If I'm ever on the jury of somebody charged with this, the prosecution has an incredibly high burden to convince me the poles and the cameras on them didn't die of natural causes.

Maybe if police weren't using Flock cameras to stalk their ex-wives [1][2].

There's an interesting angle to the Flock issue I heard recently. Some predominantly black communities prefer Flock cameras because they're over-policed, black men in particular are more likely to be pulled over on "routine" traffic stops and those stops have a skewed chance of ending in violence of death. As a reminder, US law enforcement kills over 1000 civilians every single year. Over half of those are black men and black men are only ~6% of the population.

But that's really a lesser evil type situation because the police simply shouldn't be killing so many people.

[1]: https://www.firstalert4.com/2026/08/03/brentwood-officer-acc...

[2]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/08/02/how-pol...

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JuniperMesos 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Black communities are underpoliced, not overpoliced. Black men commit a hugely disproportionate amount of violent crime compared to their percentage of the current American population - "13 commit 50" is a meme for a reason. We should expect that legitimate killings of dangerous criminals by cops who are in the process of investigating immediate criminal activity will skew towards black men; and that attempts to correct this racial discrepency will result in a greater risk to the public at large and also to cops themselves.

That's not to say that putting up Flock cameras in communities with large numbers of black people isn't a good idea - black people themselves are very often the victims of crimes committed by black men, and all the benefits Flock cameras have for making it easier for the police to arrest street criminals apply to predominantly black communities as much as anywhere else. I think that black people are as capable of complaining about being disproportionately captured committing crimes on Flock cameras as they are about being disproportionately pulled over by the cops; but there's still good reasons to like policing methodologies which reduce the need for car stops in general.

	▲	jmyeet 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		1350 is a neo-Nazi dog whistle. Think about it this way, let's say that black men committed more crimes per capita than men overall. That means one of two things: 1. There is an intrinsic reason. That's just racism. Black people are no different to any other people. What you're suggesting is that they're inherently violent, basically; or 2. There is an extrinsic reason. Put another way, there's a confounding variable. This part is true. The confounding variable is poverty. The link between poverty and crime has been known about for thousands of years. It's ridiculous and unfounded to claim black people are "under-policied". They're 20% more likely to be stopped for a "routine" traffic stop ("driving while black" is a thing for a reason) [1]. This evidence is solid enough for this that when it's dark this number drops when the police can no longer see the driver in the car. The empirical evidence for over-policing is overwhelming (eg [2]). They tend to get longer sentences for the same crime and are found guilty more often, particularly when there's a racial disparity in the jury, which there often is. [1]: https://www.nyu.edu/about/news-publications/news/2020/may/bl... [2]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10242413/

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buellerbueller 16 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Classic jury nullification.