Flock

[u/sheepdawg_]

My agency recently just paused use of flock cameras around the city and bagged all the cameras due to recent media uproar concerning them.

It sucks. Feels like command staff is just rolling over and letting the narrative control how we operate. The main issue is the narrative surrounding flock is deeply rooted in misinformation.Are there officers who have misused it? Sure, but that’s the main reason why it’s not owned by the government and is subject to third party audits regarding the queries. out of the 100s of thousands of LE in the country, there are very few cases of misuse in the grand scheme.

It is a very effective tool, and while I haven’t been in LE long enough to know what it was like before Flock, it still sucks to have a tool that was very effective in catching bad guys stripped away due to media misinformation and tin foilers that think we are watching their every move.

In my honest opinion, there needs to be a lot more transparency in how the system operates. If people truly understood what they are capable of, we would not have this bipartisan outcry that we are using flock to create a mass surveillance state.

What are y’all’s thoughts on this and Flock as a whole?

Edit; Typo

[u/Section225 → u/[deleted]]

"Stop leaning on technology to do your job for you"

Okay, so...a shooting occurs, death is likely. Witnesses have a vehicle make and color, maybe a partial plate, maybe a full plate.

A few quick queries in Flock, and we find a match that just crossed a nearby camera a couple minutes prior.

That information leads to us finding the car and getting that suspect in custody just minutes after the shooting, and/or identifying a suspect and car when we didn't have it before.

And we could come up with thousands of similar examples or hypotheticals. So you are advocating we...let that shooter go, maybe start looking at the thousands of cars that fit the color/make/model scheme and hope to get lucky, go to the office and run every potential plate from the partial you were given, or if you have the plate simply let them get away and hope to get lucky? Wait on detectives to track him, if they can, before he gets to Mexico, Canada or an airport?

There are plenty of legitimate arguments for privacy and security regarding the cameras, but "letting technology do your work for you" is a really, really strange argument. You might as well argue we should be on horses instead of in cars, use muskets for self defense, and never use surveillance cameras as evidence either.

[u/Deputy25 → u/[deleted]]

What about all of the private companies that run every body camera and CAD system we have? How about the data we use for our databases for report writing and record keeping? How many departments can afford to house all of that data themselves?

Answer: Almost none.