As Wisconsin cities flee Flock, its shared camera network loses value
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
As the article notes, in some cases a locality might try to switch to a competitor, but the competitive community pressure here is still useful. Seems like a rare time where it creates an actual direct incentive to consider what will be popular amongst the people all over, even if certain LEAs etc personally might want more.
So I guess that's a win as that first camera is not very useful. And this is a good thing? I don't see your point.
Your pro-flock argument is fine on its own. Delete the second paragraph and make your argument independently of the GP.
You did not address the primary argument against Flock cameras - the erosion of civil liberties (privacy) is not worth the higher rate of prosecution / conviction.
Although there is (allegedly) a fun feedback loop that cops more and more expect their jobs to be like police procedurals and try to solve crime as if reality was shaped by Dick Wolf.
Imagine coding like it’s shown in the Matrix, or Grandma’s Boy.
You know full well that stopping a know car fleeing the robber and profiling are two massively different actions. They are not the same thing at all.
Also, it would be nice if people stopped fantasying about crime and basing their arguments on cool movies scenes.
Loads of those just fall through the cracks of the system.
"solving the case" is mostly keeping all documented until they stumble on to something obvious, like already known perp having your stuff hidden in his stashing place while they go grab him for something unrelated.
People hate all kinds of things police do until they need the police to do something.
If you don't have video evidence the vast majority of non violent crimes go unsolved. How many manhours is a car break in worth, or a break in? Especially when the end result more than likely is still not enough to convict someone on.
The police will however stalk and harass their partners, people they personally dislike, etc because they can view the footage at their leisure.
Please do tell me what you want the police department to do here.
Please tell me what you think the police would do here?
I don't see anyone moving to Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, China, etc from the United States of America.
Just like I don't see libertarians flocking to Somalia.
Of course, white Americans don't think the cameras will be used against them. It's just for all those other people.
I see extreme comparisons, false binaries, and emotional framing, that is not really convincing me.
> Loads of those just fall through the cracks of the system.
Annoyances aside, I'm still not sure it's worth trading civil liberties when wage theft dwarfs the entire category of property crime.
Try coming up w a better analogy
I understand that the unspoken assumption is that (unlike internet randos such as myself) LEOs and your local government and every other jerk to whom they decide to grant access are universally "good and well intentioned".
But I am always astonished that folks really believe that assumption when stated as such.
If you give up on that assumption, though, the actual reality is that there isn't a difference between only letting literally everyone who has or knows someone with a .gov address access who comes and goes from your house and letting every random dumbass such as myself access that information.
So you have presented (amongst other things) a very black & white false dichotomy. You're claiming a bad, prone to abuse system is the only possible way to respond to your stated threat scenario. But it's just not. And you do actually need to win the public's approval not just browbeat them.
Moving on:
>It's like if you're trying to catch someone who robbed a home
It's notable how you didn't say "trying to catch someone who had gay sex" (a felony in some states until 22 years ago), "trying to catch someone who had an abortion" (back as a felony all of a sudden), "trying to catch someone brought as a child to the US who is in the green card process", "trying to catch someone who had a state reported stolen because the car dealership reported the car missing 6 months ago but it was found 2 months ago but the databases were never designed to get real time updates so there's a lag" and so on and so forth. Or more straight forwardly "it's like if you're a cop trying to catch your ex-girlfriend who said mean things about you on social media". You're on HN, you've been part of plenty of this, I don't think it's good faith discussion on your part to reach for an emotional tug and a lot of people here recognize and resent the technique.
And again see the first thing: in this case, why could the police not get a proper narrowly tailored warrant? They have plenty of clear, straight forward probable cause do they not?
>So you follow the car, and then you enter a dead zone [...] You're now at a dead end.
Wait, you said you were following the car? Police can do that you know, without massively networked surveillance nets, they have cars too, and they can follow cars. They can also put out an alert to keep an eye out. You'll need to quantify the gain here vs the cost.
>So I guess that's a win as that first camera is not very useful. And this is a good thing? I don't see your point.
I truly don't think you're making a good faith effort to see anyone's point at all.
----
0: I'm using scarequotes there and giving it a footnote because I also want to emphasize that part of our suspicion is that, precisely because of obvious improvements, the "stop the robber!!", like "think of the children1!!!!", is primarily a cover story for far... less popular things that elite powers want to do to us. Meaningful checks and balances are possible, implementation importance aside that they haven't even bothered to try from the start tells a story of absence all by itself.
Luckily the person you’re about to make an offer to lives within the flock network so you quickly get pings from the last week that they shopped at Whole Foods and dropped by a dispensary on the way home. Yeah this person probably has disposable income, let’s charge them the 30% increased rate.
