Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AI startup Flock thinks it can eliminate all crime in America

forbes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–49 of 49 posts

Re: AI startup Flock thinks it can eliminate all crime in America

#41

Post by salawat »

cyanydeez wrote: post #13
chatmasta wrote: post #11

This is not a new startup. It predates the AI era. This is the company that installs cameras in public places and wires them all together with data sharing arrangements that circumvent those pesky jurisdictional separations of power. And guess which neighborhoods have the most cameras? It’s a pre-crime company and data broker that sells to police forces and corporations (while sharing all the data between them). It’s…

Basically, get around those pesky amendments by third-partying evidence collection, then manufacture (parallel construction) cases. It's also entirely unnecessary. It's essentially a conduit to feed "criminals" into the prison system to support whats basically the oldest form of disaster capitalism. It's all so neat and tidy, it's almost like theres' no difference between government and business operatives.

>It's all so neat and tidy, it's almost like theres' no difference between government and business operatives.

Quoted for truth.

Re: AI startup Flock thinks it can eliminate all crime in America

#42

Post by m463 »

TheCleric wrote: post #29

Oh I'm VERY interested in seeing how this will eliminate white collar crimes like wage theft, embezzlement, ponzi schemes and the like. Or do they mean the kind of crimes THOSE OTHER PEOPLE do?

for every crime it doesn't eliminate, there could be 2 new behaviors they can capture that will become crimes.

Say, parking outside the lines. Just expand the really crazy laws around towing vehicles to treat it like a red curb or an expired parking meter.

Re: AI startup Flock thinks it can eliminate all crime in America

#43

Post by dira3 »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #32
CurtHagenlocher wrote: post #10

Even if true, it would only be for one of the narrowest possible definitions of "crime". What can Flock do about mail fraud? About domestic violence? About wage theft? About falsified studies that lead to substances being misclassified as harmless? About price fixing? Does the majority of criminal activity even take place in "public" spaces?

It's common for people to talk about "crime" when what they really mean is something like "street crime" or "stranger crime" - some random person I don't know hurting me or taking my stuff. It's true that other kinds of crime are common, but the solutions to them probably look pretty different than the solutions to let me safely walk around anywhere in my city after dark.

> safely walk around anywhere in my city after dark

For that use case, the crimes to worry about the most would be speeding or distracted driving. But people are usually more focused on e.g. someone doing drugs on the sidewalk than speeding cars; in fact speeding is hardly considered a crime at all despite the danger to pedestrians.

Re: AI startup Flock thinks it can eliminate all crime in America

#44

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

dira3 wrote: post #43
SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's common for people to talk about "crime" when what they really mean is something like "street crime" or "stranger crime" - some random person I don't know hurting me or taking my stuff. It's true that other kinds of crime are common, but the solutions to them probably look pretty different than the solutions to let me safely walk around anywhere in my city after dark.

> safely walk around anywhere in my city after dark For that use case, the crimes to worry about the most would be speeding or distracted driving. But people are usually more focused on e.g. someone doing drugs on the sidewalk than speeding cars; in fact speeding is hardly considered a crime at all despite the danger to pedestrians.

I just don't understand the point of this kind of argument. I suspect you and I would agree on the reason why people focus this way - they see the guy doing drugs on the sidewalk (or the shooting on the news, or their friend who got mugged, or...), think it's spooky, and decide without looking up any numbers that it shouldn't happen again. It's true that a statistical analysis of mortality or injury risk would focus on other things, but they didn't run that analysis and don't agree that it should dictate their focus.

Re: AI startup Flock thinks it can eliminate all crime in America

#45

Post by fraserharris »

Paraphrasing from an Oakland police officer reflecting on the spike in crime 3 years ago to today: "Flock has been a game changer. The officers who use it are getting results. Criminals will steal a car, drive through a neighborhood and rob someone. Pretty quickly we can look up 'black BMWs driving around this location'. Maybe 10 come back, you figure out which is the likely one, and then can see where it shows up in the next few hours. Then you have officers on patrol in that area look out for it. The criminals get a police car tailing them & they ditch the vehicle. Instead of doing 5 or 6 robberies with a stolen car, they can do 1 or 2. That makes it much less worth it to do the crimes."

Re: AI startup Flock thinks it can eliminate all crime in America

#46

Post by gs17 »

polartx wrote: post #20

The weakest link of the proposed technology like this is guaranteed fallibility of the folks using it, ie the judicial system and the asymmetric power dynamic against those it supposedly serves. This is a very common scenario: a sheriffs deputy holds a biased belief against an individual. Said deputy selects and overfits data from systems like this to obtain a warrant against said individual. Individual is arrested a…

> Said deputy selects and overfits data from systems like this to obtain a warrant against said individual.

Or no warrant at all, the chief just wants to stalk his ex: https://www.kansas.com/news/politics-government/article29105...

> A Sedgwick, Kansas, police chief used Flock Safety license plate readers to track his ex-girlfriend and her new boyfriend’s vehicles 228 times over four-plus months and used his police vehicle to follow them out of town, according to a city official and a report released this week by the agency that oversees police certifications.

> Nygaard’s reasons included “suspicious” and “missing child” and “drug investigation” and “drugs” and “narcotics investigation” and “suspicious activity” and “drug invest” and “drug use,” according to the KSCPOST order.

> Nygaard won’t face any charges, but he did lose his police certification.

Re: AI startup Flock thinks it can eliminate all crime in America

#47

Post by gs17 »

bslaq wrote: post #37
chatmasta wrote: post #11

This is not a new startup. It predates the AI era. This is the company that installs cameras in public places and wires them all together with data sharing arrangements that circumvent those pesky jurisdictional separations of power. And guess which neighborhoods have the most cameras? It’s a pre-crime company and data broker that sells to police forces and corporations (while sharing all the data between them). It’s…

>And guess which neighborhoods have the most cameras? The ones with highest amount of crime? But it could also be the opposite: the neighbourhoods of the well off, who are willing to pay for this kind of service. I really don't know, since both options seem likely.

It seems to be the opposite near me. There's a few well off neighborhoods that I've noticed have cameras all over, but the area near my work where there's new piles of broken glass every morning has nothing (not that I want more surveillance, but it makes the intent clear).

The neighborhoods that are less well off I spend less time in, so maybe I just haven't seen them, but usually surveillance there seems to be in the form of parking lot camera trailers.

Re: AI startup Flock thinks it can eliminate all crime in America

#48

Post by Eextra953 »

bslaq wrote: post #37
chatmasta wrote: post #11

This is not a new startup. It predates the AI era. This is the company that installs cameras in public places and wires them all together with data sharing arrangements that circumvent those pesky jurisdictional separations of power. And guess which neighborhoods have the most cameras? It’s a pre-crime company and data broker that sells to police forces and corporations (while sharing all the data between them). It’s…

>And guess which neighborhoods have the most cameras? The ones with highest amount of crime? But it could also be the opposite: the neighbourhoods of the well off, who are willing to pay for this kind of service. I really don't know, since both options seem likely.

No, not the ones with the highest crime but the poor/black/brown neighborhoods, at least in my city. I know, I live in a majority brown neighborhood and I've mapped the flock cameras in my city. There are more cameras in my neighborhood by about 3:1. To me this really shows the bias in my local PD because while there are pockets of high crime in my neighborhood, it is a huge neighborhood and the crime rate outside of those pockets is about the same as the rest of the city nevertheless, the cameras are not concentrated in the high-crime pockets but throughout the entire neighborhood.
Post reply on HN