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Analyzed from 1642 words in the discussion.

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#license#more#police#flock#plate#cops#bad#thing#things#access

Discussion (30 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

lisp224012 minutes ago
In the 2000s I knew a guy who was transitioning to software development after working in HR at a large American police department. He told me you couldn't become a cop unless you had a mental illness. They psychologically screen candidates to filter out people who have too much empathy. They would reject you if you said you had a close relationship with your mother, for example. They wanted people with aggressive tendencies. They loved it when someone had a superhero tattoo or had a parent die when they were a child.

People always comment that we need to do more screening before people become cops, do more training. The screening and the training are the problem.

NoDodgeQuestionabout 3 hours ago
Can a native English speaker explain what "I saw a shiny thing" means?
overtone1000about 2 hours ago
It's a metaphor. He was comparing seeing the woman to seeing an attractive or valuable object like a coin on the ground or a jewel.
mrguyoramaabout 1 hour ago
The police officer is saying that he is so brain damaged or otherwise incapable of self control, rational thought, and restraint, that an attractive woman existing in his presence caused him to immediately commit many crimes to see her again.

Pay close attention to how he insists that she was coming on to him. He genuinely believes that. He lives in a fake reality that he adjusts in whatever way will make him happiest because he has spent so long in a system that has zero repercussions or accountability.

He probably shouldn't be allowed to own a gun.

Men like this know they are doing bad things. They don't care. There are no repercussions. They do not feel bad about doing these bad things.

See also: https://www.bwss.org/abusive-men-describe-the-benefits-of-vi...

Basically, these people just choose to not care about other people. They know they are hurting someone. But minor personal convenience is more important to them than not hurting another person.

avgDevabout 3 hours ago
They see a good looking attractive woman and spy on them. Their low IQ vanishes completely and all the blood rushes to their pants.

They are like a toddler in a toy store and want the shiniest thing.

knodiabout 2 hours ago
Toddler with guns and a license to kill.
dgellowabout 1 hour ago
and qualified immunity. And civil asset forfeiture. And generally protected by institutions
cucumber3732842about 1 hour ago
Cops abuse every system that's given to them, to varying extents. Whining about lack of access controls and rogue (i.e. not using to do their job properly) cops is implicitly saying that this system could/would/should exist if it has "proper" access controls, whatever that means. It's like seeing a slave labor gulag and saying that the prisoners need better recreation ad more frequent laundry. To say these little things like access controlled need to be fixed is advocating for turd polishing. Even with proper access controls the purpose of these systems is to create misery at the hands of the state. The turd is still a turd.
srustagiabout 1 hour ago
> to varying extents

Is doing an INSANE amount of heavy lifting here for that generalization but yeah point taken.

avgDevabout 3 hours ago
Just unacceptable all around.

I've studied criminal justice before CS, and after getting to know cops I decided it isn't for me. The culture is awful. It is like high school, a lot of drama, sleeping around, many divorces, abuse of power and just screwed up mentality.

What makes this story worse is this for me: "The detective investigating Roman told the man “you’ll get past this bro” during his arrest, and later told the victim that he was "remorseful" and urged her not to post about the incident on social media, according to body camera footage obtained by 404 Media."

The detective urged the victim not post about it.....both should be stripped of badges immediately and never get certified again.

ishouldbeworkabout 2 hours ago
To be fair, the full quote is

> I can’t tell you what to post or not post, but if you could refrain from posting anything until my investigation is over, I would appreciate it.

emphasis mine, given that, "The detective urged the victim not post about it" seems like taking things bit out of context.

jazzyjacksonabout 2 hours ago
You’re focusing on the bad behavior of a couple individuals but the bigger story is the license plate cameras going up all over the country may be used just as easily to stalk ex girlfriends as they are to solve crimes.
krappabout 3 hours ago
These are people who wear Punisher logos unironically - because they wish they could be Frank Castle and act as judge, jury and executioner (and in the US, they can more or less because the American public wants Punishers in the force when they see too few white faces around them.) I can understand where the "defund the police" movement was coming from. Even the US military has higher standards for discipline and decorum.
avgDevabout 3 hours ago
Yep. I don't understand how departments even allow wearing the punisher logo. It is unprofessional imo. Also, a good indicator of a total toddler of a cop.
idle_zealotabout 2 hours ago
Look into what "defund" means in this context. It's a slogan that leaked from more formal and academic discussion into general usage and is misinterpreted as "let's not do law enforcement." That's not what anyone well-meaning means when they use it. They mean that the police are ineffective as a law enforcement institution, and the money spent on them would be better used on other safety projects. Giving a poorly designed institution more money does not improve safety. Maybe an effective public safety institution needs more money than the police get currently (though I doubt that) but no matter how much you give to these guys they'll spend it on retired military gear, warrior training, and building a panopticon of always-on public cameras via private partnerships.
krappabout 1 hour ago
>Look into what "defund" means in this context. It's a slogan that leaked from more formal and academic discussion into general usage and is misinterpreted as "let's not do law enforcement."

