WPD won't replace stolen Flock cameras, citing public trust
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#links https://www.winonapost.com/news/wpd-wont-replace-stolen-flock-cameras-citing-public-trust/article_06a67859-2d97-414b-aa8f-d8751ad214bb.htmlWorth looking at how these cameras got approved in the first place. My county's ALPR interlocal passed on the consent agenda in December 2024, one block vote alongside forty other items, no discussion, and went through consent again in April 2025. Nothing was "hidden", it's just that "public" here means a 300 page agenda packet and a four hour YouTube video with no transcript, completely unreadable in practice.
So I spent a week and a half building a pipeline over what the county already publishes. It pulls the CivicPlus portal (agendas, minutes, item metadata, outcomes) and the YouTube channel, does ASR plus diarization, then aligns the transcript against the published agenda so the passage carries the item it happened under and whatever outcome the minutes recorded for it. Search is hybrid lexical and semantic, and the video is synced to the transcript so any claim can be checked against the recording.
The speaker attribution and the alignment was the hard part. Roughly two thirds of passages have no reliable name attached, and diarization gives you clusters rather than identities, so I mark confidence and basis rather than guessing a name. Alignment is very messy because the published agenda order and the order things actually get taken up diverge constantly, and the recorded outcome is often just "Approved the Consent Agenda" for an item that never got discussed. There is a labeling admin area to improve the dataset after initial collection
At my county meeting on Aug 25th (in a few days) I'm bringing up the fiscal side. Ours was approved under an item title that said no funding was required. No accounting has been done of what enforcement costs when someone takes a camera down. Prosecutor and court hours. Jail time, or just holding, if the state charges it. Lost future wages from otherwise upstanding citizens who now have a felony. None of that was in front of the commissioners when they approved it, and none of it is in front of them now.
Most counties run the same portal software and post to YouTube, so this should generalize. Code is at https://github.com/Tostino/civic-watch and the Pasco instance is at https://pasco.watch if anyone wants to point one at their own county. Happy to help if anyone wants.
"I built a tool to help you understand how/if your community has agreed to deploy Flock cameras. You can try it out here: [ ].
The hardest part of this was..."
But not only do you have to trust the government now (and you likely should not), you also need to trust the government far into the future (which you absolutely cannot do) because the tools will still exist.
Don't accept tools that are also strong weapons for oppression.
It's the widespread remote camera installs that are the main problem there. If they kept data locally and had to be collected by hand, it might be fine - that's difficult enough to grow to monitor everyone all the time. Aside from using film though, I'm not sure how that would be achieved.
(To be clear, I really do think we should be prosecuting speeding (and tailgating) MUCH more than we do. Far more death and damage occurs from it than we should allow. But ubiquitous networked cameras are not the way we should do that.)
How else should it be done? I think they're going to pick the cheapest option most of the time.
Strong disagree. Life in public areas is often still part of private life. And we should treat it with the respect and privacy that it deserves. You going to the doctor? That's part of your private life. You meeting with an old friend to catch up? Also private, even though you do it in a public cafe.
It seems like (to my very uneducated mind) the founders were worried about the tyranny of government. We have the bill of rights and a constitution designed to limit government powers.
But then there are people who weaponize rights against the people in favor of the government.
A private company creating a mass-surveillance network of tracking everyone in public is absolutely a weaponization of rights. Rights designed to keep our government accountable. Our rights that give us tools to prevent government from weaponizing privacy against us (secret juries, secret trials, secret government employees, records etc citing 'privacy' as a reason for secrecy).
Independent cameras, often not networked let alone internet connected are not the same thing as a single entity controlling a huge, internet capable, always on, cloud recording panopticon.
Logistically the first limits things like police access by units of both access and time (is it recording? Does the memory card overwrite? Did it expire before a warrant was issued?)
Putting that all in a convenient console and handing direct god eye view to police with a "oh you need a warrant first, wink wink", massively reduces friction for abuse of power.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/10/flock-safety-and-texas...
The problem is that these systems, always and without fail, come with government and police overreach and then the "guilty unless proven innocent" paradigm creeps in, which we have already seen happen with flock. You have police using the technology to spy on their lovers and friends of their wives and husbands, and you have political campaigns finding ways to spy on their opponents, and activists getting special attention from prosecutors, etc. Which always happs, but with totalitarianism is an absolute train wreck for an open, fair, and power-balanced government.
https://www.thedrive.com/news/how-flock-cameras-wrongly-trac...
> In fact, four other 34 ## DTM cars were being tracked around Minnesota that week, according to Officer Ganshyn
Maybe we need even more AI, because I think Claude would probably flag this as goofy. No human involved thought that it was wild they would stop something like 100 or 1,296 vehicles?
Because each city or county is doing its whole thing.
Which comes back a bit to, it's one thing for my county to be tracking its residents, but should officers in Texas have carte blanche? If anything, the local county should have to "release" before search results are opened up to someone foreign. My officers should be protecting me from invasions abroad.
We recently got permission to expand red-light cameras and I'm hoping that this kind of neutral machine-based enforcement of laws helps move us to a more law-abiding society. Civil liberties require civilization. Abdicating public space to the anti-social only allows for a de-facto rule by the uncivilized.
