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- Hacker News
- A weird take. They seem oblivious to the fact that real problem is not distrust of flock, it’s distrust of the police. They are in a situation where the public just barely trusts the local police, and a new surveillance system pushes them over the edge into hostility. They need to be working to gain much more trust.by lokar
- These can be separate and both true.by ofjcihen
- But also, I dont understand all this hand-wringing. EFF has a clear easy solution [1]: Put all the data behind a Warrant. Problem solved. No trust required.
Wanna look up where a murderer drove? Go get a warrant
Wanna look up where a robbery suspect drove to? Go get a Warrant.
Divorce case hinging on one party's whereabouts on a certain date? Warrant.
Speeding tickets are automatically filed anyways.
[1]: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/08/too-little-too-late-fl...
by pj_mukh - Oh no, we distrust both.by outside1234
- They’re oblivious to this fact because it’s not true. Most people by a substantial margin trust their local police.
- Police are bounded by evidentiary laws and warrant requirements, all of which legitimately do stand up in court. Flock is not.
So no, actually Flock itself is the problem. If Flock were willing to sign some consent decree that its data can only be accessed by police with a valid judicial warrant, for example, they probably could've headed off this entire mess.
But instead they called people "terroristic" for pushing back. Completely braindead move from the CEO.
by estearum - >They seem oblivious to the fact that real problem is not distrust of flock
I really distrust flock in and of itself.
by everdrive - Winona, MN has a population of 20k. I've never been there, but if it's like any of the small towns I lived in, most people trust the local police. If anything, the usual small-town complaint is that the police are not doing enough about <x>, where <x> are the homeless dudes in front of the library, or package theft, or whatever.
In small towns, people distrust the federal government and big tech a lot more.
by matherial - Obviously an unpopular opinion on this site, but I wish we had speed cameras, red-light cameras, and ALPRs everywhere. Cars are incredibly dangerous and large numbers of people drive them like absolute lunatics. There should be absolutely no expectation of privacy when using public streets. That position doesn't even account for the footage helping immensely with other investigations.
- I agree. I was able to talk to my local SF supervisor the other day and congratulate him on his work with speed cameras and red-light cameras. He shares the same position as you: there is no constitutional right to drive one's car on public streets without enforcement of the rules.
We recently got permission to expand red-light cameras and I'm hoping that this kind of neutral machine-based enforcement of laws helps move us to a more law-abiding society. Civil liberties require civilization. Abdicating public space to the anti-social only allows for a de-facto rule by the uncivilized.
by arjie - Let's take this to the next level, given the current reality.
Binge alcohol consumption is incredibly dangerous and contributes to a large number of national fatalities.
Governments should purchase a contract for a citizen tracking platform operated by a private company that monitors alcohol usage to ensure you're drinking responsibly and quickly detain those that aren't, given the threat they pose to themselves or the public. Governments should make tracking a requirement for legal alcohol consumption.
The private company expands to a nationwide network that allows the federal government, private contractors, and other people that gain access to monitor your environment (or your young kids) whenever they feel motivated, where ever you are.
For the name of safety, let's write legislation that gives the government's private contractors unfettered access to your microphones and cameras to help law enforcement be more efficient.
by iAMkenough - The cameras have categorically not helped with investigation, as is shown time (1) and time (2) and time (3) again. This is just a vibe that supporters like and Flock loves to spin data however it can to support their continued expansion. Also, people do absolutely still have an expectation of privacy when it comes to regular travel, what an insane thing to say.
(1) https://futurism.com/future-society/flock-surveillance-atlan... (2) https://www.forbes.com/sites/cyrusfarivar/2024/02/29/flock-a... (3) https://www.readfrontier.org/stories/tulsas-surveillance-gam...
by totallygeeky - Personally I have nothing against municipally operated red light/speed camera system because those are triggered by a sensor rather than continuous so privacy is less of an issue.by barbazoo
- You managed to say everything but the difficult bit. People don't generally have a problem with cameras, all our computers and phones have one. The problem is who can use them and when.by moritonal
- Part of the problem is the people reacting to the data. Cops coming at an innocent someone, guns drawn, because of database and human error. If that person weren't so calm and level headed in the moment, when they were attacked by confused and mistaken aggressors, would they still be alive?
https://www.thedrive.com/news/how-flock-cameras-wrongly-trac...
by basch - > There should be absolutely no expectation of privacy when using public streets.
