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At least 25 Flock cameras have been destroyed in five states since April 2025

stateofsurveillance.org

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Re: At least 25 Flock cameras have been destroyed in five states since April 2025

#311

Post by eximius »

delichon wrote: post #300
eximius wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is against the law, but I would wager it is morally coherent to smash them.

It's more coherent with moralities that put a relatively low value on property rights and rule of law.

On both points, sure, trivially, if I do not value property or the rule of law, I will not care about destroying it. But obviously we're talking about the moral value of the implications more than the direct value of the camera. Do keep up.

On the second point specifically, that's actually much more interesting! If one values the rule of law, then you would actually want your laws to be morally aligned! Otherwise, the conflict of the law with morality _devalues_ the rule of law. Valuing rule of law does not imply only some sort of legalistic value of laws unto themselves, but of the value of a society with good laws, enforced well. This incentivizes analysis and evolution _of the law_ and, to some degree, forcing conflict to bring about those changes.

Re: At least 25 Flock cameras have been destroyed in five states since April 2025

#312

Post by stickfigure »

new_account_100 wrote: post #186
bklosky wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Poverty alleviation is not a silver bullet (or anywhere close) for crime reduction, as nice as it would be if that were true.

Seems like it would help a lot, even if it wouldn't solve the issue. I think we should forge ahead on trying reduce poverty, and I suspect that doing so would correlate with reductions in crime.

Over generations that will probably help, sure. In the mean time...

Re: At least 25 Flock cameras have been destroyed in five states since April 2025

#313

Post by Levitz »

turlockmike wrote: post #25

This website and article promote the destruction of property. If you disagree with something, you can engage civily, encourage people to vote with you, run for elections. Violence is not the answer.

The amount of justifications I'm seeing in this comment section perfectly suited for ICE to destroy any camera recording them is actually insane.

Re: At least 25 Flock cameras have been destroyed in five states since April 2025

#314

Post by bko »

idle_zealot wrote: post #296
bko wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think there is "widespread concern". I'd be willing to bet >99% of people don't know what Flock is. But if you go ask people, in a non-duplicitous way, whether you want less of a police presence or curtail use technology to solve crimes, most people will not want less police. Here is an example > When asked whether they want the police to spend more time, the same amount of time or less time than they current…

Black people wanting more police presence is a well known fact, as is the fact that increased police presence in their communities results in the police arresting and killing a lot of innocent people. This reflects a world where policing is broken, but it's the only discussed mechanism to reduce crime. In parallel the perception of crime rates has become totally unhinged from actual crime statistics. If you ask an av…

> If you ask an average person whether they think crime has gone up or down they're likely to say "up by a lot." Which is basically uniformly untrue.

If direct experience and official stats conflict, it's usually the official stats that are wrong.

Yes, I agree things like murder has gone down (especially since it's recent peak in 2020/2021)

But in terms of lawlessness, there is a lot less law and order in most large cities. There were always homeless people in my lifetime, but the fentanyl zombies is relatively new. Or let me give you another example, consider Eric Garner who was killed on Staten Island in 2014 after a confrontation for selling loose untaxed cigarettes.

Today I walk by the same person parked out every single day, with a sign selling loose cigarettes along with weed. This is breaking a number of laws in a highly policed area in NYC. However there is no will to prevent do anything about it.

> It's not a luxury belief to grapple with reality instead of subjecting yourself to a false dichotomy where you either have police prowling the streets or gangs doing the same. Don't give this "common sense" crap, you know very well that intuition fails all the time, especially when applied to incredibly complex topics like governance or social policy.

No, this isn't a complicated issue. People get arrested regularly but they get let out to re-offend. here's a stat:

Among persons admitted to state prison in 2014 across 34 states, 77% had five or more prior arrests in their criminal history, including the arrest that resulted in their prison sentence... The number of prisoners that have had 15 or more prior arrests is over 26%

How about common sense policy, after your 15th arrest, you stay in prison until you're an old man and relatively harmless to society.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Eric_Garner

https://mleverything.substack.com/p/acceptance-of-crime-is-a...

Re: At least 25 Flock cameras have been destroyed in five states since April 2025

#315

Post by smsm42 »

patcon wrote: post #191
taylodl wrote: post #175

25 cameras destroyed over the course of a year, and more than half were destroyed by a single person. This doesn't appear to be a widespread concern the headline makes it out to be.

