[hk1337]

I wouldn't say I am a huge proponent of Flock, especially considering their lack luster security for the individual cameras at least in my area, but the title makes it sound like it's an institutional procedure that the department stalking their romantic interests instead of individual officers that need to be properly reprimanded.

[apwheele]

It is institutional in the sense that Flock and the individual PDs have not put steps in place (either post auditing or pre not allowing bad queries) that prevent the abuse.

Post auditing is obviously not taken seriously by these departments, and Flock could build tools to do this out of the box (identify weird search patterns) if they wanted to.

Edit -- I see Flock does have some audit tools, https://www.flocksafety.com/trust/compliance-tools. If those work as they should, it is more on PDs to use them properly.

[goolz]

Police abuse of power in the US is a systemic problem. Your opinion is akin to thinking the Catholic church bears no burden for all the diddling they neglected to observe.

[busterarm]

Do you make any distinction between sheriff's departments that are elected into their office (e.g. Jacksonville Sheriff's Office) vs commissioned LEOs?

[AngryData]

I personally wouldn't, both positions are going to attract the same personality and be working in the same culture with the 99% the same influences. Maybe elected sheriffs are a bit better on average, but certainly not enough for it to show through ancedotaly or trust them in any capacity.

[goolz]

Honestly, a great question that I would have to think on. Whatever limits both their power, haha. Not really an answer, but I think what it boils down to is accountability. I work with a lot of state and federal cops. They are good people for the most part with good hearts. I am still incredibly weary of police on the whole. It seems that both commissioned and elected LEO lack the right level of accountability and we would do well to curb their immunity.

[busterarm]

Thanks for the thoughtful answer and not kneejerk snark and downvotes like I'm getting elsewhere in the thread.

I think that I agree to a large degree, but with the caveat that elected sheriffs that don't serve their communities get voted out. Incoming elected sheriffs know well why their predecessors lost their seat. In theory, but to a much lesser degree, this should also apply to commissioned LEO, but often in large municipalities there's only one pool you can pull candidates from.

This isn't perfect, but it does largely function in places with sane government/electorate. Also it kind of just follows that in such cases abuse of power (and who it is abused against) is at the direction of voters.

These abuses happen because at some level, we want them to. Just not to us.

Aside: I would like to see more departments where the boss of cops is not just an appointment by politicians, but an elected position accountable to voters and not controlled by other political office.

[assimpleaspossi]

Isn't that your opinion also?

[Spooky23]

It's a system whose implementations don't do anything to prevent or even detect this. It's not licensed by seat, so it doesn't require SSO and when the data was available it was obvious that most departments use shared accounts. There are no laws to regulate the use of it, so they do not. It gets rushed into production via Federal grants with limited time windows.

If you have a system that isn't designed around accountability in a place like a police department, you won't get accountability, and you will get institutionalized poor behavior. It's one of the reasons that state police organizations are usually considered more "professional" or better disciplined than most local departments.

Bureaucracy and size reduces random dumbass employee use of their discretion. People look the other way less often when there is a record of malfesance right in front of them. You don't need to be "pro" or "against" police to demand accountability.

[xboxnolifes]

The title doesn't make that sound like that at all. Unless you think in any world there woukd be able institutional procedure to abuse systems like that. To normal people it reads like police abusing the systems they have access to.

[hk1337]

Of course it does, it says "Police have used license plate readers..." not "Police officers have used license plate readers..." or indicated that individual officers have abused their authority.

[wahnfrieden]

The classic "just some bad apples" argument in defense of corruption.

In Toronto, police are pressured into gang-like conformity to support their bad apples - from last week:

> A Crown attorney is being accused of suggesting a police witness should have provided false evidence while testifying in court.

> According to the Toronto Star, a heated interaction occurred in the hallway of a Toronto courthouse earlier this year, between Crown attorney Marnie Goldenberg and Constable Edin Hasanbasic of the Toronto Police Service.

> Hasanbasic had been called as a witness in the case of a man accused of hitting a different officer with his motorcycle, with the intent of causing harm.

> Hasanbasic had just told the court that the officer who was struck by the motorcycle “seemed like he was fine” after the incident.

> Goldenberg, according to Hasanbasic’s notes about the encounter, allegedly got angry about his testimony, because it went against the Crown’s case.

> “What am I supposed to do? Lie?” Hasanbasic recalls saying.

> The attorney allegedly responded by saying, “We protect our own.”

[hk1337]

> The classic "just some bad apples" argument in defense of corruption.

Not really, something definitely should be done to correct it but some people have this notion that throwing out the baby with the bath water is and starting over from scratch is the correct action. If anything that will just create new problems and make the ability to hide misdeeds even easier.