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One Piece of Flock Camera Data Put This Innocent Woman in Jail for 13 Days

257 points · 145 comments · HotGarbage

  1. nrmitchi · · 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. dghlsakjg · · 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 · · 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 · · 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 · · 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 · · 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.

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