[flagged]
Did the HOA Flock cams provide evidence for arrests? How did they help?
Or was this a case where a fake camera to scare people off may have been equivalent, Wile E Coyote style?
LAPD lets contract with surveillance giant Flock expire
271–280 of 439 posts
Re: LAPD lets contract with surveillance giant Flock expire
#272Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nothing about OP's story sounds plausible or reasonable. The criminal gangs are magically afraid of flock cameras but not any other kind of surveillance? They had footage of the crooks but it took too long to evaluate it, and yet the cops knew exactly which gang was doing it?
Glad I'm not the only one who thought this story sounded completely fabricated. It reads like a Flock ad.
the account is 3 karma, 5 months old, 1 other comment besides these flock comments
Most likely Flock astroturfing.
Re: LAPD lets contract with surveillance giant Flock expire
#273Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can definitely take the cameras down. We did, there was zero drama. On the other hand, it wouldn't be surprising if a single county commissioner got in trouble for just deciding by fiat to take civic infrastructure down himself. That's not a power county commissioners have. Was there a county board vote authorizing that action?
re: the commisioner: > In January of 2024, the Camden County Commission passed a county ordinance banning the use of all automated license plate readers in the county (a 2023 ordinance had banned all static license plate readers, but the 2024 ordinance expanded that to include all automated license plate readers). In that ordinance, commissioners cited "numerous complaints" about the cameras "and the potential of unw…
Sounds like his only recourse was to sue the county as a private citizen for failing to enforce their laws? Or something like that. Going vigilante, as much as I like it in this case, is still illegal.
Re: LAPD lets contract with surveillance giant Flock expire
#274Earlier quoted context omitted.
By the time you get a court order. The trail has gone cold at least that's what the police said at our HOA meetings. Maybe they're getting paid by big money to say these things but these were not head of police people. Low levels coming to HOA meetings.
Presumably a victim of a crime would provide the footage without a court order. A court order would be more applicable if it caught something unrelated to the actual property the camera was on.
This sort of footage is only useful after you have an arrest and need to build a case for prosecution. It's rarely useful to actually effect an arrest.
Getting the chain of footage you need - even with enthusiastic cooperation - takes days if not weeks to complete. Most folks are not great at providing this, and most consumer security cameras kinda suck. You're dealing with cops and residents who are not the most technically proficient, so a bunch of random different video files provided via e-mail, USB stick, etc. takes a lot of time.
I have direct experience with this and Chicago PD asking for my and my neighbors footage for a carjacking that happened in my alley. It took days for everyone to respond, and by that time it's pretty useless until they catch the crew responsible and just add that charge to whatever crime they actually got caught doing in real time. This can take months to years to happen. CPD is not great though, so you always need to take things with a giant grain of salt. However, the problem is legitimately difficult even if everyone is acting in good faith.
I'm not saying this in support of Flock at all. I do not support their use since it's so trivial to abuse the capability. But the capability is there and very useful if used correctly - that's why it's such a concern. Not worth the security vs. freedom tradeoff for me. Especially when you look towards the future of how an even more robust network and better technology will be used in practice.
Re: LAPD lets contract with surveillance giant Flock expire
#275Re: LAPD lets contract with surveillance giant Flock expire
#276The best part is that flock owns the cameras and the poles so even when the contract expires the cameras keep running and recording data that flock can sell to e.g. CHP, LASD, FBI, Palantir; and LAPD can just call them and access the data the flock scam was engineered to be resilient to political pressure by giving departments and jursidictions this fake exit ability while the data continues to be harvested, it is a…
Is there any realistic road to having them outlawed nationwide? Eg, ignoring probabilities here, could a wildly successful grassroots program where it became an issue as politically salient as immigration or abortion eventually lead to legislation banning them?
> Is there any realistic...
SCOTUS could hand down another surprise decision:
Re: LAPD lets contract with surveillance giant Flock expire
#277Earlier quoted context omitted.
> So what else are you suppose to do? File a civil suit and get a court order for their removal.
Silliness. Who enforces it then? The local law banning it was already equally as valid as a court order would have been. Would the county need to ask the judge to take it down? Someone has to physically take it down and I'm guessing flock didn't put that in the budget.
