I imagine this technology is here specifically to force people to give up on privacy. In a "guilty until proven innocent" situation, you can't even do your own secure/private tracking as any local data wouldn't have attestation. Only solution is to be rich enough to fight it out in court.
This is also blatantly an engine for parallel construction & evidence laundering at a massive scale. The only things holding law enforcement back from using it that way is the commitment of individual departments to following the rules of due process, or their fear of the consequences for violating them. So effectively nothing. And everyone involved in building, selling, buying, and using this tool knows that.
I don't understand what process was going on here. Why was police showing up on her doorstep and having a back and forth if they had evidence? File charges and she can fight them.
Why is she supplying evidence to the police dept? If they haven't filed charges just ignore them? If they have, evidence goes to court.
So that means the case has been referred to a prosecutor who has already started the criminal case, right? So why the hell is the police having a back and forth with the defendant about the case?
Why is she talking to the police and not the prosecutor, who at that point is needed for a dismissal on the law enforcement side?
It just all seems weird and contrary to my understanding of the system
This isn't television where a bunch of attorneys immediately show up because they are actors paid by the production company. Going to court is an extremely heavyweight and expensive process. Retaining a criminal defense attorney will cost you a $10k retainer to start. Most people will talk to the police to try to head off the situation from escalating that way.
> Also talking to the police is a great way to wind up in jail for a long time
Or it's a way to clear up a situation without incurring a life-altering debt and criminal record. We hear about the horrible stories, but people are generally people. If you're facing serious (felony) charges, actually guilty and they're building a case, don't know how to talk without spilling a bunch of possibly-incriminating details, think the cops have it personally out for you, etc, then of course shut the fuck up and assert the full extent of the process. But for many situations this can actually be terrible advice.
I was actually just on the other side of this with a juvenile first time offender (property crime). The kid was obviously guilty, open and shut evidence, and admitted it to the detective. The detective advocated for him (them), encouraging me to settle for a small informal cash restitution payment rather than insisting it go to trial. That kid has now been hopefully scared straight, without having a criminal record hanging over his head. I hope he can keep it that way.
$10k is a massive exaggeration. Many lawyers can be retained for $500, and if you can show that affording that is untenable they will work out a payment plan for your court appointed lawyer.
$500 is two hours of time for a very low hourly rate. You might luck into finding an attorney that is chummy with the right policy/prosecutor to clear something like this up that quick, but I doubt it. $10k has been the standard retainer for a few other legal issues I've dealt with lately, and I doubt most criminal defense attorneys are going to want less if they foresee any chance of the case dragging out.
> they will work out a payment plan for your court appointed lawyer
Have you actually been there and done anything like this? From what I've seen, the reality is much much much different than the marketing.
When the detective says "I've got that (that = doorbell camera quality footage) on my phone right now of you taking that package."
This is clearly a police officer saying that she is a thief and felon. Isn't this slanderous/defamatory? The trial had not even occurred to prove guilt.
Does she have grounds to sue the police department for defamation?
> Does she have grounds to sue the police department for defamation?
No. Defamation is an injury to a person's reputation. For that injury to occur, a third party has to hear (and believe) the derogatory statement - if there's no one else to hear that statement, it's not defamatory.
She could spend thousands of dollars to sue the department for defamation, but she would have to prove without a shadow of a doubt "the speaker had a reckless disregard for the truth" when making the harmful statement, and then prove damages resulting directly from the statement.
The police department would then use her and her neighbors tax dollars to argue the officer followed procedure and did not intentionally lie with an intent to harm her reputation.
A jury would then determine if the police department fabricated the investigation or piece of evidence just so they could intentionally slander and ruin this woman's reputation.
FTA:
“We thought nothing of it, as common surveillance, that’s great,” Elser said of the cameras. “You’re watching for crime — not to wrongly accuse somebody.”
So, what did she learn?
Imagine if she hadn't been able to afford a Rivian or a lawyer. The police could easily have handcuffed her and put her in jail on day 1. Without a good lawyer, what chance of release would she have had? Bail? Sure, but if you can't afford it or don't have someone to put up a bond, guess what? You're not going home.