(1) https://futurism.com/future-society/flock-surveillance-atlan... (2) https://www.forbes.com/sites/cyrusfarivar/2024/02/29/flock-a... (3) https://www.readfrontier.org/stories/tulsas-surveillance-gam...
If you drive through any commercial area, you're captured by dozens of cameras. There are over a dozen doorbell cameras on my residential block alone. Cameras are absolutely ubiquitous, for good reason. In the United States, at least, it would be foolish to assume that driving on a public street is anything resembling privacy.
Binge alcohol consumption is incredibly dangerous and contributes to a large number of national fatalities.
Governments should purchase a contract for a citizen tracking platform operated by a private company that monitors alcohol usage to ensure you're drinking responsibly and quickly detain those that aren't, given the threat they pose to themselves or the public. Governments should make tracking a requirement for legal alcohol consumption.
The private company expands to a nationwide network that allows the federal government, private contractors, and other people that gain access to monitor your environment (or your young kids) whenever they feel motivated, where ever you are.
For the name of safety, let's write legislation that gives the government's private contractors unfettered access to your microphones and cameras to help law enforcement be more efficient.
Instead of indulging in hyperbole, why not talk about the great evidence an ALPR outside a bar could provide with current technology? It’s absolutely a great idea. I hope that AI gets good enough to tell whether someone is plastered; that would save a lot of lives lost to selfish assholes.
Let’s put them outside Gay bars and Planned Parenthoods, just in the name of safety.
Think of all the college age women some guy halfway across the country can stalk.
So no, actually Flock itself is the problem. If Flock were willing to sign some consent decree that its data can only be accessed by police with a valid judicial warrant, for example, they probably could've headed off this entire mess.
But instead they called people "terroristic" for pushing back. Completely braindead move from the CEO.
Flock in absence of police is not that bad except for the whole "now we have no police" problem. Having police in the absence of Flock is totally fine, we've done it since forever.
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Welp, sucks to get the shit beaten out of you, better luck next time.
If you have no cops, the cameras don't mean anything. It is now de facto legal for big people to beat up smaller people. Your cameras mean nothing. You can now film yourself getting beaten up every single day forever, and congrats, there's nothing to be done about it because there's no apparatus of the state to physically protect you.
If you understood my comment to mean "police are perfect", then I must've been unclear. That's not my position and not a position I'm interested in defending or discussing.
The fundamental issue is that Flock doesn't care about people's privacy or rights. That washes out in a variety of ways including CEOs' statements, product-level security controls (thus creating the horror stories), and lack of legal commitments to protections.
I would personally be in favor of a fairly widespread camera network that had significant legal protections built in. Flock has demonstrated – in every possible way – they cannot possibly be the providers of such a system.
In small towns, people distrust the federal government and big tech a lot more.
The whole "state/feds decree stuff that's bad for you but your city/town enforces it on you anyway because they'll lose grant bucks if they don't" regulatory paradigm has a lot to do with this because it's why so much of the government's interaction with everyone and everything is so net negative.
Edit: For example stuff like passing police harassing someone for smoking alone in a park because the grantbucks are dependent on it being smoke free happens because of all this.
Wanna look up where a murderer drove? Go get a warrant
Wanna look up where a robbery suspect drove to? Go get a Warrant.
Divorce case hinging on one party's whereabouts on a certain date? Warrant.
Speeding tickets are automatically filed anyways.
[1]: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/08/too-little-too-late-fl...
There is no reason or justification for us to live in a surveillance state, "protecting" the data with a warrant doesn't cut it.
Cutting down and destroying mass surveillance equipment is a patriotic action and should be applauded.
So I get it, we're in the middle of a populist uprising against it, and it's nice to ride that wave of support. But behind the scenes, these two factors are driving adoption, and we'll keep coming back to it when the backlash eventually fizzles.
I say we should just use this backlash to put in the protections EFF suggests or fix the two underlying causes. Those are the options.
[1]: https://www.oaklandca.gov/Public-Safety-Streets/Traffic-Safe...
[2]: https://stateline.org/2025/11/24/why-clearance-rates-dont-te...
With flock, citizens are concerned by the privacy implications of the state keeping a dossier of each citizen’s movements.
But once we assure citizens the flock cameras have already issued 500,000 speeding fines in a single town this year, no doubt they’ll come to support the cameras.
Perhaps the cameras could also automatically issue parking fines, to garner even more popular support!
…oops [1]
[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/18/headway/motor-vehicles-fa...
Super curious how anyone could think this. It’s not a highway, and there's pedestrians crossing. The buildings aren’t dense and the setbacks are large so maybe it “feels” like you should go faster but doesn’t mean it’s safe to.
And Oakland especially has really bad driving culture so I’m glad for this automatic enforcement.
Since outright refusal to do their jobs is more common than any real difficulty.
Among those wonders being nearly 200,000 tickets.
There are claims of safety improvements but strangely zero actual statistics about improved safety, measured speed is a proxy for safety but it has to be matched with actual casualty numbers and it is quite suspicious that these don't exist. Did the accident rate go down? Number of deaths or serious injuries?
>Police are now no longer able to (or are refusing to) solve crime "the old fashioned way"
This is pathetic, and I don't want to be controlled by robot overlords because local governments can't get their ducks in a row.
Not in States with coherent Constitutions.
I really distrust flock in and of itself.