> Police can also use the cameras to surveil protestors and stalk ex-lovers—or strangers they find attractive.
I didn't believe police actually did this until a roommate's new classmate told me her story. She has recently moved in to the neighborhood (an HOA at that). She was walking her dog one evening when a police officer who also lives in the HOA greeted her by her full legal name which she swears she never uses anywhere so the only way someone would know it was if they looked her up. She was just a roommate at this new place so her name wouldn't be in any HOA papers.
The police (or any law enforcement) really should not have access to any kind of dragnet surveillance.
They won't use technology to find our lost/stolen phones but they want even more surveillance for what?
* Note this scenario was not with Flock, which is important: there's more than one player in this space. Kill Flock and others might roll in; something broader is needed like, oh, I don't know, constitutional protections or something.
[0] https://www.cbsnews.com/atlanta/news/police-supervisor-accus...
[1] https://www.404media.co/footage-shows-cop-stalking-woman-he-...
[2] https://www.404media.co/cops-keep-getting-arrested-for-using...
It's not like people having good reason to be skeptical of police is a new thing.
Here's CNN discussing NSA analyst abuse from 13 years ago:
https://www.cnn.com/2013/09/27/politics/nsa-snooping/
Here's an article from 10 years ago discussing the police doing it:
https://apnews.com/general-news-699236946e3140659fff8a2362e1...
This is clearly an undercount, and I'm sure it's only gotten worse since 2016.
https://apnews.com/general-news-699236946e3140659fff8a2362e1...
Well that's the way I would write it.
> While Flock’s audit logs have been successful in bringing to light certain abuses, that very fact is likely to deter many officers from honestly describing the purposes of their searches moving forward. Take the controversial Texas abortion search. If the officer who logged, "had an abortion, search for female" had just left out the word "abortion” that story never would have seen the light of day. And there’s no doubt that the department — and police around the nation — realize that.
https://footnote4a.org/news/secret-searches-part2
> Our ability to identify officers was clearly effective. In a direct attempt to stop us from providing transparency, Flock and police departments have dropped the unique IDs (UUIDs) in the transparency portals entirely. They now simply replace them with the word “redacted” in the public audit logs, effectively preventing oversight and individual accountability.
> Flock Safety updated the system on 12/11/2025 to protect officer safety and active investigations, Network Audit Logs no longer include officer names, license plate, or vehicle fingerprint information.
Our local sheriff’s department used Apple’s FindMy to search for my parent’s iPad that had been stolen from their car during a smash and grab. In this case, he found it in the possession of a couple that had found it tossed on the side of the street after the thief had stripped it for cash and credit cards, but it saved them the hassle and cost of having to buy a new one.
Anyways, there’s nothing stopping PDs from searching for stolen electronics. Maybe you should talk to your local city council and ask why yours don’t?
This isn't because police are inherently horrible people, it is because they are normal humans.
We all know people who would abuse the ability to track anyone they want. And we also have all seen times at work where employees ignore or cover for another employee breaking the rules, for all sorts of reasons. Sometimes because the coworker is a friend, sometimes because of peer pressure, and sometimes just because we don't want the hassle and paperwork and stress of reporting someone for what seems at the time like a minor infraction. And then the next time it happens with a slightly worse infraction, you think, "Well, I didn't report them when the did X, and this isn't that much worse, so ill just keep my mouth shut"
That is just human nature, and it is why sometimes making something illegal isn't enough. You have to make it impossible.
Well, you also have to remember that police aren't selected at random from the population. The kind of guy (or gal) who wants to be a cop is often attracted to the power that the job brings. This sets a culture, which is self-perpetuating, affecting the kind of person who they hire, and how people think once they get in.
A few bad apples spoil the bunch - and boy oh boy, we did not get rid of those bad apples in time. It's not a perfect metaphor, of course, but we've been dealing with constant police corruption issues for at least 50 years now. I feel like we gotta try something new.
We did. Guess who you have to call when it happens?
Police do not prevent crime and rarely catch criminals, in fact they are often _involved_ in crime. There are scientific approaches to solving crime and larger budgets for more cameras and police tanks is not it.
Police are there to report a crime and add that to area stats, and if the issue is more than a lone junkie then it eventually gets to a detective in whatever the local version of Robbery is.
"They didn't get my stuff back" isn't a realistic criticism, and it detracts from the many other points that are.
Save your time and don’t get laughed at behind your back. By all means, report your stolen car but anything smaller than that is a waste of your time and the cops time since they do not care at all.
