I'm no fan of flock, but I dislike how these articles are blaming the technology when the real issue is the police not bothering to check the information they're given
But flock hit is the entire reason for the cops to go arrest them. And you’re right if they did careful assessment of other flock camera data, even the data of this particular flock camera they would have known this car was 5 miles away 23 seconds later.
The whole point being misusing/abusing flock data to wrongly jail people and that is precisely what happened here. Flock is the center of this story.
They simply didn't properly identify the vehicle because Flock's ALPR gave them the pass. The innocent person would not have needed "photo proof" of his distant location if the ALPR didn't exist in the first place. Then he would not have been forced to spend a month of his life in jail.
We blame the technology because police misusing their powers is a tale as old as police, is demonstrably not fixable, and this technology is at fault for aggressively selling itself to police to give them these powers that we all know will be misused. Flock absolutely bears significant responsibility for creating the technology and conditions for this unjust behavior to exist, and continuing to advocate against those pushing back on it by trying to brand them as terrorists.
Ironically, they're showing a situation where more tracking makes innocence clear. There's countless examples of innocent people being caught in a dragnet, based on data that correlates with but does not prove guilt, where more data collection leads to more innocent people suffering. That's what they should be focusing on.
There is absolutely that, but the CEO of Flock has said he believes a false-positive is better than a false-negative, so everything around the stack pushes police that way, too.
I love these elites who say "Yeah, it's no big deal, the police will arrest you but they'll figure it out and you can go on your way, and if you have to spend a couple of nights in jail first, or hire an attorney at considerable expense, or you lose your job or become less hirable because your state reports arrest records, not just charge or conviction records, well, that's a small price to pay for Zero Crime State, presented by Flock(TM)!"
It is Flock's responsibility to grant access only to trained professionals who undergo routine training and testing in how to and how not to use the system.
Every police officer with access to the system must ideally have to undergo mandatory annual training and testing in using it to protect the rights of innocents. If they don't pass the testing, they ideally should not be granted access.
Flock should be held accountable for ensuring adequate protections exist to prevent misuse.
It's kinda funny that all our personal data leaks out of companies all the time and little to nothing happens to them, and now you're thinking Flock is going to be held accountable?!
We should have laws against collecting this in the first place.
It's not a training problem, it's an incentive problem. You put these guys in a structure that requires them to justify their jobs at minimal cost of effort and then ooh ack surprise when they don't take the proper care to ensure that they're not stepping on innocent people in the pursuit of a healthy career.
Couple that with overburdening them with petty nonsense all the time and training them in military equipment and tactics and like it doesn't matter what tools you give them, those tools will be abused at convenience.
The issue is structural, not technical, but power tools = more damage per capita.
It's not a dichotomy. "Checks and balances" are a thing since the founding of the United States. If the local government fails to institute them, it should be the complementary responsibility of the vendor to have them. In their absence, lawsuits targeting all parties are highly desirable.
> Their tort claim notes that the path the men took to the cigar lounge passed by several other Flock cameras, which could have corroborated their story, as well as the location data on their cell phones.
It seems like if the police actually looked at the Flock data it would have exonerated them?
Quite often the cops job is to find someone close enough and then toss them into the jaws of the criminal justice system. We like to say "innocent until proven guilty", but you goddammed better be ready to prove yourself innocent unless you want to find yourself imprisoned.
I saw a video recently that flock camera installations don't follow local or city laws. All poles that hold roadsigns generally need to safely handle impact and get certified / inspected. However, flock cameras have none of it.
This doesn't seem like a Flock story so much as SDPD making an arrest purely on a nexus to "red Alfa Romeo with tinted windows". From what I understand of the story, the Flock camera did in fact tag a red Alfa Romeo (there's a still frame in the article). It wasn't the right one, but ALPR cameras aren't psychic; they tell you features, make/model, and plate, not "criminal culpability".
There's a well-known story about a man who escaped a murder conviction because he was at a Dodgers game when the murder happened, and there just happened to be a TV show filming at the stadium that just happened to record him there.