Had the victim of this police overreach been less privileged, she could easily have been convicted.
While I'm not a criminal attorney, I'm not sure if this is much different than a prosecution based upon an allegation that the defendant being identified by a bank camera capturing an image of a bank robber. If criminal charges are filed, a preliminary determination of probable cause must be made.
In a case where there was no supporting evidence - e.g. literally the only evidence is a camera image of person, I would imagine the image would have to be close to irrefutable in order to meet a probable cause standard.
Since we now know that the person depicted on the ring camera was not the defendant - and that the police voluntarily dismissed the charges when confronted with evidence showing they were wrong, makes it pretty clear the police filed charges without evidenced that could have passed the probable cause test.
This isn't necessarily the problem of using an image as evidence of a crime. It's a problem with the police filing charges in a manner they know is an abuse of their authority, but not giving a sh*t because it was only $25 and that it would be heard in Municipal Court - a place where the local Judge and Prosecutor have to get along with the Police and therefore the local police know they will never be punished for their abusive behavior.
Police overreach that wantonly harms innocent people will continue to grow until police departments are made to routinely and predictably compensate their victims for the damages they cause - in this case, the costs of having to hire an attorney, time spent responding and collecting evidence, emotional distress, etc. These are all part of the cost of having law enforcement, but are currently being shirked by the municipalities deputizing the police departments and instead levied as externalities that fall onto unlucky victims.
Once the accounting is corrected, these issues mostly become cost-benefit tradeoffs. Should department policy allow officers to continue focusing solely on someone they believe is a perpetrator based on circumstantial evidence, but who insists innocence and immediately offers up their own evidence? Should a city adopt Flock even though it costs a bunch of money, both for the service and for the false positives it generates? Town/city government might decide they're willing to pay for these things. But at least it will be an honest decision, made by the people ultimately responsible for it.
Until we get a SC ruling that reigns in the use of civil infractions as a revenue stream it'll continue. Most of these people being abused despite being innocent are just the rare bycatch of using police to generate revenue. You're always gonna have that bycatch because even if they have to pay out to make those people whole it's still worth it to run the system.
A Supreme Council decree would be one path to reform. State laws would be another. Even if this widely-scoped concept of sovereign immunity continues to exist, governments can always create laws to waive it.
This is kafkaesque. “I know you committed a crime because I have video”. Can I see the video? “No”. I found the video. That’s not me and they don’t get into my vehicle. “We know it was you” here let me spend a week of sleepless nights collecting exhaustive evidence that it wasn’t me. “Good detective work!”
I wonder if the cops just picked a car at random and said that was the thief.
Forgive me for writing this, but this whole story possibly reeks of somewhat questionable journalism...
This whole story reads like:
"Something bad happened to Person A. They were accused by Person B of something they didn't do. They were the victim. The victim. Flock doorbell cameras were nearby. They're sort of similar to Ring doorbell cameras but they're Flock. Flock. Did we mention Flock? Person A was a victim, and Flock cameras were nearby. Flock. Flock. Did we mention Flock? Flock cameras were nearby..."
But maybe some people don't see the pattern, so (again, forgive me for writing this!) let me write another story using that same "journalistic" pattern:
"A group of people tortured, raped and killed (or allegedly tortured, raped and killed) a second group of people. The first group of people we'll call a "gang" or a "junta" or a "militia" (as opposed to "a group of people"), the second group of people we'll call "The Victims" (as opposed to "a group of people" -- which was probably another gang, junta or militia!). The second group were Victims! Victims! And during the time of their victimization, their intense victimization, a bunch of Oreo Cookies(tm) sat on the table near where the atrocities (or alleged atrocities!) took place! Oreo Cookies! Oreo Cookies! Did we mention that Oreo Cookies were nearby when the victimization occurred? Oreo Cookies! Oreo Cookies! Oreo Cookies were nearby when the atrocities occured! Did we mention Oreo Cookies? Oreo Cookies were on the table near the victims!"
