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Redmond, WA, turns off Flock Safety cameras after ICE arrests

seattletimes.com

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Re: Redmond, WA, turns off Flock Safety cameras after ICE arrests

#151

Post by sergiomattei »

VWWHFSfQ wrote: post #125
SilverElfin wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Seattle is in such a tough spot. I lived there from 2001 to 2010 and left and then went back in 2018 or so and it looked like the homeless population had doubled, or tripled in the time since. And then I went back again after COVID and it was just sad. The entire downtown area is just homeless camps. There used to be a big beautiful Macy's department store on 4th Ave that's just all boarded up now. You can't browse a…

> The entire downtown area is just homeless camps.

This isn’t even remotely close to true.

> You can't browse around outside Westlake Center without being bombarded and accosted by aggressive panhandlers. Even the iconic Pike Place Market was overrun with druggies.

I live on Pike Street. There’s homeless, but it’s not “overrun” and for the year+half I’ve lived here I haven’t been “accosted by aggressive panhandlers”. These are areas with constant foot traffic.

Yes 3rd & Pike is bad, but it’s improved since then. Late at night it’s not the best—but it’s never been.

If this is truly your experience, I urge you to visit again. Seattle is a large and beautiful city with a lot to offer.

Re: Redmond, WA, turns off Flock Safety cameras after ICE arrests

#152

Post by s3p »

pton_xd wrote: post #12

What did they think would happen? Installing surveillance systems to monitor people is acceptable, as long as they're only used against the majority? I don't understand the logic here.

Who? I don't understand your logic either. I don't think anyone said this "is fine as long as it's used against the majority". Virtually every large city uses Flock. This is the norm.

Re: Redmond, WA, turns off Flock Safety cameras after ICE arrests

#153

Post by s3p »

jajuuka wrote: post #122
cipehr wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't stand this type of "journalism"/sensationalism. > Redmond’s Police Department was not among those listed in the report, and has never allowed external agencies to access their Flock data without requesting and receiving permission from the police chief first, according to an Oct. 24 statement by Lowe. So because the arrests were near a Flock Camera the "journalist" is connecting the two? Even with the stateme…

This wouldn't be the first time Flock was used by ICE and would not be the first time Flock allowed ICE backdoor access against the wishes of the local government or police department in Washington. https://jsis.washington.edu/humanrights/2025/10/21/leaving-t... So making the connection isn't a leap and seems like a pretty pragmatic action taken to reduce ICE's ability to surveil communities.

Very tinfoil hat of them.

Re: Redmond, WA, turns off Flock Safety cameras after ICE arrests

#154

Post by mschuster91 »

duped wrote: post #111
pton_xd wrote: post #12

What did they think would happen? Installing surveillance systems to monitor people is acceptable, as long as they're only used against the majority? I don't understand the logic here.

Flock is a bad actor and untrustworthy (misleading departments and officials about how data is shared/accessed, literally reinstalling cameras that cities have demanded to be taken down). Regardless of whether the local municipality wants surveillance or not, Flock is not a trustworthy company to buy it from.

> Regardless of whether the local municipality wants surveillance or not, Flock is not a trustworthy company to buy it from.

That's because the local authorities aren't the final customer. The final customer is the federal government, they want allllll the data.

Re: Redmond, WA, turns off Flock Safety cameras after ICE arrests

#155

Post by edoceo »

cipehr wrote: post #74
stocksinsmocks wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

sigh I hope LLMs can save us from ourselves. :) Maybe I need to write a news filter/browser extension that rewrites rage-bait articles to have titles and content based only on the meaningful content/facts, and less the speculation/insinuations.

I'd like that. Some sane, fact based news without all the hype and weasel words.

Re: Redmond, WA, turns off Flock Safety cameras after ICE arrests

#156

Post by VWWHFSfQ »

sergiomattei wrote: post #151
VWWHFSfQ wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seattle is in such a tough spot. I lived there from 2001 to 2010 and left and then went back in 2018 or so and it looked like the homeless population had doubled, or tripled in the time since. And then I went back again after COVID and it was just sad. The entire downtown area is just homeless camps. There used to be a big beautiful Macy's department store on 4th Ave that's just all boarded up now. You can't browse a…

> The entire downtown area is just homeless camps. This isn’t even remotely close to true. > You can't browse around outside Westlake Center without being bombarded and accosted by aggressive panhandlers. Even the iconic Pike Place Market was overrun with druggies. I live on Pike Street. There’s homeless, but it’s not “overrun” and for the year+half I’ve lived here I haven’t been “accosted by aggressive panhandlers”.…

This sounds like the perspective of a beat-down Seattlite that thinks all the problems are just "normal". I lived there for a very long time, and have lived in several other major cities since then.

Seattle's problems are not "normal". And they should not be normalized by thinking this is just how it is. It is not that way in other places.

