Flock did not put the woman in jail. The police and DA put her in Jail. This is not a failure of the technology (do they have confidence levels?). This is a failure of how police are outsourcing their reasoning and decision making to an AI camera service that seems to fail at the tail.
But Flock gives police overconfidence to commit actions instead of having due diligence. It is like the best student in your classroom tells you 2 + 2 = 5, and you naturally feel compelled to believe him, even there is clear evidence against the claim.
This is also comparable to self-driving car: Waymo's system has achieve the level of "less error than human on average" long time ago, but they are still only doing slow expansion. Why? Because when AI is involved, human naturally expect them to be almost 100% correct, not just barely better than human, otherwise why bother use AI (and all the troubles to legalize for AI) in the first place? So in this case, I guess the police just blindly trust the AI being 99.99% correct.
Flock isn’t an “AI” though? It doesn’t put together a case and say “yes, this is the criminal”. It’s not a crime-solving AI.
It’s a camera system, and data can be queried by police. They have to search for something. So the cops searched for a vehicle matching the description in the general area, seemed to take the first one, and called it a day.
That’s not an AI-uncanny-valley. That’s the equivalent of (pre-flock/cameras) looking at vehicle registration list and assuming the one at the top of the list must be it.
The automation-trust is a legitimate concern but it’s not applicable here.
Correct, but what's more, there is a lack of accountability issue that's part of it. When people are not held accountable for the screw ups, then processes don't or are very slow to change. That's how you can just call it a day, regardless of the harm done to innocent citizens.
I don't know the details on how Flock is internally designed, but I suppose AI is at least involved in the image recognition and correlation, at least to this scale. I also don't know exactly why Flock misidentifies Issacs' car in this case, because I don't find it in the article or the interview, but I assume it is due to a mislabeling of the plate number or the car damage imagery, which is related to AI. Correct me if I'm wrong.
Flock is not an AI. That they have AI features on certain products does not mean "Flock" is an AI. That's the fallacy of composition.
Flock does have AI components (this one seems LLM based). Basically every ANPR system will also use some level of AI.
Also, on "reality would like a word". Why not just speak normally instead of using what seems like a high-school grade comeback?
The main Flock related issue here is that officers treat results that come out of the systems as gospel. The same thing has happened with face recognition systems. There is also the broader issue of access controls to Flock, 5A, and whether places should be building up a technology so powerful (surveillance infrastructure can easily be used for evil).
> It is like the best student in your classroom tells you 2 + 2 = 5, and you naturally feel compelled to believe him, even there is clear evidence against the claim.
Yes, but it is still your fault. “I am dumb and I was deceived” is no valid defense, least of all for a police officer.
I'm not saying the police has no fault. Using AI assist without secondary verification is never good idea, at least not in 2026. But you can't argue Flock the technology itself, and especially Flock the company, are totally innocent, just like you can't say the "guns are just tools like hammer, it only depends on who uses them", and the gun industry.
It is not even clear from the article that there were anything wrong with the output. She has a car of that make. And it doesnt appear to be in dispute that she drove nearby.
It simply is the case that “being nearby” in itself is not enough evidence that you were involved in a crash. Especially when the colour doesn’t match and the vehicle is not damaged.
So next time start your first post with that, otherwise you lead us on this wild goose chase only to find that you mostly agree, it's a foundational part of discourse.
Which makes Flock cameras even worse right? It provides false confidence to law enforcement to make decisions that can change someone's life for worse. I don't understand why people hate the NSA spying on them and yet support Flock cameras.
If you give a toddler a gun and it shoots someone, it's the toddler's fault, not the gun's right? But you don't give toddlers guns. You don't say "well toddlers just need to be more careful".
of course it's the absence of common sense in the law enforcement but on the other hand this technology is thought to be faultless and it takes resource to put it right
While you are technically correct (which we all know from Futurama is “the best kind”), that is neither helpful nor consolation to the affected, and I wish these kinds of comments didn’t dominate the top spot in HN discussions. They’re the “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” of tech.
Yes, the system is broken even before we get to Flock (or whatever tech) but Flock makes it worse. If a bad tool is badly used to cause harm, it’s fair to criticise its existence. You can’t fix police abuse with a snap of the finger, so you need to start but taking away the tools which facilitate it.
If it were your ass which had been thrown in solitary, would you be pleading with your lawyer to “go easy on Flock. Sure, they allowed a major disruption and trauma into my life, but they’re just a tool”?
Then the right fix is to fix the system, e.g. imposing accountability. Removing tools is just a band aid. Why is the tool bad? A tool does what it's designed to do. You can use it properly or improperly. There should be no conflation of regular civilians with supposedly trained government officers.
Yes, of course the better fix is to fix the system but one thing at a time. You’re on a giant boat that has left port years ago and a leak just sprung; you should absolutely get back to port and fix the processes that allowed the leak to open but first you have to close it.
If someone released a hammer that when held a certain way would cause your hand to explode and it kept happening over and over, the solution wouldn’t be just to tell people to hold it better, it would also be to recall the tool and fix it so the issue were less likely or impossible to occur. And if it can’t be done, then maybe the hammer shouldn’t be released again.
This “it’s just a tool, the proper solution is to rework civilisation” defence is frankly as tired as it is ignorant. The way you fix the system as a whole is via a lot of small fixes.
Then it seems that you are somehow implying that it takes many years to merely enact and impose real accountability rules. I think it's not a tech problem, or scientific problem, with unknown solution. It's a social/political problem.