The article explicitly claims that the police officer claimed that they had footage from a Flock camera:
> "The proof, according to Milliman: Footage from Flock surveillance cameras showing Elser’s forest green Rivian driving through the town from 11:52 a.m. to 12:09 p.m. on the day of the theft."
That's exactly what the headline describes. It's not clear why you're trying to downplay the role of the Flock camera, given that this seems to be the central piece of evidence that the police used, incorrectly.
The Flock camera(s) in question are not doorbell cameras, and Flock Safety is not only outside the doorbell camera product category but very specifically trying to differentiate themselves inside of the AI-enabled dragnet persistent surveillance product category. Given the potential civil rights implications of Flock, I feel it’s exceptionally reasonable to be calling it out in this context. I would suggest reading the full article and googling the positive and negative coverage of the company
You're probably thinking of Ring doorbell cameras. Flock doesn't make doorbell cameras - they sell surveillance equipment like license plate readers and lightpost cameras to cities.
Because this not a doorbell camera. It is a public street surveillance camera marketed to police to “end all crime in America” through total surveillance. Unfortunately the way it worked in this case is the cops picked a random car that happened to drive by the scene of the crime at about the right time and decided the driver was guilty. It’s a chilling warning of the dangers of technology misapplied. Technology gives the impression of infallibility, people get falsely accused and lives get ruined.
You think the police are bad, just wait until all the other enforcers get their grubby mitts on this.
At least with the police you have rights. When the building inspector gets to rifle through the Home Depot camera records for the plate number of everyone who DIY'd an un-permitted shower renovation or the conservation commission asks Flock for every address the Sunbelt Rentals truck went you have no rights.
But just wait until anyone else comes after you. It's beyond insane how you basically have no rights when the parts of the government who aren't gun toting cops are after you (the information gleaned in the investigation thereof.
And this isn't to say the police don't violate rights left and right, they do. But at least you have a shred of hope that the courts will pay out at the end of the day. You've got none of that with the rest of the bureaucracy.
I'm not anti-regulation (well, I can be). I'm anti-enforcement or an extremist about equality under the law.
The fact that someone who gets a government paycheck and spends most of their day poking his nose in other people's business with the prospect of levying fines is the defining feature of enforcement. The fact that one may have a bullet proof vest and a gun and the other a safety vest and a clipboard doesn't change much. A government backed threat of a $10k sized problem is still a government backed thread of a $10k problem is close to the same whether you're being railroaded on a questionable DUI (pretty common scandal type) or you've run afoul of some local commissioner/inspector (health, building/zoning, conservation, etc) who's got much more nebulously worded rules/laws at their disposal.
It just boggles the mind that someone facing a $2k criminal fine has all sorts of rights but some inspector can just waltz across your property, be all "this culverts looks too new, you've violated the clean water act, that'll be a ton of money and I'm forcing you to fix it" or "you should have brought X up to modern code when you did Y, that'll be $300/day retroactively back 2yr to the date that X showed up on our records"
You have no real procedural protections from non law enforcement parts of government. They more or less make their own rules for how they operate in enforcement of whatever they're tasked with enforcing. They can use not talking to them against you, etc, etc. Your only "real" option is to plead your case to this office or person who has fairly unilateral power of enforcement and who (unlike with cops/criminal matters) is subject to scant public records or quality of evidince or sharing any of that. Like it's absolutely routine to show up at a hearing for something and then the enforcers read off correspondence, calculations, etc, etc, which you could counter but were never told existed until they're used against you. Not that cops can't do that stuff too, but there's a ton of rules to prevent that from going in their favor which the rest of the bureaucracy mostly doesn't have.
Sure you can sue them, but that'll often cost an obscene amount of money and you can't really do that until after you've been harmed. The whole system up until you get into a "real court" is working against you and more or less presumes the enforcer is correct. Furthermore, unless you sue and you get into a court there's nothing analogous to a judge or jury for these types of things. This is in stark contrast with criminal matters and "high volume" civil matters (e.g. traffic stuff) where they have to at least pay lip service to the principals of it and courts or court like things are on the "default track" for how the process works.
