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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

#201

Post by advisedwang »

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?

There's no such thing as legal ownership of data. There's IP rights, contracts and innumerable data regulation laws, but not actual ownership. "Ownership" here just provides a vague cover that sounds like something definite but is not.

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

#202

Post by phoghed »

ricardobayes wrote: post #181
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…

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.

I can’t find any evidence that Spain has deployed Flock or any Flock-like system. Do you have an article? I know they have plate cameras in Europe, but the traditional ANPR systems, speed traps and whatnot, they’ve had everywhere. That’s not the same class of system imo.

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

#203

Post by mohamedkoubaa »

Eueudhsbsj32 wrote: post #121
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.

The use and meaning of words shift over time. Today, third world just means less developed.

In 1995 it meant that. Today it is meaningless

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

#204

Post by altairprime »

amanaplanacanal wrote: post #142
jgbuddy wrote: post #12

Find flock cameras near you here! https://maps.deflock.org/

Heads up though: not every camera on that map is Flock. In my town, only a couple of Flock cameras are in place, on private property (Lowes is a big user). All the others are owned by my local police department.

Hopefully they had the wits to put a sticker on them saying as much!

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

#205

Post by rconti »

stickfigure wrote: post #154
ryandvm wrote: post #23

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

[flagged]

Flock seems to be pretty unpopular, internet-wide, in bipartisan tech/very online worlds; feels like 90% to me.

Where things start coming into balance a bit more is among the Nextdoor paranoia crowd.

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

#206

Post by thomastjeffery »

SoftTalker wrote: post #192
thomastjeffery wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Police use the technology to investigate crimes such as hit-and-runs and to locate missing persons. Disgusting copy. We all know that's not their primary function.

I for one do believe that is their primary function. However good intentions don't justify violating our rights or accepting the (demonstrated) potential for abuse.

It might be their intended use (from a police department's perspective), but it's certainly not their intended function.

Flock collects these images, and uses them to train statistical models, and sells those models to police departments as a one-click crime solving solution.

That means that their primary function is to passively aggregate driver behavior into an automated judgement system, where the entire judicial system (designed to check and balance itself) is laundered away. Flock cameras exist to fundamentally replace police work, not to assist with it.

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

#209

Post by topspin »

autoexec wrote: post #190
topspin wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

Assuming the enclosure isn't armored (I wouldn't know...) a ladder and a power drill with a long bit would make very short work of these.

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

#210

Post by s1artibartfast »

Henchman21 wrote: post #172
stackghost wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Police officers are also statistically more likely to abuse their spouses. Don't let the women you care about get involved with cops.

60% of the spouses of police officers report being victims of domestic violence. The other 40% are too scared to answer honestly. Seems like that might be indicative of a problem?

Not necessarily. One can accept that violent people do a violent job and commit violence in their home life.

Anyways, that study that everyone loves to cite is like 30 or 40 years old and unreplicated.

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