A lot of those are going to be the same people day in and day out, the article says 500k faces, not people. You also have to filter out those people where the cameras aren't getting an image good enough to scan.
The article doesn't say, and I haven't seen the cameras, but it's not like you're getting every single person parsing through those stations.
BTP say [0] that "the images and biometric data of those who don’t cause an alert are automatically and immediately deleted." - if that's true, they shouldn't be able to tell that it's the same faces being scanned multiple times so it has to be 500k total scans rather than, say, 500k unique faces across 2 million scans
They're being very specific about images and biometric data, and they're weaseling those words for a reason. If they deleted all data about such scans, they'd say that.
To do the lookup they're still hitting a database somewhere to know you aren't a concern, which is prime time to log that you were seen, when, and where. Then your "images and biometric data" can be "immediately deleted" since they've gotten anything else they want now.
that’s not deleting the data then. making people play Only Connect to parse out weasel phrases is akin to lying by omission. they say the same thing at US airports which is why I still opt out of the face scan at security. of course they keep hashes of the image and its features otherwise what’s the point
The sentence says "the [...] data [...] are automatically and immediately deleted". It does not say "some of the data are automatically deleted". It would be a staight lie to delete some, but not all, of the data and then issue the statement that "the data are deleted". This is not an ambiguous case or weasel-wording: it is an unambiguous falsehood.
If you have two coins and you spend one, you cannot truthfully say "I spent the coins". The definite article "the" means all of something you have in this usage, not a single member of a class of something you have. It would be true to say "I spent a coin" or "I spent some of the coins".
The sentence says "...the images and biometric data...are automatically and immediately deleted". It doesn't say that the information they learned by using the images and biometric data that they collected, such as your name, location, the timestamp etc is being deleted. Who you are and where you were at what time isn't an image and isn't your biometric data.
If the name/address is already in the “already seen” list, wouldn’t that be enough to determine the face had already been seen? Or are you saying the name/address should be considered biometric data?
If we're going to be precise, the word "data" is plural and its singular is "datum". But treating it as a substance noun does not change the argument I made in any way - "I gave away the water" does not mean "I gave away some of the water (and kept some for myself)".
Digging in it cameras were deployed 21 times for about 4 hours each time ... matching against a watchlist of around 400 faces.
Sounds like it was intended to achieve the outcome it achieved - a near zero false positive rate. If I were a betting person, I would wager the threshold for a match was set comically high.
OK, so turn them on 100%, scale (your numbers here) the results out to 50 million faces. Now you have still caught 0 criminals and you have 500 false positives.
Perhaps not many criminals use train stations during the day, for example, people probably deliver drugs by bike or car so they don't walk around a busy place stinking of weed.
How many known criminals have biometrics of them in the first place?
Of the criminals that do have identifiable biometrics, do they operate in that area?
We also don't know the false negative rate. Perhaps it's very high in order to keep the false positive rate as low as possible.
These are things pulled out of thin air that could easily explain why 500,000 face scans (not people) provided no arrests/identifications.
The biggest reason probably being as you said... it was clearly marked. Honestly I would be shocked if they found a criminal dumb enough to walk past it, but not dumb enough to have yet to be caught.
> people probably deliver drugs by bike or car so they don't walk around a busy place stinking of weed.
A year or two ago there was a "shock horror" piece in one of the far-right extremist tabloids, possibly the Daily Mail, claiming that Glasgow was so lawless "you could get a gram of coke delivered quicker than you could get a pizza delivered".
Shut down by one person's tweet - "yes, because one of them arrives in a Vauxhall Corsa and one arrives in an Audi RS3"
I was thinking about this with flock cameras the other day...what's our actual ROI? Was the world horrible before and these initiatives are going to close a monster crime gap or is this just a giant fishing expedition ... just because?
Think back to the capital riots/insurrection/what-ever you want to call it; they used similar systems to identify and arrest those participants. Heavily publicize how many people and who; doesn't matter if you a 63yo grandmom or a pastor, we will find you and prosecute. Showing that you are prosecuting the "normal" people is part of it, show that and you make them less likely to show up to the next thing, less likely to provide support.
The Capital has many cameras owned by the feds, so they could easily do that. Chicago, Atlanta, LA not so much. When anti-ICE action takes place with protestors in black block, going under umbrellas, makes it hard to identify and prove. With strategically placed cameras, you can see what cars came in the area. You get statistical data that shows if they are there normally there. Get enough abnormality and you get enough for a search warrant.
Seems strange to use prosecuting a group of people attacking the democratic process, the basis of the country and a clearly treasonous act, as an example of cameras being used to “over” prosecute to intimidate the public.
Why should it matter if you are a 63yo grandmom or pastor?
They're not wrong that it was done very publicly, regardless of whether you believe (as you and I clearly do) that they were right to be prosecuted. Luigi Mangione is another example of the panopticon being visibly flaunted by the state, and they were more explicit that time about showing it as deterrence. Literally gave so much surveillance footage to the media to prove how much they could see.
Luigi Mangione got caught because he messed up. A simple change of clothes or ditching the very individual looking items he was carrying. If he had done that, you wouldn't have had a facial ID on him.
The Nancy Guthrie case on the other hand went nowhere, because we couldn't definitively make a match.
On the other hand we have multiple instances of bad data causing people to be subject to being targeted by the police. We have police threatening or arresting people based on a lack of corroboration. Some times ignoring clearly exonerating evidence.
The world is a better place without license plate cams.
