edit: Every single thing you guys have replied with are policy/law debates, not enforcement debates. I disagree with many laws on the books today. I want the laws changed, not selective/arbitrary enforcement of them.
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
While I merely quoted the text of the Forth Amendment, the Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth are also arguably limits on policing power, making fully half the original ten amendments about limiting policing.
I invite anyone and everyone to peruse the contents of https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/
* Driving a stolen car
* Driving a car used in a recent homicide
So the question isn't: "Should we take away the tools these cops use to serve the public?" but "Should we give even more powerful surveillance tools to a group of unaccountable thugs who routinely abuse what they already have?"
It should be a quick bit of data work for records to be made of such stops based on duty logs (sans personally identifying information) and compare it to actual arrest/conviction rates to verify that at a minimum the perception of the police match reality. If they don't, then the local community should exert a suitable oversight to adjust police procedure.
To top that off there is almost no "suitable oversight" of any police departments in the US of any kind, let alone by the community.
There really are no simple solutions to this, even places not plagued by bigotry and racism have major structural power problems for the average citizen.
The problem with rats' nests of infrastructure is that it is effectively impossible to determine what wires are structurally load-bearing in unexpected ways, and there's literally nobody in a position of authority that would be even remotely trusted by a super-majority to construct a suitable replacement system from whole cloth.
“Sir, we are coming by today because we are concerned you are insufficiently supportive of our public servants in uniform. It has come to our attention that you have been disparaging some members of our law enforcement divisions to groups as large as 100 people! This is part of our new thought policing initiatives, we need everyone to support our policing efforts!”
“Yes, I work for Flock Online. We only index statements posted at publicly accessible URLs, which in principle anyone can see. We are able to profile every person at scale for a more effective community policing database. This new thought policing initiative is being carried out as a public-private partnership with the full support of your county’s representatives, as a way to preserve our community’s harmony and enhance social cohesion.”
“Please don’t be alarmed, the AI flagged you but I assure you, this is a real human in the loop wanting to talk to you about your comments. I am here because we know you’d be home around this time. Can you please come down to the station with us?”
We just want the enforcement of this policy to be maximally successful! What’s wrong with that :-)
I expect this argument is actually a poison pill for some anarchist or libertarian fantasy of “if the laws fit onto a single sheet of paper all these problems would just go away”.
His insistence that "The police are the public and the public are the police" doesn't really hold up in many countries anymore.
Flock does not force cops to be less arbitrary/selective any more than bodycams do.