For a real world example, in my town the commissioner would cruise around looking for new windows, issue fines presuming you've done a bunch of renovations, and then pressure people for entry, and if they denied him he'd send them a fine presuming that the entire room was renovated and that plumbing and electrical were done without permits and of course the fine is per day until you're in compliance. And of course even if none of that was done you had to let him in to prove it and he'd nab you for anything else he could. The only "winning" move was to know that the correct answer was "it was an emergency repair GFY." He's gone now thankfully.
It's not clear to me what this story has to do with Flock specifically. Surveillance cameras have been around for a long time, and cops can use footage from them as evidence for charging people with theft. Cops can legally lie to suspects about all sorts of things including how certain they are of evidence against a specific person - this is probably a bad thing that ought to be legally reformed, but it also has nothing specifically to do with Flock or surveillance cameras more generally.
> She later watched footage from the victim’s doorbell camera, which was posted on NextDoor, showing the package thief.
It seems like a package theft did in fact happen, and that the house owner themselves chose to put up cameras to record their door and posted the footage of it on the internet. In fact this footage was evidence the person in this article used to exonerate themselves, so this isn't even a general argument against surveillance cameras.
I wish this article explored more why the cops thought the thief was this person, or tried to suggest a better procedure for the police to use. Should the police have been legally required to just send the court summons and not try to talk to the suspect? Is there a better procedure than having a court case for incidents like this where a theft seems to have actually occurred and the police think they have a suspect? How ought the system to work here?
The police decided she was the perpetrator because of the Flock cameras flagging her. The doorbell footage was not conclusive, so the police ran a search against Flock, and it incorrectly reported her car in the area during that time. Flock installations comprise dozens or hundreds of cameras, and the police search for "vehicles at this place during this time" and the Flock servers use AI to report results. In this case, it reported incorrect results. But instead of building any kind of real evidence, the police just took the Flock system's word and charged her with a crime.
So, this story is about Flock peripherally, and a miscarriage of justice using their tools specifically.
From the article, it seems like the woman had in fact driven her car to the town where the theft happened at roughly the same time for unrelated reasons, which isn't surprising because it's a neighboring town, and there was additional non-Flock camera footage of what she was doing there. It doesn't seem like any camera system mentioned here was actually recording anything inaccurate - the cops just claimed that the (non-Flock) camera footage from the package theft victim was evidence that the woman stole the package, and that's the camera footage the cop refused to show her at the time of delivering the summons. It also seems like this is exactly the footage that the woman later found online and used to exonerate herself, although that's not 100% clear from the article.
It really doesn't seem like any surveillance camera system, Flock or otherwise, did anything wrong here. Flock (accurately) suggested her car was in the general area when the theft happened, a non-flock camera did record a person stealing the package who was apparently not her, and have no idea how reasonable it was for the cops to think that footage justified charging her (although the fact that they would not show her the footage is very suspicious).
It doesn't seem like there's any particular policy on use of surveillance cameras that would've prevented this false accusation, and this is purely about the cops (or maybe just this one cop) charging someone based on bad evidence; which is problem in and of itself and isn't directly related to Flock or any other brand of surveillance cameras in particular.
I mean, this isn't really any different than anything else police do. Police do not understand how breathalyzers, field drug testing kits, vehicle speed sensors, or anything else work for that matter. Thing X says person A did Y. Therefore, it happened.
I imagine this technology is here specifically to force people to give up on privacy. In a "guilty until proven innocent" situation, you can't even do your own secure/private tracking as any local data wouldn't have attestation. Only solution is to be rich enough to fight it out in court.
More importantly than attestation or local tracking vs cloud based is that you are forced to do tracking at all.
I shouldn't have to create documentary evidence of where I am at all times in order to fight spurious accusations regardless of how I do it.
This is also blatantly an engine for parallel construction & evidence laundering at a massive scale. The only things holding law enforcement back from using it that way is the commitment of individual departments to following the rules of due process, or their fear of the consequences for violating them. So effectively nothing. And everyone involved in building, selling, buying, and using this tool knows that.
I don't understand what process was going on here. Why was police showing up on her doorstep and having a back and forth if they had evidence? File charges and she can fight them.