I am not understanding the significance of the panopticon claim. It's common knowledge that camera price and bandwidth and digital storage prices have gone down significantly over the years, and quality has gone up.
That the government has used them to prosecute a man who assassinated someone or a large group of traitors does not seem to be an indictment of the capabilities.
An example of the government combing through records to pile on trivial charges to throw at a peaceful protestor or otherwise "over" charge them to create a chilling effect seems more apt for a discussion about the dangers of a panopticon.
Sure, in that case let's use Cop City in Georgia. That feels more like "authoritarian state seeks to quash dissent". Plenty of grey area there, plenty of overreach by the State to shut them up.
"“See that?” whispered Granger. “It'll be you; right up at the end of
that street is our victim. See how our camera is coming in? Building
the scene. Suspense. Long shot. Right now, some poor fellow is out for
a walk. A rarity. An odd one. Don't think the police don't know the
habits of queer ducks like that, men who walk mornings for the hell of
it, or for reasons of insomnia. Anyway, the police have had him
charted for months, years. Never know when that sort of information
might be handy. And today, it turns out, it's very usable indeed. It
saves face. Oh, God, look there!”" - Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
When I brought up J6, it was not because I wanted to discuss the ideology but because this is the first time to my knowledge that we prosecuted over 1,500 people for a single event. Looking at the NPR database; Violence is 417 cases, Property destruction is 55 cases, Conspiracy is 48 cases. Assuming no overlap between those, you have ~980 people that fall into the "useful idiot" or "stupid mob" category.
Should they have been there? No of course not.
If my point can't be understood because I am using J6 as an example, please substitute J6 with Occupy Wall Street or Black Lives Matter.
The change we are seeing with technology is not the amount of data we are storing but that we are able to process this data and build it out into a model.
hypothetical We saw you on a camera on J6 in the Capital but also have cell data showing you traveled down with other people. Don't have them on camera but the cell data shows they were close to you at all times, so we can charge them.
I wanted to link to a video of a protest I saw a little while ago; it showed protestors in Black Block swarm some cops then all run under a group of people that had umbrellas. When the group moved, all the black block clothes were on the ground so the responsible parties couldn't be tracked. However this time the police drone captures some footage of them before they changed into the black block, so they were able to make arrests.
This would be able to take it further, now you could see who the protestors trained with and charge them with Conspiracy.
January 6th was not a surveillance society win. It was a flash mob that live streamed their crimes, along with identification done by private individuals sleuthing in forums and chat groups.
The Nancy Guthrie case felt like ring cameras and Flock or traffic cams should have figured it out in no time. Yet it didn't happen. I feel like this is going to be something that only really works in cases, where investigation would solve it.
I'm of the opinion, consistent with principles of the Founders and at least one Constitutional amendment (or the interpretation of it by millions of people) that the people should have the literal, physical power to overthrow their government. If that becomes physically impossible, there is no remedy for a government that decides to reject democracy and citizens' rights to freedom.
It happens that the J6 rioters were on the wrong side of truth and history, but I would rather some of them get away with it than live in a perfectly effective panopticon.
It isn't an effective panopticon. It can find people who aren't trying to hide. How hard is it going to be to fool if you can subvert it with a few fake plates (even easier to make with those convenient paper plates and it). An effective system wouldn't be creating a bunch of false positives. Luigi Mangione got caught because of one security cam. If he had just changed his look, we would never have got the hostel picture.
Until it’s your civil liberties being infringed upon and you have no recourse against the faceless authoritarian bureaucracy propped up by a fallible surveillance system owned and operated by racists and bigots.
Edit: we’ll be arguing about “nothing to hide, nothing to fear” for the rest of time, won’t we.
Can we cut to the bone a little bit? The recent crime panics are not about a partner assaulting their live-in partner or a random home burglary. There is no real "ROI" to be had.
It's purely about the unease of living in chaotic cities, the random stabbings, the shoplifting, the visible homelessness etc. Flock is the stopgap here.
Partly the "feeling" of chaos is just that, a feeling, driven significantly by algorithmic feeds feeding us every random crime from around the country 24/7. Husband murders wife in a murderous rage? No one hear's about it. Mentally ill man murders a woman on the train in a Tier 2 city, immediate nationwide breaking news.
The other part though is a real dissolution in how we take care of our mentally ill. Complex topic [1].
I think complaining about Flock is complaining about the symptom. Today we dogpile on Flock to get it cancelled, tomorrow the public will reach for something else. We have to fix the underlying disease, which is a combination of the two factors above.
In the UK there is a yearly survey regarding crime and I've not read it for a few years (I've emigrated) but a regular theme used to be that people interviewed personally felt safe and weren't likely to be victims of crime but thought everyone else in the country was less safe and everywhere they didn't live had higher crime than it did.
The public perception of crime is persistently incorrect for many if not most people and this incorrect, emotional rather than evidence-based view of the world is unfortunately what drives political pressure.
> The public perception of crime is persistently incorrect for many if not most people and this incorrect, emotional rather than evidence-based view of the world is unfortunately what drives political pressure.
Some of this is definitely the BBC's fault. I happened to be over at a friend's one morning and he had it on. It smelt just like right-wing media in the US with big stories on mega important topics like... shoplifting. The crime reporting just felt really amplified up.
Some of this stuff does feed into the perception though. Flock provides more footage for media to clip, for example. Or you can look at Ring cameras and people getting worked up about joggers or neighborhood kids because now they get alerts and have neighborhood chat groups, etc.
