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by throwawaysea 1833 days ago
I am surprised by the comments here which seem very fearful of Ring. Personally I welcome anything that helps police actually locate and arrest suspects. After all the crime we experience daily in cities like SF and Seattle, I am all for citizens being able to share footage and help the police along. If you don't support that, then you really don't support the enforcement of laws in general - which seems like an argument for crime and/or anarchy.

Personally I am not convinced by the slippery slope argument that Ring cameras will lead to broader unrestricted general surveillance. Ring customers can choose to voluntarily share footage with the police, or not - it's up to them. That's not the same as a dystopian ever-present dragnet. And even if we have cameras on every corner run by the government (rather than Ring), we can establish legal controls such as needing a warrant or reasonable suspicion of a crime to examine footage or perform facial recognition matches.
2 comments
detaro 1832 days ago
A dragnet that random citizens opt-in to host infrastructure for is still a dragnet.
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throwaway0a5e 1832 days ago
The reason you have tons of crime in places like SF and Seattle is because of department and DA policy not to pursue these types of crimes even when there's evidence. More evidence doesn't make up for lack of political will.
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tehwebguy 1832 days ago
Right, no matter how many people police assault or even murder there are virtually zero DAs willing to prosecute them. That’s what you are talking about, right?

There are of course the extremely rare cases where they’ll pretend to press charges and use a grand jury to get them dropped (e.g. Torgalski & McCabe), and the even more rare case where the murder gains so much publicity that they’ll have to pursue a real case (e.g. Chauvin) or is so incredibly heinous and brutal (e.g. Michael Valva) but by and large police will never face prosecution.

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throwaway0a5e 1832 days ago
> Right, no matter how many people police assault or even murder there are virtually zero DAs willing to prosecute them. That’s what you are talking about, right?

You're being intentionally obtuse.

The person I'm replying to is talking about the rampant petty property crime (see for example the recent walgreens video that's bouncing around the internet) that they decline to prosecute sufficiently even in the most flagrant cases.

But yes, the DA should prosecute cops too because equality under law. And they fail at that more or less nationwide so it doesn't explain why property crime is so much more rampant in places like SF and Seattle than it is in places like Chicago and Cleveland.

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