The court enforces it. We're getting into movie plot politics here. The sheriff's department will not in fact ignore a district court ruling. These scenarios rapidly reach the point where the sheriff is removed from office and imprisoned for some amount of time. This is what happened to Joe Arpaio.
This is much simpler in a municipality: the board simply fires the village manager and the chief. A sheriff is usually an elected though.
Before you reach the point of suing, you cancel contracts, payments, IT infrastructure, and have public works remove the cameras from any county-owned infrastructure.
I mean, all this is pretty silly, though, because what you really do is just turn the cameras off.
Re: LAPD lets contract with surveillance giant Flock expire
#278Earlier quoted context omitted.
All of it Fox News drivel. Hence if was flagged.
Can you dispute any of it with facts? In CA: Kostas Linardos had 17 tickets — including for speeding, reckless driving and street racing — and had been in four collisions. Then, in November 2022, he gunned his Ram 2500 truck as he entered a Placer County highway and slammed into the back of a disabled sedan, killing a toddler, court records show. He’s now facing felony manslaughter charges. In December of last year,…
Convenient amnesia. Your very first link disproves your comment. He had a license; he was legal to drive.
An already entirely irrelevant point to make in this thread. Much like your second point, given that https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/trump-electio... as a talking point, it's, as more drivel pushed by the right to make it an issue, when it isn't https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/noncitizen-voting-is-e... for the purpose of voter suppression and she same control as Flock -- the same kind of control that you somehow seem to oppose in your final link. Cognitive dissonance.
Re: LAPD lets contract with surveillance giant Flock expire
#279The best part is that flock owns the cameras and the poles so even when the contract expires the cameras keep running and recording data that flock can sell to e.g. CHP, LASD, FBI, Palantir; and LAPD can just call them and access the data the flock scam was engineered to be resilient to political pressure by giving departments and jursidictions this fake exit ability while the data continues to be harvested, it is a…
The Flock contract I read from Oak Park, where we designed what I think are the country's most restrictive ALPR rules and ultimately took our cameras down, did not allow Flock to continue running, recording, and selling data after we turned the cameras off. In fact: they explicitly didn't allow them to sell the data at all . Can I ask where you got this idea from?
reproducing the same links as above:
https://www.lakeexpo.com/news/politics/felony-charges-droppe...
https://www.wmtv15news.com/2026/06/05/dane-county-covers-flo...
https://www.cnet.com/news/privacy/cities-covering-flock-surv...
https://dailynorthwestern.com/2025/09/28/top-stories/flock-c...
https://www.newsfromthestates.com/article/verona-has-waited-...
And these are just the cases where the municipality wants the cameras taken down, GP also talks about the cases where they just want to sate the public while keeping law enforcement and lobbyists happy. LA is a great example, the inaction of letting the contract expire in no way means that the cameras will be taken down, if no further action is taken, those cameras stay up, and law enforcement will continue to have access to all flock's alpr data.
And further it's unclear if the "data" governed in these contracts applies to the CCTV footage or the data produced for the customer by transforming the footage with models into identifying information. Given that flock has a profit incentive, it's reasonable to assume these contracts are written adversarially to maximize Flock's ability to persuade jurisdictions to sign the contracts and Flock's ability to use all of the data they harvest to maximize profit, we have enough examples of this in the 21st century to know this isn't paranoid, this is the basic playbook of all surveillancetech/adtech companies and they have all used language in contracts that is confusing to nonexperts that affords them maximum leverage to store all the data they harvest permanently and use it however they want.
Re: LAPD lets contract with surveillance giant Flock expire
#280Earlier quoted context omitted.
re: the commisioner: > In January of 2024, the Camden County Commission passed a county ordinance banning the use of all automated license plate readers in the county (a 2023 ordinance had banned all static license plate readers, but the 2024 ordinance expanded that to include all automated license plate readers). In that ordinance, commissioners cited "numerous complaints" about the cameras "and the potential of unw…
Sounds like his only recourse was to sue the county as a private citizen for failing to enforce their laws? Or something like that. Going vigilante, as much as I like it in this case, is still illegal.
My thing with this story is that no part of it has anything to do with him being a county commissioner; it's just added to the narrative because it makes it sound like he should have been authorized to do this.