It really ticks me off that Rings cameras are pointed at the sidewalk.
When questioned about owning them, people like to talk about security, convenience, porch package theft, etc, none of which require the devices to have a field of view extending beyond the property line. And yet, somehow they just conveniently contribute to a police-searchable database of everyone that walks past their house, with no recourse.
> Today we dogpile on Flock to get it cancelled, tomorrow the public will reach for something else.
Who's the "we" in this sentence? The people who want to keep cities crime-ridden? And why does your opinion matter more than that of the public? I thought these "we" were pro-democracy?
We are pro-democracy, but specifically votes are hidden and not everyone is in your bubble. The voting booth is a private space, away from the judgmental eyes of privacy focussed individuals common on this forum.
In the privacy of a voting booth, people will vote for Flock to feel safer and simply flooding the headlines will only work temporarily (in fact, there's a good chance Flock simply rebrands)
Let us also acknowledged that we're living in the safest time in history and modern American cities are extremely safe, despite the unhinged propaganda from the right.
It's not just politicized propaganda. A lot of unsafety feeling is almost self-inflicted.
In my opinion apps like the Citizen[0] app are some of the worst offenders. They constantly bombard you with scary notifications, creating a constant environment of fear. With that app people are constantly aware of things that are happening in your general area without any real benefit of informing you. It turns the mildly-annoying-but-ignoreable mentally ill person on the street corner from someone that "scares" the 10 people around them into someone that scares 10k people in the area.
Oh, and Citizen is also directly integrated into Axon's Flock-like surveillance product.
Citizen is also nakedly a rightwing propaganda platform. Its primary value proposition is to create fear and a paranoia to boost tough-on-crime politics. Just because it’s an app doesn’t mean it’s not propaganda. The users are the product.
I would have said that they are mainly doing it to exploit the mechanism as it just serves their profit motif, and everything else is just a byproduct.
However, it appears that when I looked at the list of investors earlier, I've missed that Peter Thiel is among them. So yeah, there are clear political ties.
Some American cities like St Louis, Baltimore, Memphis, New Orleans have averaged about 50 homicides per 100,000 per year over the last 10 years. Detroit averaged about 40.
It is not "unhinged propaganda from the right" for people living in those cities to wonder why the rate cannot be under 2.5 per 100,000 like it is in most European cities. Except for a few years in the early 2000s, London's rate has stayed below 2.5 for the last 250 years.
The usual retort here is that the anxiety driving the adoption of Flock can't be seen in crime statistics (which is mostly measuring partner/family crimes ala "murder rate is down").
The random smattering of shoplifting is never reported, the unhoused man in a fit of rage yelling at passers-by is never filed with the police. But in the privacy of the voting booth, people will vote for more Flock cameras.
Instead of waving off concerns we should be addressing them better.
I think you're saying that because you imagine the only alternative is for the police to come in and beat the homeless man up. But simply accepting it, or state violence aren't the only two options.
If we don't make better governance possible, we make Flock inevitable.
Fortunately, at least for now, "Governance" doesn't involve the state coming in to do anything to someone who's not breaking the law. Homeless people have enough problems, they don't need the police to harass them and shoo them away constantly (even without violence).
Just because much of the public think of the homeless as an eyesore that they don't want to see, and they make them briefly face uncomfortable realities, doesn't justify blanketing cities with cops and cameras.
Flock is simply the public saying we don't trust the government in being able to keep us safe, so lets hire AI to do it.
"shooing them away constantly" is also not the only option, but the bare point is the sidewalk has a purpose and it isn't housing. If the government can't enforce that, what else can it not enforce? The unhoused person needs better options and incentives and there are people far more qualified than me to tell us what they are, but they all agree the street is about the worst place for them.
The public isn't saying anything of the sort. Police are buying them or cities. It's justified by telling us it makes us safer, but it's not. Let's be honest, if you have a license plate number, the alpr system probably isn't that useful. Criminals steal cars and license plates. Immigrants and activists don't.
This is your bubble. The mayor of my city had a video up with the Police chief with a Flock camera between them talking about how this will help with the "recent traffic crime wave".
Meanwhile the police say (and act) that they aren't legally required to protect you [1].
The public is screaming for solutions, today you'll scream back at Flock, tomorrow there will be another "solution".
I don't disagree, but reflecting solely on your comment, I wonder if we should try and capture/record such disorder as a preliminary step to coming up with better ways to tackle it?
It probably loops back to better mental health care provision? But might also relate to provision of social housing? Or any number of things. These sorts of indicators can feed into a 'gross happiness quotient' to help us focus on improving society for all of us, not just feeding the greed of the billionaires which a lot of Western society seems to be subservient to right now.
But why is there a need to measure it in the first place and then only react to it?
You already came to the proper conclusion by just thinking about it for a few minutes. Let's just skip building out a surveillance state, and put that money directly into mental health & housing initiatives instead.
We were. Until about somewhere between 2016 and 2018 at which time crime rates went up significantly. Between the 1970s and the mid 2010s crime consistently went down, year over year across almost every big city. In the last decade however, almost 30 years of crime reduction got reversed in some places. Its inconsistent as some areas show this pattern, others don't. And the main differentiating factor is mostly tactical and on the ground. Meaning it is directly about changes to policing policy. Trying to ignore that this is happening is just gaslighting and it is a major reason that drove voting patterns in the last election.
