[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?

[Gigachad]

Of course you could still rack up a large penalty / jail time if you cause an incredible amount of damage quickly, but in general you'd catch people before they get that far. Catching a bike thief after the first 1-2 bikes rather than when they have stolen 100.

[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?

[Manuel_D]

No? If someone broke into your car as stole your luggage, the surveillance camera might not directly capture the thief breaking into your car. But if the camera recorded someone entering the parking garage and then exiting the garage carrying your luggage a few minutes later, that's strong evidence is it not?

[etchalon]

You're missing the part where, for that to work, we have a government with access to a massive surveillance system capable of identifying and tracking the population at scale.

And you're missing that, instead of specifically identifying a specific individual doing a specific thing, this network would be used to place under suspicion, investigation and possible arrest, people who's only documented action was "being somewhere."

Oh, and while your example is "committed a crime", that same network could easily be used to identity and track people who were, say, coming and going from protests. Or libraries. Or voting.

[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.