I don't it's about an innocent skill issue like you imply (holding a hammer the wrong way). It's an ethical issue of bad actors in the government, together with an accountability issue of the system preventing holding those bad actors to account.
AI cameras are just one tool; there are other tools, too. Where do you draw the line for which tools deserve the removal for your kind of reason? Perhaps degun the police departments because guns also get abused? How do you decide in a principled way that AI cameras are somehow special compared to other tools?
I very much agree with what you say on automation bias.
Certain technology just has too much potential to be misused / people repeatedly prove they can't use it properly. It also comes with risks of making authoritarian takeover easier.
However, here, it seems they used Flock a bit like a regular ANPR. The actions they took independent of Flock show there are better stories to use to criticise this technology.
Indeed. It’s insane to see these arguments implying the contrary. The institution committing the violence is the one responsible for the outcome.
If a random person walks into a police station and accuses a random stranger of murder, and the police put that stranger in jail based on that alone, the main problem is not the accuser.
But in this case, it wasn't a random person, it was a police-vetted system. Of course the authorities are to blame, but Flock hold a lot of responsibility, too.
It shouldn’t have been vetted then. It’s again the fault of authorities who approved that.
A scientist who uses an LLM to write a paper remains responsible for its contents. And authorities that outsource police work remain responsible for what comes from that.
Sure it shouldn't have been approved, but it was approvied through misleading marketing and a huge and expensive lobbying effort. Flock spends a ton of money convincing cops and legislators that their product works well, is useful and safe. That was always a lie and they have to be held responsible for it.
It is always both. A product that can be abused to this extent is a bad product.
I have never released a single product that has seen people die through common user misuse.
The standards for solutions shouldn't get _lower_ as the stakes get _higher_.
If a private company can puts hundreds of tons of payload into orbit without ever causing someone to accidentally be imprisoned a company that sells cameras on a stick shouldn't either.
Had the 'evidence' been a random dashcam rather than Flock cam, this wouldn't even be a story beyond severe police incompetence.
Flock didn't fail to inspect the car for damage and not find any, flock didn't take 13 days to conduct a cursory review of evidence, flock didn't fail to request cell tower triangulation data and rule out her being in the location of the accident...
I get that people feel their privacy's invaded by being filmed, but this story doesn't appear to have any more to do with Flock than what the officers had for breakfast or the brand of air freshener she had in her car at the time.
A random dashcam does not serve the police someone's identity on a platter. It had to be a stupid "smart" object for such an inexcusable offense to be committed.
With dumb camera footage, the cops looks at the plates, visual indicators, etc. That does not make them more competent or less prone to abuse. But here, Flock's software literally told them this woman was the one they were looking for, despite no evidence supporting this.
This is 100% both on the police and on Flock. Some technologies don't deserve to exist. Facial recognition and ALPR is one of those, because the error rates are too high and the stakes are too high.
> A random dashcam does not serve the police someone's identity on a platter.
Nor does Flock - Flock merely provides a photo and timestamp, which should have been scrutised like any other evidence.
The Flock data showed:
- Car of same make/model nearby at similar time to the accident
- Possible colour match (eyewitnesses gave varying reports on the colour of the perpetrating vehicle). But a match could have been ruled out in minutes had police inspected paint transfer onto the struck vehicle
- A number plate non-match (first three characters were reported to 911 and did not match)
- That's all!
So police didn't do their job (scutinise the evidence), and possibly worse, they may have fabricated evidence (since police claimed Isaacs' vehicle was damaged, but it was in factory-new condition) - which may explain why they're shifting blame to Flock!
That's exactly the same. Suggesting an output is the same as serving a suspect on a platter. I'm sure there's many studies about how humans (except statisticians) are not comfortable with confidence intervals.
A computer software is supposed to deliver reliable, predictable, reproducible results. When it does not every now and then, it's a bug. When your entire system is built in "recognition" and "confidence" and leads to wrongful arrests, it's not a bug. You are just not making computer science. You are making a power abuse machine.
Except of course the entire reason the police picked her in specific is because of information flock gave them.
Could they have, you know, double checked it? Yes, obviously. But they didn't.
I agree that this story is more about the incredible incompetence of the police involved than flock attempting to record everyone and everything, but flock giving the police an excuse to stop looking and arrest an innocent is by no means irrelevant.
The police should have thought “okay a car was seen within several miles of an accident - so what?”
Their conclusion (after 5 minutes) would have been (obviously) that there’s not so much as a strand of chewing gum connecting the car to the accident, or making it stand out from dozens of others, and they’d promptly get back to searching for the car that actually was involved.
There was a senate hearing a few days ago where this woman testified. Also Benn Jordan and Chad Marlow from the EFF were htere. I was happy hearing them put into words the problems on the national stage.
Interestingly, conservative Republican sheriff Ross Teeple also spoke against the idea of networked/data-storing ALPRs and Flock in particular at that hearing.
But seriously, privacy must not become a sided issue. Attacks on privacy are bipartisan, the defense of it would be weakened if it was not bipartisan. Civil liberties protected by the constitution should not be controversial.
the problem here appears to be that police officers are generally of average or below average intelligence. combined with the fact that they face no consequences for incompetence, you have the perfect mixture for nonsense like this happening.
I expect the solution they will settle on is to form a department for interacting with technology like this, who understand its outputs are not edicts.
you can't really expect any meaningful police reforms (such as liability and insurance) because anyone who is in any position to enact them is perfectly fine with dumb muscle that holds a monopoly on violence and is deferential to them. in fact the public disliking the police is an ideal outcome for those decision makers as it gives them more leverage over the police.
