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Comment by alistairSH | Hacker News Reader

That’s all true. But we’ve known police and prosecutors are like this forever. No need to give them tools to be even lazier and that make it easier for them to abuse us.

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Thats what always been portrayed in films and stories for so long.Police never solved cases. There were detectives involved specialist who solves crime. While only job of police is to arrest any suspicious person, take them to station, then to court, then to jail. Essentially they are just drives carrying criminals. The very first loose evidence and suspect, that it arrest them question them, torture, if officer is lucky, that person is the criminal or one who just accepts blame. All their effort is solving as fast as they can to maintain record and stars on their shoulder

Right. It's not even clear to me what the alternative critical position is here (for gp)? At the end of the day, the company is not putting you in jail, the cops who do are simply their customers.

"Flock is bad" metonymizes the situation, but doesn't let anyone off the hook.

Multiple things can be bad at the same time and cops have a demonstrated record of failures such that add a system like flock is most likely going to lead to more injustice, not less.

Absolutely not all cops and prosecutors, or even the majority of them, are this lazy. Every tool is a tool that lets them "be event lazier" and make it "easier for them to abuse us". Removing any tool that let bad-actors be lazy is not an alternative for removing the bad-actor themselves.

This situation the equivalent of an eye-witness saying "Ya, I think it might have been this person I know, Tom!" and a cop/prosecutor taking that at face value and arresting Tom (and the system that allowed that to happen).

The people who make decisions and take action so (grossly) negligently need to be held accountable and face consequences. Blaming the tool (whatever tool it is) is giving the people who have the actual responsibility an escape hatch to avoid accountability.

Lazy, I didn't know. Hard to define.

Corrupt, arrogant, bigoted, or with a superiority complex? Way more than half.

But whats the difference on the ground here? Are we meant to take the transitive property here if you will and say there is actually nothing wrong with the Flock company itself and what it enables?

As the child of a public defender who has heard some STORIES: they absolutely are not doing the work. Not because of some inherent trait, but because they are all (prosecutors and defenders) assigned a workload that forces shortcuts and allows negligence with no chance of consequence.

All public defenders and most prosecutors are happy to admit anonymously that the justice system is 90% gears grinding people. They ALL know an innocent person that pled guilty to end the grinding. Judges too. You can find plenty of court videos on YouTube of people pleading guilty while saying they didn’t do it but need to get on with their life. The judge will explain to them that they can’t accept a guilty plea from someone who claims innocence, and the defendant then folds. Everyone in the room knows that there is more to the story, but no one is willing to do the work.

They do need to be held accountable, and their access to systems like this needs to be limited and/or stopped.

If punishing bad actors alone was enough we wouldn't have a ton of 4th amendment case law.

You'd think with tech being a force multiplier and all it'd be real easy for agencies to shed the supposed few and far between 'bad apples'. They should be able to do more with less bodies, with flock and other tech helping them, right? It seems to me the entire system failed this woman and waiving it away as a single lazy cop gives the system a pass.

There is no real mechanism for holding them accountable and the consequences of these tools include death (it only takes one perceived wrong move for officers thinking they've bagged a felon to ventilate you. Hell not even that, see that officer who mag dumped his own car after he mistook an acorn for a gunshot.) This lady is quite lucky that it was only 13 days, if she had a career that's probably hosed but it might not be totally life ruining if she has a strong support system.

> , if she had a career that's probably hosed

Why? She hasn't committed a crime so why should her career be damaged?

I think there's a combination of selection bias and survivorship bias with bad cops.

When it is made pretty clear that as a cop you won't face consequences for your malicious and/or incompetent actions, you're going to select for people who find that very appealing. Similarly, the people who don't like that kind of system might leave, allowing for a reinforcement the malicious and/or incompetent behavior.

Sorry, when you're in a position of such power (and the ability to wield deadly force backed by the government is as powerful as you get), you don't get to be ambivalent about the misdeeds of your coworkers.

Even if the system is only 5% bad, that's too damn much.

I mean, have you seen what ICE is doing these days? And how many local agencies are happily deputizing their officers to do that same work?

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