Why is she supplying evidence to the police dept? If they haven't filed charges just ignore them? If they have, evidence goes to court.
If I read the story correctly, he was delivering the summons. Therefore she was charged and a court date was pending.
So that means the case has been referred to a prosecutor who has already started the criminal case, right? So why the hell is the police having a back and forth with the defendant about the case?
Why is she talking to the police and not the prosecutor, who at that point is needed for a dismissal on the law enforcement side?
It just all seems weird and contrary to my understanding of the system
This isn't television where a bunch of attorneys immediately show up because they are actors paid by the production company. Going to court is an extremely heavyweight and expensive process. Retaining a criminal defense attorney will cost you a $10k retainer to start. Most people will talk to the police to try to head off the situation from escalating that way.
I don't know where you are but a criminal defense attorney does not start at $10,000.
Also talking to the police is a great way to wind up in jail for a long time
> Also talking to the police is a great way to wind up in jail for a long time
Or it's a way to clear up a situation without incurring a life-altering debt and criminal record. We hear about the horrible stories, but people are generally people. If you're facing serious (felony) charges, actually guilty and they're building a case, don't know how to talk without spilling a bunch of possibly-incriminating details, think the cops have it personally out for you, etc, then of course shut the fuck up and assert the full extent of the process. But for many situations this can actually be terrible advice.
I was actually just on the other side of this with a juvenile first time offender (property crime). The kid was obviously guilty, open and shut evidence, and admitted it to the detective. The detective advocated for him (them), encouraging me to settle for a small informal cash restitution payment rather than insisting it go to trial. That kid has now been hopefully scared straight, without having a criminal record hanging over his head. I hope he can keep it that way.
$10k is a massive exaggeration. Many lawyers can be retained for $500, and if you can show that affording that is untenable they will work out a payment plan for your court appointed lawyer.
$500 is two hours of time for a very low hourly rate. You might luck into finding an attorney that is chummy with the right policy/prosecutor to clear something like this up that quick, but I doubt it. $10k has been the standard retainer for a few other legal issues I've dealt with lately, and I doubt most criminal defense attorneys are going to want less if they foresee any chance of the case dragging out.
> they will work out a payment plan for your court appointed lawyer
Have you actually been there and done anything like this? From what I've seen, the reality is much much much different than the marketing.
When the detective says "I've got that (that = doorbell camera quality footage) on my phone right now of you taking that package."
This is clearly a police officer saying that she is a thief and felon. Isn't this slanderous/defamatory? The trial had not even occurred to prove guilt.
Does she have grounds to sue the police department for defamation?
> Does she have grounds to sue the police department for defamation?
No. Defamation is an injury to a person's reputation. For that injury to occur, a third party has to hear (and believe) the derogatory statement - if there's no one else to hear that statement, it's not defamatory.
Police are allowed to lie during interrogations in every state in America:
- https://innocenceproject.org/news/police-deception-lying-int...
- https://www.npr.org/2024/10/21/nx-s1-4974964/police-deceptio...
Intentionality matters in defamation cases.
She could spend thousands of dollars to sue the department for defamation, but she would have to prove without a shadow of a doubt "the speaker had a reckless disregard for the truth" when making the harmful statement, and then prove damages resulting directly from the statement.
The police department would then use her and her neighbors tax dollars to argue the officer followed procedure and did not intentionally lie with an intent to harm her reputation.
A jury would then determine if the police department fabricated the investigation or piece of evidence just so they could intentionally slander and ruin this woman's reputation.
FTA: “We thought nothing of it, as common surveillance, that’s great,” Elser said of the cameras. “You’re watching for crime — not to wrongly accuse somebody.”
So, what did she learn?
Imagine if she hadn't been able to afford a Rivian or a lawyer. The police could easily have handcuffed her and put her in jail on day 1. Without a good lawyer, what chance of release would she have had? Bail? Sure, but if you can't afford it or don't have someone to put up a bond, guess what? You're not going home.
Had the victim of this police overreach been less privileged, she could easily have been convicted.
Title is "After police used Flock cameras to accuse a Denver woman of theft, she had to prove her own innocence."
