Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or just cut the power?
They have little solar panels.
plastic bag!
LAPD lets contract with surveillance giant Flock expire
321–330 of 439 posts
Re: LAPD lets contract with surveillance giant Flock expire
#322Are there any privacy-first security camera provider where it's the city that manages data access and uses it purely for local law enforcement purposes?
It's astonishing to me that the largest tech hubs in the world do not have the money to invest in developing a camera system that is sovereignly owned by the city. There are a lot of very talented engineers who would work on a project like this. Also simply putting a person in between the information would certainly reduce the profile for abuse with stalking and harassing people
> Invest in developing a camera system that is sovereignly owned by the city.
you unrealistic expectations of a city government's ability to do anything different than it has always done.
Re: LAPD lets contract with surveillance giant Flock expire
#323Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure, the issues there are also not particularly nuanced; prosectors rely on cops to arrest people and provide evidence for them to do their job, so they're incentivized to keep a good working relationship with them (i.e. by not prosecuting them, especially for things that end up helping them secure convictions, even if they're illegal)
I agree. The issues arent super nuanced (and are pretty "blatant") But I do think the nuance of "who/what should we point our finger at" is important. Because like we see in this thread, the finger is being pointed at qualified immunity when it almost never is the actual issue for a given injustice, and fixing it will not get rid of the thing you are mad about. Fixing it would go a long way to resetting some cultural…
Fair enough. My instinct is that qualified immunity is such a common target because it's not an emergent property of the system that would potentially require structural changes to fix, and that lawsuits are often the only remedy people have for the structural problems like the ones we're talking about. Being able to "have your day in court" is at least theoretically the way that regular people can get justice when the system fails them, so when the system adds another layer of protection onto itself to prevent that with virtually no constitutional basis via judicial review (and therefore could also theoretically be removed in the same manner by a future court more sympathetic to victims of injustice perpetrated by law enforcement), it's kind of hard not to fixate on that.
Re: LAPD lets contract with surveillance giant Flock expire
#324I don't understand flock cameras in high crime areas. Every time somebody commits a heinous crime it's always like "they were arrested 72 times and were well known by the police" What's the point in helping the police catch criminals when they don't do anything after the fact!
Maybe the police are part of the problem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_LASD_deputy_gangs
Definitely, but they represent the opposite problem. The thing about the LASD and LAPD is that they are... extrajudicial. It's not "They catch a gang member and do nothing", but rather "They arrest a gang member with no valid reason to do so, and tortured/killed them over some street shit." Sometimes it's not a gang member at all. The end of the CRASH unit started when an officer thought he'd flash gang signs and try to kill a plainclothes officer, all in a fit of road rage. Who knows how many times that happened to a random civilian and it got blamed on gangbangers (who happened to not be police)
Re: LAPD lets contract with surveillance giant Flock expire
#325Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 a…
Joe Arpaio was not removed from office. He was charged with contempt but was never incarcerated. He was pardoned and then lost his next election.
Re: LAPD lets contract with surveillance giant Flock expire
#326Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just out of curiosity: doesn't the US have any laws against private surveillance of public spaces? As a European I find this quite irritating (not saying we do not have problems as well with more and more cams installed and risks related to an increasing number of e.g. parking lot cams)
No, you don’t have an expectation of privacy on a public roadway, public parking lot, etc.
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Re: LAPD lets contract with surveillance giant Flock expire
#327Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 a…
or just start fining Flock per camera per day for a brazillion dollars. Sheriff compliance or not, that's still in their power.
And then get a order to take the camera to satisfy the debt
Re: LAPD lets contract with surveillance giant Flock expire
#328Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder why we aren't addressing the real problem which seems to be cops behaving completely unethically. Their job is about enforcing the system that codifies our societies agreed up and codified rules of ethics. They should be obsessed with this the same way people here obsess over system performance, correctness, etc! If we cannot trust them with the very basics of ethical behavior they are absolutely in the wron…
Cameras do address that problem. We live in a country where people go to jail for life because two witnesses they swear they saw pookie shoot dee dee. Where cops beat the hell out of citizens and say they were resisting arrest. That Pookie can show a video from a flock camera showing him somewhere else is a massive boost to his civil liberties. Same with whatever poor sap gets beat by the cops.
> That Pookie can show a video from a flock camera showing him somewhere else is a massive boost to his civil liberties. Same with whatever poor sap gets beat by the cops.
Not even remotely. The US is already at the stage where citizens can be brutally murdered, have said murder filmed at multiple angles, and have the officers involved get away with it.
Your civil liberties are irrelevant when we can just redefine and expand what it means to endanger a police officer. Or have the officers bypass the judicial system entirely.
Camera footage will only be used against you, not for you.
Re: LAPD lets contract with surveillance giant Flock expire
#329Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know much of anything about any other jurisdictions. I'm saying that my municipality took the cameras down with zero drama. I'm on one of its commissions with oversight on this. (More precisely: there was drama, but it was all public drama from residents who didn't want the cameras taken down.)
Curious. Why didn’t they want them taken down?
Everybody is filter-bubbled and people on HN are profoundly filter-bubbled. Wait'll you find what a huge number of ordinary people think about NSA surveillance.
The cameras apprehend criminals. I can show with evidence that the juice isn't worth the squeeze, and in fact that the cameras had the effect of tasking our police force with doing municipal debt collection for Melrose Park and Maywood, at the cost of 5-7 hours of sworn officer time per "failure to appear warrant" arrest. But supporters of the cameras will point to multiple stolen car interdictions and recovered firearms.
If you go into these kinds of things assuming that the median resident of a municipality is anti-policing, you're already way, way off. And I find when I talk to anti-Flock advocates (that is: people who have "anti-Flock" as part of their personal identity, not just a person chosen at random who would happen to answer "no" to "should we ALPR") that many of them are operating from anti-policing premises, and so these kinds of responses are very surprising to them.
(Totally reasonable for your reaction to this to be "whoah, that was a lot more than I asked for", I just feel like I've been in these kinds of conversations a lot. It's not personal.)
Re: LAPD lets contract with surveillance giant Flock expire
#330Honestly, if Flock forces people to enforce speed limits and follow the rules of the road, its expansion can't come fast enough. I realize how contrarian of a view this is to the mainstream, but car accidents are a leading cause of death worldwide, and it's my belief that many of them wouldn't have happened if driving rules were respected.