They're also getting banned fast. The city level should be the most accessible government for change.
There's been over 70[1] documented wins.
Don't feel like this is a lost cause, it clearly isn't. If everyone who was going to comment on this thread instead or additionally got involved by going to a city council meeting and explaining the problems to friends/family, many more cities could reject them.
They're not getting banned fast, and regulation isn't a lost cause. Flock, in particular, is getting contracts cancelled primarily in ultra-liberal municipalities, and that's in large part because of their public relationship with the current federal administration. But ALPRs are going up everywhere; they're a commodity technology. We canceled our Flock contract (I wasn't psyched about that) and we're ringed by munis that use ALPRs from vendors that haven't made themselves political flashpoints.
I'm fond of pointing out on HN that the muni I live in is likely one of the 10 most progressive-leaning in the country (it's the most progressive-leaning municipality in Chicagoland). Even here, Flock had an ardent cheering section, of normal people who think expediting the interdiction of stolen vehicles (which are vectors of violent crime) is a perfectly reasonable thing for a city to invest in.
This list isn't exactly describing "bans," this is a city contract rejection list - otherwise known as just "deploy in commercial parking lots abutting a major thoroughfares" restriction
Yeah, I'm not a fan of these things. If they were just ALPRs, I could probably give them a bit of slack -if they tightened up their security-, but all the other stuff they do, makes them pretty much untenable.
However:
> This makes AI powered cameras like Flock's distinct from traditional surveillance or traffic cams, which require someone to manually look over footage in order to find a specific vehicle or individual.
Is a bit misleading. These days, anyone can give an LLM footage from any source, and get this kind of information.
What LLM can I get and feed hundreds of hours of video into that will give me the position of a specific vehicle alongside when that happened?
An LLM isn’t going to help you here, but basic Computer Vision and a SQL database has been a solution _if you have the cameras_. I wrote a license plate reader as a university project using OpenCV almost 20 years ago.
If you were able to write one 20 years ago, I dare say an LLM could whip one up super-fast. Or just search the internet and tell you where to find one.
One of the risks of LLMs is that a lot of tasks go from "an expert could do this easily given a few weeks" to "anyone who thinks to ask an LLM can do this easily and get results the same day"
Bullshit. Show me how, today, an average person with no coding or ml background can go from 0 to their own ALPR tracking system in ONE DAY with Claude Code or Codex. Assuming they have access to terabytes of regional video surveillance but don't have their own compute besides what the LLM will buy for them.
I'll wait.
LLMs can do some incredible things but the hype is astronomical.
Oh honey, that's a just glorified OCR pipeline that extracts license plates from single images. That's the easy part, solved 20 years ago. Actually tracking unique vehicles across a region from terabytes of video data for an average person to be able to do it in ONE DAY is a lot different.
But HNers famously don't understand the difference between rsync and Dropbox
Dropbox stock is trading at 50% of its initial price 5y ago when it went public, maybe the public markets also don't understand the difference between rsync and Dropbox.
I honestly can't tell if this is ragebait or you believe this.
My friend, if you have a database of license plates extracted from single images taken by multiple cameras, YOU ARE TRACKING UNIQUE VEHICLES ACROSS A REGION.
Terabytes of data don't matter because you don't need to search terabytes, you need to search a few MB of text data. You don't even have to store the original video.
You’re moving the goalposts. The original point of this thread is that Flock AI technology is hardly needed to efficiently search traditional video footage for license plates.
> Assuming they have access to terabytes of regional video surveillance but don't have their own compute besides what the LLM will buy for them
Amazing how you can move the goalposts to make things impossible, isn't it? Where in the world did "without compute" come from? Are they not even allowed a decent desktop computer?
Any competent llm would write a script using opencv to extract the license plates.
I did this with Gemini 3, mostly for fun and to test it's capabilities. Teslausb records all dash cam videos and auto syncs it to my nas when in wifi range. Yolo and opencv extracts and does ocr on any defected license plate, and puts it all on a map, along with trip information. Not particularly useful or interesting, and not something I would have done pre-llms, but the difficulty was basically writing a one paragraph prompt and using some free tokens
That's interesting, because the ALPR part of Flock is what caused all the problems here; the rest of it, of characterizing vehicles with attributes beyond just plates, wasn't really problematic at all.
There's a very important difference between "anyone could walk through my door and steal my stuff" and "this person walked in my door and stole my stuff".
But not so much between "this person walked in my door and stole my stuff" and "I left the door to my house open and then I put my stuff in the doorway."
What makes Flock bizarre is that it's a private business, and this is precisely how police departments are getting around a lot of traditional gates and checks on this sort of thing.
Police setting up a 1984 monitoring system throughout your city, tracking every car, person, activity -- yields lots of questions, oversight, concerns, debate, challenges, etc.
Some private business doing the same, and then letting the same police use it at will as a paying customer -- yay, all of the invasive monitoring with none of the oversight.
And of course, it's compounded by being pooled. Like RealPage, ALPR services like Flock, Axon Fleet Hub, and Motorola Vigilant VehicleManager offer data laundering so that organizations that shouldn't be talking can communicate.
That's actually the one thing that does make sense: police has always wanted to be able to do this, but they legally can't. But they can reward a private company willing to do it for them, so that they can "ask for the data" without ever breaking the law.
The police can, in fact, operate cameras in public spaces and they have done so for decades. ALPRs have been widely deployed since the 1990s.
I'm frequent surprised by how many people think that privacy laws block the police from recording their activities in public. For whatever reason, Flock is getting a lot of press, but this is hardly a new field.
The real joke is that the 1984 system was already in place long before flock. We all carry phones. Either from tower records ot google advert tags, private industry already tracked our every movement. Licence plate readers? Why bother when every car now has bluetooth enabled and so is constantly prodcasting its LAP id. (Some cities have tracked cars this way for over a decade, mostly for traffic management.)
Nah. Fascism only tolerates one power, that being itself. It can emerge from either the state or corporate side, and necessarily subsumes or destroys the other, just as it subsumes or destroys unions, families, friend networks, communications, and anything else that can establish power. That doesn't mean the merger of two of them is the defining feature.
Corporations generally tend to only tolerate the state to the extent that guns or courts mandate that they must. How many billions of corporate dollars have gone to fund campaigns to deregulate, to skirt authority, to do whatever is necessary to make sure profits go up?
>there has been widespread public backlash to cameras that track everyone, whether or not they've been suspected of a crime.
Well, duh. It doesn't know your plate from anyone elses so your plate gets recorded along with everyone else. If you go about a normal person's business then there is no harm and nothing happens.
I'm sure someone will decide harm is being done even when nothing happens.
And people that don't run red lights and suffer selective enforcement and are used for arbitrary surveillance and so on and so on. Don't let your naive view of what you want these things and their handlers to do distract you from reality, regardless of the brand or intent of widely deployed cameras.
The operating theory of all of these cameras is that anything happening in public sight is by its nature not private. The federal government is dumping millions and millions of dollars into grant programs for municipalities to buy it… It’s a giant federal surveillance program disguised as decisions made by individual police departments.
It’s hilarious and depressing to contrast the HN community reaction to Snowden versus the mostly meh response to flock.
You never had privacy. Nobody has ever had privacy like what HN people strive for! You're all deluded about how much historical privacy anyone enjoyed.
Today in a hyper-urban environment, a lot of "privacy" comes from blending into the background and simply, nobody cares about the very mundane everyday activities of ordinary people.
Looking at the past--sure, you could conceal things by writing them into a book and safeguarding the book, such as your accounts or your diary/journal. You could conceal objects and keep them physically safe from others, insofar as was possible. But you could never conceal these things from governments, organized crime, or similar threat actors. And once your interactions involve more than one person, all bets are off. What is the quote--"Three men can keep a secret, if two are dead"?
Small towns and small communities have always had active rumor mills, grapevines, and gossiping neighbors. Have you ever read newspapers from 100+ years ago? They would report on ordinary visitors showing up in town to see their friends or family! There were "City Directories" that listed everyone, including their occupation and family members.
And how did the concept of an omniscient and all-seeing God come about? It wasn't to drive people to paranoia but it was simply to remind us that nothing is concealed and there really is no right to privacy at all. The bottom line is that humans are social animals, and our society becomes sick if people can keep secrets (the wrong kinds of secrets).
Sure, basic levels of privacy and confidentiality are important. The act of wearing clothes is an exercise of privacy and concealment, after all. Doing things behind closed doors, this used to have an expectation of "privacy" insofar as you would know how many humans and/or animals were present to witness things.