PS Tracking crime stats is tough as property crime is inconsistently reported. This is why you often see criminologists take murder stats and only murder stats in their analysis and then estimate other crime stats back from that. Basically, once people realize the police won't investigate property crime, they stop reporting things that aren't insured.
We can acknowledge that and also acknowledge that a lot of petty crime goes unreported/unresolved because the police can't do anything, and that our target should still be 0 crime and folks are entitled to be upset about any amount of crime. Recent example I have is a work truck behind my neighbors house in the alleyway. Parked for less than 5 minutes, went inside a garage to look at something, came back, and someone had already walked off with their tools. I sort of got the guy who did it on video which I provided to the person who was victimized, but who knows if anything ever really came of it. Probably not. Does that actually show up in crime statistics? I bet it doesn't.
What is also missing here is that even if there is not criminal activity occurring, there is a general influx of highly anti-social behavior occurring that feeds in to the perception that higher rates of criminal activity occurring. This is very noticeable when you see people casually running red lights, driving without registration, yelling and screaming at people on the street or at the bus stop, and more. Even if I'm unlikely to be a victim of a crime, I don't feel safe when these anti-social behaviors are occurring, people are shoplifting and now going to CVS feels like going to a third-world country.
Framing this as right-wing propaganda I believe is a mistake and if you are a leftist it just loses elections for you because even if the folks who are concerned about crime levels are wrong (they're not though) the perception matters much more than reality. Denying the perception implies you deny the reality too and fewer people are going to vote in favor of candidates who tell them that what they see for themselves isn't happening.
> What is also missing here is that even if there is not criminal activity occurring, there is a general influx of highly anti-social behavior occurring that feeds in to the perception that higher rates of criminal activity occurring.
This counts for white collar crime too. And unethical behavior that’s technically legal because the scales of justice haven’t tipped yet, like predatory payday loans.
The social contract isn’t only being broken by petty criminals that do things like steal hardware tools, but also those who come in to your firm that you’ve worked for for 8 years and fired you without cause because they’re some Jack Welch acolyte.
Tools cost a few hundred bucks at most. Jack Welch bastards siphon millions or even billions in aggregate from the working class, one dismissal at a time.
Well I agree with you that white collar crime counts a lot here too (hello 2008).
But I'd disagree about but also those who come in to your firm that you’ve worked for for 8 years and fired you without cause. There are also plenty of people who don't do anything and siphon off value so if you wanted to use that example I think you have to use the thieves and bums who don't do anything too.
Sure whatever but I was talking about bad employees and people who don't do anything at work. They'd probably be most closely aligned to your grifter category or maybe a cheat.
So many people's heads are no longer in reality. Perceptions and this fantasy world people have constructed (and right-wing propaganda feeds) is driving election results, not the real world. If you are politician who is part of the shrinking population who is actually still in reality, how do you win? You can't go on TV and acknowledge the phony "high crime" non-reality, any more than you can go on TV and say the moon landings were fake. But, pretending falsehoods are true wins elections. We're in a dark period.
Do you live in a city? I do. Come to Columbus and stand at the bus stop not a half mile away from my home where people are tweaking out and walking around in the middle of the street, there are piles of garbage everywhere, drivers are blasting through red lights, and everything at the CVS is locked up. Last week someone stole a car and drove it through the best park in the city and ran over a historic marker. I guess it's not a big deal right? We're probably privileged to have a park. Yea? Jeez what were the social circumstances that led these people to steal this car and drive through a park. Society has failed them. It's my fault they did it I bet? That's the message that the DSA and more left-leaning groups are sending to Americans and most are seeing through the bullshit.
Also your comment about "shrinking population" - you are referring to white Americans right? You're welcome to go look for yourself to see Trump's election results from the last election and see how he increased voter share across blacks and hispanics (and maybe more). How is this "shrinking population" happening when Trump also had the most votes of any president in American history? Maybe the population isn't shrinking in the way that you think.
If you want to know why Democrats are losing elections despite it being so obvious they shouldn't, your comments and rejection of the reality that many Americans face every day is precisely why. And before you try and accuse me of being some Trump sycophant I have voted for Obama twice, Clinton, Biden, and then Harris and will be voting for Sherrod Brown and Amy Acton here in Ohio. Denying reality because you think that the picture other Americans see must be some right-wing propaganda feed is confusing you. It's simply not accurate. Most Americans do not agree with your point of view. If the Democrats want to start winning elections they better come to grips with reality.
I think we are just fundamentally disagreeing on what "reality" means. My reality comes from measurement by experts, reports and documentation--hopefully broad, impartial, and highly cross-sectional studies. Yours appears to be about people's everyday perception and lived experience. But lived experience is like looking through a keyhole. It's never going to be complete and applicable broadly. But people believe it's reality because they hear it somewhere or they see a tiny slice of it with their eyes. Your keyhole view of Columbus shapes a broader idea of reality that "crime is rampant everywhere".
Even if these keyhole slices of reality were not being fed by right-wing propaganda (let's assume for the sake of argument that there is no right-wing propaganda at all), it's still not a reality that is applicable broadly across the country.
As an example we saw this during COVID. "Nobody around me that I know personally has died of COVID, therefore it doesn't exist, it's a hoax, or it's not a problem."
Well no I don't think we're disagreeing, it's more about terms that are not captured in measurements, reports, things like that.
The example I gave is just an example. It's real no matter what the data says. When folks experience that, they experience it and it informs their opinions about the rates of crime and how safe an area is. I can tell you I believe the area I live in is safe, but with the introduction of these anti-social behaviors it is less safe regardless of the level of reported crime.
