone actually gets stolen and you tell the cops "Hey, my phone is at this exact address, I can prove it with Find My," they still don't give a shit and don't lift a finger to solve it, so the technology is in reality useless.

This is location-dependent.

Take a lesson from the UK where there are cameras everywhere.

Brothers van parked in London. Window broken, bag stolen off front seat. Right under camera.

He calls police and miracle of miracles they actually attend. Must have been in the area.

Plod:"Shouldn't have left your bag on view"

Bro:"Can you check the CCTV"

Plod:"You watch too much TV mate, we don't have time for that"

But cameras will one day help catch a murderer and suddenly everyone will want them everywhere.

Tell them someone said "from the river to the sea". They'll drop everything to look.

This is such a lie. UK arrests people for flying UK flags. Pro Palestinian terrorists get away with assaulting police all the time.

the cops were in the apartment where my phone was stolen when my phone was stolen and had a video recording of it getting stolen clearly showing the person who stole it who was known to the police because it was the person the police were called about.

I said: can you get my phone back? They said: use find my, then come to the police station. I did. The police said: sorry, this location only shows the building and not the apartment, so we can't enter the apartment and get your phone

The phrase I constantly recite to people at this point is "Mass surveillance is not mass enforcement and the two are separate words and concepts for a reason." People don't seem to get it until there's an effort to point that out.

Sounds like a mini version of Habermas’s legitimation crisis playing out in real time

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