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Flock cameras track more than your license plate, and they're spreading fast

engadget.com

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Re: Flock cameras track more than your license plate, and they're spreading fast

#141

Post by kennywinker »

naturalmovement wrote: post #118
righthand wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a bail reform propaganda. If you feel unsafe because we dont put deoderant thieves in Rikers then move.

[flagged]

In your conception, the only reason any drug store is able to stay in business is because deodorant thieves are getting hard time?

If enough people are stealing deodorant to put them out of business, I think there are some big social problems that jail time isn’t going to fix.

Frankly, i’d 100% of the time rather bare the cost of shoplifters thru slightly higher prices than thru paying ~$100,000 year each incarcerating anyone who shoplifts.

There are “low level” crimes that are predictable signs of violent crime. E.g. intimate partner violence. I’d love to see those taken more seriously, even if it’s just for the downstream effects.

Re: Flock cameras track more than your license plate, and they're spreading fast

#142

Post by beambot »

deepsquirrelnet wrote: post #97

Can anybody find trustworthy stats that these actually reduce crime? All I see are occasional anecdotes about how they were used to find one person one time. Skeptical me seriously doubts this is an effective solution for crime. But maybe that's because this country has a history of being willing to do a million expensive and privacy violating things, and only if it's a punitive measure.

UK cctv and China's system are probably the closest examples?

Re: Flock cameras track more than your license plate, and they're spreading fast

#143

Post by cucumber3732842 »

abalashov wrote: post #41

These horrific things are multiplying exponentially in my (rural GA) environs. There are a dozen of them along every conceivable cycling route I could take, and far more if I drive somewhere. If you think this is a city thing meant to deter urban crime, the explosive proliferation of Flock cameras in quite rural and suburban areas may shock you. I find them in the darndest of places, near but not on county lines, adj…

These things proliferate where people trust the government or see the government as a means to the end of getting one over on whoever is bad for them.

So the Nth generation group of townies that run any given rural shithole will happily slap them up, the government represents them as far as they're concerned.

And meanwhile in some snooty inner ring Chicago suburb that fancies themselves "progressive" (but in what direction?) they slap up the same damn cameras because they see it as a means to make more efficient the enforcement of the myriad of rules on which their enclave depends and they are wealthy and well represented so they have no fear of it being used against them.

Rural Georgia probably has a little of column A, little of column B going on.

Re: Flock cameras track more than your license plate, and they're spreading fast

#144

Post by tr45872267 »

righthand wrote: post #42
steelbrain wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You must live in a different New York City than the one I visited. I had the safety calibration of Tallinn, Estonia and Dubai, UAE. The subway was extremely hostile. People were regularly drugged out of their mind. I saw one guy try to drink a Coca Cola upside down and spilled it all in the bus. Another crazy chased my limited mobility Estonian friend who wanted to visit nyc alongside me when she went alone for groce…

These are all lies. Small towns have notiriously higher crime rates than Nyc. We should send the National Guard to your small town and place cameras every where. I dont feel safe in your small town. I moved away from middle America that’s swamped in meth, high murder rate, and racism. Sorry someone spilled a coca-cola though. Your pearls must be powder in your hands by now.

This is false. Urban areas have the highest rate of crime compared to rural and suburban. For example look at the years 2020 and 2021 from this report:[0]

Table 8

Rate of victimization, by type of crime and location of residence, 2020 and 2021

Location of residence

Total violent crime Violent crime excluding simple assault Total property crime

2020 2021* 2020 2021* 2020 2021*

Urban 19.0 † 24.5 7.7 9.7 158.9 157.5

Suburban 16.8 16.5 5.6 5.2 90.5 86.8

Rural 13.4 11.1 4.5 4.4 65.6 57.7

You can see clearly that urban has the highest rate of crime, and this has been true for decades.[1]

Also, many crimes are not recorded at all in NYC, which is why many stores have locked down all their items with a key that requires permission from a staff member to access. I haven't seen this in the small towms I've been to.

[0] https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/cv21.pdf

[1] https://ovc.ojp.gov/sites/g/files/xyckuh226/files/ncvrw2018/...

Re: Flock cameras track more than your license plate, and they're spreading fast

#146

Post by therealdrag0 »

jubilanti wrote: post #110
tough wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why wouldn't codex or claude just reach for whatever FOSS https://github.com/openalpr/openalpr

[flagged]

You’re moving the goalposts. The original point of this thread is that Flock AI technology is hardly needed to efficiently search traditional video footage for license plates.

Re: Flock cameras track more than your license plate, and they're spreading fast

#147

Post by FireBeyond »

microgpt wrote: post #126
christoph wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Fascism should rightly be called corporatism, as it is the merger of corporate and government power.” - Benito Mussolini

Nah. Fascism only tolerates one power, that being itself. It can emerge from either the state or corporate side, and necessarily subsumes or destroys the other, just as it subsumes or destroys unions, families, friend networks, communications, and anything else that can establish power. That doesn't mean the merger of two of them is the defining feature.

Corporations generally tend to only tolerate the state to the extent that guns or courts mandate that they must. How many billions of corporate dollars have gone to fund campaigns to deregulate, to skirt authority, to do whatever is necessary to make sure profits go up?

Re: Flock cameras track more than your license plate, and they're spreading fast

#148

Post by therealdrag0 »

microgpt wrote: post #127
sublinear wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't have stats, but most police have made it pretty clear that they're used for investigations that would otherwise have very little to go on. I don't think anyone other than the manufacturers have made claims of cameras reducing crime. You can put all the AI bells and whistles on them, but they're still just cameras. They're a fallback option, not a dragnet. The police are generally reactive to reports of crime,…

If they don't reduce crimes what do they do? Oh right they track inconvenient people

Solving crime is still valuable even if it doesn’t reduce crime.

Re: Flock cameras track more than your license plate, and they're spreading fast

#149

Post by ethagnawl »

naturalmovement wrote: post #57
abalashov wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And it's not an accident that Flock cameras were implicated in many ICE raids at Home Depot and Lowe's, either.

[flagged]

Then surely they're being used to bust the people hiring them, too ... Right?

Re: Flock cameras track more than your license plate, and they're spreading fast

#150

Post by kamma4434 »

christoph wrote: post #95
llm_nerd wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes Flock bizarre is that it's a private business, and this is precisely how police departments are getting around a lot of traditional gates and checks on this sort of thing. Police setting up a 1984 monitoring system throughout your city, tracking every car, person, activity -- yields lots of questions, oversight, concerns, debate, challenges, etc. Some private business doing the same, and then letting the s…

“Fascism should rightly be called corporatism, as it is the merger of corporate and government power.” - Benito Mussolini

Fascism was corporative, but in Italian the word has a very different meaning compared to the English one.
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