I think statistically the numbers show there is much less crime than there has been, but the statistics aren't perfect. For example, can you provide a report or measurement that measures how unsafe people feel when they walk by a pile of needles and have a homeless person screaming at them? If you can't, then you can clearly see there are flaws in the measurements that need to be addressed.
Chalking it up to right wing propaganda just doesn't help here and only serves to lose votes. I'm not "right-wing". I live in a city. I walk by this stuff. I don't feel safe of comfortable walking by these people. I also don't think my quality of life is improved when I have to go ask someone to unlock a case so I can buy a razor blade or something. If your metrics aren't capturing that then that would explain the disconnect you are seeing.
That's what my post was about though: You're not really talking about actual crime--you're talking about your own perception/feelings.
By all measurements and all sources of data available, violent crime has been absolutely plummeting since around 1991. Property crime is plummeting in direct parallel. Yet, nearly every year, a large majority of people (~66% or so) who are polled believe that crime is higher this year than it was last year.
We measure actual crime and we also poll people about their feelings. The large difference between these two doesn't mean that the measurement of actual crime is flawed. It just means that people are not informed, or if they are informed, they are letting their perceptions and feelings override the actual information. We shouldn't be making public policy based on how people feel.
But I mentioned other areas where crime occurs but is not reported. It has quite literally happened to me. Crime can be down simply because it is underreported. Here's another example. At my house someone stole a package, I have them on video because they're stupid and that was sent to police and maybe that was solved, idk. But it's quite a bit of work to submit a police report. My local police office has file size limits. I had to go and adjust a video, make sure it's in the proper format, and of course fill out the form, describe everything. If it's a lower value item someone may say forget it, this is too much work.
Part of the survey response you are seeing is that while crime itself may be down, citizens are uncomfortable and feel less safe (I provided an example that you can come and see for yourself any time of day) and I believe that helps to explain the discrepancy in the data you are seeing. How do you account for increases in crime when someone runs a red light (that's a crime) that simply is not reported? What am I going to do, call the local police? Are they going to actually do anything?
Data is only just one piece of the puzzle. Arguably not the most important in many circumstances. If the data is telling you crime is down, but people feel as though it is not, that doesn't necessarily mean "right-wing propaganda", and for someone who is inclined as you are to look at data you would think you wouldn't immediately draw such a conclusion and instead you would want to question your data collection process, the methods you are using, whether or not specific groups have stories they want to tell.
> You're not really talking about actual crime--you're talking about your own perception/feelings.
> By all measurements and all sources of data available, violent crime has been absolutely plummeting since around 1991. Property crime is plummeting in direct parallel.
> Yet, nearly every year, a large majority of people (~66% or so) who are polled believe that crime is higher this year than it was last year.
Maybe the majority is right and your data is wrong?
Why are you taking it so personally? It’s funny you say you’re leftwing, but this comment screams that you’re deep into the rabbit hole being pushed by the right that there should be no personal accountability for societal failures. The same rabbit hole that is pushing “uncomfy” topics out of schools so white kids don’t feel guilty about slavery.
Which, is honestly a great strategy. It’s an echo of the libertarian right that has fizzled out under Trump. Erase all of the wrongdoings of political conservativism because conservatives shouldn’t have to demonstrate self-reflection or empathy. That would get in the way of being conservative.
Because it pisses me off and it's stupid. I don't like this anti-social behavior. You think folks shouldn't be pissed off about it?
> It’s funny you say you’re leftwing
I'm not left-wing.
> but this comment screams that you’re deep into the rabbit hole being pushed by the right that there should be no personal accountability for societal failures.
If my comments mean I'm right-wing, you've found your problem. Your perception is really far to one direction and doesn't reflect how people actually think. It's kind of like an Internet view.
> The same rabbit hole that is pushing “uncomfy” topics out of schools so white kids don’t feel guilty about slavery.
I don't feel any guilt about slavery lol. I don't think anyone else needs to either.
I was talking about the part of your comment where you literally say:
> It's my fault they did it I bet?
The whole point of my comment is an observation that for some reason conservatives, including yourself (despite your voting record?) have a visceral negative reaction to being informed about how the society they participate in has demons that they are - by virtue of being part of that society - partially responsible for. It doesn’t mean you have to feel guilty. I don’t feel guilty about things I do not have an inordinate amount of personal responsibility for, but I do feel guilty whenever I know that there’s something I could do but don’t - usually out of laziness or convenience. But I chalk that up to having a conscience.
"Someone disagrees with me, therefore I have a conscience and they don't". C'mon. That's boring.
Anyway, if you are asking me I'm conservative about some things, liberal about others. Feel free to ask me if you are curious. I'm anti-MAGA, but I'm also anti-DSA. I'm anti-woke and anti-Proud boys too. All of these groups of small-minded people are annoying and destructive and generally produce bad policy and the ways in which our society and government have become dysfunctional is in a large part because of people who identify with these groups.
Part of the reason for my response was due to the path the OP was already going down in their earlier comments. The drug addict on the corner yelling at people and walking with his dick out (yes that's real shit that happens where I live) doesn't show up in the data, yet it doesn't make me feel safe. Yet the OP seems to suggest that they have no reason for someone to not feel safe and it's all right-wing talking points. The next step is to make it my fault somehow. It's a very tried and true trope that I've seen over and over.