Re: Redmond, WA, turns off Flock Safety cameras after ICE arrests

#157

Post by gmueckl »

estearum wrote: post #55
pton_xd wrote: post #12

What did they think would happen? Installing surveillance systems to monitor people is acceptable, as long as they're only used against the majority? I don't understand the logic here.

You don't understand the logic of "there are some crime problems we're willing to accept more intrusions to solve than other crime problems?" Seems like something virtually everyone believes, and all that changes is where they draw the line of balance between intrusion and safety.

The problem here is that the law and order politicians world wide pretty consistently follow a pattern that starts by demanding surveillance tools to fight very serious crimes and those crimes only. Once they get that, they eventually start another campaign to allow use of the tools that they now have access to for less serious crimes. After a few cycles of this, you get a massive erosion of citizen rights.

This is called "Salamitaktik" in Germany.

Re: Redmond, WA, turns off Flock Safety cameras after ICE arrests

#158

Post by [deleted] »

aerostable_slug wrote: post #10
fuzzylightbulb wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its a data gathering system. it takes pictures of everything that goes past it so that IF something happens, cops can search back through the system to see if/when a suspect went past that sensor. This sort of thing should be turned off regardless. I don't want my movements recorded and tracked all the time in the off chance someone might do something later. This ICE situation is the perfect example of why these acti…

In my home county they've arrested car thieves and recovered vehicles due to real-time Flock hits. It is not simply for forensic purposes. If it was a bad idea it shouldn't have been installed in the first place. Turning it off now because a few loud people assumed things that weren't true (ICE using the system) is idiotic.

[deleted]

Re: Redmond, WA, turns off Flock Safety cameras after ICE arrests

#159

Post by fngjdflmdflg »

notepad0x90 wrote: post #128
fngjdflmdflg wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hundreds of thousands to millions of people have come to the US legally each year for the last thirty years.[0] How is that impractical? In fact the share of immigrants in the US has increased significantly (by 3 times) in the last 50 years, and is above the level of the EU, and is at the highest level in the last 100 years in the US.[1][2] Even if legal immigration was set to zero, that shouldn't give people the rig…

The biggest illegal immigration source is the southern border. Yes, lots of people have immigrated, but they're a tiny fraction of those who wanted to immigrate. H-1B is a good example, it counts as immigration but it is really not, it is residency contingent on specific employment contracts. Those people with H-1B have no way to gain permanent residency without their employer sponsoring them, which would let them le…

>Yes, lots of people have immigrated, but they're a tiny fraction of those who wanted to immigrate

What point are you making here specifically? Are you saying the law is considered broken unless all or most people that want to come to the US can come? If so, the citizens (or at least the government) of the country are the ones that decide its laws, not people who want to immigrate to that country.

>H-1B is a good example, it counts as immigration but it is really not

The fist link I gave only includes green cards issued, it doesn't include H-1B visas to begin with. In any case, H-1B is not that significant a source of immigration, it seems to account for less than 1 million people in the US.[0] And it pays better than immigrating illegally in 99% of cases, most people would take that. Also by your own metric immigrating illegally isn't immigration either. I don't see what specific point you are making. Are you saying people come here illegally because they don't want to come via an H-1B visa, or are you just making a general point that immigration is not that high?

>The comparison with EU is not meaningful, especially since it isn't even a country

Then why does the worldbank include it? And why use OECD as a metric for anything if it isn't a country?

>population growth of the US and the world

The "highest in 100 years" statistic is in terms of percentage, so that shouldn't be relevant.

[0] https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/document/reports/U... "As of September 30, 2019, the H-1B authorized-to-work population is approximately 583,420."

Re: Redmond, WA, turns off Flock Safety cameras after ICE arrests

#160

Post by mothballed »

freeone3000 wrote: post #141
cipehr wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its an interesting question indeed. You're saying there might be some expectation of privacy even in public? The line here is a little different. I could point a camera out my window and record every license plate that drives by my house, and that would be allowed because its recording public activities, and the data I collect would be private—its mine from my camera. The question here is if a public/government agenc…

> I could point a camera out my window and record every license plate that drives by my house, and that would be allowed because its recording public activities, and the data I collect would be private—its mine from my camera. Maybe you shouldn’t be allowed to do that. Permanent persistent recording of the public feels very different than taking a photo every once in a while, and I feel it’s an infringement of privac…

Feels more like stalking to me when the government does it. The intent is to intimidate and put the observed parties in imminent fear of imprisonment if they do something those in power do not like. Coupling this with intentionally following them around, with the specific goal of en masse systematic targeting of those in transit, albeit with stationary cameras strategically replaced, has a lot of parallels to criminal stalking.

If you put up cameras on all the intersections on the way of say an ex went to work, and started logging when they were coming and going, it's hard for me to believe a prosecutor wouldn't be able to file that under some stalking-adjacent statute. The fact that they're doing the same thing en masse doesn't make it more generalized, it's just a larger scale of high specificity.

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