After Town Bans Flock, Councilmember Crashes Out, Proposes Internet, Phone Ban

It sounds like you're saying the parent shouldn't be critical of this practice because it is common, which obviously doesn't follow, but I could be interpreting your comment wrongly.

Does feel immodest.

Strengthens what signal? The local coverage does not say anything about "crashing out". It states that the council has voted to terminate the contract after an initial approval, in response to public opposition, and publishes a dissenting statement from one of the councilmembers in full.

The author could have amplified that non-sensational article and tied it in with the Youtube clips and other non-sensational articles he found; there's good journalism lurking in here. But instead he wanted to be sensational.

It's easy to understand why false news can distort your understanding of the world. If a journalist convinces you that X happened when actually it did not happen, you'll have a wrong belief which makes it harder to understand what's going on. What's more challenging to understand is the phenomenon called "sensationalism", where accurate news distorts your understanding of the world.

Crime coverage is usually the easiest starting point. You can, and some people do, continually scan the country for crimes. Then when such a crime happens, you publish an emotive article declaring that it happened. Crime is of course bad, so each of these articles will make sense on its own terms; poor innocent victims who've been hurt or killed by evil men deserve sympathy! But if you only ever publish content on crime from within that framing, your readers will inevitably start to conclude that it's the only framing, and crime policy should primarily be focused on protecting us innocent potential victims from the hordes of evil men who want to hurt us.

Hopefully that makes sense. If it does, then I'd encourage you to take that critical eye and turn it to the 404Media Flock coverage (https://www.404media.co/tag/flock/). When you scroll through, does it seem like they're carefully studying Flock to keep you informed on the policy landscape surrounding it? Or does it seem like they're searching for the most sensational Flock-related stories they can find?

Anecdotes about whether people like Flock cameras are useful. Anecdotes about how one specific guy who likes Flock made an overheated analogy are not useful. The author conflating the two is a dictionary-perfect example of sensationalism.

I don't know what you are basing your opinions on here but the literature is pretty clear that their main concern is how likely they think they will be apprehended and cameras + technology + law enforcement clearly make that more likely.

Well, I'd say security cams and Flock affect the likelihood of apprehending a suspect, not so much the amount of prison time, so the argument still holds - you can't claim they won't have an effect.

In a small town of 900 people, it seems odd a council member would be THAT upset about removing license plate reading camera systems, when it's clear the town doesn't want it. To get flustered enough to start proposing sarcastic bills, it's not a stretch to immediately think that there's at least some political maneuvering behind it, if not blatant kickbacks.

In my opinion that should be enough to get some investigative journalists and private investigators poking around. Assuming investigative journalists are still a thing.

And besides, these days no ones giving straight cash to bribe, it's always via other means that are harder to trace and maybe not even directly monetary (sending them on a vacation, golfing, donations to charity...).

It's weird that people seem to act like lobbying doesn't exist at the city council level.

I've lived in a small community (pop<1000) and a budget of $5K could turn you into a shadow mayor.

First Law of Message Boards: bribery is fun to talk about, people just disagreeing about stuff and having little temper tantrums when they lose arguments is boring, ergo: bribery is everywhere.

I think a lot about another comment from a while ago that donated 100 dollars or something to his city. That had his state govenor personally call him to thank him in a 5 minute call.

It's not a bribe, but if a govenor is placing his time @ 1200/hour for an individualized bow of gratitude, I can only imagine how cheap it is for a not good govenor to sell out for his own personal interests.

At the scale these tech trillionaires are working, why not throw a few pennies at some small councilman?

credibly accused.