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Comment by nomilk | Hacker News Reader

Had the 'evidence' been a random dashcam rather than Flock cam, this wouldn't even be a story beyond severe police incompetence.

Flock didn't fail to inspect the car for damage and not find any, flock didn't take 13 days to conduct a cursory review of evidence, flock didn't fail to request cell tower triangulation data and rule out her being in the location of the accident...

I get that people feel their privacy's invaded by being filmed, but this story doesn't appear to have any more to do with Flock than what the officers had for breakfast or the brand of air freshener she had in her car at the time.

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A random dashcam does not serve the police someone's identity on a platter. It had to be a stupid "smart" object for such an inexcusable offense to be committed.

With dumb camera footage, the cops looks at the plates, visual indicators, etc. That does not make them more competent or less prone to abuse. But here, Flock's software literally told them this woman was the one they were looking for, despite no evidence supporting this.

This is 100% both on the police and on Flock. Some technologies don't deserve to exist. Facial recognition and ALPR is one of those, because the error rates are too high and the stakes are too high.

> A random dashcam does not serve the police someone's identity on a platter.

Nor does Flock - Flock merely provides a photo and timestamp, which should have been scrutised like any other evidence.

The Flock data showed:

- Car of same make/model nearby at similar time to the accident

- Possible colour match (eyewitnesses gave varying reports on the colour of the perpetrating vehicle). But a match could have been ruled out in minutes had police inspected paint transfer onto the struck vehicle

- A number plate non-match (first three characters were reported to 911 and did not match)

- That's all!

So police didn't do their job (scutinise the evidence), and possibly worse, they may have fabricated evidence (since police claimed Isaacs' vehicle was damaged, but it was in factory-new condition) - which may explain why they're shifting blame to Flock!

That's exactly the same. Suggesting an output is the same as serving a suspect on a platter. I'm sure there's many studies about how humans (except statisticians) are not comfortable with confidence intervals.

A computer software is supposed to deliver reliable, predictable, reproducible results. When it does not every now and then, it's a bug. When your entire system is built in "recognition" and "confidence" and leads to wrongful arrests, it's not a bug. You are just not making computer science. You are making a power abuse machine.

It just enables incompetence. If they were forced to do actual police work they would have probably used their policeman brains.

While using one's brain has never been 'the thing', it's positively unfashionable nowadays.

Except of course the entire reason the police picked her in specific is because of information flock gave them.

Could they have, you know, double checked it? Yes, obviously. But they didn't.

I agree that this story is more about the incredible incompetence of the police involved than flock attempting to record everyone and everything, but flock giving the police an excuse to stop looking and arrest an innocent is by no means irrelevant.

Had a random person submitted a pic taken on their phone of a vehicle in the same location the Flock cam did, police would ask:

- Does anything connect this vehicle to the accident?

- Did it look damaged; as though it had been in a crash?

- Did it look like it was fleeing or driving erratically?

- Was there anything suspicious about the vehicle or the driver?

Police would have deemed the photo irrelevant and moved on. But that didn't happen in this case.

Their failure to do so doesn't have to do with source of the image (Flock, shop CCTV, dashcam), but with their inexplicable lack of rigour.

The lack of rigor doesn't seem "inexplicable" to me- the lack of rigor seems fairly well described in the comment you're replying to.

Can you give an account of the lack of rigor, or is it some kind of holy mystery?

The police should have thought “okay a car was seen within several miles of an accident - so what?”

Their conclusion (after 5 minutes) would have been (obviously) that there’s not so much as a strand of chewing gum connecting the car to the accident, or making it stand out from dozens of others, and they’d promptly get back to searching for the car that actually was involved.

Yeah, I agree that is what usually would or should happen.

But the question is why it didn't happen. Because that is not what happened.

The answer is that it's flock, and that's the point you're "inexplicably" ignoring.

I would say part of it could be on flock depending on how flock displays information and details in responce to a query. Simply flagging a photo for review, no. But if it was like "this single person matches your search parameters exactly and here is their name, address, and current location", which could heavily imply guilt through overconfident displays of information.

At no point does a cop have to look at the photo(s), the timestamps, confirm the plate, see if the person who owns the car is driving it, or see the dozens of other cars in that area at the time that should also be of potential interest. They enter the query and get a single answer so obviously accept it as likely perpetrator.

It's pretty clear that flock is presented as reliable evidence to the people acting on it.

Yeah, if things were different, people would react differently.

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