I would guess the only way to make this data available long term is by regulation. Then again, I would hope Flock is subject to FOIA already if they are collaborating with state or local law enforcement...

Can you FOIA some unique identifier of the officers (badge number, name, etc) associated with the serialized searches?

On the subject of those Flock cameras, it really is amazing how much high-purity copper they manage to put in one of those. They might as well be putting ingots of copper on those poles.

Two independent studies established that police families experience higher rates of domestic violence than the rest of the population.

Do not let your loved ones get romantically involved with cops.

Lmao, anonymization of usage

Worth noting that these weren't low level employees watching the children's gymnastics areas but included the accounts of the Director of Growth, and the VP of Strategic Relations and Business Development among several other staff members. You really have to wonder what these people mean when they say "think of the children".

Gives the heebeejeebies, how is it that so many companies are so casual with spying.

"14x times" to me sounds like statistically "zero" since I assume the sample size would be in the millions "at least."

Why? Is there something about their dataset and/or methodology that you can identify as deficient that would indicate that the rate is much higher than what was published?

I agree with the sentiment, but if you want anyone to do anything about it we need evidence and not vibes.

I'm trying to help you make your case. So far the only comments in this thread are the most low-effort reactions that don't say anything substantive.

It is institutional in the sense that Flock and the individual PDs have not put steps in place (either post auditing or pre not allowing bad queries) that prevent the abuse.

Post auditing is obviously not taken seriously by these departments, and Flock could build tools to do this out of the box (identify weird search patterns) if they wanted to.

Edit -- I see Flock does have some audit tools, https://www.flocksafety.com/trust/compliance-tools. If those work as they should, it is more on PDs to use them properly.

Police abuse of power in the US is a systemic problem. Your opinion is akin to thinking the Catholic church bears no burden for all the diddling they neglected to observe.

It's a system whose implementations don't do anything to prevent or even detect this. It's not licensed by seat, so it doesn't require SSO and when the data was available it was obvious that most departments use shared accounts. There are no laws to regulate the use of it, so they do not. It gets rushed into production via Federal grants with limited time windows.

If you have a system that isn't designed around accountability in a place like a police department, you won't get accountability, and you will get institutionalized poor behavior. It's one of the reasons that state police organizations are usually considered more "professional" or better disciplined than most local departments.

Bureaucracy and size reduces random dumbass employee use of their discretion. People look the other way less often when there is a record of malfesance right in front of them. You don't need to be "pro" or "against" police to demand accountability.

The title doesn't make that sound like that at all. Unless you think in any world there woukd be able institutional procedure to abuse systems like that. To normal people it reads like police abusing the systems they have access to.

The classic "just some bad apples" argument in defense of corruption.

In Toronto, police are pressured into gang-like conformity to support their bad apples - from last week:

> A Crown attorney is being accused of suggesting a police witness should have provided false evidence while testifying in court.

> According to the Toronto Star, a heated interaction occurred in the hallway of a Toronto courthouse earlier this year, between Crown attorney Marnie Goldenberg and Constable Edin Hasanbasic of the Toronto Police Service.

> Hasanbasic had been called as a witness in the case of a man accused of hitting a different officer with his motorcycle, with the intent of causing harm.

> Hasanbasic had just told the court that the officer who was struck by the motorcycle “seemed like he was fine” after the incident.

> Goldenberg, according to Hasanbasic’s notes about the encounter, allegedly got angry about his testimony, because it went against the Crown’s case.

> “What am I supposed to do? Lie?” Hasanbasic recalls saying.

> The attorney allegedly responded by saying, “We protect our own.”

I don't see why any plates should be looked up for any reason without evidence of a crime. If someone isn't enough of a problem for their plate to be flagged otherwise, it is not the governments business to know who is where or when.

> by resigning

Ah, so then they just resumed another law enforcement job in the next town over like so many do, whose investigations into their criminal activity was terminated because they resigned, and because they were never charged or fired, then they have a clean record to apply elsewhere.

Can you tell me more about what a volunteer court watcher does? That sounds fascinating. What do you do when you see something questionable in a court? Are there broader organizations you raise concerns with or submit statistics to?

I have always gravitated towards a market model. Force police, like doctors, to have malpractice insurance. Let for-profit insurance companies model what that risk looks like. Now cities have to make a financial decision when hiring cops that is directionally accurate to the risk of said cop. Imperfect but I don’t believe perfect systems exist.

But this goes back to government agencies never thinking about budgets. Modern politics is about marketing a tax reduction but never how that impacts the budget.

This is pretty straightforward actually. The third party doctrine [1] has been extrapolated to the digital age to the massive detriment of privacy. All it takes is for Congress to pass a law clarifying to the courts that the third party doctrine isn't correct.

There's also an alteration to the interpretation of "reasonable expectation of privacy" that could be made (again, by Congress) to account for the total sum of information, rather than each individual piece of information in isolation. For example, I have no expectation of privacy that people don't see my license plate when I'm driving but I don't expect that a single person/entity would have all of the locations my license plate has been in the last 3 days.

The other clarification/change Congress could make would be to change the "reasonable expectation" test to something less susceptible to erosion over time. (I didn't used to expect I'd be tracked in certain way because I thought it would have been illegal but now I do expect it even though I still feel it's illegal). The reasonable expectation test encourages normalizing surveillance for as long as possible before it gets to court so that it's unreasonable to expect otherwise.

All of these things, of course, would be still within the grasp of investigators with a simple warrant which would normally take less than an hour to attain.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_doctrine

I feel like this actually isn't that complicated. Just remove any special protections that they get on the judicial end. The judicial is already there with the intention of balancing the powers of the executive, it just doesn't do that currently because they limply decided that the executive can go and do whatever the hell they please.

there's never been a point human history where the ruling class was subject to its rules. so no.

These cameras record bumper stickers, dents, accessories, etc. Many vehicles can be uniquely identified by a computer without a license plate.