While I'm not a criminal attorney, I'm not sure if this is much different than a prosecution based upon an allegation that the defendant being identified by a bank camera capturing an image of a bank robber. If criminal charges are filed, a preliminary determination of probable cause must be made.
In a case where there was no supporting evidence - e.g. literally the only evidence is a camera image of person, I would imagine the image would have to be close to irrefutable in order to meet a probable cause standard.
Since we now know that the person depicted on the ring camera was not the defendant - and that the police voluntarily dismissed the charges when confronted with evidence showing they were wrong, makes it pretty clear the police filed charges without evidenced that could have passed the probable cause test.
This isn't necessarily the problem of using an image as evidence of a crime. It's a problem with the police filing charges in a manner they know is an abuse of their authority, but not giving a sh*t because it was only $25 and that it would be heard in Municipal Court - a place where the local Judge and Prosecutor have to get along with the Police and therefore the local police know they will never be punished for their abusive behavior.
Almost makes an 18-hr body cam worth it.
Police overreach that wantonly harms innocent people will continue to grow until police departments are made to routinely and predictably compensate their victims for the damages they cause - in this case, the costs of having to hire an attorney, time spent responding and collecting evidence, emotional distress, etc. These are all part of the cost of having law enforcement, but are currently being shirked by the municipalities deputizing the police departments and instead levied as externalities that fall onto unlucky victims.
Once the accounting is corrected, these issues mostly become cost-benefit tradeoffs. Should department policy allow officers to continue focusing solely on someone they believe is a perpetrator based on circumstantial evidence, but who insists innocence and immediately offers up their own evidence? Should a city adopt Flock even though it costs a bunch of money, both for the service and for the false positives it generates? Town/city government might decide they're willing to pay for these things. But at least it will be an honest decision, made by the people ultimately responsible for it.
Until we get a SC ruling that reigns in the use of civil infractions as a revenue stream it'll continue. Most of these people being abused despite being innocent are just the rare bycatch of using police to generate revenue. You're always gonna have that bycatch because even if they have to pay out to make those people whole it's still worth it to run the system.
A Supreme Council decree would be one path to reform. State laws would be another. Even if this widely-scoped concept of sovereign immunity continues to exist, governments can always create laws to waive it.
This is kafkaesque. “I know you committed a crime because I have video”. Can I see the video? “No”. I found the video. That’s not me and they don’t get into my vehicle. “We know it was you” here let me spend a week of sleepless nights collecting exhaustive evidence that it wasn’t me. “Good detective work!”
I wonder if the cops just picked a car at random and said that was the thief.
Forgive me for writing this, but this whole story possibly reeks of somewhat questionable journalism...
This whole story reads like:
"Something bad happened to Person A. They were accused by Person B of something they didn't do. They were the victim. The victim. Flock doorbell cameras were nearby. They're sort of similar to Ring doorbell cameras but they're Flock. Flock. Did we mention Flock? Person A was a victim, and Flock cameras were nearby. Flock. Flock. Did we mention Flock? Flock cameras were nearby..."
But maybe some people don't see the pattern, so (again, forgive me for writing this!) let me write another story using that same "journalistic" pattern:
"A group of people tortured, raped and killed (or allegedly tortured, raped and killed) a second group of people. The first group of people we'll call a "gang" or a "junta" or a "militia" (as opposed to "a group of people"), the second group of people we'll call "The Victims" (as opposed to "a group of people" -- which was probably another gang, junta or militia!). The second group were Victims! Victims! And during the time of their victimization, their intense victimization, a bunch of Oreo Cookies(tm) sat on the table near where the atrocities (or alleged atrocities!) took place! Oreo Cookies! Oreo Cookies! Did we mention that Oreo Cookies were nearby when the victimization occurred? Oreo Cookies! Oreo Cookies! Oreo Cookies were nearby when the atrocities occured! Did we mention Oreo Cookies? Oreo Cookies were on the table near the victims!"
(Again, forgive me for writing this...)