God has always seen everything. You don't have any secrets he doesn't know. If that frightens you, or makes you anxious or angry, that is a "you" problem and not a problem with this world. Some of us simply live with the assumption that everything has already been seen and known, and everything will be revealed in justice, and life is too short to worry about cameras and microphones revealing our faults to one another.
There's this insidious tendency among HNers to make this argument and ones like it.
Yeah, if you live in a tiny medieval village or a small town in the middle of nowhere in 1980 there was little "privacy" but Jeffrey Dahmer was fucking dudes (back when that wasn't ok) and eating people in his apartment for years before anyone caught on. In more suburban settings there truly was privacy to a large practical extent.
Furthermore, these argument lie through their teeth to portray privacy from those who you mostly voluntarily associate, vs privacy from government systems that can seek you out, have power over you and can fairly unilaterally screw you with little recourse and you cannot choose not to associate with.
Having people not associate with you in 1980, or 1280, because you did something sly or immoral is fundamentally different from being combed over by the government because you hit some unknowable proprietary criteria that triggered them to go over you with a fine tooth comb.
Good, because nothing “problematic” about an individual matters one bit when presented with nefarious government activities. It’s obvious distraction technique 101.
Can anybody find trustworthy stats that these actually reduce crime? All I see are occasional anecdotes about how they were used to find one person one time.
Skeptical me seriously doubts this is an effective solution for crime. But maybe that's because this country has a history of being willing to do a million expensive and privacy violating things, and only if it's a punitive measure.
I don't have stats, but most police have made it pretty clear that they're used for investigations that would otherwise have very little to go on.
I don't think anyone other than the manufacturers have made claims of cameras reducing crime. You can put all the AI bells and whistles on them, but they're still just cameras.
They're a fallback option, not a dragnet. The police are generally reactive to reports of crime, not proactively trying to piece together the details of everyone's lives and nail them the moment their dog poops on the sidewalk. No AI can even do that anyway and it would be a waste of money.
There are two vocal camps of people on these threads that are eroding HN: fearmongerers and grifters. I don't understand how it got this bad, but that's the real crisis here.
You are absolutely correct but you won't get anywhere here.
I have relatives who are cops and lawyers and city councilmen. No cop is sitting in a back room somewhere tracking all the cars on every street trying to do, uh, whatever it is people here are claiming they are going to do to them.
I also wonder what makes people think the cops are going to trust AI any more than anyone else. A mistake on bad information is even more dangerous for them and often makes national news.
Are you willing to potentially be prosecuted to make a point that will ultimately come down to, "The cameras you destroyed are replaced with newly purchased units"?
The way to beat this isn't vandalism, it's getting them banned from every municipality and county in the country, while fighting at state levels for more bans.
It's also silly talk from kids online, just like "Don't vote, burn your local Wal-Mart" is only meant to impress other online children. The rest of us know that you'll neither vote, nor burn down the Wal-Mart.
I can't speak for anyone else, but I suspect most terminally ill people want to spend time with the people they love, not breaking cameras and working their way through the legal system.
These horrific things are multiplying exponentially in my (rural GA) environs. There are a dozen of them along every conceivable cycling route I could take, and far more if I drive somewhere. If you think this is a city thing meant to deter urban crime, the explosive proliferation of Flock cameras in quite rural and suburban areas may shock you. I find them in the darndest of places, near but not on county lines, adjacent to minor bridges, etc. And next time I go through there, there are more. They seem to be procreating.
As others have pointed out, they're not just ALPRs or traffic cameras, and their use-cases, official and unofficial, are extremely dynamic and expanding fast. They are not the only thing of their kind, but they justly earned the lightning rod status for their conspicuous cooperation with the administration's immigration thuggery and the douchy--but highly consequential--pronouncements of their CEO. Moreover, there's a ticker tape of daily news about police misuse of Flock's database, mainly for stalking exes and things like that.
This _is_ a stop on the way to a Chinese-style surveillance state, and there's nothing inevitable about it. But it will happen if we allow it to happen.
Ben Johnson's video on the security vulnerabilities, linked in the article, always deserves an explicit shout-out. It's likely to intrigue the tinkerers here:
These things proliferate where people trust the government or see the government as a means to the end of getting one over on whoever is bad for them.
So the Nth generation group of townies that run any given rural shithole will happily slap them up, the government represents them as far as they're concerned.
And meanwhile in some snooty inner ring Chicago suburb that fancies themselves "progressive" (but in what direction?) they slap up the same damn cameras because they see it as a means to make more efficient the enforcement of the myriad of rules on which their enclave depends and they are wealthy and well represented so they have no fear of it being used against them.
Rural Georgia probably has a little of column A, little of column B going on.
There may be no expectation of privacy in the sense someone may see you and take your picture.
There is an expectation you are not constantly tracked everywhere you go by a nationwide surveillance apparatus, that your location is not constantly monitored, indexed and shared. Unless you expect to live in an Orwellian distopia.
Imagine representatives who did what voters actually wanted. There's probably a name for that. Representative democracy or something. As opposed to corporate representation.
I misread "corporate democratism" and I like that - democratism is to democracy what scientism is to science - democratism is something that has the superficial appearance of democracy but isn't democracy because it doesn't achieve outcomes based on a consensus of voters.
This is why gerrymandering should be unconstitutional, and why corporations should have their rights explicitly curtailed: they're not citizens or the people.
I'm really unconvinced gerrymandering is the issue here.
It's not like Red cities have flock cameras and Blue cities don't.
It's really just that the Fairness Doctrine [1] needed to apply to more than radio. If you can constantly just repeat your point and then deny an opposition time then of course you'll get your point through.
Although maybe if super-pacs got outlawed then the Equal-time rule [2] would suffice.
Imagine what I really meant was that in those areas people largely approve of these cameras and it’s the minority that don’t.
Now of course your narrative is rude and more entertaining but sadly far from the mark. Saying “that’s not what I paid for” is all fine and dandy but it’s cuts both ways.
Alright, but in those areas did the politicians run on having those cameras installed everywhere? Were the voters given a proposition to approve?
Data centers seem to be widely unpopular on both the left and right, so I'm wonder where the representative democracy comes into play. More often than not local politicians approve these projects despite there being majority opposition from the public.
If a certain group of people think that it should be their right to take others rights away and turn society into a dystopia for perceived security, then for the same reason it should be other individuals rights to assert that their rights should be protected by taking the first group's rights away to install or do whatever they think they can do for convenience/security's sake.
This includes "ancestry tests", security cameras with AI in them, upload IDs to "verify", and even social media where you are allowed to upload pictures with others in them.
And since we "supposedly" live in a democracy, we should be allowed to have a vote to decide on this, the group that wins is the majority, right? I don't understand why we're allowing our rights to erode before we have an informed election about this, in democracies.
Got these installed all over local parking lots for wallmart, home depot, ross, every exit solar panel and camera. Was wondering if there is some sort of quickly blinking infrared light or something that would make it visible to a naked eye of a cop, but not to a recording camera. I bet you would sell millions of those license plate holders in a heartbeat.
We need some way to address the low level crime in the US. If you look at cities in east Asia, they're both much larger than typical US cities and much safer. It -is- possible to have safe large cities. The fact that we don't is a choice.
Exactly. More people die from cars every month in the US than in 9/11. We value our freedom with cars, we should value our privacy to an even greater extent.
What's even more amazing is that they had these safe cities without [Flock, Motorola, Axon]. I guess we will never know how they did it, but at least we get the Chinese surveillance state.
My experience in major East Asian cities (predominantly Tokyo and Taipei) is that they have extensive networks of surveillance cameras operated by or accessible to the police.
Japanese police are very rarely willing to even ask to look at any of the disorganized hodgepodge of private cameras for property crimes or even minor physical altercations. They are far more likely to rely on personal accounts. TV dramas not withstanding.
Although Tokyo does have a system of traffic cameras which log traffic movement and license plates, that's most all that it does. Except in cases of murder or kidnapping (or political influence), it's quite rare to request the recordings of many private cameras. Outside of big cities, it's even more rare.
The largest connected system of cameras I'm aware of are for the subway camera systems (Shinjuku, Shinagawa, etc). Although independent systems, together they can do facial recognition to track individuals. Not a lot of AI yet, though.