> Regardless, the true takeaway of Isaacs’ experience is that ALPR technology, whether it’s from Flock or any of the other competitors in this space providing the same functionality (Axon, etc), is dangerous not only because it is so easily abused by police (or even by hackers) to invade the privacy and liberty of citizens, but also because it enables a lazy police department to outsource basic critical thinking to machines and then take action based on a single data point to ruin a person’s life.
The accusation that some machine made any decision here goes beyond the reporting in the article. It seems concocted to raise AI alarm. All we have is that it supplied accurate data that police then abused. That isn't in the vicinity of "outsource[d] basic critical thinking to machines".
I want such general government surveillance banned, but the machines in this story had no more volition than a breathalyzer.
The machines matter, because we know how human behavior works. We know that if you give humans an automated tool that works most of the time, they get lazy, to the point where they make more mistakes than if they had no automation at all.
Flock isn’t an automated tool though; you don’t give it a crime, and it gives back an automated package saying “this is who the criminal is”.
As far as I know, it lets law enforcement query for things against the data. Can be specific (like a license plate) or more general (like a dark colored mid-sized SUV around <location> at <time>).
To get where this story is at, cops here must have done the latter, and taken the first name off the top of the pile and patted themselves on the back, and then waited 7 months, and went and arrested her. Unless there’s an explanation for a 7 month delay, it seems designed to allow defensive evidence to spoil.
There isn’t an uncanny-valley of automation here. There is just lazy, grossly-incompetent, bad-faith, and malicious cops/investigators.
Volition has nothing to do with it. A breathalyser doesn't point to a person and say this is the likely drunk, so that comparison is fatuous. These identification systems do point the finger.
The key thing she ought to have done was not answer the door, or given any sign she was there. She should have rung an experienced criminal attorney immediately, and moved to an undisclosed location that wasn't a hotel, with a new cell phone, and let her lawyer negotiate with the police to discover what their laziness has led them to believe.
When the police come and want to arrest you for triple manslaughter you just don’t open the door, and they shrug and you can let a third party “negotiate” with them for you?
it could have been a so called no knock warrant where police just ram your house door and enter your house. but what I don't understand is that it took from the impounding of the car to the incarceration of her seven months I would have assumed that she lawyered up to get the car back and deny the allegations
Well the next step obviously is to get in touch with the lodge these police officers belong to, talk to the grandmaster and convince him to organize a conciliation night with you as a guest. When you leave, whisper in the ear of the officer in charge of your case "I'm hungry, and I only use pressure cookers. If you behave I'll invite you to the diner".
People don't like to hear this, but we're going to need to become technologically literate as a society. Your local bread shop is going to need to use facebook. Your dentist is going to have to learn to use the latest x-ray machine, not the one they still have from 1992. And yes, your police are going to have to know that ALPR cameras aren't magical criminal identification devices.
I had no idea that cameras were walking the streets and arresting people in America. Only the police should be able to do that. They are clearly far more competent. Oh wait-I just read the article...
> Police didn't care that Lindsey Isaacs' car was the wrong color, and wasn't damaged. They still arrested her because of Flock data.
This is literally the first sentence of the article.
You can dislike public surveillance, but statements like "Flock camera data put this woman in jail for 13 days" blatantly ignores the the fact that Flock didn't put anyone in jail, a bunch of cops who very clearly knew that it wasn't her.
> The Flock camera, meanwhile, had recorded Isaacs’ car and its license plate several miles away from the site of the accident, sometime around the time of the incident.
Blaming a tool, when the cops in question are clearly willing to grasp to whatever piece of "evidence" makes their job "easier" is a giant cop-out and excuse for the people who are abusing it.
Any piece of evidence requires some form of critical examination; that is what law enforcement's job is. If you're just going to go with the first theory/piece-of-evidence they find.... they're not doing their job (and violating peoples constitutional rights through sheer laziness).
That’s all true. But we’ve known police and prosecutors are like this forever. No need to give them tools to be even lazier and that make it easier for them to abuse us.
Thats what always been portrayed in films and stories for so long.Police never solved cases. There were detectives involved specialist who solves crime. While only job of police is to arrest any suspicious person, take them to station, then to court, then to jail. Essentially they are just drives carrying criminals. The very first loose evidence and suspect, that it arrest them question them, torture, if officer is lucky, that person is the criminal or one who just accepts blame. All their effort is solving as fast as they can to maintain record and stars on their shoulder
Right. It's not even clear to me what the alternative critical position is here (for gp)? At the end of the day, the company is not putting you in jail, the cops who do are simply their customers.
"Flock is bad" metonymizes the situation, but doesn't let anyone off the hook.
Multiple things can be bad at the same time and cops have a demonstrated record of failures such that add a system like flock is most likely going to lead to more injustice, not less.
Absolutely not all cops and prosecutors, or even the majority of them, are this lazy. Every tool is a tool that lets them "be event lazier" and make it "easier for them to abuse us". Removing any tool that let bad-actors be lazy is not an alternative for removing the bad-actor themselves.
This situation the equivalent of an eye-witness saying "Ya, I think it might have been this person I know, Tom!" and a cop/prosecutor taking that at face value and arresting Tom (and the system that allowed that to happen).
The people who make decisions and take action so (grossly) negligently need to be held accountable and face consequences. Blaming the tool (whatever tool it is) is giving the people who have the actual responsibility an escape hatch to avoid accountability.
As the child of a public defender who has heard some STORIES: they absolutely are not doing the work. Not because of some inherent trait, but because they are all (prosecutors and defenders) assigned a workload that forces shortcuts and allows negligence with no chance of consequence.
