veec_cas_tant

When the police ask for video evidence, they simply ask. They do not need a warrant. They might need a subpoena to force someone to hand it over, but I’m guessing that’s incredibly rare because people and businesses with cameras generally want to help. The issue is the incredible waste of time and money. It is incredibly inefficient to send a team out to collect footage instead of simply checking Flock, Axon, etc. No doubt, that hurdle prevents abuse, but it also hinders legitimate investigations. I would prefer strong safeguards against abuse while still allowing for real investigative wins.

Slippery slope from cameras on public streets to giving contractors unfettered access to your phone’s camera! Why even let the government investigate crimes at all if something bad might happen in the future?

Instead of indulging in hyperbole, why not talk about the great evidence an ALPR outside a bar could provide with current technology? It’s absolutely a great idea. I hope that AI gets good enough to tell whether someone is plastered; that would save a lot of lives lost to selfish assholes.

Do you think every store in the Western world is just dumb for installing cameras? Cities like NYC, London, Singapore, etc.? I can't believe the number of people who want to argue that video footage is useless.

If you drive through any commercial area, you're captured by dozens of cameras. There are over a dozen doorbell cameras on my residential block alone. Cameras are absolutely ubiquitous, for good reason. In the United States, at least, it would be foolish to assume that driving on a public street is anything resembling privacy.

In the USA? Any café you go to is reasonably likely to have cameras, both inside and outside. If you mean driving to a doctor's office, you probably pass by hundreds of cameras along the way: video doorbells, dash cams, Teslas, Waymos, gas stations, ATMs, traffic-flow cameras, etc. If you are in one of the many cities with tens of thousands of existing non-Flock cameras, you are likely passing many more.

I don't disagree: bad policing is a terrible issue. That does not mean we should prevent investigating stolen vehicles because a human might enter the characters incorrectly. I don't even understand how this story happened:

> In fact, four other 34 ## DTM cars were being tracked around Minnesota that week, according to Officer Ganshyn

Maybe we need even more AI, because I think Claude would probably flag this as goofy. No human involved thought that it was wild they would stop something like 100 or 1,296 vehicles?

Obviously an unpopular opinion on this site, but I wish we had speed cameras, red-light cameras, and ALPRs everywhere. Cars are incredibly dangerous and large numbers of people drive them like absolute lunatics. There should be absolutely no expectation of privacy when using public streets. That position doesn't even account for the footage helping immensely with other investigations.

Probably because there’s a new Flock-bashing post every day or two on here, and there’s barely any tech relevance for a global audience.

Does OCR accuracy even matter much here? I would expect, and maybe this is unrealistic, that anything even close to “this plate represents a stolen vehicle” would have at least one human involved. If I send in video evidence and someone just uses iOS OCR on a screenshot without checking it, I am definitely not blaming Apple.

There seems to be a very sizable number of people who believe cameras should not be used as evidence because the footage could implicate an innocent person or be misinterpreted. OCR can be wrong, just as a person can make a mistake or fat-finger a data entry, and so on. We should absolutely expect law enforcement to understand the gravity of their actions and use this technology appropriately. I don't agree that getting rid of cameras is the answer here, far from it.

Yeah legally there might be a difference, not my area. The question was whether I’d be fine with a GPS tracker and the answer is I have opted in already with numerous GPS tracking devices, both in my car and on my person. I don’t believe for one second that someone against cameras would be okay with a personal police shadow everywhere even if the Supreme Court has okayed that.

Every car I have owned in the last decade has a GPS tracker built in and I carry one in my pocket and on my wrist. I don’t believe any warrant is required for police to follow someone, so they wouldn’t even need the tracker!

> One that uses previously unimaginable technology to circumvent the spirit of the Fourth Amendment, which consistency tells us would have otherwise explicitly protected us from such abuse

Is it the AI or the number of cameras? It can’t be cameras in general, and I struggle to believe it’s the number of cameras because we have so many cities with tens of thousands of cameras already. So it’s just that it became too efficient and instead, for any investigation, we should pay a team to spend hundreds of man hours collecting and reviewing footage that a computer could have finished immediately?

There are police and security all over popular areas, nobody is alarmed. I’m guessing the average person feels safer. Would airports really feel safer without cameras and security?

I have never heard anyone try and argue that video evidence is not effective. That’s a pretty big stretch.

There is nothing reversed with Flock. There is a crime scene, they see who was entering or leaving and work from there. Without plate readers it takes a team of people many hours, that’s the difference. You can’t know who had anything to do with the crime without investigating, that’s the definition of the word!

> … we're invading their privacy

Who expects privacy driving on public roads? In any sort of developed area you are driving past cameras on every single street. Every Uber has a dash cam, the Teslas are recording (sometimes?), every police car has a camera, etc.

They ask and everybody turns the footage over. They need nothing at all to ask for the footage, it just takes a large amount of man hours and ends up producing grainy, low-res footage. Everybody knows how important video footage is, so the real issue does seem to be that Flock makes it too easy?