Yet another Hacker News

One Piece of Flock Camera Data Put This Innocent Woman in Jail for 13 Days

57 points HotGarbage 2 hours ago 19 comments

nrmitchi 1 hour ago | parent

> 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).

alistairSH 1 hour ago | parent

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.

nrmitchi 1 hour ago | parent

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.

singingtoday 59 minutes ago | parent

Lazy, I didn't know. Hard to define.

Corrupt, arrogant, bigoted, or with a superiority complex? Way more than half.

beepbooptheory 58 minutes ago | parent

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?

dghlsakjg 57 minutes ago | parent

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.

omgwtfbyobbq 56 minutes ago | parent

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.

beepbooptheory 1 hour ago | parent

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.

dghlsakjg 1 hour ago | parent

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.

nrmitchi 59 minutes ago | parent

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.

dghlsakjg 46 minutes ago | parent

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.

omgwtfbyobbq 1 hour ago | parent

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.

vxxzy 55 minutes ago | parent

Would these sorts of things happen more often with or without the technology?

greyface- 50 minutes ago | parent

> 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.

rambojohnson 37 minutes ago | parent

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.

delichon 38 minutes ago | parent

> 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.

samudrijan 23 minutes ago | parent

Police abusing the law? Never.

fliglr 34 minutes ago | parent

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...

smalltorch 10 minutes ago | parent

Video about the same thing

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkUJbJCFjN8