Do you have any hard numbers from your community on how many cases had flock as crucial to resolving the case?

When my community banned them, the police were only able to offer a single vehicle theft case as positive evidence, but the data was being sent to police stations and locally unpopular federal agencies clear across the country. We could have spent the municipal budget on giving the victims a new car with far fewer privacy concerns and still saved money.

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mlfreeman 17 hours ago | parent | next [-]

And vehicle theft doesn't even need cameras logging EVERYONE to Flock's databases - just cameras that only report in to the mothership when they see a plate on an internal "most-wanted" list.

Person reports car stolen, cop adds car info to plate reader most wanted list, most wanted list is transmitted to cameras, cameras don't let plate readings leave RAM unless they're 90% or higher confident that it's on the most wanted list.

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SoftTalker 17 hours ago | parent [-]

Are the cameras doing the plate recognition and OCR locally? Or (my guess) they are uploading images to a Flock data center where they are processed and then the plate number and location data saved to a database where active search queries are processed?

	▲	mlfreeman 12 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The tech exists to do it on-camera (Ubiquiti among other vendors claims on-camera LPR), but I figure they're doing whatever is most battery-efficient since the ones I've seen all have solar panels. I do wonder what they do on busy interstates though. Some of the ones I've had to go past would basically be sending a live video feed - LPR matches as text would save a ton of bandwidth and maybe even power compared to a cellular radio always transmitting.

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ricardobayes 17 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

For disclosure I'm not in the US and I'm not well versed how things are set up over there. However the cameras seemed to have worked, here: crime has dropped by 10% year on year.

	▲	phoghed 16 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I can’t find any evidence that Spain has deployed Flock or any Flock-like system. Do you have an article? I know they have plate cameras in Europe, but the traditional ANPR systems, speed traps and whatnot, they’ve had everywhere. That’s not the same class of system imo.

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pinkyboy 17 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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	▲	dang 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
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