Or maybe you’re a future employer - oh this guy stopped at a dispensary 12 years ago? The algorithm will give him +4 risk points before we make our hiring decision. Plus he regularly goes to this bad neighborhood (which the algorithm doesn’t know is where his sister lives that he visits), that’s another +9 risk points.
AND on the darker side — if you knew they did this, would you visit your sister less?
As an aside, some people have an uncanny ability to take two things that are different in every conceivable way except one, and use the one similarity as the basis for an analogy.
It's also why a big brother system will always become full on/more and more big brother, because it needs to suck up and remove all the dead ends.
The Flock cameras, on the other hand, upload all data to Flock which stores all video forever. They also do image recognition to identify license plates as well as other identifiable information (they've claimed to not do facial recognition but the implication is they can).
They then make this searchable so any cop with a flock login can put, say, your license plate into a flock search and it will give him a complete record of all your movements all across the country.
Playgrounds with flock cameras allow folks I don't know to watch children live.
Flock apparently know how to sell this stuff to cops because not only did they film children's gymnastics they used the footage as part of their sales pitch to police:
https://www.gadgetreview.com/flock-safety-employees-watched-...
If it were a single camera or location, there is much less ability to track and attempt to coerce a large population.
even https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flock_Safety#Controversies is a good start
The number of cameras rolled out since 2025 is insane.
People go to prison for providing incorrect data without malicious intent? Are you sure? Anyway, working under contract with the police is not the same as calling in a report. Even if you wish it were.
If they’re not liable in specific circumstances, then at least they’re liable on aggregate for false claims of reliability.
Lots of forensic science is dubious, if not quackery. At least in court as the accused you can challenge such evidence with expert testimony. The uncharitable interpretation of your comment is that it would be just fine and dandy if citizens had no redress against Flock and law enforcement due to poor insights.
Bad shit has always been tolerated when done in furtherance of the state's goals.
I wouldn’t discount the role of the law enforcement industry, with prior greatest hits including Street Cop Conference, Bulletproof Warrior, Killology, etc.
Imagine all the scumminess and questionable ethics of pharmaceutical reps, but instead of a medical treatment, its ways to infringe on your civil liberties.
However, most tools available to police are designed to be responsive; they help catch a criminal that has already done something bad. This is not crime prevention. Nothing was prevented. Anyone living in an American city knows these cameras don't prevent much.
It is also (unfortunately) a very vendor driven industry. IACP is a big deal each year, and Flock / Axon / Motorola go all out on spending to influence decision makers.
Talking to communities, in my experience, they ask for crime prevention. People want the actual incident to never have occurred in the first place. When vendors go around saying they are solving crime once and for all, but all they deliver is surveillance, it builds distrust. It feels like lying, while the companies themselves get rich on public money.
Then they go on huge PR campaigns to tell the public actually what they're feelings is wrong and they should accept the surveillance. It's silly.
In the policing communications world, people often say trust is built in drops, and lost in buckets.
Of the measures available to the justice system for deterrence, increasing the perceived certainty of arrest is possibly the most effective.
An arrest also prevents the same offender from committing more crimes. Since offending is highly concentrated among a relatively small number of repeat offenders, this isn't insignificant.
A camera does not prevent the first crime that it records. But a system that makes detection more likely can reduce later crime.
I'm a bit disappointed that they didn't call out how much bullshit was in that statement. They are just changing the default settings for new customers. That's it. All the deployed cameras remain the same, and new customers can just toggle those settings off of the defaults. It is so obvious that they were attempting to get credit for doing nothing, and reporters should call that out.
Thats the only stick with carrot these companies follow, rest is just empty PR not worth anyone's time.
They're just trading one problem for another
Or... perhaps it's because Wisconsin is a hotbed of progressive politics? Especially in the Madison area.
Wisconsin is a "purple" state, but that's somewhat misleading, because the people aren't generally "centrist". Rather, the state is deeply divided between left wing and right wing, as evidenced by Wisconsin's polar opposite Senators Tammy Baldwin and Ron Johnson.
Support for Trump is not crumbling. His base still supports him. What is crumbling is the alliance of "right wing" people who never really liked/supported Trump, but were willing to accept him for the alliance. This is enough to turn the next election, but the "right wing" (again, whatever that is...) is still there and mostly hasn't change positions.
Plenty if you're in charge of allocating finite resources. Look up "guns vs butter"
I'm only responding at all in hopes that someone can help me understand the confusion and perhaps explain things in a way you can understand.
Trump's disapproval is all Democrats.
DNC's disapproval is all Republicans plus many/most Democrats (for not opposing Trump hard enough).
Ah, yes, Wisconsin. Famously more progressive than the bordering states of Michigan, Minnesota and Illinois (I'll give you Iowa).
Attitudes on surveillance follow economics more than anything else.
