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All of Winona Police Department's Flock cameras cut down and stolen

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Re: All of Winona Police Department's Flock cameras cut down and stolen

#181

Post by ricardobayes »

AlotOfReading wrote: post #114
ricardobayes wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Do you have any hard numbers from your community on how many cases had flock as crucial to resolving the case? When my community banned them, the police were only able to offer a single vehicle theft case as positive evidence, but the data was being sent to police stations and locally unpopular federal agencies clear across the country. We could have spent the municipal budget on giving the victims a new car with far…

For disclosure I'm not in the US and I'm not well versed how things are set up over there. However the cameras seemed to have worked, here: crime has dropped by 10% year on year.

Re: All of Winona Police Department's Flock cameras cut down and stolen

#182

Post by topspin »

autoexec wrote: post #35
accountrequired wrote: post #25

it is bad to see theft of physical property as a good thing

It wasn't private property. It belonged to the people and the people decided they didn't want it. It's bad to see people being forced to break the law to retain their freedom, but it's a good thing that folks are still willing to fight for it.

"but it's a good thing that folks are still willing to fight for it"

This is at least as likely to be theft as much as civic action. There are far easier ways one might permanently inhibit these cameras than cutting them down and taking them away.

Re: All of Winona Police Department's Flock cameras cut down and stolen

#183

Post by SoftTalker »

avree wrote: post #46
ryandvm wrote: post #23

Curious about the official YCombinator stance on this extremely unpopular YCombinator-backed startup (unpopular here at HN anyway).

The official YCombinator stance is that Flock was a huge success as an investment - which it seemingly was, given that they managed to sign deals with what seems like every tiny municipality/sheriff/government organization. https://www.ycombinator.com/library/N0-unpopular-ideas-that-...

Because for police departments, they are a huge benefit and well worth the cost. A lot of crimes have been solved with Flock cameras. Stolen cars, or cars linked to criminal activity have been tracked and located. Missing persons have been found.

None of that justifies the massive invasion of privacy that these cameras represent. You don't have a right to not be individually surveiled in public, but that doesn't mean it's OK for the government to warrantlessly track everyone everywhere they go 24x7, or to do it by proxy with a private company such as Flock. The potential for abuse is just too high, and we've seen many cases of that too.

Re: All of Winona Police Department's Flock cameras cut down and stolen

#184

Post by ranger_danger »

joe_the_user wrote: post #132
advisedwang wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Camera data is owned by the police department and permanently deleted after 30 days There's so much going on in that sentence! What a thing of pure PR beauty. What does "owned" mean in this sentence? Probably fairly little. What data does it even refer to? Just the actual video footage? Does the statement include derived data like license plate reads or ML models? And surely if data is flagged as relevant to an inv…

Yes, the police own the videos they take of you? Like LLM companies own the models they digest from the texts they don't own?

I believe they're implying that Flock still has access to it even if the police technically retain legal ownership.

Re: All of Winona Police Department's Flock cameras cut down and stolen

#185

Post by mohamedkoubaa »

john_strinlai wrote: post #165
mohamedkoubaa wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PSA: third world means non-aligned in the cold war. It's use in 2026 is meaningless at best.

> It's use in 2026 is meaningless at best. not really. the word has evolved enough that dictionaries and wikipedia acknowledge the common-day usage of "underdeveloped"

Wikipedia and dictionaries are wrong. It has a different usage than "underdeveloped" and that usage at best doesn't have a clear meaning, and at worst does have a clear derogatory meaning

Re: All of Winona Police Department's Flock cameras cut down and stolen

#186

Post by SoftTalker »

mlfreeman wrote: post #163
AlotOfReading wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any hard numbers from your community on how many cases had flock as crucial to resolving the case? When my community banned them, the police were only able to offer a single vehicle theft case as positive evidence, but the data was being sent to police stations and locally unpopular federal agencies clear across the country. We could have spent the municipal budget on giving the victims a new car with far…

And vehicle theft doesn't even need cameras logging EVERYONE to Flock's databases - just cameras that only report in to the mothership when they see a plate on an internal "most-wanted" list. Person reports car stolen, cop adds car info to plate reader most wanted list, most wanted list is transmitted to cameras, cameras don't let plate readings leave RAM unless they're 90% or higher confident that it's on the most w…

Are the cameras doing the plate recognition and OCR locally? Or (my guess) they are uploading images to a Flock data center where they are processed and then the plate number and location data saved to a database where active search queries are processed?

Re: All of Winona Police Department's Flock cameras cut down and stolen

#188

Post by john_strinlai »

mohamedkoubaa wrote: post #185
john_strinlai wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's use in 2026 is meaningless at best. not really. the word has evolved enough that dictionaries and wikipedia acknowledge the common-day usage of "underdeveloped"

Wikipedia and dictionaries are wrong. It has a different usage than "underdeveloped" and that usage at best doesn't have a clear meaning, and at worst does have a clear derogatory meaning

>Wikipedia and dictionaries are wrong.

sorry, but no one is taking some random HN user's definition over established dictionaries on what a word means.

perhaps you can convince enough people that the word will evolve into whatever you imagine it to mean, and then the dictionaries will be updated to match.

Re: All of Winona Police Department's Flock cameras cut down and stolen

#189

Post by s1artibartfast »

nchmy wrote: post #80
fourseventy wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you own a $20,000 car and I steal it, is your loss not $20k? (excluding depreciation etc)

Sure, if we're talking about total "wealth". Towns might put the cameras on their balance sheet (unless they're just leased in some way), but I strongly doubt that any towns are selling their flock cameras. Moreover, the quote was about budget - it only hits the budget if they replace them. Likewise, if someone steals your car, it only hits your budget if you replace it or otherwise incur other expenses (taxi, etc).…

If you are leasing your car, you are absolutely on the hook to the dealership.

The city is basically leasing the cameras, and responsible for their cost.

Re: All of Winona Police Department's Flock cameras cut down and stolen

#190

Post by autoexec »

topspin wrote: post #182
autoexec wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It wasn't private property. It belonged to the people and the people decided they didn't want it. It's bad to see people being forced to break the law to retain their freedom, but it's a good thing that folks are still willing to fight for it.

"but it's a good thing that folks are still willing to fight for it" This is at least as likely to be theft as much as civic action. There are far easier ways one might permanently inhibit these cameras than cutting them down and taking them away.

> There are far easier ways one might permanently inhibit these cameras than cutting them down and taking them away.

Like what? Setting them on fire or shooting them might be easier, but it's more dangerous.

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