[Avshalom]

>>Flock and law enforcement regularly cite documented cases where LPR helped solve violent crimes, recover stolen vehicles, and locate missing persons. Those outcomes are real.

My opposition wouldn't change regardless but are those outcomes real?

[Manuel_D]

In Seattle at least, the majority of homicide cases are solved with the assistance of surveillance cameras (though what % of said cameras are specifically Flock, I'm not sure): https://spdblotter.seattle.gov/2026/03/05/new-analysis-rtcc-...

[asveikau]

Cops can politely ask owners of private cameras for access for things like murder investigation. If the polite answer is no (most people will say yes), they can go to court for a subpoena. This has happened for a long time. This is how it should work. If the cops are too lazy or chicken to ask a judge while investigating a murder, they don't deserve the footage.

[ACCount37]

This is very doable when what you're dealing with is a Major Crime That Gets Full Institutional and Individual Attention.

What about a bike theft, a jacked car or a stolen parcel though?

There is a price to having information easily available to the law enforcement. There is a price to not having this information easily available to the law enforcement too.

[eclipticplane]

Even with Flock, police aren't solving those crimes.

[dw_arthur]

The majority of crime is committed by a relatively small number of individuals. If citizens feel crime is out of control they need to vote in politicians and judges who sentence repeat offenders to long sentences or involuntary commitment.

[Gigachad]

Long sentences are far less effective than reliable enforcement. Something that seems to be very true in practice. If you steal or vandalise something in China, there is an extremely high chance you will get caught, you won't get a massive penalty, but it will be enough to cover the damages + some.

If you for example knew that stealing had a penalty of 100% of the item value + 10% fine, with a 100% chance of getting caught, you'd never steal anything again even though the penalty is so much smaller than what it is currently in most countries. And then if you make a dumb decision as a teenager or in a lapse of judgement, it won't ruin your life.

[defen]

How does that work when you don't have enough assets to cover the cost of the thing you broke or stole?

[willis936]

If only we had an amendment in the original bill of rights that drew the line here.

[thewebguyd]

Doesn't matter, they should have to follow the same process.

Cops, at least where I live, don't give af about any of those crimes though. Bike gets stolen? You'll be lucky if they even show up at all, let alone do anything about it, surveillance data available or not. They largely don't even get prosecuted when caught.

[plagiarist]

They can get a subpoena for that, too. The bike and the parcel are already long gone by the time police do anything. (Nor will they do anything other than file a report if you are lucky.)

[glaslong]

This was exactly the case on a King County jury I was on. Lots of camera footage, most from security cams of individual businesses, some from red light cameras.

The event predated Flock rollout though, so no idea if the distribution of camera sources has shifted.

Regardless though, in the end the phone location data meant a lot more than any of the camera data, which just confirmed the path from phone sources.

[Manuel_D]

Right and what if lots of crime happens in a place where there are not many businesses? Hardly an implausible scenario given that crime is bad for business.

The city can set up its own camera for its own use. Is that really that wild of a proposal?

[asveikau]

What if what if what if?

That whole premise of "what if lots of crime happens" -- already false.

Did you know that most places in America are at historically low crime rates in most of our lifetimes? It is garbage to say this needs deep societal focus right now. I don't give a shit about the hypothetical hurt feelings of small town cops whining that they don't have always-on spy equipment.

[chmod775]

What if lots of murders happened in bathrooms?

[glitchc]

We create doors that physically limit access to one person at a time.

[Manuel_D]

The hopefully we'll be able to at least narrow down the list of suspects to the people who entered the bathroom around the time they the murder took place.

Surveillance often doesn't directly capture crime on camera, but is rather used to identify who traveled to and from the crime scene around the time of the incident

[etchalon]

You understand why that's worse, right?

[LocalH]

That is not this, however. This is the city hooking into a private, nationwide surveillance network.

You didn't think these cities actually own these Flock cameras, did you?

[ocdtrekkie]

They pay to have them installed and maintained, they're not different in that sense from subscribing to Office 365 licensing, it's a subscription product.

They key difference is not whether they own their cameras but the automatic data sharing with other agencies and their cameras. Arguably law enforcement does this casually on request anyways but the drastically reduced friction of an automatic system enables easy abuse.

An officer may hesitate to ask a neighboring agency for data on their girlfriend, and would likely be very hesitant to file actual paperwork to request it. But a search in Flock's interface is probably all of the same legal peril in a venue which doesn't feel as intimidating or risky to do and doesn't see the same level of human review or scrutiny.

[etchalon]

In America, yes.

Obviously in other places, no.

[lazyasciiart]

The wording he used was that it helped make arrests in 53% of cases. Nothing about whether those cases were solved, or whether the arrests were correct, or whether he's counting times where the cameras see police making an arrest and count it as 'helping'.

[Avshalom]

That's not what that says though.

>technology and professional analysts with helping detectives make arrests in 53%

"technology and analysts" "help" "make arrests" not surveillance, not convictions and only the implication that they wouldn't have made the arrest otherwise.