All public defenders and most prosecutors are happy to admit anonymously that the justice system is 90% gears grinding people. They ALL know an innocent person that pled guilty to end the grinding. Judges too. You can find plenty of court videos on YouTube of people pleading guilty while saying they didn’t do it but need to get on with their life. The judge will explain to them that they can’t accept a guilty plea from someone who claims innocence, and the defendant then folds. Everyone in the room knows that there is more to the story, but no one is willing to do the work.
You'd think with tech being a force multiplier and all it'd be real easy for agencies to shed the supposed few and far between 'bad apples'. They should be able to do more with less bodies, with flock and other tech helping them, right? It seems to me the entire system failed this woman and waiving it away as a single lazy cop gives the system a pass.
There is no real mechanism for holding them accountable and the consequences of these tools include death (it only takes one perceived wrong move for officers thinking they've bagged a felon to ventilate you. Hell not even that, see that officer who mag dumped his own car after he mistook an acorn for a gunshot.) This lady is quite lucky that it was only 13 days, if she had a career that's probably hosed but it might not be totally life ruining if she has a strong support system.
I think there's a combination of selection bias and survivorship bias with bad cops.
When it is made pretty clear that as a cop you won't face consequences for your malicious and/or incompetent actions, you're going to select for people who find that very appealing. Similarly, the people who don't like that kind of system might leave, allowing for a reinforcement the malicious and/or incompetent behavior.
But whats the difference on the ground here? Are we meant to take the transitive property here if you will and say there is actually nothing wrong with the Flock company itself and what it enables?
From the same article : “what else would you call the account of a woman who was arrested by incompetent police based on nothing more than a single Flock camera piece of data, and held in jail for 13 days”
When the headline of the article is explicitly blaming Flock, and not the cop/DA/judge who never even looked at the evidence available, it is 100%, whether on purpose or not, letting/helping the cops point the finger at another party.
The headline is what 99% of people read, and remember.
I prefer to discuss the actual material. If you want discuss what you believe other people believe about just a headline, let’s do it somewhere other than a thread discussing content specifically from the article.
What a weird thing to say. The headline is supposed to be the takeaway of the material. People are certainly allowed to discuss an article's choice of headline (which is what people remember), and should give no care to you telling them to go elsewhere.
There will always be cops willing to misuse whatever they have access to.
Part of it is holding cops accountable in these situations. Part of it is limiting or stopping the use of these systems so cops don't have as many opportunities to abuse them.
> critical examination; that is what law enforcement's job is
Critical examination is the judiciary's job, not the police's. Jordan v. City of New London established that police departments can and do deny employment to prospective officers who possess excessive cognitive ability.
The point is that if the flock surveillance data hadn't existed in the first place, we wouldn't be in this situation. Everybody knows police will abuse this kind of surveillance technology, regardless of how accurate it is.
> The point is that if the flock surveillance data hadn't existed in the first place, we wouldn't be in this situation.
Yeah. After all, the police are known for never arresting people based solely on very tenuous and easily disproved evidence. This damn flock surveillance data!
> Everybody knows police will abuse this kind of surveillance technology
Only here that is literally not the case. There was a real crime and the surveillance technology provided the relevant evidence.
Flock did not put the woman in jail. The police and DA put her in Jail. This is not a failure of the technology (do they have confidence levels?). This is a failure of how police are outsourcing their reasoning and decision making to an AI camera service that seems to fail at the tail.
But Flock gives police overconfidence to commit actions instead of having due diligence. It is like the best student in your classroom tells you 2 + 2 = 5, and you naturally feel compelled to believe him, even there is clear evidence against the claim.
This is also comparable to self-driving car: Waymo's system has achieve the level of "less error than human on average" long time ago, but they are still only doing slow expansion. Why? Because when AI is involved, human naturally expect them to be almost 100% correct, not just barely better than human, otherwise why bother use AI (and all the troubles to legalize for AI) in the first place? So in this case, I guess the police just blindly trust the AI being 99.99% correct.
Flock isn’t an “AI” though? It doesn’t put together a case and say “yes, this is the criminal”. It’s not a crime-solving AI.
It’s a camera system, and data can be queried by police. They have to search for something. So the cops searched for a vehicle matching the description in the general area, seemed to take the first one, and called it a day.
That’s not an AI-uncanny-valley. That’s the equivalent of (pre-flock/cameras) looking at vehicle registration list and assuming the one at the top of the list must be it.
The automation-trust is a legitimate concern but it’s not applicable here.
Correct, but what's more, there is a lack of accountability issue that's part of it. When people are not held accountable for the screw ups, then processes don't or are very slow to change. That's how you can just call it a day, regardless of the harm done to innocent citizens.
I don't know the details on how Flock is internally designed, but I suppose AI is at least involved in the image recognition and correlation, at least to this scale. I also don't know exactly why Flock misidentifies Issacs' car in this case, because I don't find it in the article or the interview, but I assume it is due to a mislabeling of the plate number or the car damage imagery, which is related to AI. Correct me if I'm wrong.
Ahem, reality would like a word about flock not being AI.
https://cybernews.com/privacy/flock-ai-os-investigate/
Flock is not an AI. That they have AI features on certain products does not mean "Flock" is an AI. That's the fallacy of composition.
Flock does have AI components (this one seems LLM based). Basically every ANPR system will also use some level of AI.
Also, on "reality would like a word". Why not just speak normally instead of using what seems like a high-school grade comeback?
