Discussion
When Flock Comes to Town: Why Cities Are Axing the Controversial Surveillance Technology
jmuguy: I'm surprised Garrett Langley still has a job, he seems wildly out of touch. For instance he really believes that his Panopticon as a service is the reason crime is down in cities, conveniently ignoring crime rates prior to COVID.
thinkingtoilet: Does he really believe it or is it his job to say he really believes it?
Dezvous: It's quite ironic to get an amazon ring video ad while viewing this article.
therobots927: Ring is just as bad. Arguably worse because it comes with a convenience / personal security factor.
jdross: I realize how unpopular flock is, and I will first say that I have literally never personally looked into the privacy concerns. But one city you don’t see named here is SF, which has cited Flock as a primary driver of its 10x reduction in car break-ins, and 30% reduction in burglaries. Those were a quality of life plague while I lived there
therobots927: He won’t for long. The backlash is just getting started. Left or right, no one wants their whereabouts subject to constant surveillance.His only advantage is that the cops are on his side and won’t let go of these cameras without a fight.
gorgonical: Musician-turning-tech anarchist (?) Benn Jordan is making a very interesting series of videos about Flock cameras, their poor safety, and their gray-area interfacing with local governments:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMIwNiwQewQhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uB0gr7Fh6lYhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vU1-uiUlHTohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pp9MwZkHiMQI recommend them.
waNpyt-menrew: Someone complaining about local governments having data while directing them to YouTube, whose owner does surveillance at a scale far exceeding all local governments of all countries combined, is ironic.Why don’t these people use Peertube at least. Fact of the matter is they’d like to personally profit off the same nonsense they complain about.
BoggleOhYeah: Any evidence that the reduction is actually due to the cameras?
boriskourt: Super worth a watch. Lots of technical tidbits also.
elphinstone: An obnoxious, autoplay-at-full-volume ad that took the page an extra 30 seconds to load and somehow bypassed firefox adblockers...
mlinhares: Nah, he's just missing a good PR campaign, there's a 30% of the population that will eat whatever their supreme leaders say they should, I'm sure they can sanewash these cameras as well.
therobots927: America is pretty polarized around privacy as demonstrated by reactions to the Snowden leaks. So I think that’s a fair point.
hrimfaxi: That was over a decade ago. I wonder if it has gotten better or worse since.
waNpyt-menrew: Would crime go up, down or stay the same if all surveillance cameras were removed? The answer to that is the only one that matters.Ironically many people who whine about surveillance cameras have their video door bells or similar setups.So which is it?
RankingMember: > The answer to that is the only one that matters.Is it, though? Crime would be super low if we were all confined to prison cells by default, too.
waNpyt-menrew: For a tech forum the rebuttals are terrible. I expected better. Cameras do not confine one to a prison cell.
ses1984: No one wants their whereabouts subject to constant surveillance, except everyone who carries a “normal” cell phone, in other words not a burner.
hrimfaxi: Do people who carry normal cell phones do so with the active desire to have their whereabouts subject to constant surveillance?
macintux: Crime would go down if everyone was executed. Your question is not the only one that matters.
waNpyt-menrew: Flock cameras aren’t the same as executing people. So dramatic
hrimfaxi: No it's not. Would crime go up, down, or stay the same if we had to get strip searched before entering airplanes?
waNpyt-menrew: The types of crime that would happen in an airplane would already be identifiable due to its constrained cabin, so I don’t understand the comparison.Let’s use your example for say a concert. Is checking bags worth it? Would crime go up if there was no bag check? Why or why not?
therobots927: Yes but you can always leave your phone behind if you want to drop off the map. Flock makes that borderline impossible.
ceejayoz: > Is checking bags worth it?Probably not. It's mostly there to preserve the profits from alcohol sales.> Would crime go up if there was no bag check?Did it go down when they added them?
RankingMember: You made a broad-brush statement that essentially justified anything in the name of safety. You might want to re-word your statement if you meant otherwise.
phendrenad2: It's funny, if the company had just sold cameras to cities, they probably could have avoided this whole mess. But they just had to hit some keywords for Wall Street (like "AI" "cloud" and "SaaS"), which had the side-effect of making it appear (true or not) that they were part of a Palantir-style surveillance panopticon that tracks you everywhere.
alex43578: A big part of the value is the network: track a stolen a car or a suspect in the next town over, or across the country.
cucumber3732842: And they will either quietly rebrand and build it or someone else will.Government loves the product. What it doesn't like about Flock is that the peasants are aware about it and complaining.
whimsicalism: I'm very in favor of speed & redlight cameras and don't have a particular problem with license plate trackers. I think we partisan-ize far too many things nowadays, unfortunately.
peab: It's a stretch for sure.I think the point is that it's a tradeoff of civil liberties in exchange for safety.I think it's an interesting discussion and it's not clear to me what the right answer is.Given the first amendment in the USA, i think once it's cheap enough everyone will be filming everyone all the time. Just look at how many people have ring doorbells.
zulux: It's gotten worse: I'm so tired of rampant crime that I'm up for a little surveillance. And I used to donate to the ACLU before they went crazy.