Like look at the example: somebody calls in an OD and a guy sees that the dude ODing matches (the clothing of) a suspect in some other crime and so they arrest him.

Once again an arrest is not a conviction but also what part of that needed/used pervasive surveillance?

ALSO a conviction is not the same thing as truth.

ALSO ALSO by basic subtraction the panopticon wasn't even helpful 47% of the time.

[lazyasciiart]

Even better, they saw a guy who was nearby the dude ODing.

[Computer0]

Historically Seattle's surveillance has been fulfilled via Axon.

[wil421]

Yes. Prior to flock, my city trialed LPRs attached to the local power company’s poles. In the first month, they recovered more stolen cars than any prior years total recoveries. I’ve got mixed feelings about Flock, LPRs, and what it allows people and governments to do.

I’m 100% sold on the results.

[Gigachad]

The problem imo is the usage and laws rather than the technology. Security cameras used for public good is good. But it needs to be heavily limited to preventing crime, with strict access logs and penalties for misuse.

[conception]

Imagine if the police had the names and faces of every marcher in every protest. They too would be (are) 100% sold on the results.

[cm2012]

Flock doesnt scan faces, only cars.

[AngryData]

So they claim. But the footage will continue to exist if somebody or themselves decide to identify faces.

[mingus88]

I have no doubt that provided a vast camera network covering every ingress and egress into a city, and every major intersection, plus a database of when and where a license plate was last seen, cops can find their suspect

It used to be that news articles would claim that the police used “CCTV from local businesses” to catch a crook. Even back then I knew this was cover for Ring, Flock and who knows what else. they just didn’t want the bad press.

At this point you don’t need to be a conspiracy theorist to understand that parallel construction happens all the time. They have more tools that we know about, and they want to keep it that way.

Everyone should throw some money to 404 media. They are independent and doing the best work right now to keep these things in the public eye.

[Avshalom]

That's the thing though, I do doubt that. Surveillance that you don't need a warrant to put in front of a jury is a perfect thing to use for the ostensibly-legal construction in parallel construction.

[rolph]

guess what prolific career criminals do with crime cars?

they look for a car that is very similar if not exact make and model of thier stolen vehicle, then they "clone" the victims license plate with a sheet of embossment copper and a stylus, apply paint at thier shop and affix the imposter to the crime vehicle. that buggers the whole LPR thing.

they can replicate dozens of plates in a day and offer the service for contras.

[Avshalom]

That seems like a lot of effort when you can just take the license plate off and if you're really worried print off a convincing temporary license and tape in the back window.

[rolph]

its effort well worth it, and really is not a lot of effort. if you stole the plate, the theft is evident, when there are duplicates then it becomes difficult to know which one to suspect, and that also presupposes knowledge of the duplication.

you would have to realize, it is not feasible for a car to be in location 1 thenbe in location 2 many miles away in a few minutes.

the odd thing about criminals is thier effort to perpetuate crime is often far greater than getting a job, but is somehow the preferable option.

[FireBeyond]

> you would have to realize, it is not feasible for a car to be in location 1 thenbe in location 2 many miles away in a few minutes.

You say that but just last week there was a post here about how LPR claimed that the same car was in two locations in a timeframe that would have required the car to have been traveling non-stop at 160mph for 20 minutes through suburban streets, and even then authorities and proponents were defending it as plausible, or that the LPR was right, but there might just have been timing issues, or, or, or.

[rolph]

i think i saw that post, i think we're both describing what happens when someone copies plates and doppelgangs people to throw off the surveillance.

i think in this case the LPR was right, the same plate number was in two different places, the assumption of how many plates were involved needs review.

160mph for 20min through suburban streets, that kind of attracts attention, there would be a lot of complaints and witnesses if that happened

[next_xibalba]

Sure. But if we have enough surveillance cameras, we can just trace the full path of the car from the moment of theft to now. I'm reminded of Gorgon Stare [1]. Stolen cars suck. But how about murders? I'm sure all of the people who've had loved ones murdered in, say, South Chicago, might have a more positive opinion of such a system. Especially since it wouldn't have to rely on witnesses who are cowed by the threat of reprisal and anti-snitch culture.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorgon_Stare

[Gigachad]

Not really because it flags an anomaly where the same plate is found in two places that are impossibly far to reach in the time span. Then police can just pull over that plate when they see it with a 50/50 chance it's the stolen car.

The more cameras in the network the faster and more likely a duplicated plate will be spotted.

[FireBeyond]

Flock's position, statistically, is that if during the course of an investigation into a crime, a detective queries Flock, and the crime is later solved, that Flock "helped solve a crime", regardless of the merit or value of the query. "Saw a vehicle, look it up, "nope, unrelated", but still "helped solve".

[Avshalom]

Right, that's more or less my suspicion.

[apothegm]

The AI slop in that quote sure is real.