In Tokyo, it is not uncommon to see bikes parked on residential streets with keys left overnight in their wheel locks (as if there aren't even mischievous 12 year olds?!). Oh, and outside of the cities, crime is even more rare. It is common in youth hostels for there to be open cubbies where personal items are stored in the front near the door. Nothing is taken. Most common thefts are: umbrellas (considered a fungible public good?), unlocked bikes (in high traffic business areas), women's underwear (off of outdoor drying racks).
Yes, there are cultural reasons crime is lower in East Asia too, but I haven't been to a major city there that doesn't have an extensive surveillance system.
It’s the culture. Every Japanese person is always aware that they are “a part of society.”
Even the Yakuza participate in society. When they have big disasters, the local mobsters are usually helping people out, before the authorities can get going.
East Asia built a uni-culture by being extremely racist against outsiders. I don't think you can get away with that anywhere else.
A friend of mine (white guy) married a Chinese woman and when they visited China they were subject to slurs and dirty looks in public.
There's a whole category of videos on social media of Japanese furiously angry at Westerners acting like fools on their subways. They're not happy about it.
I’m an Indian with a Taiwanese-American wife. I’ve never experienced even the mildest amount of racism in Taiwan. Everyone was kind and friendly to me. And Taiwan is very safe.
I’m not going to pretend that an anecdote fully captures a problem but considering I spent over a month there just living a normal life I imagine that if the problem were widespread I’d have many chances to experience it.
My elderly parents were there for two weeks too and they have nothing but positive things to say.
And finally, my wife’s cousin married a White man from Ireland and he has loved the place for the many years he’s lived there.
I don’t know if I would consider a month long vacation as evidence. Taiwan is pretty famous for have lower labor classes that they import from places like the Philippines and while people are friendly, they are still generally looked down upon. Not dissimilar to places like Japan, Hong Kong and Singapore. So I think racism is a pretty loaded and broad word and people typically think about it in purely an American context, it’s more common around the world than people think in all kinds of shades.
Ultimately I do agree with the original thesis around monocultures.
Well, certainly my experience on the ground is far more meaningful than someone’s statements without evidence. Just googling around it seems that American policing is generally considered fairly racially discriminatory so performing racism on its own is not getting us less crime. Taiwan doesn’t seem to have that problem as extensively.
And I’m an Indian who grew up in and spent the majority of my life in India as did my parents. I’ve lived in a few countries for years and stayed in many for months. My frame of reference is unlikely to be the American context for racism.
I don’t think anyone is arguing that Taiwan or Japan are uniquely or universally racist. The point is that many highly cohesive societies have clear social hierarchies and stronger in-group preferences than Americans (or other groups) often recognize.
Taiwan’s treatment of many Southeast Asian migrant workers is a commonly discussed example. People can be welcoming to tourists and expatriates while still having structural biases toward certain groups. Those aren’t contradictory observations.
Likewise, we wouldn’t dismiss concerns about women’s safety in India simply because a visitor spent a month there and had a wonderful experience. An individual’s experience matters, but it doesn’t settle broader questions about how different groups experience a society.
My opinion comes from having spent a lot of time around Asia and more than a month of “tourism”.
> I don’t think anyone is arguing that Taiwan or Japan are uniquely or universally racist.
The original comment used this as the explanation for why there's low crime. Here's a reminder of the context we are conversing within.
> > > > East Asia built a uni-culture by being extremely racist against outsiders. I don't think you can get away with that anywhere else.
I think "extreme racism to outsiders" is detectable within a month. I am as outsider as they come - being a brown-skinned South Asian Indian[0]. I also think that "I don't think you can get away with that anywhere else" means "uniquely". I guess we could argue about whether "extreme racism" means "universal racism" if you'd like but I don't think it's interesting as an explanation for safety. And the other statement I'm replying to there is
> > > > A friend of mine (white guy) married a Chinese woman and when they visited China they were subject to slurs and dirty looks in public.
My wife's cousin is married to a White Irish man who has lived there over a decade. This is not his experience anywhere in Taiwan, in particular, as opposed to the GP's China experience.
I think his decades of living there prior to and then after marrying my wife's cousin probably provide some experience. There's a lot of Planet of Hats thinking from Westerners visiting Asia. But different countries there are clearly different, just like France and Switzerland are different.
And in the end, if racism is not unique then it cannot explain difference in crime outcomes. To quote the great sage pj evans: "Cars have windows and can move. Houses have windows and can't move. So it's not the windows that make the car go. It's something else entirely."
And as a little epilogue, we may consider other countries with a foreign-born populace similar to Taiwan's: Poland, Argentina, Uruguay, and South Africa. None of them match Taiwan's broad lack of crime while having a similar degree of foreign-born people.
Which brings us again to whether the windows make the car go or not.
0: website in profile, feel free to take a look at my face
I’m not claiming “Taiwan is extremely racist, therefore low crime.” I’m saying cohesive societies often have stronger in-group preferences and social expectations than Americans tend to recognize, and those coexist with being welcoming to many foreigners.
Your experience and your relative’s experience are perfectly compatible with that. One or two positive anecdotes don’t tell us much about how a society views every minority or lower-status group any more than one bad anecdote proves pervasive racism.
As for crime, I agree it’s obviously not explained by a single variable. That’s a much stronger claim than I was making.
No desire to look at your profile but I hope the point I am trying to argue for is clearer to you.
I understand what you're saying but it seems like a complete non-sequitur given the context of the conversation, which I'll reproduce here in threaded fashion in case it's not visible in your client.
> > > We need some way to address the low level crime in the US. If you look at cities in east Asia, they're both much larger than typical US cities and much safer. It -is- possible to have safe large cities. The fact that we don't is a choice.
> > East Asia built a uni-culture by being extremely racist against outsiders. I don't think you can get away with that anywhere else. A friend of mine (white guy) married a Chinese woman and when they visited China they were subject to slurs and dirty looks in public. There's a whole category of videos on social media of Japanese furiously angry at Westerners acting like fools on their subways. They're not happy about it.
The claim is precisely what you're saying you're not claiming. So you must understand that I am having this conversation in that context. Though I suppose we can both interpose unrelated facts into the conversation and claim contextual irrelevance in the motte and bailey style. Here are a few I present for discussion:
A choice that has tradeoffs. Assuming we're talking about the sorts of places that lean heavily into surveillance I don't want to live there and their views on the role of the government is one of the reasons.
You're getting loads of replies that seem to knee-jerk defend US cities purely to oppose Flock. And let's be real and admit that adding more cameras does little to improve this. My whole neighbourhood has a panopticon of surveillance cameras on every property, yet there have still been home burglaries and several cars stolen.
Many Asian cities are safer -- and they undisputedly are -- for cultural reasons. You can't create culture through surveillance.
How much of that is addressed by a strong social-safety net? How are addicts and homeless people handled? How about general poverty (a known driver of crime)?
What is the trade off though and are Americans willing to make it? What sort of social conditions lead to more low level crime? This sort of complaint is nothing new btw.
US cities are plenty safe. The fact that you think otherwise is propaganda you’ve been successfully served. I live in Nyc and visit other cities often.
You must live in a different New York City than the one I visited. I had the safety calibration of Tallinn, Estonia and Dubai, UAE.
The subway was extremely hostile. People were regularly drugged out of their mind. I saw one guy try to drink a Coca Cola upside down and spilled it all in the bus. Another crazy chased my limited mobility Estonian friend who wanted to visit nyc alongside me when she went alone for groceries.
Could it be that your frame of reference is broken and/or you’re numb to it?
You saw someone try to drink a soda upside down and spill it? We are going to need more than a Flock cam to stop that heinous act, perhaps a Flock robot arm that could grab the criminals arm and turn it right side up, or just restrain them while the authorities are on the way.
I saw a tall man on L train stomping aggressively through the car and yelling bloody murder that he is gonna "stab the next mf I see", while attempting to swing punches at random people. The whole train ended up getting evacuated, and the train line got delayed. That was last winter. Between then and now, I saw people threatening others on the subway multiple times.
The most recent incident was a few weeks ago on Q train, where a seated man was screaming at the woman across from him (who was trying to do her best to ignore him), how he was gonna kill her and "the rest of her people" (whatever that means).
But please tell me how stuff like this never happens.
And I am not even a subway hater overall, I take it daily, and it is my preferred method of transportation. And no, I am not taking subway into deep and shady parts of bronx or brooklyn, as heavy majority of my rides are contained between Dekalb/Jay St Metrotech (aka dt brooklyn) and midtown.
