Thread

1. nrmitchi · 1790387333 · focus · HN ↗

   > Police didn't care that Lindsey Isaacs' car was the wrong color, and wasn't damaged. They still arrested her because of Flock data.

   This is literally the first sentence of the article.

   You can dislike public surveillance, but statements like "Flock camera data put this woman in jail for 13 days" blatantly ignores the the fact that Flock didn't put anyone in jail, a bunch of cops who very clearly knew that it wasn't her.

   > The Flock camera, meanwhile, had recorded Isaacs’ car and its license plate several miles away from the site of the accident, sometime around the time of the incident.

   Blaming a tool, when the cops in question are clearly willing to grasp to whatever piece of "evidence" makes their job "easier" is a giant cop-out and excuse for the people who are abusing it.

   Any piece of evidence requires some form of critical examination; that is what law enforcement's job is. If you're just going to go with the first theory/piece-of-evidence they find.... they're not doing their job (and violating peoples constitutional rights through sheer laziness).

   1. alistairSH · 1790387631 · focus · HN ↗

      That’s all true. But we’ve known police and prosecutors are like this forever. No need to give them tools to be even lazier and that make it easier for them to abuse us.

      1. nrmitchi · 1790388319 · focus · HN ↗

         Absolutely not all cops and prosecutors, or even the majority of them, are this lazy. Every tool is a tool that lets them "be event lazier" and make it "easier for them to abuse us". Removing any tool that let bad-actors be lazy is not an alternative for removing the bad-actor themselves.

         This situation the equivalent of an eye-witness saying "Ya, I think it might have been this person I know, Tom!" and a cop/prosecutor taking that at face value and arresting Tom (and the system that allowed that to happen).

         The people who make decisions and take action so (grossly) negligently need to be held accountable and face consequences. Blaming the tool (whatever tool it is) is giving the people who have the actual responsibility an escape hatch to avoid accountability.

         1. singingtoday · 1790388672 · focus · HN ↗

            Lazy, I didn't know. Hard to define.

            Corrupt, arrogant, bigoted, or with a superiority complex? Way more than half.

         2. beepbooptheory · 1790388735 · focus · HN ↗

            But whats the difference on the ground here? Are we meant to take the transitive property here if you will and say there is actually nothing wrong with the Flock company itself and what it enables?
         3. dghlsakjg · 1790388761 · focus · HN ↗

            As the child of a public defender who has heard some STORIES: they absolutely are not doing the work. Not because of some inherent trait, but because they are all (prosecutors and defenders) assigned a workload that forces shortcuts and allows negligence with no chance of consequence.

            All public defenders and most prosecutors are happy to admit anonymously that the justice system is 90% gears grinding people. They ALL know an innocent person that pled guilty to end the grinding. Judges too. You can find plenty of court videos on YouTube of people pleading guilty while saying they didn’t do it but need to get on with their life. The judge will explain to them that they can’t accept a guilty plea from someone who claims innocence, and the defendant then folds. Everyone in the room knows that there is more to the story, but no one is willing to do the work.

         4. omgwtfbyobbq · 1790388833 · focus · HN ↗

            They do need to be held accountable, and their access to systems like this needs to be limited and/or stopped.

            If punishing bad actors alone was enough we wouldn't have a ton of 4th amendment case law.

         5. m4ck_ · 1790392474 · focus · HN ↗

            You'd think with tech being a force multiplier and all it'd be real easy for agencies to shed the supposed few and far between 'bad apples'. They should be able to do more with less bodies, with flock and other tech helping them, right? It seems to me the entire system failed this woman and waiving it away as a single lazy cop gives the system a pass.

            There is no real mechanism for holding them accountable and the consequences of these tools include death (it only takes one perceived wrong move for officers thinking they've bagged a felon to ventilate you. Hell not even that, see that officer who mag dumped his own car after he mistook an acorn for a gunshot.) This lady is quite lucky that it was only 13 days, if she had a career that's probably hosed but it might not be totally life ruining if she has a strong support system.

            1. ninalanyon · 1790419716 · focus · HN ↗

               > , if she had a career that's probably hosed

               Why? She hasn't committed a crime so why should her career be damaged?

         6. tombert · 1790397405 · focus · HN ↗

            I think there's a combination of selection bias and survivorship bias with bad cops.

            When it is made pretty clear that as a cop you won't face consequences for your malicious and/or incompetent actions, you're going to select for people who find that very appealing. Similarly, the people who don't like that kind of system might leave, allowing for a reinforcement the malicious and/or incompetent behavior.

         7. alistairSH · 1790430663 · focus · HN ↗

            Sorry, when you're in a position of such power (and the ability to wield deadly force backed by the government is as powerful as you get), you don't get to be ambivalent about the misdeeds of your coworkers.

            Even if the system is only 5% bad, that's too damn much.

