I'm no fan of flock, but I dislike how these articles are blaming the technology when the real issue is the police not bothering to check the information they're given
But flock hit is the entire reason for the cops to go arrest them. And you’re right if they did careful assessment of other flock camera data, even the data of this particular flock camera they would have known this car was 5 miles away 23 seconds later.
The whole point being misusing/abusing flock data to wrongly jail people and that is precisely what happened here. Flock is the center of this story.
They simply didn't properly identify the vehicle because Flock's ALPR gave them the pass. The innocent person would not have needed "photo proof" of his distant location if the ALPR didn't exist in the first place. Then he would not have been forced to spend a month of his life in jail.
We blame the technology because police misusing their powers is a tale as old as police, is demonstrably not fixable, and this technology is at fault for aggressively selling itself to police to give them these powers that we all know will be misused. Flock absolutely bears significant responsibility for creating the technology and conditions for this unjust behavior to exist, and continuing to advocate against those pushing back on it by trying to brand them as terrorists.
Ironically, they're showing a situation where more tracking makes innocence clear. There's countless examples of innocent people being caught in a dragnet, based on data that correlates with but does not prove guilt, where more data collection leads to more innocent people suffering. That's what they should be focusing on.
There is absolutely that, but the CEO of Flock has said he believes a false-positive is better than a false-negative, so everything around the stack pushes police that way, too.
I love these elites who say "Yeah, it's no big deal, the police will arrest you but they'll figure it out and you can go on your way, and if you have to spend a couple of nights in jail first, or hire an attorney at considerable expense, or you lose your job or become less hirable because your state reports arrest records, not just charge or conviction records, well, that's a small price to pay for Zero Crime State, presented by Flock(TM)!"
It is Flock's responsibility to grant access only to trained professionals who undergo routine training and testing in how to and how not to use the system.
Every police officer with access to the system must ideally have to undergo mandatory annual training and testing in using it to protect the rights of innocents. If they don't pass the testing, they ideally should not be granted access.
Flock should be held accountable for ensuring adequate protections exist to prevent misuse.
It's kinda funny that all our personal data leaks out of companies all the time and little to nothing happens to them, and now you're thinking Flock is going to be held accountable?!
We should have laws against collecting this in the first place.
It's not a training problem, it's an incentive problem. You put these guys in a structure that requires them to justify their jobs at minimal cost of effort and then ooh ack surprise when they don't take the proper care to ensure that they're not stepping on innocent people in the pursuit of a healthy career.
Couple that with overburdening them with petty nonsense all the time and training them in military equipment and tactics and like it doesn't matter what tools you give them, those tools will be abused at convenience.
The issue is structural, not technical, but power tools = more damage per capita.
It's not a dichotomy. "Checks and balances" are a thing since the founding of the United States. If the local government fails to institute them, it should be the complementary responsibility of the vendor to have them. In their absence, lawsuits targeting all parties are highly desirable.
> Their tort claim notes that the path the men took to the cigar lounge passed by several other Flock cameras, which could have corroborated their story, as well as the location data on their cell phones.
It seems like if the police actually looked at the Flock data it would have exonerated them?
Quite often the cops job is to find someone close enough and then toss them into the jaws of the criminal justice system. We like to say "innocent until proven guilty", but you goddammed better be ready to prove yourself innocent unless you want to find yourself imprisoned.
I saw a video recently that flock camera installations don't follow local or city laws. All poles that hold roadsigns generally need to safely handle impact and get certified / inspected. However, flock cameras have none of it.
This doesn't seem like a Flock story so much as SDPD making an arrest purely on a nexus to "red Alfa Romeo with tinted windows". From what I understand of the story, the Flock camera did in fact tag a red Alfa Romeo (there's a still frame in the article). It wasn't the right one, but ALPR cameras aren't psychic; they tell you features, make/model, and plate, not "criminal culpability".
People are writing as if an ALPR directed these cops to arrest someone. No, it didn't. They asked it where they could find a red Alfa. It accurately told them. It's not the tool's fault it didn't occur to SDPD that there could in San Diego be in fact 2 red Alfas.
There's a well-known story about a man who escaped a murder conviction because he was at a Dodgers game when the murder happened, and there just happened to be a TV show filming at the stadium that just happened to record him there.