Another quiet little village in rural New York just signed on for 11 cameras, and it sounds like the county itself (2800 square miles(!)) is also playing around with them. The locals won’t raise the hard hitting questions - they’ll just roll over with the bullshit answers from Flock reps.
https://northcountrynow.com/stories/village-of-massena-enter...
What is funding all those Flock reps jetting around BFE to dazzle and kickback the boomer city managers and county commissioners of deep red littleville America? Is it the 2 cameras in Big Rapids MI or the 2425[1] cameras in Detroit metro?
The "roll over" that mattered has already been secured.
But we don't have to agree on that; people everywhere care about crime, and the promises ALPR vendors make, while arguable, are not ludicrous.
Most of the ones in my neighborhood are pointed at parks, playgrounds, and the big transit center. Which makes no sense to me since there's a ton of government buildings around that you'd think would be under Flock surveillance for "safety."
Our Lowe's have the mobile parking lot camera/light units, I wasn't aware if these were Flock but either wouldn't be surprised if they were, had access or plans to buy in.
You will be tracked and you will be happy about it.
https://gdigraphics.com/police-car-ghost-graphics/
There were laws in many places where you could fight a traffic ticket because you couldn't plainly recognize a police vehicle, especially when a taillight or headlight is out, but now we pay for graphics to make them more invisible. "If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about." I like the plausible deniability angle, myself
Thank you, Flock!
Or when they enable the mics in their devices to just start recording your conversations with your friend in a public place and does the same. "AI didn't like what you were talking about, so alerted the local PD".
This is currently an epidemic. Drivers are targeted for “random” checks by police for a number of non-falsifiable factors (e.g. the evergreen “your license plate light was out…huh, looks fine now”) that overwhelmingly correlate with driver income and race.
That’s not whataboutism; I am genuinely not sure if ALPR/automated policing systems stand to make that situation worse or better. Are Flock and friends likely to be abused in the same way that human police traffic stop reasons are?
Flock's founders belief is that he wants to eliminate all crime (literally) with Flock.
So in his eyes, false positives are inherently acceptable, and preferable to false negatives.
And I feel that (actually, I know that, though I wasn't in Sales, but I did work at Flock) one of their selling points to agency is almost a "whitewashing" of such practices. "Oh, our PD wasn't targeting anyone, we were just acting on the recommendations of the Flock surveillance system".
Why can't cities hire good software developers to create custom solutions that are safe and secure rather than paying a startup thousands of dollars in taxpayer money. Austin City Council spent 1.2 MILLION dollars on just a handful of cameras. Texas already ruled that red-light cameras cannot issue tickets or citations so why are we allowing cameras to creep into the same space. It's just another tax on people
>The ACLU is fighting DUI laws in CA right now for instance. SF is a hell-hole because of these crime loving activist groups.
Not sure what you are referring to here but if you do find the news stories be sure to post the article and I will read the cases on PACER to see what its all about
https://calmatters.org/investigation/2025/12/california-road...
All flock gets you is more of that except also every petty theft gets run and then they harass an old lady. It almost certainly costs more, too.
https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/colorado/news/flock-cameras-lead...
We have plenty of evidence of harm and no good evidence for effectiveness. We don't need to "save police resources" we need more well-trained capable police officers who are doing good police work AND good community work
"Austin spent $1.2 million on Flock cameras. They scanned 113 million license plates and got 165 arrests. That's $7,300 per arrest"
I agree there needs to be better safe guards. I still believe it’s worth figuring out a balanced path forward, I like having cameras track public streets.
think about what a police officer's salary is. think about underpoliced areas.
how many arrests would a trained, qualified police officer make in a high crime area of a major city in the timeframe it takes for them to earn $7300?
this is a bad deal.
Again I don’t know where that 1.2 million number is coming from. That should get you over 300 cameras deployed in the first year.
Should mention, stealing nearly any car is extremely easily, and quite fast, too.
The reason more cars aren’t stolen is because they are registered to an owner, and the resale value of a stolen cars is on the order of a couple hundred bucks USD for a brand new vehicle. It simply isn’t worth the time.
Essentially nobody is stealing cars except for a few chop shop operations who concentrate in specific areas.
the cost per arrest in austin while these cameras were up was over $7000/arrest.
From an anti-crime perspective, spending $7000 on police salaries & having the police patrol high crime areas is a much more effective use of funds. It also doesn't violate the 4th amendment.
Maybe the argument against is that ALPR can’t constantly track you like cell towers can?
pavel_lishin•1mo ago
The video also links you to a wiki with some nice counter-arguments to the standard pro-Flock arguments: https://consumerrights.wiki/w/Common_Questions,_Arguments,_%...
I went ahead and signed up; I live in a pretty dense part of the US, we'll see how many alerts I get in the next year.
tptacek•1mo ago
I think it's good to engage this way, but I have a lot of thoughts on things to do that are more effective than giving public comment, and a caution that if you have strong opinions about ALPRs and you choose to pay attention to this issue you're going to be confronted with a lot of opinions that may surprise/discomfit you.
pavel_lishin•1mo ago
So, I'm aware that the people I live next to are tremendously rude dipshits who hold awful opinions.
ViscountPenguin•1mo ago
In my experience, a sizable chunk of people who are anti-surveilance are pretty staunchly rightwing.
This is bad news in that it means that there isn't a pre-formed anti surveillance coalition, but good news in every other way imo.