Thread

1. ourmandave · 1790618257 · focus · HN ↗

   This is 100% cop's fault.

   She presented a current insurance coverage card to the officer and he still ticketed her because Flock said she wasn't covered.

   What would have happened if she showed the current coverage using the insurance app on her phone?

   1. caconym_ · 1790621696 · focus · HN ↗

      Why should a police officer trust a scrap of paper somebody could easily have faked vs. a massive networked software system that claims to have the up to date ground truth? What if, for instance, the victim got her insurance cards and then stopped making her monthly payments?

      (Incidentally, I assume paper insurance cards will cease to be considered valid before too long, and handing your unlocked phone to a cop will be coercively normalized.)

      Cops aren't intellectually inclined (or equipped, for that matter) to second guess a surveillance tool that's showing them an unequivocal answer to a question. This is 100% on Flock for selling a tool to users they know won't reliably question its output, despite whatever bullshit CYA terms and conditions come attached to it, and then failing to ensure that its output is correct.

      1. ourmandave · 1790624081 · focus · HN ↗

         Ignoring the legal document that's supposed to be proof and going with the system is following your phone navigation into a lake level bad.

         1. caconym_ · 1790625771 · focus · HN ↗

            The thing you need to realize is that reality is the way it is and as a result cops are going to behave the way they do and there's nothing we can do about it in the near to mid term. You appear to think what the cop did here is stupid, and that means you think many cops are stupid, because we've seen far worse examples of "surveillance platform trumps reality according to cop" stories in the news recently. And if you think cops are stupid in this particular way then it would be hard not to agree with me as far as: they can not, in aggregate, be trusted with access to surveillance tools whose outputs are not 100% reliable.

            So whose responsibility really is that? Should the governments that purchase surveillance tools, and the companies that sell them, be held accountable for the (predictable) harms they enable? Or should we ignore them, ignore the fact that we all knew this was going to happen and the fact that it keeps fucking happening, and just blame the individual cops? (which, as we all know, amounts to nothing.)

            The fabric of our society continues to be eroded by these big moneyed interests because we (the public, the parts of our government that are supposed to protect us from predation) continually and happily swallow all the disingenuous mealy-mouthed bullshit they spew to deflect past, present, and future responsibility for predictable harms. If we keep swallowing then we are headed for bad times. I am done swallowing.

            1. tzs · 1790646020 · focus · HN ↗

               > You appear to think what the cop did here is stupid, and that means you think many cops are stupid, because we've seen far worse examples of "surveillance platform trumps reality according to cop" stories in the news recently

               Didn't those all involve major crimes? In those cases the person who has wrongly been identified is not going to present the officer with evidence showing that the crime did not happen or that they have already been tried for the crime and either acquitted or served their sentence.

               This involved driving without insurance. The person presented what is supposed to be legally accepted proof of insurance. This is not even a crime in most jurisdictions, I believe, unless there were repeat offenses or causing an accident while uninsured or falsifying documents.

               The default assumption when someone who was flagged for driving without insurance is pulled over and they present an unexpired insurance could should be at worst that after whatever incident that got them in the system (which in many cases will be that they didn't realized their insurance had expired) they correct the problem by getting insurance.

               1. caconym_ · 1790660369 · focus · HN ↗

                  > Didn't those all involve major crimes?

                  I'm not sure about all, but many did (at least, a serious crime was alleged), which is why I described them as "far worse examples". But they are examples of the same pattern (cops blindly trusting the surveillance oracle), so severity of the alleged infraction/crime apparently won't protect you in either direction.

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