Woman pulled over twice after Flock-linked software connected her to homicide

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• Hacker News
• I parked in a mall when someone stole my plate and replaced it with one from a stolen car. The next day, my brother, brand new in the country, borrowed my car to go to his first job. He was surrounded with dozens of LAPD cars, held at gun point in the middle of a boulevard and dragged through the mud in his first day work clothes.

  He tells me the only thing that saved him that day for not getting shot was not having the vocabulary to ask questions or explain himself. He was kneed, arms twisted, humiliated, then tossed in the back of a cruiser. Our car was a white infiniti. The stolen car was a black honda.

  When the cops get information there is zero investigation. It's "we got him!" And act immediately. It's like having a giant llm generated PR and you just comment "lgtm" and merge, only someone's life is on the line.

  by firefoxd
• I just spoke at my county commission meeting this morning, against these cameras, as they're debating putting 50% more cameras up across the county. The original set went up without any news coverage or fanfare.

  https://www.youtube.com/live/1OmEmpL-7qY?t=720&is=z_mb9ZEVCs...

  Looks like I have two serious opponents to privacy on the commission to deal with, and the commissioner seems to at least want to end the contract. I have no idea where the other two members sit.

  by Tostino
• This happened while I was up in Maine - friend had purchased a used vehicle with all the paperwork earlier in the day. Both parties happy, somehow flock wrongly flagged the vehicle as "stolen" and dispatched police without any probable cause or ask from the buyer or seller. This is completely NOT ok.
  by tezo_cooper
• The outrage level and desire to stop tech being used this way ought to be reaching a fever pitch rather than being a kind of unfortunate documentary of how it isn't working right.
  by thataccount
• That's not a Flock error. That's a law enforcement error. Flock isn't responsible for a bogus warrant in the system.

  The woman probably has a good case for damages from the police department for doing it twice. That's sloppy police work.

  by Animats
• New police records reveal there’s more to the Amber Newell/Flock story than a simple “camera glitch.” Milwaukee police used 30 days of Flock location history to identify her vehicle’s travel pattern, positioned officers along its predicted route, conducted a high-risk stop, and seized the vehicle as homicide evidence. Ten days later, after the vehicle had apparently been returned, an outdated alert led Brookfield police to stop it again at gunpoint.

  https://www.reddit.com/r/1A_Auditor_Summit/comments/1vx3mbw/...

  The big unanswered question: How did a vehicle go from police evidence custody back onto the road without the law-enforcement alert being cleared? We’re continuing to request the Flock audit trail and alert history to find out.

  by offordscott
• This is exactly why we took our cameras down in nearby Oak Park in Chicagoland.

  People talk online as if this is a Flock technology issue, but it only peripherally is. The core problem is that the hotlist systems states set up were never intended for real-time enforcement; there's a great deal of imprecision in them that tends not to matter in human-scale enforcement, but matters a great deal when enforcement is automated.

  This distinction is important because there's basically not much Flock can do about it. The source of truth about which cars should be curbed isn't Flock's and can't be Flock's; it's core law enforcement data that belongs to and is the responsibility of the state. Companies like Flock can presumably rig up Rube Goldberg devices to double-check and cross-check hotlist data, but their goals are in tension: they have a window of just minutes to detect and interdict a car. Our police department pledged to do voice confirmations on these hits, and everyone knew that wasn't going to work.

  In our specific case, we curbed more innocent vehicles than stolen ones (though not at gunpoint). In each bogus case, Illinois LEADS had left a car recorded "stolen" weeks after it had been "recovered"; "recovered" in scare-quotes because many (most?) of these cars were never stolen to begin with, but rather driven off by a relative without notice. More context on why these data sources are unsuited for real-time enforcement!

  Unfortunately, every law enforcement ALPR deployment in the country is a dragnet for all curb-able offenses, from stolen cars to failure-to-appear warrants (the plurality of arrests under our system, which turned our police force into municipal debt collectors for neighboring suburbs). The starting point for mitigating this problem would be to drastically reduce the set of offenses you alert on --- and that's tricky, because your instinct is to reduce them to the most serious offenses, but what you really need is the set of offenses least likely to result in false positives. We settled on "stolen license plate" (no innocent explanation) before giving up on the endeavor entirely.

  by tptacek
• We shouldn't be wasting time figuring out how to make these tools usable. A healthy society requires privacy and a healthy society leads to long term safety trends. Mass surveillance as a tool, fundamentally, even if perfectly implemented and used, is fundamentally flawed and unfixable since it destroys the long term health of society. That is why I am against Flock and similar technologies.
  by jmward01