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Comment by bko | Hacker News Reader

Can someone explain to me why you wouldn't want a camera accessible to police monitoring the comings and goings of your residence? Seems it would make it trivial to catch any criminal behavior.

And the pool makes sense as well as pools are incredibly dangerous. If children are regularly breaking in and swimming at night, which has been known to happen, it's a huge liability to residents not to mention the possibility of someone drowning

I guess it could be private effort (everyone I know has a ring or Google home type system monitoring their residence 24/7), but I think the hysterics around Flock is mostly an online phenomenon.

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> Can someone explain to me why you wouldn't want a camera accessible to police monitoring the comings and goings of your residence?

You can't be serious.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/08/02/how-pol...

"Flock’s array of license-plate cameras was built to fight crime. But at least 50 law enforcement officers were charged with or accused of misusing it and other systems."

They're stalking people with them.

Is this net bad behaviour that was added due to Flock, or was it a bad actor who happened to use Flock?

Agreed that it's bad behaviour, and that we don't want police overstepping. But I don't see how the use of Flock by police can't be monitored in a way, which catches or even eliminates this issue.

> Is this net bad behaviour that was added due to Flock, or was it a bad actor who happened to use Flock?

Every tool we give to cops gets widely abused.

Which is precisely why we should be slow to provide them with new ones.

Yes, surely if we add more surveillance then the problems of surveillance will be solved.

Police have bad behavior because it's de-facto allowed. Police have very little accountability. They can do whatever they want and nobody really cares in a way that matters. The department protects them, courts go light on them, and prosecutors don't prosecute. If you surveil the police, it doesn't matter. You can catch the police killing someone on camera and they're not going to jail.

When bad behavior is allowed, and said bad behavior "helps" your life in some way, why wouldn't you do it? It's a matter of incentives. We build an incentive structure where police are rewarded for being awful. So the end result is the police are awful basically by construction. They can't not be awful.

This assumes the police are always upstanding and never have ulterior motives. Which has proven not to be true. [0] and tons of others

[0] https://www.kcra.com/article/new-bedford-police-officer-on-l...

This assumes that the benefit of allowing police to effectively do their job outweighs instances of abuse of that power.

I don't get this argument. Police aren't perfect therefore police shouldn't be granted the ability to do their job?

Police already can't do their job because we select for sub-90 IQ cops.

Giving idiot cops abusable tools is PURE AND UTTER STUPIDITY. If you think otherwise, I can't wait for those same idiots to kick in your door despite you having done nothing wrong due to some false accusation by a clanker and show you the error of your mistaken train of thought.

If by that you mean we formally select for police with lower intelligence, that's not true; it's an Internet urban myth. If you meant something along the lines of the job's conditions and circumstances intrinsically selects for people with lower intelligence, I mean, I disagree, but you could have the debate.

"that's not true; it's an Internet urban myth."

Jordan vs City of New London, year 2000, US 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals - try again.

Yes, this has come up several times on HN before. In a single municipality, with a population of 27,000, more than 25 years ago, one person was declined for a job on the basis of being overqualified. Meanwhile, virtually every major police department in the country administers a form of cognitive testing to all new recruits, and many require post-secondary schooling.

Single municipality? No. Learn what the Wonderlic score is and how it was used in the 80s and 90s. Police departments used to have an IQ cap of 110 (about 27 on the Wonderlic score scale) and would not hire applicants with higher Wonderlic scores.

Try again - you're arguing with someone that's been in court over this.

I'm familiar with Wonderlic and would be very happy for sources on this, because the only sources I've ever seen have been that dumb New London case.

What sources are you using? The og reporter did provide a source but you have not.

Just want to say that I went looking for cases other than New London and found nothing. You've got something interesting to share here, share it!

Nobody's taking away their ability to do their job. What we're trying to do is make sure that the police don't abuse their power, that their use of power is accountable, and that they can be held liable for it when they do abuse it.

Police have to get warrants for searches as well, and nobody seems to be saying that that stops them from being able to do their job.

You're saying two separate things.

We should make sure police don't abuse their power. That's what auditing and strict access controls are for. If someone abuses it, they are held accountable.

But that doesn't mean you need a warrant for everything. It's much like police have guns and can use them at their discretion, but every time an officer draws a weapon of fires is brought under scrutiny. It works exactly the same way. Imagine if police had to go to a judge before they were able to draw their weapons!

But Flock cameras aren't a gun, and they should be held to the same standard as any other information-gathering - it should require a warrant.

If only everything worked perfectly as intended. In the real world there are unintended consequences of most things we do and we need to balance.

The question isn't what good can these do, the question is does the good outweigh the bad? At best we can say the jury is still out on that question - and we can only say that on the assumption that Flock and the law (likely both) does something about the ways the system can be abused.

I have neighbors and that’s good enough. We all think Flock is creepy and nobody wants to be listed in a database. At this point everyone’s had their PII leaked more than once, so everyone knows the risk.

I personally have an NVR that isn’t connected to the internet and I encourage others to do the same if they want cameras.

Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety

Benjamin Franklin, Philadelphia, 1756.

“Where there is no law, there is no freedom.”

John Locke, Second Treatise of Government (1689)

Ah yes, laws, notoriously non-existent before the introduction of camera surveillance.

The irony of this quote, is it's about a communities right to fund their own defense when the greater powers (London at the time, federal gov't now) will not provide what is needed. It's about a community having the power and holding that power. The flock business model is precisely this. Those who pay for the cameras decide how it is used. Your participation in local government will have greater and faster impact in the use of your local ALPR technology than the federal government will have for a long time.

If it was just 2-4 weeks of camera footage archives accessible to local police with paper trail on an as-needed basis, I doubt there would be much opposition.

But then this happened in my county:

https://www.lakemchenryscanner.com/2026/06/19/prosecutors-sa...

You're absolutely right! If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear. That's why I installed a camera in your bathroom and made it publicly accessible to the internet. If somebody commits a crime in your bathroom, they'll be trivially caught.

Find me some evidence that Flock ever helped catch a criminal.

Privacy. Controlling your own data.

The police aren't your friends

This isn't true. Most police are your friends. The problem is a few are not your friends and nobody can tell the difference until it is too late.

Have you seen American cops?

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