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Comment by Waterluvian | Hacker News Reader

I think what makes this resemble a moronic idea is it’s a thin veneer of an invention based on your personal stereotyped perspective.

The real challenge, if you wanted to work on the meat of the issue, is that we need to reduce crime without catching the innocent in the net, without having a chilling effect on legal behaviour and people’s rights, and without normalizing the mindset that we should just precrime people.

One of the core points of Minority Report is in the film’s title: that even if technology becomes 99.99% accurate, we are still damned by the destruction of due process and the presumption of innocence.

I think ideas like yours belong in the incinerator.

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The unlicensed ebike, while not a serious problem, is a really annoying one in certain places, and everybody suspects that it's not a wave of people doing it but in fact a fairly small number of people doing antisocial things over and over again. Who are relying on being untraceable and on a versatile getaway vehicle.

https://theedinburghreporter.co.uk/2025/11/thirteen-e-bikes-...

Note that "illegal motorbike with no plates" is an offense that you can detect just by looking at it. There's no "pre" in the crime. The problem is either stopping them or tracing them.

..And the broken windows theory of prosecuting minor crime to deter major crime worked pretty well in Guiliani New York.

The balaclava thing is stupid, but you're missing the point that they're already doing something illegal. If you think anti-ebike law is stupid then that law should be repealed, not ignored.

There are degrees of crime though. Is going after e-bikes really important enough to justify a surveillance panopticon?

I mean, in some places jaywalking is a crime. Do we really need to spend resources going after jaywalkers?

No, I certainly don't think so. The problem is that fighting people pushing the surveillance panopticon by lying about their motivations doesn't work.

While what you say has merit in isolation, you're replying to a post where the person says "they're already doing illegal things". If the cameras pick up people "breaking the law", using further algo on that seems... sensible?

EG, the gatekeep is 'already should get a ticket or something'.

I actually oppose all cameras, and think we should just have more police in the streets. It's how policing used to be done. Human judgement.

I would agree to having more police in the street, but their budget just seems to be getting cut week after week and they're struggling. They seem to be around 9-5 and after that the streets turn into a free-for-all.

Wait. Is this Poe’s Law in action? This isn’t satire or sarcasm?

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