> Trying to say it was 5 miles away 23 seconds after an unknown reference is being intentionally obtuse.
The article specifically says:
> just 23 seconds after San Police Officers in Golden Hill tried stopping the suspected carjacker
> Their tort claim notes that the path the men took to the cigar lounge passed by several other Flock cameras, which could have corroborated their story, as well as the location data on their cell phones.
Your argument is that, what, this guy you argue has no money also hacked the phone company to fake their records while driving at 100 mph through San Diego under an invisibility cloak so no other cameras or people saw anything?
> Meanwhile, on the other side of town, five miles away in Old Town, just 23 seconds after San Police Officers in Golden Hill tried stopping the suspected carjacker, a Flock Automated License Plate Reader captured a photo of a red Alfa Romeo driving on the 2200 block of Moore Street.
There was a recent case in Florida where an innocent woman with no past record was falsely jailed for 13 days due to Flock imagery. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6F_0iIaXGqA
I'm no fan of flock, but I dislike how these articles are blaming the technology when the real issue is the police not bothering to check the information they're given
Yeah this reads like the cops simply didn't properly identify the vehicle. If anything, the Flock camera photo proves he was miles away.
But flock hit is the entire reason for the cops to go arrest them. And you’re right if they did careful assessment of other flock camera data, even the data of this particular flock camera they would have known this car was 5 miles away 23 seconds later. The whole point being misusing/abusing flock data to wrongly jail people and that is precisely what happened here. Flock is the center of this story.
> [T]hey would have known this car was 5 miles away 23 seconds later.
Tack on a reckless driving charge and a speeding ticket.
782.6mph is way too fast.
Police would just argue that the second datapoint was wrong.
Obviously so, maybe society should hire criminals to catch the police.
They simply didn't properly identify the vehicle because Flock's ALPR gave them the pass. The innocent person would not have needed "photo proof" of his distant location if the ALPR didn't exist in the first place. Then he would not have been forced to spend a month of his life in jail.
We blame the technology because police misusing their powers is a tale as old as police, is demonstrably not fixable, and this technology is at fault for aggressively selling itself to police to give them these powers that we all know will be misused. Flock absolutely bears significant responsibility for creating the technology and conditions for this unjust behavior to exist, and continuing to advocate against those pushing back on it by trying to brand them as terrorists.
Ironically, they're showing a situation where more tracking makes innocence clear. There's countless examples of innocent people being caught in a dragnet, based on data that correlates with but does not prove guilt, where more data collection leads to more innocent people suffering. That's what they should be focusing on.
A tool that requires perfect human oversight to avoid harming innocent people is a problem
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal
There is absolutely that, but the CEO of Flock has said he believes a false-positive is better than a false-negative, so everything around the stack pushes police that way, too.
I love these elites who say "Yeah, it's no big deal, the police will arrest you but they'll figure it out and you can go on your way, and if you have to spend a couple of nights in jail first, or hire an attorney at considerable expense, or you lose your job or become less hirable because your state reports arrest records, not just charge or conviction records, well, that's a small price to pay for Zero Crime State, presented by Flock(TM)!"
It is Flock's responsibility to grant access only to trained professionals who undergo routine training and testing in how to and how not to use the system.
So they can't show it to the police in the US?
Every police officer with access to the system must ideally have to undergo mandatory annual training and testing in using it to protect the rights of innocents. If they don't pass the testing, they ideally should not be granted access.
Flock should be held accountable for ensuring adequate protections exist to prevent misuse.
It's kinda funny that all our personal data leaks out of companies all the time and little to nothing happens to them, and now you're thinking Flock is going to be held accountable?!
We should have laws against collecting this in the first place.
It's not a training problem, it's an incentive problem. You put these guys in a structure that requires them to justify their jobs at minimal cost of effort and then ooh ack surprise when they don't take the proper care to ensure that they're not stepping on innocent people in the pursuit of a healthy career.