Wisconsin actually is famously progressive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisconsin_Progressive_Party
"Milwaukee is a city where socialists have found success to a greater extent than any other U.S. city" https://uwm.edu/lib-collections/mke-socialism/
Wisconsin is a hotbed of progressive politics. It's also a hotbed of regressive politics. Nowadays the urban/rural difference tends to be very stark.
No, I mean very active and influential, achieving real, significant political results. The submitted article is about how they've achieved results, not only fighting Flock but winning and getting rid of Flock.
My links about the history of Wisconsin progressivism show that they were winning elections.
"They" meaning just Wisconsinites. The only political point I can find with a quick skim of the article is
>“There are well-documented concerns about how this company operates and uses its technology to violate people’s Fourth Amendment rights [against unreasonable searches],”
which is not what I would call a progressive political stance. If anything, it's conservative in the literal sense, of maintaining existing political institutions in their present state. It'd be more progressive (again, in the literal sense) to want to embrace more unrestricted surveillance.
> It'd be more progressive (again, in the literal sense) to want to embrace more unrestricted surveillance.
> which is not what I would call a progressive political stance. If anything, it's conservative in the literal sense, of maintaining existing political institutions in their present state. It'd be more progressive (again, in the literal sense) to want to embrace more unrestricted surveillance.
1) The word "progressive" has multiple meanings. Your overly "literal" interpretation is not particularly useful in the political context.
2) The Flock cameras were already in place, so getting them removed is "progressive" even under your odd interpretation. But I don't even want to argue semantics. That seems like a silly argument to me.
There’s also what I call the “Janesville conservative”, or people who likely worked or know someone who worked for Scott Walker and/or Paul Ryan. Their politics are much more conservative coastal elite / country club rather rural / pastoral.
Uninteresting?
> There’s also a strong union-blue presence
The largest number of union members in Wisconsin may be government workers. (Incidentally, the outgoing Governor was originally a public school teacher.)
> people who likely worked or know someone who worked for Scott Walker and/or Paul Ryan.
What do you mean by "worked for"? If you meant that literally, it wouldn't be an electorally significant number of people.
> Wisconsin is a "purple" state, but that's somewhat misleading, because the people aren't generally "centrist". Rather, the state is deeply divided between left wing and right wing, as evidenced by Wisconsin's polar opposite Senators Tammy Baldwin and Ron Johnson.
WRT union-blue presence, I'm speaking from a position of firsthand experience: friends and family who are union-blue and not public sector workers. Paper mill workers and railroaders, specifically.
WRT "worked for", you'll notice my full phrasing included "or know someone who worked for". Janesville is not a sprawling metropolis and most people know most people. Paul Ryan and Scott Walker have deep connections with the south-central part of the state, which has a thick flavor of coastal / country club elite that is not found elsewhere in Wisconsin. Ryan and Walker's success in Wisconsin is interesting given how much they were not rural yokels and would stick out like a sore thumb in most taverns north of the conifer line. Ron Johnson was part of that same anti-Obama political wave, but he's maintained his presence by embracing MAGA in a way that Ryan and Walker never did.
There is some centrism in there, especially if you consider that MAGA is further right than the Tea Party, and have probably successfully shifted the Overton window.
I'm certainly not denying their existence, but their political potency is another matter.
> Janesville is not a sprawling metropolis and most people know most people.
That's ridiculous. I've lived in smaller cities than Janesville, live in one now, and most people do not in fact know most people. I don't even know most of the people who live in my building.
> Ryan and Walker's success in Wisconsin is interesting given how much they were not rural yokels and would stick out like a sore thumb in most taverns north of the conifer line.
This is true of most politicians, indeed Trump himself. Politicians are not "average" people.
> There is some centrism in there, especially if you consider that MAGA is further right than the Tea Party, and have probably successfully shifted the Overton window.
I put "centrist" in quotes specifically because I think the line theory of politics is bunk, the idea that political views can be put on a line of left-center-right or liberal-moderate-conservative. The elections of Trump should have completely refuted that theory, but it somehow survives in reality denial form. Anyway, I don't think the Tea Party was ever centrist.
What's wrong with arguing point by point?
> I'm pointing out, as someone very familiar with Wisconsin, that coming onto this forum and making claims about the state
I would point out that I live in Wisconsin and have lived in Wisconsin for more than 30 years. You?
> reduces its political dynamics to "deeply divided between left wing and right wing"
I don't think "reduces" is a fair characterization. My point is that although Wisconsin is a "swing" state, it often swings quite wildly, again evidenced by its two Senators for example, so purple does not imply centrist or moderate, and the superficial appearance of Wisconsin election results does not preclude it from being a hotbed of progressive politics (and/or the opposite of progressive politics).