It just sounds like crazy talk to me, when someone claims that the safety cams in subway cars are not, at least, somewhat helpful. At least newer A/C train cars have those cams now, and, I hope, it will lead to prosecution of serial subway harassers.
These are all lies. Small towns have notiriously higher crime rates than Nyc. We should send the National Guard to your small town and place cameras every where. I dont feel safe in your small town. I moved away from middle America that’s swamped in meth, high murder rate, and racism. Sorry someone spilled a coca-cola though. Your pearls must be powder in your hands by now.
This is false. Urban areas have the highest rate of crime compared to rural and suburban. For example look at the years 2020 and 2021 from this report:[0]
Table 8
Rate of victimization, by type of crime and location of residence, 2020 and 2021
Location of residence
Total violent crime Violent crime excluding
simple assault Total property crime
2020 2021* 2020 2021* 2020 2021*
Urban 19.0 † 24.5 7.7 9.7 158.9 157.5
Suburban 16.8 16.5 5.6 5.2 90.5 86.8
Rural 13.4 11.1 4.5 4.4 65.6 57.7
You can see clearly that urban has the highest rate of crime, and this has been true for decades.[1]
Also, many crimes are not recorded at all in NYC, which is why many stores have locked down all their items with a key that requires permission from a staff member to access. I haven't seen this in the small towms I've been to.
There’s possibly a fantasy mindset at play where people need a certain identity to be true. As we’ve witnessed on a national scale, humans have great capacity for fantastical thinking to support what a friend of mine calls their “binkie narrative.”
His small town? Tallinn is comparatively tiny to NYC admittedly but Dubai is a fairly large and urban city. I think that it doesn’t quite fit the appellation.
I live in NYC and I don't think it is safe, so there's one person that disagrees with you. Part of the problem in NYC is when you commit a low-level crime the social-justice warriors let the person back out on the street without charging them. This is why when somebody kills somebody in NYC you often hear that the person had been arrested for various things twelve times earlier. Just covering up the "un-safeness" by saying "it's safe" or citing crime stats doesn't change what people can see with their own eyes.
Are you sure these people weren't making plea deals or having their cases dismissed because prosecutors can't try every single low level criminal case? I'm not sure where "social-justice warriors" comes in to play. It's the legal system making choices about what crimes are worth prosecuting.
In your conception, the only reason any drug store is able to stay in business is because deodorant thieves are getting hard time?
If enough people are stealing deodorant to put them out of business, I think there are some big social problems that jail time isn’t going to fix.
Frankly, i’d 100% of the time rather bare the cost of shoplifters thru slightly higher prices than thru paying ~$100,000 year each incarcerating anyone who shoplifts.
There are “low level” crimes that are predictable signs of violent crime. E.g. intimate partner violence. I’d love to see those taken more seriously, even if it’s just for the downstream effects.
It’s hard to distil to a single comment but I think it might be a poor example given the NYPD takes about double the budget per capita to be less safe than Toronto.
I think the only objective conclusion we can come to in a comments section is that going by “I visited there” vibes isn’t going to be useful.
What about the high murder rate and meth problems of middle America, lets talk about that more instead of the “oh no homeless people” rhetoric all the time.
This type of "there is no problem and any evidence is propaganda" denial is why social disorder like rampant petty theft, open air drug use, and people shitting in the streets is destroying these cities.
What about the meth heads shitting in the streets of the small town? Rampant assault and murder rates. What about all the drinking and driving killing people in America. No, no, it’s Nyc that’s scary.
When meth heads get arrested, there isn't an army of losers protesting the sheriff the next day claiming it's cruel and unusual punishment and demanding the city give them a free house for them to do meth in.
Enjoy your Alcatraz pharmacies while they're still open.
But there are approximately zero meth heads shitting in the streets in small towns in the US.
I have never once seen a person shitting in the streets in a small town. I saw it within 24 hours of visiting Portland. I’ve never seen that in NYC either to be clear.
Really? I lived in Greenwich village until last year and I’d have people threaten to kill me for politely declining to give them change. I live in Park Slope now and there’s violent people on the F line all the time. Maybe wealthy neighbourhoods are super dangerous or maybe you’re just not noticing.
> If you look at cities in east Asia, they're... much safer.
ah yes, the famously dependable statistics of east Asia, with their famously free press and citizen auditing communities, and the famously dependable impressions of tourists and expatriates...
They're also getting banned fast. The city level should be the most accessible government for change.
There's been over 70[1] documented wins.
Don't feel like this is a lost cause, it clearly isn't. If everyone who was going to comment on this thread instead or additionally got involved by going to a city council meeting and explaining the problems to friends/family, many more cities could reject them.
[1] https://deflock.org/council/#wins
They're not getting banned fast, and regulation isn't a lost cause. Flock, in particular, is getting contracts cancelled primarily in ultra-liberal municipalities, and that's in large part because of their public relationship with the current federal administration. But ALPRs are going up everywhere; they're a commodity technology. We canceled our Flock contract (I wasn't psyched about that) and we're ringed by munis that use ALPRs from vendors that haven't made themselves political flashpoints.
I'm fond of pointing out on HN that the muni I live in is likely one of the 10 most progressive-leaning in the country (it's the most progressive-leaning municipality in Chicagoland). Even here, Flock had an ardent cheering section, of normal people who think expediting the interdiction of stolen vehicles (which are vectors of violent crime) is a perfectly reasonable thing for a city to invest in.
This list isn't exactly describing "bans," this is a city contract rejection list - otherwise known as just "deploy in commercial parking lots abutting a major thoroughfares" restriction
Yeah, I'm not a fan of these things. If they were just ALPRs, I could probably give them a bit of slack -if they tightened up their security-, but all the other stuff they do, makes them pretty much untenable.
However:
> This makes AI powered cameras like Flock's distinct from traditional surveillance or traffic cams, which require someone to manually look over footage in order to find a specific vehicle or individual.
Is a bit misleading. These days, anyone can give an LLM footage from any source, and get this kind of information.
What LLM can I get and feed hundreds of hours of video into that will give me the position of a specific vehicle alongside when that happened?
An LLM isn’t going to help you here, but basic Computer Vision and a SQL database has been a solution _if you have the cameras_. I wrote a license plate reader as a university project using OpenCV almost 20 years ago.
If you were able to write one 20 years ago, I dare say an LLM could whip one up super-fast. Or just search the internet and tell you where to find one.
One of the risks of LLMs is that a lot of tasks go from "an expert could do this easily given a few weeks" to "anyone who thinks to ask an LLM can do this easily and get results the same day"
Bullshit. Show me how, today, an average person with no coding or ml background can go from 0 to their own ALPR tracking system in ONE DAY with Claude Code or Codex. Assuming they have access to terabytes of regional video surveillance but don't have their own compute besides what the LLM will buy for them.
I'll wait.
LLMs can do some incredible things but the hype is astronomical.
Automated License plate readers are a half century old at this point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_number-plate_recogni...
why wouldn't codex or claude just reach for whatever FOSS https://github.com/openalpr/openalpr
Oh honey, that's a just glorified OCR pipeline that extracts license plates from single images. That's the easy part, solved 20 years ago. Actually tracking unique vehicles across a region from terabytes of video data for an average person to be able to do it in ONE DAY is a lot different.
But HNers famously don't understand the difference between rsync and Dropbox
Ok, so you don’t understand that ALPR is two commodity technologies: object detection and OCR.
Yes, an ALPR is basically just a glorified [thing that an ALPR does]
Dropbox stock is trading at 50% of its initial price 5y ago when it went public, maybe the public markets also don't understand the difference between rsync and Dropbox.
I honestly can't tell if this is ragebait or you believe this.
My friend, if you have a database of license plates extracted from single images taken by multiple cameras, YOU ARE TRACKING UNIQUE VEHICLES ACROSS A REGION.
Terabytes of data don't matter because you don't need to search terabytes, you need to search a few MB of text data. You don't even have to store the original video.
But you don't have such a database.
You’re moving the goalposts. The original point of this thread is that Flock AI technology is hardly needed to efficiently search traditional video footage for license plates.
> Assuming they have access to terabytes of regional video surveillance but don't have their own compute besides what the LLM will buy for them
Amazing how you can move the goalposts to make things impossible, isn't it? Where in the world did "without compute" come from? Are they not even allowed a decent desktop computer?
Any competent llm would write a script using opencv to extract the license plates.