The main Flock related issue here is that officers treat results that come out of the systems as gospel. The same thing has happened with face recognition systems. There is also the broader issue of access controls to Flock, 5A, and whether places should be building up a technology so powerful (surveillance infrastructure can easily be used for evil).
Software developers approving AI PRs without reading them: This is the way the world works now. Get with the times.
Police approving AI PRs without reading them: This is the way the world works now. Get with the times.
> It is like the best student in your classroom tells you 2 + 2 = 5, and you naturally feel compelled to believe him, even there is clear evidence against the claim.
Yes, but it is still your fault. “I am dumb and I was deceived” is no valid defense, least of all for a police officer.
I'm not saying the police has no fault. Using AI assist without secondary verification is never good idea, at least not in 2026. But you can't argue Flock the technology itself, and especially Flock the company, are totally innocent, just like you can't say the "guns are just tools like hammer, it only depends on who uses them", and the gun industry.
> the police has no fault
Gross lack of due diligence: it has full fault.
Untrained officials: graver systemic fault.
> company, are totally innocent
How clear is the uncertainty of the output?
> How clear is the uncertainty of the output?
It is not even clear from the article that there were anything wrong with the output. She has a car of that make. And it doesnt appear to be in dispute that she drove nearby.
It simply is the case that “being nearby” in itself is not enough evidence that you were involved in a crash. Especially when the colour doesn’t match and the vehicle is not damaged.
So next time start your first post with that, otherwise you lead us on this wild goose chase only to find that you mostly agree, it's a foundational part of discourse.
Cops regularly frame people and get caught only because of cameras that the cops are too stupid/incompetent to disable or avoid. This goes both ways.
Which makes Flock cameras even worse right? It provides false confidence to law enforcement to make decisions that can change someone's life for worse. I don't understand why people hate the NSA spying on them and yet support Flock cameras.
If you give a toddler a gun and it shoots someone, it's the toddler's fault, not the gun's right? But you don't give toddlers guns. You don't say "well toddlers just need to be more careful".
Are toddlers being hired to do government work nowadays, including as police officers?
As far as reasoning abilities goes it would seem so.
The police is of course responsible, but you can't wave the responsibility of flock away when it's inconvenient for them
How is Flock responsible in this case?? There may be cases where Flock is responsible, but I don't see it here.
of course it's the absence of common sense in the law enforcement but on the other hand this technology is thought to be faultless and it takes resource to put it right
While you are technically correct (which we all know from Futurama is “the best kind”), that is neither helpful nor consolation to the affected, and I wish these kinds of comments didn’t dominate the top spot in HN discussions. They’re the “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” of tech.
Yes, the system is broken even before we get to Flock (or whatever tech) but Flock makes it worse. If a bad tool is badly used to cause harm, it’s fair to criticise its existence. You can’t fix police abuse with a snap of the finger, so you need to start but taking away the tools which facilitate it.
If it were your ass which had been thrown in solitary, would you be pleading with your lawyer to “go easy on Flock. Sure, they allowed a major disruption and trauma into my life, but they’re just a tool”?
The people who say there are problems with Flock are perceived as excusing the human police officers.
The people who say there are problems with the human police officers are perceived as excusing Flock.
Who is responsible for the area inside a square, the width or the height? It is not an additive relationship.
Then the right fix is to fix the system, e.g. imposing accountability. Removing tools is just a band aid. Why is the tool bad? A tool does what it's designed to do. You can use it properly or improperly. There should be no conflation of regular civilians with supposedly trained government officers.
Yes, of course the better fix is to fix the system but one thing at a time. You’re on a giant boat that has left port years ago and a leak just sprung; you should absolutely get back to port and fix the processes that allowed the leak to open but first you have to close it.
If someone released a hammer that when held a certain way would cause your hand to explode and it kept happening over and over, the solution wouldn’t be just to tell people to hold it better, it would also be to recall the tool and fix it so the issue were less likely or impossible to occur. And if it can’t be done, then maybe the hammer shouldn’t be released again.
This “it’s just a tool, the proper solution is to rework civilisation” defence is frankly as tired as it is ignorant. The way you fix the system as a whole is via a lot of small fixes.
Then it seems that you are somehow implying that it takes many years to merely enact and impose real accountability rules. I think it's not a tech problem, or scientific problem, with unknown solution. It's a social/political problem.
I don't it's about an innocent skill issue like you imply (holding a hammer the wrong way). It's an ethical issue of bad actors in the government, together with an accountability issue of the system preventing holding those bad actors to account.
AI cameras are just one tool; there are other tools, too. Where do you draw the line for which tools deserve the removal for your kind of reason? Perhaps degun the police departments because guns also get abused? How do you decide in a principled way that AI cameras are somehow special compared to other tools?
True, this isn't about flock and it's not even about outsourcing reasoning.
This is the good old police incompetence that you come across once in a while and shake your head.
Where detectives lock on one angle of a case and completely refuse to entertain any other possible explanations
The technology is not a neutral thing here. Automation bias¹ exists and is especially problematic in this context.
And if your country happens to have a police force that is historically bad at its job, giving them that power seems like a really stupid idea.
¹: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automation_bias
I very much agree with what you say on automation bias.
Certain technology just has too much potential to be misused / people repeatedly prove they can't use it properly. It also comes with risks of making authoritarian takeover easier.
However, here, it seems they used Flock a bit like a regular ANPR. The actions they took independent of Flock show there are better stories to use to criticise this technology.
Indeed. It’s insane to see these arguments implying the contrary. The institution committing the violence is the one responsible for the outcome.