>From my understanding cities like NYC were actually in a really bad shape in 1950s and after compared to now, until around the 90s
>Edit: actually, from what I find in the 1950s there was even ongoing heroin epidemics, in addition to gang warfare, and of course racial inequality
I can confirm the gang warfare (at least in the 1970s and early 1980s) -- there were street gangs every few blocks and the police were (mostly) just considered the biggest and best armed gang -- and for good reason.
I didn't know Verdi Park[0] was called "Verdi Park" until the late 1990s. It was (but not any more) shaped like a triangle which is why I (incorrectly) thought it was actually named "Needle Park" But that was actually because of the heroin.
But all that's changed and has been for more than 20 years. NYC is the safest it's ever been.
There definitely was recorded incidence of this - Washington Square Park for example - but the main reason for the difference today was due to vagrancy and loitering laws, as well as 1930s Dust Bowl governance, that no longer exist for human-rights reasons.
Very easy to keep the parks 'beautiful' when you could just shift anyone undesirable to a prison, asylum, or skid row.
N.B. Littering also wasn't seen as a social failing in 50s America, so there's a bit of a juxtaposition there versus the contemporary reality.
Nope, but alcohol consumption was a lot higher, as well as domestic violence. And race-based violence. And opiate production hadn’t industrialized yet.
Given the public policy of the 50s, if the Sacklers had been around, I would imagine a much higher death toll and much more damage to the public welfare than the opiate epidemic of the 2000s.
I truly think it's safetyism. People seem to have a lower and lower tolerance for risk as society gets safer.
Since governments are run by people, this safetyism
has become enshrined in law, typified by nonsense like criminalizing free-range parenting and mass surveillance.
Well, they aren't really for stopping crime. They're for identifying political dissent so it can be crushed early. Stopping crime requires manpower that costs money, and if they were successfuy they'd have a harder time making the case they need even more surveillance beyond the currently monstrous amount no one could have even imagined 40 years ago.
There’s no way they captured Luigi using normal means at a random McDonald’s because of a random ID. I always figured it used some unpublished data and facial tracking and was high profile enough to use in this case with only a flimsy “parallel construction” necessary
Occam's Razor my fiend. Ask yourself what's the higher statistical probability in Trump's America:
A minimum wage teenager, in a city of less than 50,000, on the tills during the breakfast rush, managed to positively ID the suspect, despite him wearing a mask and beanie, based on ambiguous CCTV photos, and decided to snitch. He was then detained within 11 minutes.
Versus
A federal agency tapped into CCTV or kiosk-cameras automatically ID'd him via facial recognition, and then established clean, admissible evidentiary trail to mask an unconstitutional investigative source.
This happened a few years ago before flock. Some idiot drove down the street with a pellet gun shooting at car windows. About five of us needed to pay several hundred dollars a piece to replace the glass.
My street is not "horrible", but everyone on my street would have loved to have a camera that recorded what happened. Even if we didn't get a working license plate number, it would have been useful to see what happened.
It doesn't have to be a "monster crime gap" to get people to vote for these things. It just takes some selfish idiots.
its one of the value function that makes it almost impossible to evaluate.
Lets imagine that catching someone in the Interpol list of wanted terrorists is a huge catch. You would expect the avg catch rate to be almost 0 but once one is caught the avg value of the system becomes very easy to justify.
Its the same idea as having photos of known terrorists in airports and train stations to see if guards recognise someone. But with the added benefit that the facial recognition should not miss them.
If the evaluation function is it costs X to run each day and we caught Y number of criminals who robbed phones worth Z > X then the system will come off pretty badly in terms of ROI.
That’s not hard to value, it just doesn’t make Flock look particularly good. If these actually work well, you would expect the average catch rate to be nearly 100%. We had decent rates just having humans look, Flock should be clearing those like crazy if it works.
It doesn’t. I had a car stolen, called it in as they pulled away. I live a block from a Flock camera, 2 others apparently captured it. Car wasn’t intercepted, car was never recovered, no arrests were ever made. They could have put up scarecrows and it would have done as much good for a lot cheaper.
> the system will come off pretty badly in terms of ROI.
It’s a bad evaluation function. A lot of the cost of crime isn’t directly the crime, it’s the economic deadweight of trying to deter the crime. Every car needs anti-theft parts, lots of people buy home security systems, armored cars to do bank drops, etc, all this stuff we pay for that exists solely to try to stop crime.
Flock would look great if it worked so well it made armored cars and car anti-theft obsolete. It won’t, but if it did the ROI would be crazy.
That only happens because you’re poor. If you were someone the police would have done more. My friend that is rich, always has an easy with with police when some problem happens.
In reality, Flock cameras are bought for “law enforcement”, using taxpayer dollars (therefore free to the people making decisions) and enable both feelings of omniscience and the ability to stalk exes.
So ROI is pretty good when the I comes from someone else and the R is and random act of spying that makes the operators feel powerful.
Cynical, I know, but not empty cynicism I hope. All evidence leads me that way.
The question is if the value of the database (to any party, present or future) of all collected data is greater than the value of catching that one guy (or one guy every few years).
It would be interesting to see how these are justified internally. If I had to guess, it’s either excess budget being channeled into “something” or a justification to reduce street patrols/street crime.
Flock claims they perform greater than 20 billion plate reads per month and allegedly are used in solving a few thousand cases per year. Their actual usefulness in those solved cases is not quantified. A customer could have used the cameras for a search that returned nothing or produced no additional leads, but Flock could still say they were used in the investigation. So the ROI is not great.