I did this with Gemini 3, mostly for fun and to test it's capabilities. Teslausb records all dash cam videos and auto syncs it to my nas when in wifi range. Yolo and opencv extracts and does ocr on any defected license plate, and puts it all on a map, along with trip information. Not particularly useful or interesting, and not something I would have done pre-llms, but the difficulty was basically writing a one paragraph prompt and using some free tokens
That's interesting, because the ALPR part of Flock is what caused all the problems here; the rest of it, of characterizing vehicles with attributes beyond just plates, wasn't really problematic at all.
I think there's a limit to how misleading.
There's a very important difference between "anyone could walk through my door and steal my stuff" and "this person walked in my door and stole my stuff".
But not so much between "this person walked in my door and stole my stuff" and "I left the door to my house open and then I put my stuff in the doorway."
Flock cameras are roughly that secure.
Isn't Flock more like a house sitter in the analogy though?
"I gave the person keys to my house and then I trusted they wouldn't open bathroom doors while somebody was there".
Like law enforcement is being given access to the systems, the door isn't "left open", a key was given to them.
What makes Flock bizarre is that it's a private business, and this is precisely how police departments are getting around a lot of traditional gates and checks on this sort of thing.
Police setting up a 1984 monitoring system throughout your city, tracking every car, person, activity -- yields lots of questions, oversight, concerns, debate, challenges, etc.
Some private business doing the same, and then letting the same police use it at will as a paying customer -- yay, all of the invasive monitoring with none of the oversight.
And of course, it's compounded by being pooled. Like RealPage, ALPR services like Flock, Axon Fleet Hub, and Motorola Vigilant VehicleManager offer data laundering so that organizations that shouldn't be talking can communicate.
Privacy laws now.
That's actually the one thing that does make sense: police has always wanted to be able to do this, but they legally can't. But they can reward a private company willing to do it for them, so that they can "ask for the data" without ever breaking the law.
The police can, in fact, operate cameras in public spaces and they have done so for decades. ALPRs have been widely deployed since the 1990s.
I'm frequent surprised by how many people think that privacy laws block the police from recording their activities in public. For whatever reason, Flock is getting a lot of press, but this is hardly a new field.
The real joke is that the 1984 system was already in place long before flock. We all carry phones. Either from tower records ot google advert tags, private industry already tracked our every movement. Licence plate readers? Why bother when every car now has bluetooth enabled and so is constantly prodcasting its LAP id. (Some cities have tracked cars this way for over a decade, mostly for traffic management.)
“Fascism should rightly be called corporatism, as it is the merger of corporate and government power.”
- Benito Mussolini
Nah. Fascism only tolerates one power, that being itself. It can emerge from either the state or corporate side, and necessarily subsumes or destroys the other, just as it subsumes or destroys unions, families, friend networks, communications, and anything else that can establish power. That doesn't mean the merger of two of them is the defining feature.
Corporations generally tend to only tolerate the state to the extent that guns or courts mandate that they must. How many billions of corporate dollars have gone to fund campaigns to deregulate, to skirt authority, to do whatever is necessary to make sure profits go up?
Fascism was corporative, but in Italian the word has a very different meaning compared to the English one.
>These days, anyone can give an LLM footage from any source, and get this kind of information.
Is a bit misleading itself, to do this at scale requires all those iffy data centers.
What's an iffy data center?
One that gets built over the public's objection because just maybe the company building it will create an AGI that will take everyone's jobs?
>there has been widespread public backlash to cameras that track everyone, whether or not they've been suspected of a crime.
Well, duh. It doesn't know your plate from anyone elses so your plate gets recorded along with everyone else. If you go about a normal person's business then there is no harm and nothing happens.
I'm sure someone will decide harm is being done even when nothing happens.
Meanwhile in Texas we can’t even have red light cameras to automatically ticket people willing to kill you just to catch a light.
"Meanwhile in <location> we can't even have Flock cameras to automatically catch people who may have killed someone"
Hopefully the absurdity of broad scale surveillance can't be so easily lost in hyperbole
Flock doesn't automatically catch people who killed someone. Red light cameras do catch people who run red lights.
And people that don't run red lights and suffer selective enforcement and are used for arbitrary surveillance and so on and so on. Don't let your naive view of what you want these things and their handlers to do distract you from reality, regardless of the brand or intent of widely deployed cameras.
Traditional red light cameras take a still frame and are triggered only during a red light violation.
Having been in Texas last month these cameras are all over your state. I saw them everywhere from the smallest city to houston
https://imgur.com/a/P7WxKpU
Make sure you're not looking at traffic control cameras. These are used to monitor traffic for the traffic lights.
They're all basically turned off by law, just not removed
Honestly I like that policy. What's the legality of flock in Texas?
Totally legal.
The operating theory of all of these cameras is that anything happening in public sight is by its nature not private. The federal government is dumping millions and millions of dollars into grant programs for municipalities to buy it… It’s a giant federal surveillance program disguised as decisions made by individual police departments.
It’s hilarious and depressing to contrast the HN community reaction to Snowden versus the mostly meh response to flock.
The last 20 years has burned privacy into the ground for a large part of the population.
You never had privacy. Nobody has ever had privacy like what HN people strive for! You're all deluded about how much historical privacy anyone enjoyed.
Today in a hyper-urban environment, a lot of "privacy" comes from blending into the background and simply, nobody cares about the very mundane everyday activities of ordinary people.
Looking at the past--sure, you could conceal things by writing them into a book and safeguarding the book, such as your accounts or your diary/journal. You could conceal objects and keep them physically safe from others, insofar as was possible. But you could never conceal these things from governments, organized crime, or similar threat actors. And once your interactions involve more than one person, all bets are off. What is the quote--"Three men can keep a secret, if two are dead"?
Small towns and small communities have always had active rumor mills, grapevines, and gossiping neighbors. Have you ever read newspapers from 100+ years ago? They would report on ordinary visitors showing up in town to see their friends or family! There were "City Directories" that listed everyone, including their occupation and family members.
And how did the concept of an omniscient and all-seeing God come about? It wasn't to drive people to paranoia but it was simply to remind us that nothing is concealed and there really is no right to privacy at all. The bottom line is that humans are social animals, and our society becomes sick if people can keep secrets (the wrong kinds of secrets).
Sure, basic levels of privacy and confidentiality are important. The act of wearing clothes is an exercise of privacy and concealment, after all. Doing things behind closed doors, this used to have an expectation of "privacy" insofar as you would know how many humans and/or animals were present to witness things.
God has always seen everything. You don't have any secrets he doesn't know. If that frightens you, or makes you anxious or angry, that is a "you" problem and not a problem with this world. Some of us simply live with the assumption that everything has already been seen and known, and everything will be revealed in justice, and life is too short to worry about cameras and microphones revealing our faults to one another.
There's this insidious tendency among HNers to make this argument and ones like it.
Yeah, if you live in a tiny medieval village or a small town in the middle of nowhere in 1980 there was little "privacy" but Jeffrey Dahmer was fucking dudes (back when that wasn't ok) and eating people in his apartment for years before anyone caught on. In more suburban settings there truly was privacy to a large practical extent.
Furthermore, these argument lie through their teeth to portray privacy from those who you mostly voluntarily associate, vs privacy from government systems that can seek you out, have power over you and can fairly unilaterally screw you with little recourse and you cannot choose not to associate with.
Having people not associate with you in 1980, or 1280, because you did something sly or immoral is fundamentally different from being combed over by the government because you hit some unknowable proprietary criteria that triggered them to go over you with a fine tooth comb.
You're mistaken if you think the community is still the same percentage of humans.
That’s a fair point that I didn’t consider, thank you.
What meh response? There has been a continued and very vocal response against flock here.
If you pointed out any of the many problematic aspects of Snowden in those days, you’d be shouted down and voted into oblivion immediately.
Good, because nothing “problematic” about an individual matters one bit when presented with nefarious government activities. It’s obvious distraction technique 101.
It's legal for any random citizen to build one of these surveillance networks, right?
Correct, at least in the US you can record people in public pretty much at any time.
That's a great point. We should build a network that tracks all cops to make sure they don't get up to no good while off duty.
Are you one of those guys who hates the cops until you need one? Do you also forget that cops are people, too?
Only in free countries. Many authoritarian regimes don’t let people take pictures in public.
Can anybody find trustworthy stats that these actually reduce crime? All I see are occasional anecdotes about how they were used to find one person one time.