If a random person walks into a police station and accuses a random stranger of murder, and the police put that stranger in jail based on that alone, the main problem is not the accuser.
But in this case, it wasn't a random person, it was a police-vetted system. Of course the authorities are to blame, but Flock hold a lot of responsibility, too.
It shouldn’t have been vetted then. It’s again the fault of authorities who approved that.
A scientist who uses an LLM to write a paper remains responsible for its contents. And authorities that outsource police work remain responsible for what comes from that.
Sure it shouldn't have been approved, but it was approvied through misleading marketing and a huge and expensive lobbying effort. Flock spends a ton of money convincing cops and legislators that their product works well, is useful and safe. That was always a lie and they have to be held responsible for it.
It is always both. A product that can be abused to this extent is a bad product.
I have never released a single product that has seen people die through common user misuse.
The standards for solutions shouldn't get _lower_ as the stakes get _higher_.
If a private company can puts hundreds of tons of payload into orbit without ever causing someone to accidentally be imprisoned a company that sells cameras on a stick shouldn't either.
Had the 'evidence' been a random dashcam rather than Flock cam, this wouldn't even be a story beyond severe police incompetence.
Flock didn't fail to inspect the car for damage and not find any, flock didn't take 13 days to conduct a cursory review of evidence, flock didn't fail to request cell tower triangulation data and rule out her being in the location of the accident...
I get that people feel their privacy's invaded by being filmed, but this story doesn't appear to have any more to do with Flock than what the officers had for breakfast or the brand of air freshener she had in her car at the time.
A random dashcam does not serve the police someone's identity on a platter. It had to be a stupid "smart" object for such an inexcusable offense to be committed.
With dumb camera footage, the cops looks at the plates, visual indicators, etc. That does not make them more competent or less prone to abuse. But here, Flock's software literally told them this woman was the one they were looking for, despite no evidence supporting this.
This is 100% both on the police and on Flock. Some technologies don't deserve to exist. Facial recognition and ALPR is one of those, because the error rates are too high and the stakes are too high.
> A random dashcam does not serve the police someone's identity on a platter.
Nor does Flock - Flock merely provides a photo and timestamp, which should have been scrutised like any other evidence.
The Flock data showed:
- Car of same make/model nearby at similar time to the accident
- Possible colour match (eyewitnesses gave varying reports on the colour of the perpetrating vehicle). But a match could have been ruled out in minutes had police inspected paint transfer onto the struck vehicle
- A number plate non-match (first three characters were reported to 911 and did not match)
- That's all!
So police didn't do their job (scutinise the evidence), and possibly worse, they may have fabricated evidence (since police claimed Isaacs' vehicle was damaged, but it was in factory-new condition) - which may explain why they're shifting blame to Flock!
That's exactly the same. Suggesting an output is the same as serving a suspect on a platter. I'm sure there's many studies about how humans (except statisticians) are not comfortable with confidence intervals.
A computer software is supposed to deliver reliable, predictable, reproducible results. When it does not every now and then, it's a bug. When your entire system is built in "recognition" and "confidence" and leads to wrongful arrests, it's not a bug. You are just not making computer science. You are making a power abuse machine.
It just enables incompetence. If they were forced to do actual police work they would have probably used their policeman brains.
While using one's brain has never been 'the thing', it's positively unfashionable nowadays.
Except of course the entire reason the police picked her in specific is because of information flock gave them.
Could they have, you know, double checked it? Yes, obviously. But they didn't.
I agree that this story is more about the incredible incompetence of the police involved than flock attempting to record everyone and everything, but flock giving the police an excuse to stop looking and arrest an innocent is by no means irrelevant.
Had a random person submitted a pic taken on their phone of a vehicle in the same location the Flock cam did, police would ask:
- Does anything connect this vehicle to the accident?
- Did it look damaged; as though it had been in a crash?
- Did it look like it was fleeing or driving erratically?
- Was there anything suspicious about the vehicle or the driver?
Police would have deemed the photo irrelevant and moved on. But that didn't happen in this case.
Their failure to do so doesn't have to do with source of the image (Flock, shop CCTV, dashcam), but with their inexplicable lack of rigour.
The lack of rigor doesn't seem "inexplicable" to me- the lack of rigor seems fairly well described in the comment you're replying to.
Can you give an account of the lack of rigor, or is it some kind of holy mystery?
The police should have thought “okay a car was seen within several miles of an accident - so what?”
Their conclusion (after 5 minutes) would have been (obviously) that there’s not so much as a strand of chewing gum connecting the car to the accident, or making it stand out from dozens of others, and they’d promptly get back to searching for the car that actually was involved.
Yeah, if things were different, people would react differently.
There was a senate hearing a few days ago where this woman testified. Also Benn Jordan and Chad Marlow from the EFF were htere. I was happy hearing them put into words the problems on the national stage.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=klE498xFjOY
Interestingly, conservative Republican sheriff Ross Teeple also spoke against the idea of networked/data-storing ALPRs and Flock in particular at that hearing.
Plenty of individuals regardless of politics resent the loss of privacy and the growing thumb of big brother.
That stuff is politics.
They assembled the avengers.
But seriously, privacy must not become a sided issue. Attacks on privacy are bipartisan, the defense of it would be weakened if it was not bipartisan. Civil liberties protected by the constitution should not be controversial.
If parties agreed on things there'd only be one party.
Man, this just feels like proving RMS right all over again, as usual, when it comes to our rights in the digital world.
We must not listen to anything RMS said because he ate his toenail hair and creeped on women.