I found some news articles that seem to back up this stat. It wasn't all attributable to the cameras though. It also included targeted enforcement strategy with bait cars and what not.
I haven't validated your statistic (and it's unclear what "in the long run means" since this is a point-in-time thing), but assuming it's true, how do you determine it is causation and not correlation?
It would be so nice if government projects and regulations came with some sort of KPI. And if they aren’t reached the thing is reverted/removed. With a bit of flexibility of course, to be sure there is room for debate. I’m sure that could be gamed in lots of ways but with the current status quo is just so much vibes
Trying to be as charitable as possible, is that this is a technology that allows people (the average municipal police force) that can only solve the most obvious of crimes to solve marginally less obvious crimes - at the great expense of the general populace through loss of privacy and abuse.
We can probably calculate the investment, but how do you calculate the return? What's the value of solving a crime? Is it solely the value of preventing some future crimes by the suspect, or does it have intrinsic value?
The real ROI is the change in behaviour of people constantly surveiled. We know people change their behaviour when under constant scrutiny and this why the elites want it.
my mom lives in small town that only has two roads in/out of town and the police have alprs on those. there's no violent crime there, and all the police department does is traffic (DWI's, speeding and parking tickets, and accidents) and respond to small town crime (noise complaints, stolen bicycle, stray/lost dogs etc). I think the only thing that the alpr has ever caught people for is out of date vehicle registrations - but now the police department wants a flock camera because they are "great crime fighting tools"
ANPR catches lack of MOT, road tax, and insurance. They also alert on wanted cars.
They are a good thing to have in general, the issue with those things is always data retention and access by authorities. Currently I think that data are retained for 12 months so, for the sake of argument, let's say you commit a serious crime now and only come to the attention of the police in 10 months, well they can still query all of your car's movements at the time of the crime from the ANPR network's database...
Perhaps, but not the way Flock does it. Transparency, oversight, controls - all essentially just missing.
"Disruption" to these people means "try to sell the most legally questionable service possible until we get slapped down by the society we're trying to extract money from."
my proposal to fix the ALPR issue in general focuses on the information asymmetry. The real reason people hate them is because only government forces have access to them, thus creating an unfair advantage.
My solution to this is to make every ALPR database openly and publicly searchable. It solves every problem with them today.
Government abuse? Well now the people can find out where all the politicans are.
False positives? the data is right there. go ham.
Oh no now the police say THEY dont want to be tracked??? Problem almost solves itself.
If you give the public access to ANPR they're going to spend 30 seconds googling the cops and then they're going to go to town on wives, husbands, exes, stalking victims etc. etc.
Here’s the thing - if your local you know they’re there - and if you’re planning on committing a crime they’re trivial (but inconvenient to bypass). So really they’re just recording the everyday movements of the towns populace “just in case”
I've had an idea in the back of my head but I'm no businessman so have this one for free.
Build an AI model, train it from the catalogues of JD Sports and Sports Direct (and other brands like Stone Island etc.) and how to detect balaclavas, illegal electric bikes and e-scooters. Have it link to cameras and do a percentage chance using machine learning on chance of crime. Also increase the percentage if a 'wheely' is done (riding only on back wheel).
Would minority report the majority of crime in this country in one fell swoop.
Could call it ScroteScanner.
Some would call it discrimination but the majority of ASB I see around my area are people dressed/using those exact things.
If they start to catch-on (unlikely) then worse case we have a fancier looking society with gangsters in suits again.
They should just round up and imprison all the people who walk in my neighbourhood.
Some would call it discrimination but the majority of people who commit crimes in my area are people who can walk. I rarely see the wheelchair crowd pulling off B&Es.
Oh, or people who wear clothes. Criminals seem to like wearing clothes. Point proven: you never see nudists shoplifting Old Navy.
People on illegal escooters or illegal electric bikes are already committing crimes, there's rarely a decent reason to be wearing a balaclava in the city.
As I said, machine learning to take all these pointers into perspective.
I think what makes this resemble a moronic idea is it’s a thin veneer of an invention based on your personal stereotyped perspective.
The real challenge, if you wanted to work on the meat of the issue, is that we need to reduce crime without catching the innocent in the net, without having a chilling effect on legal behaviour and people’s rights, and without normalizing the mindset that we should just precrime people.
One of the core points of Minority Report is in the film’s title: that even if technology becomes 99.99% accurate, we are still damned by the destruction of due process and the presumption of innocence.
I think ideas like yours belong in the incinerator.
The unlicensed ebike, while not a serious problem, is a really annoying one in certain places, and everybody suspects that it's not a wave of people doing it but in fact a fairly small number of people doing antisocial things over and over again. Who are relying on being untraceable and on a versatile getaway vehicle.
Note that "illegal motorbike with no plates" is an offense that you can detect just by looking at it. There's no "pre" in the crime. The problem is either stopping them or tracing them.
While what you say has merit in isolation, you're replying to a post where the person says "they're already doing illegal things". If the cameras pick up people "breaking the law", using further algo on that seems... sensible?
EG, the gatekeep is 'already should get a ticket or something'.
I actually oppose all cameras, and think we should just have more police in the streets. It's how policing used to be done. Human judgement.
I would agree to having more police in the street, but their budget just seems to be getting cut week after week and they're struggling. They seem to be around 9-5 and after that the streets turn into a free-for-all.