Related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_fallacy
(AKA: "Guilt By Association")
> Flock cameras were nearby
The article explicitly claims that the police officer claimed that they had footage from a Flock camera:
> "The proof, according to Milliman: Footage from Flock surveillance cameras showing Elser’s forest green Rivian driving through the town from 11:52 a.m. to 12:09 p.m. on the day of the theft."
That's exactly what the headline describes. It's not clear why you're trying to downplay the role of the Flock camera, given that this seems to be the central piece of evidence that the police used, incorrectly.
> Forgive me for writing this
You would need to explain yourself first.
Why couldn't the journalist simply have said "Doorbell camera" every time they said "Flock camera"?
?
(It would have been the same story -- just less biased against a single equipment manufacturer in a product category (Doorbell Cameras)...)
So, why couldn't the journalist simply have said "Doorbell camera" every time they said "Flock camera"?
?
The Flock camera(s) in question are not doorbell cameras, and Flock Safety is not only outside the doorbell camera product category but very specifically trying to differentiate themselves inside of the AI-enabled dragnet persistent surveillance product category. Given the potential civil rights implications of Flock, I feel it’s exceptionally reasonable to be calling it out in this context. I would suggest reading the full article and googling the positive and negative coverage of the company
You're probably thinking of Ring doorbell cameras. Flock doesn't make doorbell cameras - they sell surveillance equipment like license plate readers and lightpost cameras to cities.
That's about to be more confusing, because Ring is partnering with Flock. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/10/ring-cameras-are-abo...
Because this not a doorbell camera. It is a public street surveillance camera marketed to police to “end all crime in America” through total surveillance. Unfortunately the way it worked in this case is the cops picked a random car that happened to drive by the scene of the crime at about the right time and decided the driver was guilty. It’s a chilling warning of the dangers of technology misapplied. Technology gives the impression of infallibility, people get falsely accused and lives get ruined.
You think the police are bad, just wait until all the other enforcers get their grubby mitts on this.
At least with the police you have rights. When the building inspector gets to rifle through the Home Depot camera records for the plate number of everyone who DIY'd an un-permitted shower renovation or the conservation commission asks Flock for every address the Sunbelt Rentals truck went you have no rights.
> At least with the police you have rights
Hah!
I know, you think that now.
But just wait until anyone else comes after you. It's beyond insane how you basically have no rights when the parts of the government who aren't gun toting cops are after you (the information gleaned in the investigation thereof.
And this isn't to say the police don't violate rights left and right, they do. But at least you have a shred of hope that the courts will pay out at the end of the day. You've got none of that with the rest of the bureaucracy.
Why wouldn't you have the same ability to use the courts?
The reason I ask is because it seems like you are trying to turn this into an anti-regulation conversation.
I'm not anti-regulation (well, I can be). I'm anti-enforcement or an extremist about equality under the law.
The fact that someone who gets a government paycheck and spends most of their day poking his nose in other people's business with the prospect of levying fines is the defining feature of enforcement. The fact that one may have a bullet proof vest and a gun and the other a safety vest and a clipboard doesn't change much. A government backed threat of a $10k sized problem is still a government backed thread of a $10k problem is close to the same whether you're being railroaded on a questionable DUI (pretty common scandal type) or you've run afoul of some local commissioner/inspector (health, building/zoning, conservation, etc) who's got much more nebulously worded rules/laws at their disposal.
It just boggles the mind that someone facing a $2k criminal fine has all sorts of rights but some inspector can just waltz across your property, be all "this culverts looks too new, you've violated the clean water act, that'll be a ton of money and I'm forcing you to fix it" or "you should have brought X up to modern code when you did Y, that'll be $300/day retroactively back 2yr to the date that X showed up on our records"
You have no real procedural protections from non law enforcement parts of government. They more or less make their own rules for how they operate in enforcement of whatever they're tasked with enforcing. They can use not talking to them against you, etc, etc. Your only "real" option is to plead your case to this office or person who has fairly unilateral power of enforcement and who (unlike with cops/criminal matters) is subject to scant public records or quality of evidince or sharing any of that. Like it's absolutely routine to show up at a hearing for something and then the enforcers read off correspondence, calculations, etc, etc, which you could counter but were never told existed until they're used against you. Not that cops can't do that stuff too, but there's a ton of rules to prevent that from going in their favor which the rest of the bureaucracy mostly doesn't have.