What is the age-education surface for Flock support?
the problem here appears to be that police officers are generally of average or below average intelligence. combined with the fact that they face no consequences for incompetence, you have the perfect mixture for nonsense like this happening.
I expect the solution they will settle on is to form a department for interacting with technology like this, who understand its outputs are not edicts.
you can't really expect any meaningful police reforms (such as liability and insurance) because anyone who is in any position to enact them is perfectly fine with dumb muscle that holds a monopoly on violence and is deferential to them. in fact the public disliking the police is an ideal outcome for those decision makers as it gives them more leverage over the police.
> Regardless, the true takeaway of Isaacs’ experience is that ALPR technology, whether it’s from Flock or any of the other competitors in this space providing the same functionality (Axon, etc), is dangerous not only because it is so easily abused by police (or even by hackers) to invade the privacy and liberty of citizens, but also because it enables a lazy police department to outsource basic critical thinking to machines and then take action based on a single data point to ruin a person’s life.
The accusation that some machine made any decision here goes beyond the reporting in the article. It seems concocted to raise AI alarm. All we have is that it supplied accurate data that police then abused. That isn't in the vicinity of "outsource[d] basic critical thinking to machines".
I want such general government surveillance banned, but the machines in this story had no more volition than a breathalyzer.
The machines matter, because we know how human behavior works. We know that if you give humans an automated tool that works most of the time, they get lazy, to the point where they make more mistakes than if they had no automation at all.
Flock isn’t an automated tool though; you don’t give it a crime, and it gives back an automated package saying “this is who the criminal is”.
As far as I know, it lets law enforcement query for things against the data. Can be specific (like a license plate) or more general (like a dark colored mid-sized SUV around <location> at <time>).
To get where this story is at, cops here must have done the latter, and taken the first name off the top of the pile and patted themselves on the back, and then waited 7 months, and went and arrested her. Unless there’s an explanation for a 7 month delay, it seems designed to allow defensive evidence to spoil.
There isn’t an uncanny-valley of automation here. There is just lazy, grossly-incompetent, bad-faith, and malicious cops/investigators.
This should be emphasized more. Regardless of how technology could be used, we (should be) are responsible for how it is likely to be used.
Guns can be used for all sorts of things. A handgun in a house is likely to be used for murder/suicide.
> A handgun in a house is likely to be used for murder/suicide.
On an article about people who did no research to actually prove out their assumptions, this is perhaps the most ironic comment to be chastising them.
"A handgun in a house" is statistically extremely unlikely to be "used for murder/suicide."
Volition has nothing to do with it. A breathalyser doesn't point to a person and say this is the likely drunk, so that comparison is fatuous. These identification systems do point the finger.
Police abusing the law? Never.
The key thing she ought to have done was not answer the door, or given any sign she was there. She should have rung an experienced criminal attorney immediately, and moved to an undisclosed location that wasn't a hotel, with a new cell phone, and let her lawyer negotiate with the police to discover what their laziness has led them to believe.
Is that how it works in the US?
When the police come and want to arrest you for triple manslaughter you just don’t open the door, and they shrug and you can let a third party “negotiate” with them for you?
it could have been a so called no knock warrant where police just ram your house door and enter your house. but what I don't understand is that it took from the impounding of the car to the incarceration of her seven months I would have assumed that she lawyered up to get the car back and deny the allegations
> "Police didn't care that Lindsey Isaacs' car was the wrong color, and wasn't damaged. They still arrested her because of Flock data."
Cue 20 minute 2020 short film Please Hold https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Please_Hold_(2020_film)
> Jezebel
Well the next step obviously is to get in touch with the lodge these police officers belong to, talk to the grandmaster and convince him to organize a conciliation night with you as a guest. When you leave, whisper in the ear of the officer in charge of your case "I'm hungry, and I only use pressure cookers. If you behave I'll invite you to the diner".
Video about the same thing
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkUJbJCFjN8
Is anyone familiar enough with the legal aspects of this case to have an informed opinion about how much she is likely to get in a settlement?
Police departments are very hard to sue when they acted on 'honest' confidence in incorrect beliefs. Incompetence is rarely punished.
So now restore her life to state before arrest.
People don't like to hear this, but we're going to need to become technologically literate as a society. Your local bread shop is going to need to use facebook. Your dentist is going to have to learn to use the latest x-ray machine, not the one they still have from 1992. And yes, your police are going to have to know that ALPR cameras aren't magical criminal identification devices.
Why? The police still get paychecks and nothing bad will happen to them if they don't understand the technology.
"using facebook", unironically presented as evidence of "technologically literate" is so funny
I had no idea that cameras were walking the streets and arresting people in America. Only the police should be able to do that. They are clearly far more competent. Oh wait-I just read the article...
and yet, without the camera this woman would not have been arrested.
The problem is the police-camera system, of which the camera is an instrumental component
> Police didn't care that Lindsey Isaacs' car was the wrong color, and wasn't damaged. They still arrested her because of Flock data.
This is literally the first sentence of the article.
You can dislike public surveillance, but statements like "Flock camera data put this woman in jail for 13 days" blatantly ignores the the fact that Flock didn't put anyone in jail, a bunch of cops who very clearly knew that it wasn't her.
> The Flock camera, meanwhile, had recorded Isaacs’ car and its license plate several miles away from the site of the accident, sometime around the time of the incident.
Blaming a tool, when the cops in question are clearly willing to grasp to whatever piece of "evidence" makes their job "easier" is a giant cop-out and excuse for the people who are abusing it.