AndrewKemendo: Wow thank you for sharing this I had no idea this guy existed!There’s more of us techno anarchists out there apparently!
baggachipz: I drove into a very affluent subdivision this weekend, and like most others around here it had a flock camera recording every car on the way in. This camera, however, had the gall to advertise its presence as a neighborhood security measure. "Flock Safety watches this neighborhood" read the sign on the post, or some such. Of course the residents there had no choice but to accept its installation, as the local police support it. Nefarious framing and marketing in the name of "safety".
bradleyankrom: I saw the same thing in a Home Depot parking lot yesterday. I guess I'm glad there's some sort of notice about it, even if its intent is more, I dunno, branding? It took me a while to figure out what all the solar panel + camera on a post installations were as they popped up around my town. I even pulled over to inspect the hardware for signs of ownership and didn't find anything.
ceejayoz: Crime's been descending from the COVID blip for a while, everywhere, Flock or otherwise. My city saw zero murders in Q1; 2021 saw ~15 by now.In other words: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSVqLHghLpw
whimsicalism: it's clearly not a covid effect https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/sf-car-breakins/
ceejayoz: The spike in your link's chart clearly starts in early 2020.And "While our data extends only to 2018" is... important, yeah?
whimsicalism: i encourage other people reading to look at the chart so they can assess the veracity of ^ comment
ceejayoz: Here it is.https://imgur.com/a/FK3sfnaThere's an enormous drop in 2019, and the second drop starts in 2023.https://www.sanfranciscopolice.org/your-sfpd/policies/depart...> Starting on March 19, 2024, Flock Safety began installing ALPR cameras in various strategic locations across San Francisco. This rollout is expected to take place over the next 90 days. Per 19B ALPR policy, the administration of the Flock ALPR system is the responsibility of the Investigations Bureau.How did the Flock cameras cause two crime drops before their installation?The article's note about 2018 is talking about extending backwards, not forwards. It's entirely accurate, and a direct quote from your link.
mmcnickle: > Fact of the matter is they’d like to personally profit off the same nonsense they complain about.Benn Jordan's YouTube channel is a registered Nonprofit https://www.patreon.com/posts/nonprofit-has-82858569
delecti: > no one wants their whereabouts subject to constant surveillanceBut sadly lots of people want everyone else subject to it, and some are willing to submit to it themselves to get it. It's not a foregone conclusion.
snsr: Maybe you're also in favor of some light reading https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-4/
whimsicalism: you think speed cameras violate the 4th amendment?
HelloMcFly: > The answer to that is the only one that matters.This statement rests on the belief that absolute crime rate is the only thing that matters, and is a cousin to the "I have nothing to hide!" response from people who care little for intrusions to their privacy. Are you in favor of giving law enforcement authorities a way to unlock all private electronic devices?I'm willing to tolerate the presence of some crime in the name of personal liberty. I do not think my whereabouts should be known on demand by government actors just because I drive a car.
estebank: > And I used to donate to the ACLU before they went crazy.When was that? Because in 1977 they defended Nazi's free speech to demonstrate in a town that had jewish people as half its population so it tried to block them, and I don't recall them doing anything nearly that controversial since.https://www.aclu.org/news/free-speech/the-skokie-case-how-i-...
maerF0x0: And switches to Axon - https://denverite.com/2026/02/24/denver-ends-flock-contract-...I have not done any research if that's out of the frying pan and into the fire or an improvement
dfxm12: Practically, axon cameras aren't nearly as ubiquitous as flock's, thus reducing the leo's dragnet capability. I'm sure the feds will successfully try to get access to this footage as well.
mothballed: No but license plate requirements pretty clearly violate the 4th and/or 1st amendment, IMO. And without being required to have your license plate searched (registration 'papers' forced to be displayed) at all times without even an officer presenting RAS or PC of a crime, these cameras become a lot less useful.I don't see how removing the cameras is compatible with the first amendment, but if you have the right of "speech" to record me in public chasing every place I go in a manner that is the envy of any stalker, I ought to have the right of "speech" not to "say anything" (compelled speech of showing my plate).
nemomarx: It really doesn't seem like the courts agree that you have a right to travel via car without a visible plate.
mothballed: The courts have been wrong about many things, sometimes for centuries before they've fixed it. Some things they think they've interpreted correctly now that they'll turn around and interpret some other way later.Trying to interpret viewing and recording the plate as speech but not displaying it as speech is trying to have your cake and eat it too.
oooyay: Both of these camera systems also usually come with a kangaroo civil court of sorts. Last time I looked at red light camera distribution in Texas it was also fairly obvious that they were only installing them in poorer areas.These systems were largely disliked bipartisanly because of those factors.
esbranson: There is no evidence it's not due to the cameras, not that I am aware of. Lots of theories abound, but absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