The balaclava thing is stupid, but you're missing the point that they're already doing something illegal. If you think anti-ebike law is stupid then that law should be repealed, not ignored.
> (what fact about?) their scooter actually making society better?
- illegal motorbike (ebike not complying with type restrictions)
- no plates (enables evading liability for damage or injury caused)
- underage riders / no license (danger to self and others)
- no helmet (personally I'm least bothered about this, but it is a legal requirement and safety issue if you're doing high speeds on a motorbike without one)
The "no plates" leads to hit-and-run incidents in which people have been seriously injured and a dog killed. There have also been incidents of these underage illegal riders getting themselves killed or seriously injured; while that's their own fault it's not something we should entirely shrug off.
> because UK residents sincerely want one
Yeah, this is kind of a general problem (online ""safety""), but the ebike kids are also a real problem. And not just in the UK.
Yes, they actively make public spaces unpleasant and dangerous. Town centres are on their knees as people don't want to go there anymore due to ASB like this.
Most town centres are 90% boarded up forgotten realms. They have been in decline for decades, blaming it on people riding e-scooters and illegal e-motorcycles is laughable.
It's a catch-22. They're boarded up realms because even after the online shopping revolution and attempts to regenerate them people don't want to go because they're full of deadbeats and ASB. Who would want to open a business there? For christ sake our local McDonalds is now playing Mozart at full blast in the evening outside to try and keep the ferral youth away as it's in the bang center and a popular hangout spot. It's somewhat working to an extent, but they're still around.
There's going to be a generation of ex-youths nostalgic for Mozart from their days hanging around McDonald's - I'd get shares in Classic FM if you've got money.
All fun and games until someone gets seriously injured or their dog killed. I had a run-in a couple of years ago with some kids on a motorbike trying (unsuccessfully) to knock me off my pedal bike.
That enables the hit-and-run incidents. The whole point of making vehicles have license plates in the first place is traceability for criminal and civil liability for injury or damage.
It's not just them, you've got ebikes going 30mph, kids/teens congregating on bikes in balaclavas. Come look for yourself and see if you don't feel intimidated.
Oh! I live somewhere like that. I just don't be intimidated by things unless I have a reason to be intimidated. Although scary looking people congregate sometimes, they've never actually harmed me so I don't avoid the whole area. And the few times I've ever interacted with a scary looking person, they were chill.
Tendency to fear has to be one of those personality axes. Studies found that political conservatives have larger amygdala (the part of their brain that governs things like fear) so maybe this is something similar.
This is the mindset I'd expect from a toddler - "it hasn't happened to me yet so it's not a problem and people who think it is are overreacting".
Should we also treat drinking and driving a no-big-deal thing since you haven't been affected by that either? Can you let us know what else your fellow countrymen are doing wrong in your estimation, based on your own narrow slice of lived experiences?
Can you really not put yourself in the shoes of, say, a young woman walking home in the dark feeling intimidated by a group of men wearing masks? Like it takes half a second of self-reflection and critical thinking to come up with a very believable, commonly occurring scenario that would lead to someone thinking differently than you. Give it a try sometime.
Another user a level up in this thread has also linked articles to 2 hospitalizations and a dead dog that are the result of e-bikes being used in places they're prohibited, so clearly it's an issue that needs addressing. Being smarmy and self-aggrandizing about it is a really bad look for you.
> "it hasn't happened to me yet so it's not a problem and people who think it is are overreacting".
I've never been attacked by a ghost-possessed toothbrush but I still avoid the toothbrush aisle just in case. It's a real problem. I'm not overreacting.
Thanks for doubling down on being facetious and making me feel better that I didn't just jump to conclusions about you, and that I made the right assumptions lol
> Is arresting someone for (what fact about?) their scooter actually making society better?
In London people are scooters are often mildly annoying.
>Comments like these reinforce my belief that the UK is a panopticon because UK residents sincerely want one and not because the government is corrupt.
You are correct, despite what you will see on HN/reddit the UK electorate are united only in wanting more authoritarianism at any cost.
In the age of everything being filmed in a panopticon, I look at the teens wearing balaclava and wonder where they bought theirs. Good on them for having a modicum of privacy.
It'd be much more effective to close the gaping loopholes which allow importing, selling, and servicing unrestricted and unsafe ebikes and escooters (currently you just need to have some small print informing riders that they should be insured, licensed, and only use them on roads where mopeds are permitted - even though no-one actually does that).
Ideally, you'd go back in time and do this before the problem really took off - but failing that, you could introduce scrappage/swap schemes to incentivise taking existing bikes out of circulation.
To tighten things up further, you might think about making safety certification mandatory, and force delivery platforms to take responsibility for ensuring that their riders are using only certified bikes.
Deal with the source of the problem rather than wasting police time on chasing down every teenage cyclist or bringing back sus laws.
Trouble is you'd be scooping up 90% of boys in a certain race, class, age bracket, because those ballys and bikes and Nike tech are effectively fashion at this point even if you're doing nothing wrong. And if that's the case you don't need AI you can just wait outside the school gates and arrest everyone.
Those are the types likely to be committing a lot of the crimes. Come to a working class town and see for yourself, or go on any local town Facebook group or council page and look at the comments.
Not arrest, you could monitor though. Personal anecdote but it's clear that after 3pm/4pm once they leave school they start to scatter around. It's rather peaceful for the most part before then. Chaos on school holidays.
For scale 500k people is 2 days of Liverpool Street Stations daily average