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Flock Credibility Lost as It Repeatedly Lies to City Councils, Police, & Public

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Re: Flock Credibility Lost as It Repeatedly Lies to City Councils, Police, & Public

#181
post #45

People always want high trust societies. They are incredibly hard to create and incredibly easy to destroy. However, once the cameras go up, you will never ever create one there. High trust requires, well, actual trust. You can’t build real trust in a panopticon just a sickly police state facsimile of it. Society and progress moves at the speed of trust. Without it many uniquely human and beautiful things disappear.

My counter argument is that you only need 1% of the population to be bad apples in order to destroy a high trust society. Hell, even a single serial killer on the loose will make a lot of people too afraid to walk alone at night. One or two burglars can be responsible for 50% of the burglaries in a town. And so in and so forth. The other problem you have is that a lot of crime tends to be financially rewarding, so if…

> For all those reasons, you need surveillance to catch criminals and restore trust even if 99% of the population are good people.

Hard disagree. Everyone knows who the bad apples are, but the policies are made so that they get a slap on the wrist and the get sent back out on the streets.

Re: Flock Credibility Lost as It Repeatedly Lies to City Councils, Police, & Public

#182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a mischaracterization. Flock helps solve around 700k crimes in the US per year and is involved in ~10k missing person cases (this claim comes from Gemini). It's reported to assist in around ~10% of crimes. To call what they're doing "dystopian" is ignoring the upside: it's certainly saved many lives, that's undebatable.

To me the fact tha policing through profiling all citizen is already a dystopia. The fact that a private company gets paid to do it and collect the data is even worse.

What about the upside though? Is that worth ignoring? There are so many crimes that can't be solved without having a camera watching the street. There is the potential for the government profiling, but cities have governance over their own Flock data and don't share it with the federal government, unless they explicitly opt-in.

Re: Flock Credibility Lost as It Repeatedly Lies to City Councils, Police, & Public

#183
post #45

People always want high trust societies. They are incredibly hard to create and incredibly easy to destroy. However, once the cameras go up, you will never ever create one there. High trust requires, well, actual trust. You can’t build real trust in a panopticon just a sickly police state facsimile of it. Society and progress moves at the speed of trust. Without it many uniquely human and beautiful things disappear.

That's like saying you can't have a high trust society if you have locks on the doors. In other words it's preposterously wrong.

You can both have a high trust society and have public cameras for when something happens. The locks and the cameras keep honest people honest.

Re: Flock Credibility Lost as It Repeatedly Lies to City Councils, Police, & Public

#184

Even with all this said, surveillance like this is certainly going to be one of the best ways to catch criminals and reduce crime over the long term. I hope the misgivings that we have around Flock won't close the door to us ever using this type of technology, in some way, in the future.

You will never find anyone who is against these cameras saying that they don’t reduce crime. Of course they do. The problem is what you give up to have that is far, far more valuable and we can point to the “Ben Franklin” quote here about those who would give up freedom for safety deserve neither.

  You will never find anyone who is against these cameras saying that they don’t reduce crime. Of course they do.
Debatable. This is the first data I’ve seen that wasn’t paid for by Flock. https://atlpresscollective.com/2026/07/28/flock-cameras-atla...
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