Skeptical me seriously doubts this is an effective solution for crime. But maybe that's because this country has a history of being willing to do a million expensive and privacy violating things, and only if it's a punitive measure.
UK cctv and China's system are probably the closest examples?
I don't have stats, but most police have made it pretty clear that they're used for investigations that would otherwise have very little to go on.
I don't think anyone other than the manufacturers have made claims of cameras reducing crime. You can put all the AI bells and whistles on them, but they're still just cameras.
They're a fallback option, not a dragnet. The police are generally reactive to reports of crime, not proactively trying to piece together the details of everyone's lives and nail them the moment their dog poops on the sidewalk. No AI can even do that anyway and it would be a waste of money.
There are two vocal camps of people on these threads that are eroding HN: fearmongerers and grifters. I don't understand how it got this bad, but that's the real crisis here.
You are absolutely correct but you won't get anywhere here.
I have relatives who are cops and lawyers and city councilmen. No cop is sitting in a back room somewhere tracking all the cars on every street trying to do, uh, whatever it is people here are claiming they are going to do to them.
I also wonder what makes people think the cops are going to trust AI any more than anyone else. A mistake on bad information is even more dangerous for them and often makes national news.
If they don't reduce crimes what do they do? Oh right they track inconvenient people
Solving crime is still valuable even if it doesn’t reduce crime.
I don't get why any of these devices are still intact...
Right? The installers conveniently made them within baseball bat range. Luckily, we don't have them where I live (small West Texas town).
Are you willing to potentially be prosecuted to make a point that will ultimately come down to, "The cameras you destroyed are replaced with newly purchased units"?
The way to beat this isn't vandalism, it's getting them banned from every municipality and county in the country, while fighting at state levels for more bans.
It's also silly talk from kids online, just like "Don't vote, burn your local Wal-Mart" is only meant to impress other online children. The rest of us know that you'll neither vote, nor burn down the Wal-Mart.
You get to sacrifice your life one or zero times in your life. Surely there are some terminally ill people who would do it?
I can't speak for anyone else, but I suspect most terminally ill people want to spend time with the people they love, not breaking cameras and working their way through the legal system.
Is there such a crime as creating false positives for the panopticon?
These horrific things are multiplying exponentially in my (rural GA) environs. There are a dozen of them along every conceivable cycling route I could take, and far more if I drive somewhere. If you think this is a city thing meant to deter urban crime, the explosive proliferation of Flock cameras in quite rural and suburban areas may shock you. I find them in the darndest of places, near but not on county lines, adjacent to minor bridges, etc. And next time I go through there, there are more. They seem to be procreating.
As others have pointed out, they're not just ALPRs or traffic cameras, and their use-cases, official and unofficial, are extremely dynamic and expanding fast. They are not the only thing of their kind, but they justly earned the lightning rod status for their conspicuous cooperation with the administration's immigration thuggery and the douchy--but highly consequential--pronouncements of their CEO. Moreover, there's a ticker tape of daily news about police misuse of Flock's database, mainly for stalking exes and things like that.
This _is_ a stop on the way to a Chinese-style surveillance state, and there's nothing inevitable about it. But it will happen if we allow it to happen.
Ben Johnson's video on the security vulnerabilities, linked in the article, always deserves an explicit shout-out. It's likely to intrigue the tinkerers here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uB0gr7Fh6lY
Benn Jordan, you mean. Good video.
These things proliferate where people trust the government or see the government as a means to the end of getting one over on whoever is bad for them.
So the Nth generation group of townies that run any given rural shithole will happily slap them up, the government represents them as far as they're concerned.
And meanwhile in some snooty inner ring Chicago suburb that fancies themselves "progressive" (but in what direction?) they slap up the same damn cameras because they see it as a means to make more efficient the enforcement of the myriad of rules on which their enclave depends and they are wealthy and well represented so they have no fear of it being used against them.
Rural Georgia probably has a little of column A, little of column B going on.
"Security" will be redefined.
There is no expectation of privacy in public. It's really that simple.
There may be no expectation of privacy in the sense someone may see you and take your picture.
There is an expectation you are not constantly tracked everywhere you go by a nationwide surveillance apparatus, that your location is not constantly monitored, indexed and shared. Unless you expect to live in an Orwellian distopia.
And what happens to you? Has something happened to you? Or anyone you know who wasn't involved in something illegal?
Actually, the supreme court ruled that police have to get a warrant to view cell tracking data and attach a location tracking device to cars.
Flock is a clever workaround that should be illegal, but before that can happens we can get them removed at the city council level.
Do you agree with that, or are you just deferring to an overly simplified interpretation of the law?
No law is that simple. You can be photographed when you’re out in public most places, yet stalking is also illegal most places.
There should be. Other countries have one and they seem no worse off for it.
do you wear a skirt or a kilt? now about the no expectation of privacy in public ..
I have strong expectations, in fact; I need the state to respect that.
There should be.
They owe George orwell’s estate a royalty for this idea.
As a voter and taxpayer, I never asked for this.
That’s not how voting and paying taxes work.
Imagine representatives who did what voters actually wanted. There's probably a name for that. Representative democracy or something. As opposed to corporate representation.
I misread "corporate democratism" and I like that - democratism is to democracy what scientism is to science - democratism is something that has the superficial appearance of democracy but isn't democracy because it doesn't achieve outcomes based on a consensus of voters.
This is why gerrymandering should be unconstitutional, and why corporations should have their rights explicitly curtailed: they're not citizens or the people.
I'm really unconvinced gerrymandering is the issue here.
It's not like Red cities have flock cameras and Blue cities don't.
It's really just that the Fairness Doctrine [1] needed to apply to more than radio. If you can constantly just repeat your point and then deny an opposition time then of course you'll get your point through.
Although maybe if super-pacs got outlawed then the Equal-time rule [2] would suffice.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairness_doctrine
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal-time_rule
Imagine what I really meant was that in those areas people largely approve of these cameras and it’s the minority that don’t.
Now of course your narrative is rude and more entertaining but sadly far from the mark. Saying “that’s not what I paid for” is all fine and dandy but it’s cuts both ways.
> in those areas people largely approve of these cameras
How sure of that are you? I’m thinking it’s mostly a mix of indifference and ignorance. Has anywhere you know of voted specifically on these cameras?
Alright, but in those areas did the politicians run on having those cameras installed everywhere? Were the voters given a proposition to approve?
Data centers seem to be widely unpopular on both the left and right, so I'm wonder where the representative democracy comes into play. More often than not local politicians approve these projects despite there being majority opposition from the public.
archived: https://nonogra.ph/flock-cameras-track-more-than-your-licens...
Consider using that one as well as archive.org(when no paywall), archive.today, megalodon.jp, archive box?
If a certain group of people think that it should be their right to take others rights away and turn society into a dystopia for perceived security, then for the same reason it should be other individuals rights to assert that their rights should be protected by taking the first group's rights away to install or do whatever they think they can do for convenience/security's sake.
This includes "ancestry tests", security cameras with AI in them, upload IDs to "verify", and even social media where you are allowed to upload pictures with others in them.
And since we "supposedly" live in a democracy, we should be allowed to have a vote to decide on this, the group that wins is the majority, right? I don't understand why we're allowing our rights to erode before we have an informed election about this, in democracies.
Got these installed all over local parking lots for wallmart, home depot, ross, every exit solar panel and camera. Was wondering if there is some sort of quickly blinking infrared light or something that would make it visible to a naked eye of a cop, but not to a recording camera. I bet you would sell millions of those license plate holders in a heartbeat.
these are being mapped, i will like to see a GPS route option to avoid flock cameras, but I suspect they will end up flooding all intersections.
Like that paparazzi fabric that saturates the image?
Amazing innovation and dynamism.
We need some way to address the low level crime in the US. If you look at cities in east Asia, they're both much larger than typical US cities and much safer. It -is- possible to have safe large cities. The fact that we don't is a choice.
Don't we? Crime rates have been dropping for decades.
https://usafacts.org/answers/what-is-the-crime-rate-in-the-u...
But if the choice is between liberty and safety, then Americans are supposed to choose liberty, that's why America is what it is.
Ben Franklin famously said, "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
Exactly. More people die from cars every month in the US than in 9/11. We value our freedom with cars, we should value our privacy to an even greater extent.
What's even more amazing is that they had these safe cities without [Flock, Motorola, Axon]. I guess we will never know how they did it, but at least we get the Chinese surveillance state.
