My mental model:

1. Policing is yet another example of Baumol’s effect[1]; sectors where automation lags become expensive

2. Policing can be automated effectively, including via Flock:

> Hunters Point rapper Dreamllife Rizzy described how police tech has made it more difficult to get away with bipping and other crimes. “Crime in San Francisco, period, that shit over with, brother,” the rapper said. “They got drones, hella shit.” He described how Flock cameras clock the plates on a stolen car and send an alert to police stations, which send drones to follow the vehicle.[2]

3. Policing, like major surgery, ambitious construction, military invasions, and other high-consequence endeavors, is not immune to perfidy, incompetence, or other human weaknesses.

4. Argument by implicit synecdoche (here is an example of an abuse, therefore the general behavior is abusive) is ubiquitous and invalid; you need to actually collect wide evidence and weigh major tradeoffs. How does Flock affect total crime rates? Total abuse rates? That only matters if you think that we should be open to the possibility that widespread use of Flock cameras might be good.

5. WRT privacy and policing-the-police in particular, there is a small but highly vocal community of libertarians whose perspective is sharp, detailed, and not reflective of broader society’s perspective except in motte-and-bailey form, and who will never be persuaded by evidence because for them what matters are the principles (n.b.: this observation is not per se a criticism — sometimes principles should trump evidence around tradeoffs).

6. HN’s 10^5 (?) active commenters include 10^4(?) members of that libertarian vanguard

7. Everyone has heard all the libertarian and contra-libertarian arguments going back decades; no one is learning from yet another go-round

[1] https://acjsissons.medium.com/the-baumol-effect-not-a-diseas...

[2] https://sfstandard.com/2026/08/13/rest-peace-bip-city/?utm_s...

A way to think of the Baumol effect in more local terms:

High-productivity organizations have increased revenue and reduced expenses, almost by definition. These profits can be "spent" in various ways like charging customers less, paying workers more, paying investors more, and blue-sky research. (I'm remembering the early days of Google here.) Or it could fund various forms of corruption.

Paying employees more helps drive up local wages. Also, wealthier people want higher-end services and are price-insensitive, so they're inevitably going to be charged more. They'll bid more for houses and pay more to eat in fancier restaurants.

People discount the "trickle-down" effect but everyone notices when the cost of living goes up because there are a lot of rich people around who will pay more.

Not only is policing not immune against perfidy, but I would argue perfidy is built into the police system as a core tenet. There is a lot of widely available evidence

> Everyone has heard all the libertarian and contra-libertarian arguments going back decades; no one is learning from yet another go-round

People are generally massively uninformed if not misinformed. People have not heard real arguments or data for most issues in general.