Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Woman pulled over twice after Flock-linked software connected her to homicide

guessingheadlights.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 250 posts

Re: Woman pulled over twice after Flock-linked software connected her to homicide

#161

Post by andrewla »

Animats wrote: post #19

That's not a Flock error. That's a law enforcement error. Flock isn't responsible for a bogus warrant in the system. The woman probably has a good case for damages from the police department for doing it twice. That's sloppy police work.

If a human had spotted the license plate that had been flagged with an All Points Bulletin or an Amber Alert the same outcome would have occurred. It's hard to see why Flock is even mentioned in this except for clickbait purposes. From the article, it appears that the vehicle was not misidentified; it was correctly identified but incorrectly flagged.

Re: Woman pulled over twice after Flock-linked software connected her to homicide

#162

Post by stickfigure »

aftbit wrote: post #121
stickfigure wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don't the details of the flag. In general cops err on the side of protecting themselves from danger and I can't fault them for that. How would you approach a car whose driver is suspected of homicide? Obviously someone made a mistake here but I'm not sure this has anything to do with Flock. The car had an "APB" out. We want cops to pull over "wanted" cars, right?

If I were going to approach a vehicle whose driver was suspected of homicide, I would do so in a very obvious, slow, and non-threatening manner, probably without obviously being a cop. The last thing I would want to do if someone is potentially a hair trigger threat is give them a surprise and cause them to start shooting. Police could solve a ton of these issues if they investigated before they tried to apprehend. I…

I invite you to spend a few hours watching this channel:

https://www.youtube.com/@PoliceActivity

It's pretty unvarnished; there are good shootings and bad shootings, they just post everything released. There are ~2700 videos right now. Pretty big sample.

I think you might reconsider your "If I were going to approach" statement.

Re: Woman pulled over twice after Flock-linked software connected her to homicide

#163

Post by nogridbag »

lukan wrote: post #96
shimman wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No this is bad logic. Flock is absolutely responsible and they should not be releasing or selling products that are this poorly made. Saying that the responsibility is only on the user is extremely myopic. It's also dismissing the role Flock has in how they make and design their software. If they can't handle this maybe they should be disbanded as a company or nationalized for better public control.

"Flock is absolutely responsible and they should not be releasing or selling products that are this poorly made." I am not a fan of flock, nor police surveillance state, but what could they have done better here? "Milwaukee police later admitted the alert should have been cleared out of the system days earlier, but an employee simply forgot to remove it. " The system seemed to work as intended - that numberplate was…

Yeah I'm confused. The title of the article is wrong. There was no "Flock Camera Glitch" according to the article.

The human in the loop did not properly delete an invalid license plate number from one of the databases the flock system checks against.

The issue issues are with:

1. Human in the loop

2. Third party database police use for homicide info

3. Police response

I don't see what the license plate reading technology has to do with any of this. It seems like the only thing working reliably.

Re: Woman pulled over twice after Flock-linked software connected her to homicide

#164

Post by ertgbnm »

Animats wrote: post #19

That's not a Flock error. That's a law enforcement error. Flock isn't responsible for a bogus warrant in the system. The woman probably has a good case for damages from the police department for doing it twice. That's sloppy police work.

It's a failure on all fronts. I think it's an indictment of Flock in the same way that full body scans are a scam. If you are always scanning for illnesses/crimes you will inevitably find tons and tons of false positives without ever meaningfully improving outcomes. The juice isn't worth the squeeze. Flock has been around long enough that if it had a meaningful benefit to safety, they'd be able to prove it in numbers. Instead we just have a long list of instances where it has made the world worse.

Re: Woman pulled over twice after Flock-linked software connected her to homicide

#166

Post by CalChris »

VariousPrograms wrote: post #13

The inaccuracy of our omniscient AI surveillance network isn't why I'm against it. The conclusion of this article is that we need more humans in the loop for a successful police state.

Brookfield's police chief has defended his officer's, saying they responded appropriately given the information in front of them.

This meant there were no humans in the loop.

Re: Woman pulled over twice after Flock-linked software connected her to homicide

#167

Post by cwillu »

M3L0NM4N wrote: post #66
EGreg wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or else! “Sir, we are coming by today because we are concerned you are insufficiently supportive of our public servants in uniform. It has come to our attention that you have been disparaging some members of our law enforcement divisions to groups as large as 100 people! This is part of our new thought policing initiatives, we need everyone to support our policing efforts!” “Yes, I work for Flock Online. We only inde…

This is not an issue with bad policing, but bad policy.

If your notion of good/bad policing is predicated on perfect policy, your notion of good/bad policing does not survive contact with the real world.

I expect this argument is actually a poison pill for some anarchist or libertarian fantasy of “if the laws fit onto a single sheet of paper all these problems would just go away”.

Re: Woman pulled over twice after Flock-linked software connected her to homicide

#168

Post by fedpost »

consumer451 wrote: post #36
nemomarx wrote: post #9

Why did they need to have guns drawn and that many cops, even if the flag had been correct? A car involved in a homicide investigation doesn't mean it's even being driven by the suspect. It's not a positive ID at all

I am currently in the countryside, outside of the USA. I speak to folks about the USA sometimes, and guns come up. We are known for that. They think they want them. I get it... they do sound cool. I try to explain that in the USA, the ratio of guns to people is far above 1:1. Therefore, if I was a police officer approaching any car, I would assume that the driver had a gun. That reality increases the chances of bad t…

What if we just didn't have as many police interactions? They love pulling people over because it let's them run everyone for warrants.

Re: Woman pulled over twice after Flock-linked software connected her to homicide

#169

Post by jkestner »

aftbit wrote: post #143
Animats wrote: post #19

That's not a Flock error. That's a law enforcement error. Flock isn't responsible for a bogus warrant in the system. The woman probably has a good case for damages from the police department for doing it twice. That's sloppy police work.

You should read Normal Accidents. "Human error" is an excuse. It isn't really actionable. Instead of trying to fix the "human error", you must design the system such that it does not permit life-threatening errors. Sometimes that means a tradeoff in terms of efficiency, cost, or something else. Often this tradeoff is not one that people in charge of the system are willing to make, unless they are forced to do so by a…

A human must always be held responsible, but a tool must expose its limitations to enable human judgement. I put this in the same basket as Autopilot, which already fails with its name.

I’ve seen too many cases where people intuitively trust the magic technology instead of verifying it. The tool shouldn’t not present itself as magic or AI or whatever the current term is.

Re: Woman pulled over twice after Flock-linked software connected her to homicide

#170

Post by exe34 »

Xirdus wrote: post #102
jvanderbot wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. A perfect surveillance state is still wrong by design. If you dont accept this, consider the perfect surveillance state under president N, used by president N+1 given the inevitable flipflop in party control.

Unfortunately, the Trump presidency has conclusively proved the "imagine if your opponent was in power" argument doesn't work. Everybody says Trump should be impeached, nobody says the office of the president should be deprived of the powers Trump used to do the things he should be impeached for.

I think that's because he doesn't have those powers. He only wields them on behalf of Congress, which has decided not to defend that which belongs to it.
Post reply on HN