My experience in major East Asian cities (predominantly Tokyo and Taipei) is that they have extensive networks of surveillance cameras operated by or accessible to the police.
Japanese police are very rarely willing to even ask to look at any of the disorganized hodgepodge of private cameras for property crimes or even minor physical altercations. They are far more likely to rely on personal accounts. TV dramas not withstanding.
Although Tokyo does have a system of traffic cameras which log traffic movement and license plates, that's most all that it does. Except in cases of murder or kidnapping (or political influence), it's quite rare to request the recordings of many private cameras. Outside of big cities, it's even more rare.
The largest connected system of cameras I'm aware of are for the subway camera systems (Shinjuku, Shinagawa, etc). Although independent systems, together they can do facial recognition to track individuals. Not a lot of AI yet, though.
In Tokyo, it is not uncommon to see bikes parked on residential streets with keys left overnight in their wheel locks (as if there aren't even mischievous 12 year olds?!). Oh, and outside of the cities, crime is even more rare. It is common in youth hostels for there to be open cubbies where personal items are stored in the front near the door. Nothing is taken. Most common thefts are: umbrellas (considered a fungible public good?), unlocked bikes (in high traffic business areas), women's underwear (off of outdoor drying racks).
Flock is not the police. Their main customer is Home Depot. Their second one is Lowe's.
Then come the big police department.
Allowing a private company to profit of holding information about me is innerving to me.
I would feel better if it was 100% run by the police. ( better, not good )
And it's not an accident that Flock cameras were implicated in many ICE raids at Home Depot and Lowe's, either.
Was that because of the cameras, or because illegal day laborers have been known to congregate in home center parking lots for 30+ years.
Then surely they're being used to bust the people hiring them, too ... Right?
It was both, of course, but it's not an accident they were placed there at scale.
My Home Depot, on the north coast, was selling off cases of Jarritos a few months ago. They very much cater to the day laborers.
I disagree, I see them all over the place, it is due to shoplifting.
It is also due to shoplifting. They wouldn't get deployed if nobody could justify them in any way.
https://prospect.org/2026/05/21/home-depot-lowes-downplay-cu...
I can’t remember the last place I visited which didn’t. Maybe Lake Atitlan pre-2020?
Still, a few some areas of Asia achieved this reputation back when cameras were still extremely rare.
Yes, there are cultural reasons crime is lower in East Asia too, but I haven't been to a major city there that doesn't have an extensive surveillance system.
It is possible. What keeps japanese cities safe'er', is not the cameras though.
It’s the culture. Every Japanese person is always aware that they are “a part of society.”
Even the Yakuza participate in society. When they have big disasters, the local mobsters are usually helping people out, before the authorities can get going.
A lot of the neighborhoods where Flock is being deployed aren't even bad by higher standards, so I'm not sure what this has to do with anything.
East Asia built a uni-culture by being extremely racist against outsiders. I don't think you can get away with that anywhere else.
A friend of mine (white guy) married a Chinese woman and when they visited China they were subject to slurs and dirty looks in public.
There's a whole category of videos on social media of Japanese furiously angry at Westerners acting like fools on their subways. They're not happy about it.
I’m an Indian with a Taiwanese-American wife. I’ve never experienced even the mildest amount of racism in Taiwan. Everyone was kind and friendly to me. And Taiwan is very safe.
I’m not going to pretend that an anecdote fully captures a problem but considering I spent over a month there just living a normal life I imagine that if the problem were widespread I’d have many chances to experience it.
My elderly parents were there for two weeks too and they have nothing but positive things to say.
And finally, my wife’s cousin married a White man from Ireland and he has loved the place for the many years he’s lived there.
I don’t know if I would consider a month long vacation as evidence. Taiwan is pretty famous for have lower labor classes that they import from places like the Philippines and while people are friendly, they are still generally looked down upon. Not dissimilar to places like Japan, Hong Kong and Singapore. So I think racism is a pretty loaded and broad word and people typically think about it in purely an American context, it’s more common around the world than people think in all kinds of shades.
Ultimately I do agree with the original thesis around monocultures.
Well, certainly my experience on the ground is far more meaningful than someone’s statements without evidence. Just googling around it seems that American policing is generally considered fairly racially discriminatory so performing racism on its own is not getting us less crime. Taiwan doesn’t seem to have that problem as extensively.
And I’m an Indian who grew up in and spent the majority of my life in India as did my parents. I’ve lived in a few countries for years and stayed in many for months. My frame of reference is unlikely to be the American context for racism.
I don’t think anyone is arguing that Taiwan or Japan are uniquely or universally racist. The point is that many highly cohesive societies have clear social hierarchies and stronger in-group preferences than Americans (or other groups) often recognize.
Taiwan’s treatment of many Southeast Asian migrant workers is a commonly discussed example. People can be welcoming to tourists and expatriates while still having structural biases toward certain groups. Those aren’t contradictory observations.
Likewise, we wouldn’t dismiss concerns about women’s safety in India simply because a visitor spent a month there and had a wonderful experience. An individual’s experience matters, but it doesn’t settle broader questions about how different groups experience a society.
My opinion comes from having spent a lot of time around Asia and more than a month of “tourism”.
> I don’t think anyone is arguing that Taiwan or Japan are uniquely or universally racist.
The original comment used this as the explanation for why there's low crime. Here's a reminder of the context we are conversing within.
> > > > East Asia built a uni-culture by being extremely racist against outsiders. I don't think you can get away with that anywhere else.
I think "extreme racism to outsiders" is detectable within a month. I am as outsider as they come - being a brown-skinned South Asian Indian[0]. I also think that "I don't think you can get away with that anywhere else" means "uniquely". I guess we could argue about whether "extreme racism" means "universal racism" if you'd like but I don't think it's interesting as an explanation for safety. And the other statement I'm replying to there is
> > > > A friend of mine (white guy) married a Chinese woman and when they visited China they were subject to slurs and dirty looks in public.
My wife's cousin is married to a White Irish man who has lived there over a decade. This is not his experience anywhere in Taiwan, in particular, as opposed to the GP's China experience.
I think his decades of living there prior to and then after marrying my wife's cousin probably provide some experience. There's a lot of Planet of Hats thinking from Westerners visiting Asia. But different countries there are clearly different, just like France and Switzerland are different.
And in the end, if racism is not unique then it cannot explain difference in crime outcomes. To quote the great sage pj evans: "Cars have windows and can move. Houses have windows and can't move. So it's not the windows that make the car go. It's something else entirely."
And as a little epilogue, we may consider other countries with a foreign-born populace similar to Taiwan's: Poland, Argentina, Uruguay, and South Africa. None of them match Taiwan's broad lack of crime while having a similar degree of foreign-born people.
Which brings us again to whether the windows make the car go or not.
0: website in profile, feel free to take a look at my face
I think we’re talking past each other.
I’m not claiming “Taiwan is extremely racist, therefore low crime.” I’m saying cohesive societies often have stronger in-group preferences and social expectations than Americans tend to recognize, and those coexist with being welcoming to many foreigners.
Your experience and your relative’s experience are perfectly compatible with that. One or two positive anecdotes don’t tell us much about how a society views every minority or lower-status group any more than one bad anecdote proves pervasive racism.
As for crime, I agree it’s obviously not explained by a single variable. That’s a much stronger claim than I was making.
No desire to look at your profile but I hope the point I am trying to argue for is clearer to you.
I understand what you're saying but it seems like a complete non-sequitur given the context of the conversation, which I'll reproduce here in threaded fashion in case it's not visible in your client.
> > > We need some way to address the low level crime in the US. If you look at cities in east Asia, they're both much larger than typical US cities and much safer. It -is- possible to have safe large cities. The fact that we don't is a choice.
> > East Asia built a uni-culture by being extremely racist against outsiders. I don't think you can get away with that anywhere else. A friend of mine (white guy) married a Chinese woman and when they visited China they were subject to slurs and dirty looks in public. There's a whole category of videos on social media of Japanese furiously angry at Westerners acting like fools on their subways. They're not happy about it.
The claim is precisely what you're saying you're not claiming. So you must understand that I am having this conversation in that context. Though I suppose we can both interpose unrelated facts into the conversation and claim contextual irrelevance in the motte and bailey style. Here are a few I present for discussion:
2 + 2 = 4
The sky is blue
PRC has a demographic issue with missing women that engenders resentment of the foreign devils.