Couple that with overburdening them with petty nonsense all the time and training them in military equipment and tactics and like it doesn't matter what tools you give them, those tools will be abused at convenience.
The issue is structural, not technical, but power tools = more damage per capita.
It's not a dichotomy. "Checks and balances" are a thing since the founding of the United States. If the local government fails to institute them, it should be the complementary responsibility of the vendor to have them. In their absence, lawsuits targeting all parties are highly desirable.
> Their tort claim notes that the path the men took to the cigar lounge passed by several other Flock cameras, which could have corroborated their story, as well as the location data on their cell phones.
It seems like if the police actually looked at the Flock data it would have exonerated them?
Quite often the cops job is to find someone close enough and then toss them into the jaws of the criminal justice system. We like to say "innocent until proven guilty", but you goddammed better be ready to prove yourself innocent unless you want to find yourself imprisoned.
Our justification systems are already overburdened with people lacking plausible alibis.
Cue recent video of a cop giving armless woman ticket for holding a cellphone.
ACLU needs to take his case and sue everything in sight.
Why would they not have a human look at the hit? Flock, San Diego and the SDPD are all liable.
I saw a video recently that flock camera installations don't follow local or city laws. All poles that hold roadsigns generally need to safely handle impact and get certified / inspected. However, flock cameras have none of it.
Not the same video, but best I could find: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/_zmZLJY5Ev4
This doesn't seem like a Flock story so much as SDPD making an arrest purely on a nexus to "red Alfa Romeo with tinted windows". From what I understand of the story, the Flock camera did in fact tag a red Alfa Romeo (there's a still frame in the article). It wasn't the right one, but ALPR cameras aren't psychic; they tell you features, make/model, and plate, not "criminal culpability".
right, its the cops who decide "criminal culpability" all Flock did was lead them to the wrong person...poor innocent Flock
It didn't lead SDPD to any person at all. It led them to a red Alfa Romeo with tinted windows.
Flock doesn't do facial recognition. It's a real-time search engine for cars on video feeds.
Ironically flock is what proves innocence. What would happen here without it?
There's a well-known story about a man who escaped a murder conviction because he was at a Dodgers game when the murder happened, and there just happened to be a TV show filming at the stadium that just happened to record him there.
https://innocenceproject.org/news/how-curb-your-enthusiasm-s...
I'd like to think motive and a police sketch wouldn't be enough evidence for a conviction, but that's optimistic.
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I don’t think someone should be thrown in jail for a month for having polarized windows on their car.
Red is a very popular color for the Giulia and window tint is not an uncommon item.
Any random person on the street could be described as able to be “caught without enough evidence to convict”
.
Dumb astroturf grok bot is dumb. Don't feed the trolls.
> It would only take 3 mins to get 5 miles away at 100 mph.
It would take a lot longer than that.
> Trying to say it was 5 miles away 23 seconds after an unknown reference is being intentionally obtuse.
The article specifically says:
> just 23 seconds after San Police Officers in Golden Hill tried stopping the suspected carjacker
> Their tort claim notes that the path the men took to the cigar lounge passed by several other Flock cameras, which could have corroborated their story, as well as the location data on their cell phones.
Your argument is that, what, this guy you argue has no money also hacked the phone company to fake their records while driving at 100 mph through San Diego under an invisibility cloak so no other cameras or people saw anything?
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> Meanwhile, on the other side of town, five miles away in Old Town, just 23 seconds after San Police Officers in Golden Hill tried stopping the suspected carjacker, a Flock Automated License Plate Reader captured a photo of a red Alfa Romeo driving on the 2200 block of Moore Street.
5 miles in 23 seconds is 782 mph.
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FYI: This San Diego man also has been arrested before/prior this incident.. & has a past record.
So can you really blame the courtroom being handed this (eventually wrongful) license plate data.
There was a recent case in Florida where an innocent woman with no past record was falsely jailed for 13 days due to Flock imagery. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6F_0iIaXGqA
Of course I can.