(but HN will flag me for "name-calling" a person promoting and creating violent state oppression)
An excerpt:
> “I've spent the last several months talking to people all over Casa Grande, and one thing keeps coming up: Safety. So, today I'm excited to announce a new company called Shepherd Safety,” he said. “Our mission is simple. Keep government officials and their families safe.” It would be no different than how the city monitors its citizens using Flock cameras, he said; he planned to launch satellites that would use AI to monitor “where government officials go, where they stop, who they meet with, and when they return home.”
It was satire, but drove the point home well.
Sorry for a negative comment, but it's just an interesting observation from an outsider.
I can't speak for China since I'm not as familiar with that culture, but as for the US, the culture has not changed, as you can see by protest campaigns like this and many similar types of protests (e.g. public destruction of Flock cameras). The culture in the US was founded on minimal government interference based on those trying to escape persecution elsewhere at that time, and that thread is still baked into many facets of US politics.
What has changed is the state. Surveillance has been growing constantly, to much of the disapproval of those who live in the US (e.g. Edward Snowden's revelations were very damning and the revealed surveillance was very much protested against, and likewise after the Cambridge Analytica leaks). But it's a bit of boiling frog syndrome for those experiencing it: the state can grow more controlling of our lives slow enough not to be perceptible, or to spin surveillance under manipulative politics, which is for example what led to bipartisan support of the Patriot Act. This makes it difficult to stop. Technology is especially a double edged sword for making this worse.
I'll reach out anywhere on the site but feel free to get in touch here as well. I want to interview the creator and broadcast the situation in Casa Grande.
edit: emailed the address on the site. Anyone else on the east valley working on similar efforts should give me a nudge in the comments.
Austin Texas has 1 million+ residents and they stopped their contract with Flock.
When inter-faction violence in a neighborhood escalates to the level of a murder, for example, they surge for a couple weeks. Massively increased visible patrol presence—cops on every corner—portable light towers attached to generators, to provide near-daylight-level illumination on the sidewalks and streets... a conspicuous level of “eyes on the street” that discourages retaliation and responds to residents’ heightened fear in the immediate aftermath. While at the same time being obviously temporary—not permanent measures that signal the neighborhood as structurally crime-ridden.
It’s a “fly the flag at half mast for a bit” kind of signal, not “this neighborhood is full of criminals and deserves the corresponding built environment.”
I wonder if something in that spirit might be a reasonable long-term equilibrium for things like Flock. Garbage bags over the camera poles for ordinary times, almost as a point of civic pride that the place we’ve built and maintained is safe enough not to need to use them. Pull the garbage bags off if there’s a problem—spate of auto thefts, high-profile crime, fugitive on the loose—but we demand an explanation when that happens and a concrete end point where they go back on.
Now, if the guy holding the skimmer had a sign with the URL on it, then we're on to something.
Or a QR code.
(Extra points for a hand-drawn QR code. Yes, it takes patience (or grid paper), but it's easier than it sounds.)
However... the opinion of people who do not want to be surveilled is heavier than those who do, naturally. The effect of being surveilled, especially by a system that has already been demonstrated to be abused, is more dramatic than the effect of not being surveilled despite wanting it.
Surveillance is simply too double-edged in the long term (or, in this case, the short term, considering Flock's incompetence). We must resist the temptation to allow it because it currently benefits us.
And this isn't even to mention the criminal negligence of Flock, and the evils they have already enabled, as committed both by Flock employees and by government.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/georgia-cops-keep-get...
https://cambridgeanalytica.org/surveillance-privacy/police-f...
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/the-cop-investigating-a...
Analogies are distracting. They are rhetorical junk food. Make an argument directly supporting Flock cameras - don't just say "it's like phones".
Do you think this hasn't been tried?
We have laws on stalking. We've tried to rein in cops.
Just like you say, it still gets abused both within and outside the government (eg. Salt Typhoon) because surveillance inherently threatens society.
It's unfair that criminals can opt-out of surveillance, while Senators and CEOs cannot.
Edit: Actually, it's such an extreme misconstrual that I'm wondering if you thought you were replying to a different post?
But the problem is the cameras are pervasive. It's not like a red light camera, or a speed zone camera, or a toll road camera, that has a specific purpose in a specific location. And it's the building of a database, and correlation of data from point to point, and the potential abuse. We have documented cases of cops abusing Flock data to stalk exes, And history proves that any time you collect data about a group of people, it will eventually if not immediately be abused.
You can propose all the warrants and anonymizing and other restrictions that you might like to control who looks at the data and when, but at the end of the day it's all about trusting those in power who have control of the data, and that's not a good thing to do. The government does not (or should not) have the right to track the public to this degree as they go about their daily personal business.