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Comment by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF | Hacker News Reader

> Police in Union Township, a Cincinnati suburb, accused Cody Morelock of disassembling the camera, its support pole and solar panel on June 13.

To add to this, it stood out to me that the headline uses "destroy" but the article uses "disassemble" to describe what happened. Not that the act of calmly dissasembling something couldn't be indicted as potentially criminal (if a ham sandwich can be), but it stands out regardless. Maybe he literally just walked up and started unscrewing things. That would be the most civil form of "vandalism" I can imagine; force them to (pay someone to) come set it up again until they give up or try something else.

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The actual source article[1] mentions the equipment was destroyed. The SAN.com republication linked here dropped that detail.

[1] "Investigators alleged Morelock removed bolts securing the camera system, bringing down the camera, solar panel and support pole before destroying the equipment." https://local12.com/news/local/felony-charges-dismissed-agai...

> Not that the act of calmly dissasembling something couldn't be indicted as potentially criminal (if a ham sandwich can be)

Why do you doubt this? If I calmly disassemble your car in the middle of the night, haven't I committed a crime?

Where I live, calmly disassembling property that is't yours is, at minimum, vandalism: https://codes.findlaw.com/tx/penal-code/penal-sect-28-03/

> A person commits an offense if, without the effective consent of the owner . . . he intentionally or knowingly tampers with the tangible property of the owner and causes . . . substantial inconvenience to the owner or a third person . . . .

My guess is the cost to remedy this disassembly is over $2,500, making this a felony. Even if not, if a government Flock camera is considered a "public service" then it's a felony no matter the cost to remedy because it falls under "causes wholly or partly impairment or interruption of property used for . . . public communications, public transportation, [] or other public service . . ."

Putting aside this specific case, I wonder how that $2,500 cost is calculated?

Flock owns the devices and leases them out I think. Hypothetically somebody could take the device down and put it in a nice tidy little box for them. Then the cost to remedy is… how much they charge the town to send a person out to put it back up? Or how much it costs them internally to send somebody out to put it back up?

If it is the latter, I guess it must just be somebody’s travel costs and wages (could be figured out like any contractor).

If it is the former, does that have to be the same cost they always charge to send out maintenance people? (Since a disassembled, not destroyed camera should be one of the cheapest issues to deal with, right?). Otherwise it seems like they could exploit the law by specifically “charging” enough to make it a felony whenever they suspect tampering.

Municipal sign installation is a decent floor approximation. Can run into the thousands if it's electrified (think: blinking lights on a warning sign). Depends on availability of electricity, engineering, weather at that time, etc. In some places, a stop sign can be close to $2,000 based on some quick googling, and that has no power supply to worry about.

It's always more expensive than residential bc it's publicly reachable by a million morons, and is meant to stand much longer than residential work.

Sounds like SpaceX with unscheduled rapid disassembly

Considering that the enterprising people suffering from unhousedness in tents are frequently described as being involved in the repair of bicycles the frames of which can be more than a month of rent, I am somewhat underwhelmed by the amount of signal in phrasal choices implying civility.

Is this an AI generated comment?

What do any of these words have to do with a person disassembling a camera in a surveillance dragnet?

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