I feel that part of the insight is that many people reading this story may want it to be true as stated. All the upvotes and it's propagation in networks may lossily lay this claim (of course debatable) The beauty of surveillance is that it mutes the ability to cover the distance between desire and action. Which is another way to state "it has a chilling effect" As I understand, part of any story being shared is that…

> I feel that part of the insight is that many people reading this story may want it to be true as stated.

People that are writing this story surely would. They, of course, wouldn't do it themselves - I mean, you could be arrested and lose your job and go to jail... but if somebody else would bear those consequences, then of course it's fine!

> Which is another way to state "it has a chilling effect"

Yes, that's kind of the point. The question is what does it chill. If it is chilling criminal activities, it's good, if it's chilling legal activities, it's bad.

Re: At least 25 Flock cameras have been destroyed in five states since April 2025

#316

Post by ssl-3 »

peyton wrote: post #193
cortesoft wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am interested to hear why the cameras give you peace of mind? I'd be curious to know what situation you imagine where these cameras help protect you or your family from any harm.

The other day somebody sped through my neighborhood ignoring all red lights and lane markers. It would be cool to deter this behavior before somebody gets hurt. The police aren’t patrolling 24/7.

It would indeed be cool to deter that kind of stuff; I agree.

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. And I think it's fair to say that deterrence works similarly to prevention, in this context.

How does the presence of Flock cameras serve to deter (or prevent) the kind of behavior you describe?

Or, as a corollary question: How does the absence of Flock cameras serve to encourage it?

Re: At least 25 Flock cameras have been destroyed in five states since April 2025

#317

Post by bko »

dualvariable wrote: post #306
bko wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think there is "widespread concern". I'd be willing to bet >99% of people don't know what Flock is. But if you go ask people, in a non-duplicitous way, whether you want less of a police presence or curtail use technology to solve crimes, most people will not want less police. Here is an example > When asked whether they want the police to spend more time, the same amount of time or less time than they current…

Ask them what they think about cameras run by private companies being used to spy on them and their neighbors and see what the poll results look like. Just because people want policing doesn't mean they want the kind of policing that we seem to be getting. And that article you cite is a pretty good example of this. The title is: Black Americans Want Police to Retain Local Presence The bottom half is: Black Americans…

Let me introduce you to Ring security cameras...

Police cameras are actually very popular, as is private security. I've even heard rich people voluntarily pay private security with guns (!) to protect them.

You're living in fantasy land my friend. No one outside of your bubble thinks about things this way. People are trying to live their lives and raise their kids. People don't like this chaos and have very little empathy for the few percent of people that terrorize their neighborhoods.

Re: At least 25 Flock cameras have been destroyed in five states since April 2025

#319

Post by martin-t »

megaman821 wrote: post #182
martin-t wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that's why we need more direct democracy. People (correctly) feel like they have very little power over laws which affect them day to day. If someone represents me, then logically I should have the right to vote directly instead of him, or remove him at any point.

That's why planes should be flown using direct democracy. Passengers (correctly) feel like they have little power over the maneuvers planes make and affect them moment to moment. Representational democracy is far superior. Decisions need to be weighed against both their popularity and their effect with input from experts and other affected parties.

See, with a plane, you get to choose which one you board.

And the pilot is not a random guy from the street with no education or at best a completely unrelated degree. And he's probably not 90 years old. And he's the engineer, mechanic, ATC, pilot, stewerd, advertiser, accountant and TSA in one person.

Direct democracy shouldn't be the only change, obviously. As you correctly point out the issue is when uninformed, uneducated and not sufficiently intelligent people make decisions for everyone.

The issue with direct democracy is that you're describing a highly dimensional vector (your opinion) by picking one of a small set of predefined points (the political parties). Some countries only have 2. That's obviously stupid.

---

For example we should weight votes by how informed they are. How to determine that? That's a difficult question. But shooting down the idea does move us closer to a solution.

Making voting indirect only has the effect that all nuance is lost. You still get dumb people voting for populists, fascists, narcissists, rapists, etc.

Re: At least 25 Flock cameras have been destroyed in five states since April 2025

#320

Post by [deleted] »

eximius wrote: post #311
delichon wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's more coherent with moralities that put a relatively low value on property rights and rule of law.

On both points, sure, trivially, if I do not value property or the rule of law, I will not care about destroying it. But obviously we're talking about the moral value of the implications more than the direct value of the camera. Do keep up. On the second point specifically, that's actually much more interesting! If one values the rule of law, then you would actually want your laws to be morally aligned! Otherwise, th…

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