The pot calling the kettle black…
What are you even trying to say? Why does everything devolve into whataboutism?
Poverty and lack of economic opportunity are the biggest drivers of street-level crime. Good thing we have all these AI layoffs.
A choice that has tradeoffs. Assuming we're talking about the sorts of places that lean heavily into surveillance I don't want to live there and their views on the role of the government is one of the reasons.
You're correct that it is a choice. Flock would barely move the needle on stopping crimes caused by the mentally ill and drug addicted.
By low level crime you mean unlawful surveillance?
You're getting loads of replies that seem to knee-jerk defend US cities purely to oppose Flock. And let's be real and admit that adding more cameras does little to improve this. My whole neighbourhood has a panopticon of surveillance cameras on every property, yet there have still been home burglaries and several cars stolen.
Many Asian cities are safer -- and they undisputedly are -- for cultural reasons. You can't create culture through surveillance.
How much of that is addressed by a strong social-safety net? How are addicts and homeless people handled? How about general poverty (a known driver of crime)?
My small city was safer before flock.
Before, if the cops asked for witnesses to come forward, they always got someone because they had a good reputation and were trusted.
A few years of the people saying no to flock and the cops and city hall ignoring us has destroyed that trust.
Now, when the cops ask for help, they get told to go flock themselves.
I'd suggest a better way is to reform policing. They need to start working for all the people, not just the Epstein class.
That sounds pretty racist though…
Is the anti-prosecution narrative
> much safer
They have severe consequences for criminal behavior and no subculture that elevates criminality.
> and no subculture that elevates criminality
And which subculture, specifically, would you be referring to here?
What is the trade off though and are Americans willing to make it? What sort of social conditions lead to more low level crime? This sort of complaint is nothing new btw.
US cities are plenty safe. The fact that you think otherwise is propaganda you’ve been successfully served. I live in Nyc and visit other cities often.
You must live in a different New York City than the one I visited. I had the safety calibration of Tallinn, Estonia and Dubai, UAE.
The subway was extremely hostile. People were regularly drugged out of their mind. I saw one guy try to drink a Coca Cola upside down and spilled it all in the bus. Another crazy chased my limited mobility Estonian friend who wanted to visit nyc alongside me when she went alone for groceries.
Could it be that your frame of reference is broken and/or you’re numb to it?
You saw someone try to drink a soda upside down and spill it? We are going to need more than a Flock cam to stop that heinous act, perhaps a Flock robot arm that could grab the criminals arm and turn it right side up, or just restrain them while the authorities are on the way.
I saw a tall man on L train stomping aggressively through the car and yelling bloody murder that he is gonna "stab the next mf I see", while attempting to swing punches at random people. The whole train ended up getting evacuated, and the train line got delayed. That was last winter. Between then and now, I saw people threatening others on the subway multiple times.
The most recent incident was a few weeks ago on Q train, where a seated man was screaming at the woman across from him (who was trying to do her best to ignore him), how he was gonna kill her and "the rest of her people" (whatever that means).
But please tell me how stuff like this never happens.
And I am not even a subway hater overall, I take it daily, and it is my preferred method of transportation. And no, I am not taking subway into deep and shady parts of bronx or brooklyn, as heavy majority of my rides are contained between Dekalb/Jay St Metrotech (aka dt brooklyn) and midtown.
It just sounds like crazy talk to me, when someone claims that the safety cams in subway cars are not, at least, somewhat helpful. At least newer A/C train cars have those cams now, and, I hope, it will lead to prosecution of serial subway harassers.
You’re describing a spilled soda as a safety issue. The other person isn’t the one with a broken frame of reference.
These are all lies. Small towns have notiriously higher crime rates than Nyc. We should send the National Guard to your small town and place cameras every where. I dont feel safe in your small town. I moved away from middle America that’s swamped in meth, high murder rate, and racism. Sorry someone spilled a coca-cola though. Your pearls must be powder in your hands by now.
This is false. Urban areas have the highest rate of crime compared to rural and suburban. For example look at the years 2020 and 2021 from this report:[0]
Table 8
Rate of victimization, by type of crime and location of residence, 2020 and 2021
Location of residence
Total violent crime Violent crime excluding simple assault Total property crime
2020 2021* 2020 2021* 2020 2021*
Urban 19.0 † 24.5 7.7 9.7 158.9 157.5
Suburban 16.8 16.5 5.6 5.2 90.5 86.8
Rural 13.4 11.1 4.5 4.4 65.6 57.7
You can see clearly that urban has the highest rate of crime, and this has been true for decades.[1]
Also, many crimes are not recorded at all in NYC, which is why many stores have locked down all their items with a key that requires permission from a staff member to access. I haven't seen this in the small towms I've been to.
[0] https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/cv21.pdf
[1] https://ovc.ojp.gov/sites/g/files/xyckuh226/files/ncvrw2018/...
There’s possibly a fantasy mindset at play where people need a certain identity to be true. As we’ve witnessed on a national scale, humans have great capacity for fantastical thinking to support what a friend of mine calls their “binkie narrative.”
His small town? Tallinn is comparatively tiny to NYC admittedly but Dubai is a fairly large and urban city. I think that it doesn’t quite fit the appellation.
I live in NYC and I don't think it is safe, so there's one person that disagrees with you. Part of the problem in NYC is when you commit a low-level crime the social-justice warriors let the person back out on the street without charging them. This is why when somebody kills somebody in NYC you often hear that the person had been arrested for various things twelve times earlier. Just covering up the "un-safeness" by saying "it's safe" or citing crime stats doesn't change what people can see with their own eyes.
Are you sure these people weren't making plea deals or having their cases dismissed because prosecutors can't try every single low level criminal case? I'm not sure where "social-justice warriors" comes in to play. It's the legal system making choices about what crimes are worth prosecuting.
This is a bail reform propaganda. If you feel unsafe because we dont put deoderant thieves in Rikers then move.
Can't wait for all the pharmacies in your neighborhood to close because you think punishing deodorant thieves is wrong.
In your conception, the only reason any drug store is able to stay in business is because deodorant thieves are getting hard time?
If enough people are stealing deodorant to put them out of business, I think there are some big social problems that jail time isn’t going to fix.
Frankly, i’d 100% of the time rather bare the cost of shoplifters thru slightly higher prices than thru paying ~$100,000 year each incarcerating anyone who shoplifts.
There are “low level” crimes that are predictable signs of violent crime. E.g. intimate partner violence. I’d love to see those taken more seriously, even if it’s just for the downstream effects.
It’s hard to distil to a single comment but I think it might be a poor example given the NYPD takes about double the budget per capita to be less safe than Toronto.
I think the only objective conclusion we can come to in a comments section is that going by “I visited there” vibes isn’t going to be useful.
What about the high murder rate and meth problems of middle America, lets talk about that more instead of the “oh no homeless people” rhetoric all the time.
This type of "there is no problem and any evidence is propaganda" denial is why social disorder like rampant petty theft, open air drug use, and people shitting in the streets is destroying these cities.
What about the meth heads shitting in the streets of the small town? Rampant assault and murder rates. What about all the drinking and driving killing people in America. No, no, it’s Nyc that’s scary.
They have laws against those people.
When meth heads get arrested, there isn't an army of losers protesting the sheriff the next day claiming it's cruel and unusual punishment and demanding the city give them a free house for them to do meth in.
Enjoy your Alcatraz pharmacies while they're still open.
NYC is safer than many cities for sure.
But there are approximately zero meth heads shitting in the streets in small towns in the US.
I have never once seen a person shitting in the streets in a small town. I saw it within 24 hours of visiting Portland. I’ve never seen that in NYC either to be clear.
Yes, crime in small towns is bad too. Do we agree?
NYC is quite safe compared to most US cities. It is still more dangerous than most major cities in the developed world.
Really? I lived in Greenwich village until last year and I’d have people threaten to kill me for politely declining to give them change. I live in Park Slope now and there’s violent people on the F line all the time. Maybe wealthy neighbourhoods are super dangerous or maybe you’re just not noticing.
I've lived in major US cities my entire life and have never been a victim of crime. Do you have any facts to back up this seemingly outrageous claim?
> If you look at cities in east Asia, they're... much safer.
ah yes, the famously dependable statistics of east Asia, with their famously free press and citizen auditing communities, and the famously dependable impressions of tourists and expatriates...
What do you mean we don't? Our cities seem quite safe...
Everyone should do their best to take down or disable every one they see in my opinion.