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Flock used >100 times to track veteran who recorded traffic stop

Flock used >100 times to track veteran who recorded traffic stop

bbatsell

Comments (156)

  • claaams
    How was there ever any doubt that these cameras and this access would be used in this way?I personally blame the lack of accountability that police have in the US and the lack of public oversight into how departments operate.
  • jmward01
    When people believe they are being watched they act differently. Essentially you are coercing them. People need a reasonable sense of privacy to be able to act freely so, to me, this means that privacy is a central requirement of freedom.There are legitimate reasons for some ability to conduct surveillance, but without a cost any surveillance method becomes mass surveillance. That cost must be human, it must scale in human time, or it turns into mass surveillance since without a human cost all it takes is one person and one button to watch one or a hundred thousand people.Technologies like flock have no human scaling cost. They run 24/7/365 and make surveilling one person or hundreds of thousands of people as easy as pushing a button. There is no human scaling cost to them. That means that all it takes to abuse a massive portion of the population is one person and one action. The probability of abuse, abuse which harms a population as a whole, therefore approaches 100% no matter how 'good' the controls are on it. All mass surveillance technologies have this fundamental flaw. The consequence of that abuse is that people, rightfully, will believe that they are being watched, legitimately or not, 24/7/365. The harm here is clear. A society that is under mass surveillance is a society that is having its basic freedoms continuously attacked.Mass surveillance, surveillance without a direct human cost that scales with the level of surveillance, is not compatible with any definition of 'freedom'. Or, to sum all this up, every argument about how a system like this could be made better to limit harm is a red herring because technologies like Flock have a fundamental flaw that is incompatible with any definition of a free society.
  • wateralien
    Surely access to footage can be gated behind some sort of expedited digital court warrant?I always think of that scene in Minority Report where 3 judges are conferenced in live when a “vision” arrived.Because if used properly and lawfully these cameras can be useful to keep people safe. Including from the cops.
  • tostrstrudel
  • theturtletalks
    Was just reading into this and it’s infuriating. He was recording another person’s traffic stop in a parking lot. Once the stop was done, he walks to his car. The same officer goes to his car and “pulls him over.” The vet says that you can’t pull someone over in a private parking lot, that’s not a legal stop. Doesn’t matter, he’s arrested and car towed.He’s kept in jail for 5 hrs before being released for it not being a legal stop just like the vet said. Then that officer tracked him thru flock over 100 times for some personal vendetta.
  • venusenvy47
    How can we find more information about when we can refuse police requests as is mentioned here? It seems like the public needs to know about when we can legally do this. "Shayhorn's supervisor informed him shortly after the arrest that he'd, in fact, illegally stopped Jones, and he therefore could not compel Jones to produce his identification"
  • mrluckysmith
    I think Flock could be very useful to track actual criminals. However, any queries to the system must require a warrant and publicly available track record.
  • thangalin
  • GiorgioG
    Flock is the most successful and well-known company doing this, however they’re not the only one. We need to be really careful to push back against the use of this technology as a whole and not fixate only on Flock. My town doesn’t use Flock, it uses another company’s tech…it’s no better! Don’t give the politicians an out.
  • spongebobstoes
    surveillance technology is not going away. we need to mitigate the downsideswhat systems could be changed or created to prevent abuse of power?
  • jmclnx
    Hopefully he gets a big enough payment that makes other jurisdictions remove these cameras.
  • layer8
    The fact that the victim is a Navy veteran should be immaterial here. People shouldn’t be any less upset if he wasn’t.
  • spenrose
    My mental model:1. Policing is yet another example of Baumol’s effect[1]; sectors where automation lags become expensive2. Policing can be automated effectively, including via Flock:> Hunters Point rapper Dreamllife Rizzy described how police tech has made it more difficult to get away with bipping and other crimes. “Crime in San Francisco, period, that shit over with, brother,” the rapper said. “They got drones, hella shit.” He described how Flock cameras clock the plates on a stolen car and send an alert to police stations, which send drones to follow the vehicle.[2]3. Policing, like major surgery, ambitious construction, military invasions, and other high-consequence endeavors, is not immune to perfidy, incompetence, or other human weaknesses.4. Argument by implicit synecdoche (here is an example of an abuse, therefore the general behavior is abusive) is ubiquitous and invalid; you need to actually collect wide evidence and weigh major tradeoffs. How does Flock affect total crime rates? Total abuse rates? That only matters if you think that we should be open to the possibility that widespread use of Flock cameras might be good.5. WRT privacy and policing-the-police in particular, there is a small but highly vocal community of libertarians whose perspective is sharp, detailed, and not reflective of broader society’s perspective except in motte-and-bailey form, and who will never be persuaded by evidence because for them what matters are the principles (n.b.: this observation is not per se a criticism — sometimes principles should trump evidence around tradeoffs).6. HN’s 10^5 (?) active commenters include 10^4(?) members of that libertarian vanguard7. Everyone has heard all the libertarian and contra-libertarian arguments going back decades; no one is learning from yet another go-round[1] https://acjsissons.medium.com/the-baumol-effect-not-a-diseas...[2] https://sfstandard.com/2026/08/13/rest-peace-bip-city/?utm_s...
  • jauntywundrkind
    If only there was a more general way to find the lying sneaking power tripping police officers. Flock is turning out to be quite useful for society, in this one very specific way. Data to watch the watchmen.
  • ksudb
    [dead]
  • johnmlussier
    Don't remove the cameras - make sure they're used legally and bad apples don't ruin a good thing:Four different places, four different children rescued by use of Flock cameras.https://kfdm.com/news/local/flock-camera-teamwork-credited-w...https://www.foxcarolina.com/2026/07/31/kidnapped-mother-son-...https://www.whsv.com/2026/08/01/deputy-uses-flock-cameras-fi...https://abc3340.com/news/local/moody-police-say-flock-camera...Want to track latest on what flock cameras did? https://flockstopscrime.com