I wouldn't say I am a huge proponent of Flock, especially considering their lack luster security for the individual cameras at least in my area, but the title makes it sound like it's an institutional procedure that the department stalking their romantic interests instead of individual officers that need to be properly reprimanded.

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.”