            I mean, have you seen what ICE is doing these days? And how many local agencies are happily deputizing their officers to do that same work?

         8. ksudb · 1790436520 · focus · HN ↗

            [dead]

      2. beepbooptheory · 1790388387 · focus · HN ↗

         Right. It's not even clear to me what the alternative critical position is here (for gp)? At the end of the day, the company is not putting you in jail, the cops who do are simply their customers.

         "Flock is bad" metonymizes the situation, but doesn't let anyone off the hook.

         1. wredcoll · 1790397970 · focus · HN ↗

            Multiple things can be bad at the same time and cops have a demonstrated record of failures such that add a system like flock is most likely going to lead to more injustice, not less.
      3. G_o_D · 1790397004 · focus · HN ↗

         Thats what always been portrayed in films and stories for so long.Police never solved cases. There were detectives involved specialist who solves crime. While only job of police is to arrest any suspicious person, take them to station, then to court, then to jail. Essentially they are just drives carrying criminals. The very first loose evidence and suspect, that it arrest them question them, torture, if officer is lucky, that person is the criminal or one who just accepts blame. All their effort is solving as fast as they can to maintain record and stars on their shoulder
   2. dghlsakjg · 1790388334 · focus · HN ↗

      From the same article : “what else would you call the account of a woman who was arrested by incompetent police based on nothing more than a single Flock camera piece of data, and held in jail for 13 days”

      No one is letting cops off the hook.

      1. nrmitchi · 1790388654 · focus · HN ↗

         When the headline of the article is explicitly blaming Flock, and not the cop/DA/judge who never even looked at the evidence available, it is 100%, whether on purpose or not, letting/helping the cops point the finger at another party.

         The headline is what 99% of people read, and remember.

         1. dghlsakjg · 1790389420 · focus · HN ↗

            I prefer to discuss the actual material. If you want discuss what you believe other people believe about just a headline, let’s do it somewhere other than a thread discussing content specifically from the article.

            1. newtonsmethod · 1790421875 · focus · HN ↗

               What a weird thing to say. The headline is supposed to be the takeaway of the material. People are certainly allowed to discuss an article's choice of headline (which is what people remember), and should give no care to you telling them to go elsewhere.

               1. dghlsakjg · 1790431553 · focus · HN ↗

                  I didn’t say that discussions about headlines aren’t allowed.

                  I pointed out that this thread is a discussion about the content of the article, and I prefer to discuss content in a discussion about content. I would also point out that the argument about the content of the headline is just a repeat of the argument I was rebutting. It added absolutely nothing to the discussion.

                  People with any knowledge of publishing know that the headline writer and the article writer are two different people with two different goals. It doesn’t make sense to use a headline written for one purpose by one author to critique the content of an article by a different author.

                  As to the assertion that a headline is “what people remember”, that has never been my experience. Plenty of people have asked me if I have read the piece in x publication about y topic. No one has ever asked me if I read the article headlined z. The headline is so inconsequential that many reputable publications will use multiple headlines for the same article depending on when and where it is seen.

                  If you weren’t aware of this, apologies for being so direct. Now you know. Stop remembering only the headlines. The article is the content, not the headline.

      2. [deleted] · 1790395852 · focus · HN ↗

         [deleted]

   3. omgwtfbyobbq · 1790388564 · focus · HN ↗

      It's both.

      There will always be cops willing to misuse whatever they have access to.

      Part of it is holding cops accountable in these situations. Part of it is limiting or stopping the use of these systems so cops don't have as many opportunities to abuse them.

   4. vxxzy · 1790388873 · focus · HN ↗

      Would these sorts of things happen more often with or without the technology?
   5. greyface- · 1790389167 · focus · HN ↗

      > critical examination; that is what law enforcement's job is

      Critical examination is the judiciary's job, not the police's. Jordan v. City of New London established that police departments can and do deny employment to prospective officers who possess excessive cognitive ability.

   6. rambojohnson · 1790389994 · focus · HN ↗

      The point is that if the flock surveillance data hadn't existed in the first place, we wouldn't be in this situation. Everybody knows police will abuse this kind of surveillance technology, regardless of how accurate it is.

      1. MentalM · 1790421353 · focus · HN ↗

         > The point is that if the flock surveillance data hadn't existed in the first place, we wouldn't be in this situation.

         Yeah. After all, the police are known for never arresting people based solely on very tenuous and easily disproved evidence. This damn flock surveillance data!

         > Everybody knows police will abuse this kind of surveillance technology

         Only here that is literally not the case. There was a real crime and the surveillance technology provided the relevant evidence.

         1. rambojohnson · 1790649505 · focus · HN ↗

            It proved that Isaacs’s car was at a particular location at 9:51 p.m... about three miles from the crash scene. It did not prove that her car was the crash vehicle, that she was at the crash, or that she was the driver who caused it. did you bother to read teh fucking article?

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