Strong disagree. Life in public areas is often still part of private life. And we should treat it with the respect and privacy that it deserves. You going to the doctor? That's part of your private life. You meeting with an old friend to catch up? Also private, even though you do it in a public cafe.
by vaylian - They are great for tracking criminals who cross state lines for medical care.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/10/flock-safety-and-texas...
by tverbeure - I posted this in another thread, and had my comment instantly flagged. Love this site.
Worth looking at how these cameras got approved in the first place. My county's ALPR interlocal passed on the consent agenda in December 2024, one block vote alongside forty other items, no discussion, and went through consent again in April 2025. Nothing was "hidden", it's just that "public" here means a 300 page agenda packet and a four hour YouTube video with no transcript, completely unreadable in practice.
So I spent a week and a half building a pipeline over what the county already publishes. It pulls the CivicPlus portal (agendas, minutes, item metadata, outcomes) and the YouTube channel, does ASR plus diarization, then aligns the transcript against the published agenda so the passage carries the item it happened under and whatever outcome the minutes recorded for it. Search is hybrid lexical and semantic, and the video is synced to the transcript so any claim can be checked against the recording.
The speaker attribution and the alignment was the hard part. Roughly two thirds of passages have no reliable name attached, and diarization gives you clusters rather than identities, so I mark confidence and basis rather than guessing a name. Alignment is very messy because the published agenda order and the order things actually get taken up diverge constantly, and the recorded outcome is often just "Approved the Consent Agenda" for an item that never got discussed. There is a labeling admin area to improve the dataset after initial collection
At my county meeting on Aug 25th (in a few days) I'm bringing up the fiscal side. Ours was approved under an item title that said no funding was required. No accounting has been done of what enforcement costs when someone takes a camera down. Prosecutor and court hours. Jail time, or just holding, if the state charges it. Lost future wages from otherwise upstanding citizens who now have a felony. None of that was in front of the commissioners when they approved it, and none of it is in front of them now.
Most counties run the same portal software and post to YouTube, so this should generalize. Code is at https://github.com/Tostino/civic-watch and the Pasco instance is at https://pasco.watch if anyone wants to point one at their own county. Happy to help if anyone wants.
by Tostino - by dredmorbius
- Looks neat, any chance you'd be willing to share how much this costs to run?
- You should start with the lede:
"I built a tool to help you understand how/if your community has agreed to deploy Flock cameras. You can try it out here: [ ].
The hardest part of this was..."
by estearum - A good sign, but I wonder if this will hold.by Varelion
- So they will be replacing them with Axon cameras I presume?
- I feel like I’ve seen this exact reply in multiple Flock threads.by ofjcihen
- Looks like they’re actually listening to their community, so maybe not.by iAMkenough
- That sounds like a viable path to ending mass surveillance.
- https://i.ibb.co/WWWYznHX/flock-future.png ;-)
Also: https://dave.autonoma.ca/blog/2019/06/06/web-of-knowledge/
by thangalin - by heythere22
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curl -A "" -Haccept: https://www.winonapost.com/news/wpd-wont-replace-stolen-flock-cameras-citing-public-trust/article_06a67859-2d97-414b-aa8f-d8751ad214bb.html \ |egrep -o '(og:image.*https://.*..image.jpg)|(<p[ ]class=\"p1\".*div>)' \ |sed '1s/^/<meta charset=utf-8>/; s|og:image\" content=\"|<a href=|; s|\.jpg|&>Photo</a>|' > 1.htm firefox ./1.htm #links https://www.winonapost.com/news/wpd-wont-replace-stolen-flock-cameras-citing-public-trust/article_06a67859-2d97-414b-aa8f-d8751ad214bb.html - Mods: To reduce ambiguity, can we change "WPD" to "Winona, Minnesota PD"?by otterley