Any piece of evidence requires some form of critical examination; that is what law enforcement's job is. If you're just going to go with the first theory/piece-of-evidence they find.... they're not doing their job (and violating peoples constitutional rights through sheer laziness).
That’s all true. But we’ve known police and prosecutors are like this forever. No need to give them tools to be even lazier and that make it easier for them to abuse us.
Thats what always been portrayed in films and stories for so long.Police never solved cases. There were detectives involved specialist who solves crime. While only job of police is to arrest any suspicious person, take them to station, then to court, then to jail. Essentially they are just drives carrying criminals. The very first loose evidence and suspect, that it arrest them question them, torture, if officer is lucky, that person is the criminal or one who just accepts blame. All their effort is solving as fast as they can to maintain record and stars on their shoulder
Right. It's not even clear to me what the alternative critical position is here (for gp)? At the end of the day, the company is not putting you in jail, the cops who do are simply their customers.
"Flock is bad" metonymizes the situation, but doesn't let anyone off the hook.
Multiple things can be bad at the same time and cops have a demonstrated record of failures such that add a system like flock is most likely going to lead to more injustice, not less.
Absolutely not all cops and prosecutors, or even the majority of them, are this lazy. Every tool is a tool that lets them "be event lazier" and make it "easier for them to abuse us". Removing any tool that let bad-actors be lazy is not an alternative for removing the bad-actor themselves.
This situation the equivalent of an eye-witness saying "Ya, I think it might have been this person I know, Tom!" and a cop/prosecutor taking that at face value and arresting Tom (and the system that allowed that to happen).
The people who make decisions and take action so (grossly) negligently need to be held accountable and face consequences. Blaming the tool (whatever tool it is) is giving the people who have the actual responsibility an escape hatch to avoid accountability.
As the child of a public defender who has heard some STORIES: they absolutely are not doing the work. Not because of some inherent trait, but because they are all (prosecutors and defenders) assigned a workload that forces shortcuts and allows negligence with no chance of consequence.
All public defenders and most prosecutors are happy to admit anonymously that the justice system is 90% gears grinding people. They ALL know an innocent person that pled guilty to end the grinding. Judges too. You can find plenty of court videos on YouTube of people pleading guilty while saying they didn’t do it but need to get on with their life. The judge will explain to them that they can’t accept a guilty plea from someone who claims innocence, and the defendant then folds. Everyone in the room knows that there is more to the story, but no one is willing to do the work.
You'd think with tech being a force multiplier and all it'd be real easy for agencies to shed the supposed few and far between 'bad apples'. They should be able to do more with less bodies, with flock and other tech helping them, right? It seems to me the entire system failed this woman and waiving it away as a single lazy cop gives the system a pass.
There is no real mechanism for holding them accountable and the consequences of these tools include death (it only takes one perceived wrong move for officers thinking they've bagged a felon to ventilate you. Hell not even that, see that officer who mag dumped his own car after he mistook an acorn for a gunshot.) This lady is quite lucky that it was only 13 days, if she had a career that's probably hosed but it might not be totally life ruining if she has a strong support system.
> , if she had a career that's probably hosed
Why? She hasn't committed a crime so why should her career be damaged?
They do need to be held accountable, and their access to systems like this needs to be limited and/or stopped.
If punishing bad actors alone was enough we wouldn't have a ton of 4th amendment case law.
Lazy, I didn't know. Hard to define.
Corrupt, arrogant, bigoted, or with a superiority complex? Way more than half.
I think there's a combination of selection bias and survivorship bias with bad cops.
When it is made pretty clear that as a cop you won't face consequences for your malicious and/or incompetent actions, you're going to select for people who find that very appealing. Similarly, the people who don't like that kind of system might leave, allowing for a reinforcement the malicious and/or incompetent behavior.
But whats the difference on the ground here? Are we meant to take the transitive property here if you will and say there is actually nothing wrong with the Flock company itself and what it enables?
From the same article : “what else would you call the account of a woman who was arrested by incompetent police based on nothing more than a single Flock camera piece of data, and held in jail for 13 days”
No one is letting cops off the hook.
When the headline of the article is explicitly blaming Flock, and not the cop/DA/judge who never even looked at the evidence available, it is 100%, whether on purpose or not, letting/helping the cops point the finger at another party.
The headline is what 99% of people read, and remember.
I prefer to discuss the actual material. If you want discuss what you believe other people believe about just a headline, let’s do it somewhere other than a thread discussing content specifically from the article.
What a weird thing to say. The headline is supposed to be the takeaway of the material. People are certainly allowed to discuss an article's choice of headline (which is what people remember), and should give no care to you telling them to go elsewhere.
It's both.
There will always be cops willing to misuse whatever they have access to.
Part of it is holding cops accountable in these situations. Part of it is limiting or stopping the use of these systems so cops don't have as many opportunities to abuse them.
Would these sorts of things happen more often with or without the technology?
> critical examination; that is what law enforcement's job is
Critical examination is the judiciary's job, not the police's. Jordan v. City of New London established that police departments can and do deny employment to prospective officers who possess excessive cognitive ability.
The point is that if the flock surveillance data hadn't existed in the first place, we wouldn't be in this situation. Everybody knows police will abuse this kind of surveillance technology, regardless of how accurate it is.
> The point is that if the flock surveillance data hadn't existed in the first place, we wouldn't be in this situation.
Yeah. After all, the police are known for never arresting people based solely on very tenuous and easily disproved evidence. This damn flock surveillance data!
> Everybody knows police will abuse this kind of surveillance technology
Only here that is literally not the case. There was a real crime and the surveillance technology provided the relevant evidence.