Sure you can sue them, but that'll often cost an obscene amount of money and you can't really do that until after you've been harmed. The whole system up until you get into a "real court" is working against you and more or less presumes the enforcer is correct. Furthermore, unless you sue and you get into a court there's nothing analogous to a judge or jury for these types of things. This is in stark contrast with criminal matters and "high volume" civil matters (e.g. traffic stuff) where they have to at least pay lip service to the principals of it and courts or court like things are on the "default track" for how the process works.
For a real world example, in my town the commissioner would cruise around looking for new windows, issue fines presuming you've done a bunch of renovations, and then pressure people for entry, and if they denied him he'd send them a fine presuming that the entire room was renovated and that plumbing and electrical were done without permits and of course the fine is per day until you're in compliance. And of course even if none of that was done you had to let him in to prove it and he'd nab you for anything else he could. The only "winning" move was to know that the correct answer was "it was an emergency repair GFY." He's gone now thankfully.
For exterior work the threat is more like drones, planes, and satellites.
It's not clear to me what this story has to do with Flock specifically. Surveillance cameras have been around for a long time, and cops can use footage from them as evidence for charging people with theft. Cops can legally lie to suspects about all sorts of things including how certain they are of evidence against a specific person - this is probably a bad thing that ought to be legally reformed, but it also has nothing specifically to do with Flock or surveillance cameras more generally.
> She later watched footage from the victim’s doorbell camera, which was posted on NextDoor, showing the package thief.
It seems like a package theft did in fact happen, and that the house owner themselves chose to put up cameras to record their door and posted the footage of it on the internet. In fact this footage was evidence the person in this article used to exonerate themselves, so this isn't even a general argument against surveillance cameras.
I wish this article explored more why the cops thought the thief was this person, or tried to suggest a better procedure for the police to use. Should the police have been legally required to just send the court summons and not try to talk to the suspect? Is there a better procedure than having a court case for incidents like this where a theft seems to have actually occurred and the police think they have a suspect? How ought the system to work here?
The police decided she was the perpetrator because of the Flock cameras flagging her. The doorbell footage was not conclusive, so the police ran a search against Flock, and it incorrectly reported her car in the area during that time. Flock installations comprise dozens or hundreds of cameras, and the police search for "vehicles at this place during this time" and the Flock servers use AI to report results. In this case, it reported incorrect results. But instead of building any kind of real evidence, the police just took the Flock system's word and charged her with a crime.
So, this story is about Flock peripherally, and a miscarriage of justice using their tools specifically.
From the article, it seems like the woman had in fact driven her car to the town where the theft happened at roughly the same time for unrelated reasons, which isn't surprising because it's a neighboring town, and there was additional non-Flock camera footage of what she was doing there. It doesn't seem like any camera system mentioned here was actually recording anything inaccurate - the cops just claimed that the (non-Flock) camera footage from the package theft victim was evidence that the woman stole the package, and that's the camera footage the cop refused to show her at the time of delivering the summons. It also seems like this is exactly the footage that the woman later found online and used to exonerate herself, although that's not 100% clear from the article.
It really doesn't seem like any surveillance camera system, Flock or otherwise, did anything wrong here. Flock (accurately) suggested her car was in the general area when the theft happened, a non-flock camera did record a person stealing the package who was apparently not her, and have no idea how reasonable it was for the cops to think that footage justified charging her (although the fact that they would not show her the footage is very suspicious).
It doesn't seem like there's any particular policy on use of surveillance cameras that would've prevented this false accusation, and this is purely about the cops (or maybe just this one cop) charging someone based on bad evidence; which is problem in and of itself and isn't directly related to Flock or any other brand of surveillance cameras in particular.
Not only that, but Flock actively uses AI to proactively report to police departments "vehicle movements that appear to be suspicious".
I mean, this isn't really any different than anything else police do. Police do not understand how breathalyzers, field drug testing kits, vehicle speed sensors, or anything else work for that matter. Thing X says person A did Y. Therefore, it happened.