No it didn't. It came from black activist movements and got popularized by BLM and the Black Visions Collective during the George Floyd protests, and abolition was very much an intended part of the message.

It then leaked into more formal and academic discussion as it was adopted by the white liberal mainstream because the original message was too radical to be acceptable. Which is understandable. No one wants to admit that their complicity in a white supremacist system is the problem.

quickthrowmanabout 2 hours ago
If he didn’t say “Because I wanted to have sex with her,” he is lying. He wanted to have sex with her so he stalked her. I bet this is several orders of magnitude more common than hat is reported among police with access to databases.
bkoabout 1 hour ago
I recently listened to the Flock CEO on All In podcast, and he mentioned an ironic thing about Flock and it's audit trail is that it serves as a honeypot to root out bad police.

Flock basically knows what a malicious request looks like. The simple example he gives is someone pinging the same license plate every day without putting it on a watchlist, because the officer doesn't want others to know. They started rolling out auto-detection of bad-faith queries and flagging those to supervisors.

If you figure that some percentage of cops are dirty, a simple easily detectable honeypot is extremely effective in identifying them and firing them. I guess the hard part here is actually holding the cops that abuse the system accountable but that's also likely solvable. It's a huge liability for the police force. Usually the ones that are protecting dirty cops are the police unions, but that's a whole different conversation

It's also important to note that Flock is just a license plate reader. It doesn't record video or do any facial recognition. And storage typically gets deleted between 1 and 7 days and is up to the precent to set.

https://singjupost.com/transcript-all-in-interview-with-floc...

chapsabout 1 hour ago
Flock is not just a license plate reader. They have many products. Here's an article today that includes a decent deep dive into the code of one of its new projects that's... definitely more than just license plate reading.

https://www.wired.com/story/flock-safety-os-investigate/

bko37 minutes ago
From the article:

> The code describes 45 tools at the AI’s disposal, giving it access to plate scans and camera metadata, arrest records, case files, dispatch logs, ballistics results, and commercial databases that contain Social Security numbers, dates of birth, phone numbers, email addresses, relatives and associates.

Sounds like they're shipping an AI that can use external datasources like an MCP. By this regard, Claude does exactly the same thing. Give it access to a database with social security numbers and it'll query them for you.

The rest of the things described in the article is all a byproduct of having a database (typically kept around for 1-7 days) of cars, their license plates, locations and some physical description of the car. For instance:

> vehicles that left one city for another and returned within a week, made repeat roundtrips over 14 days, or passed through three areas in sequence.

If you have still photos of every car passing on particular street corners, this is just a query. They're just taking photos and reading license plates. And they started getting some description of the car, like unusual things. The CEO talks about that as well. From the interview:

> A car drives by, we take a still image of the vehicle, we read the license plate, and the system’s gotten more sophisticated with time. We can detect things like a roof rack or a bumper sticker or dent or damage, but that’s at its core what the technology does...

> So it’s pretty cool technology, and pretty effective, because if you think about what happens on a 911 call, most people don’t instinctively look at the license plate and remember it. They see the thing that was unique about the car — oh, it had damage on the right side.

I would definitely recommend the interview if you want to learn more.

chaps32 minutes ago
Friend, even after listening to that interview you still insisted on saying that flock ONLY does ALPR and only now that you've been given an example of where you were wrong, you suggest that I listen to the thing that clearly didn't inform you enough?

Your goalposts are quite mobile.

m304728 minutes ago
1) Flock is a company.

2) One of their products is a license plate scanner / reader.

3) This scanner / reader consumes camera output which includes license plates.

3) One of their products is a tracker / alerter / searcher.

4) The searcher / tracker isn't limited to license plates, it can correlate on other aspects in the photo. These other aspects concern the vehicle, the vehicle occupants, objects and individuals elsewhere in the photo.

bko11 minutes ago
The searcher / tracker is limited to license plates or descriptions of the car, not occupants.

This is backed up by their statements. If you have an alt source supporting your statement please provide

dudu24about 1 hour ago
I'm sure once Flock notifies departments of these bad apples, they will take swift inaction.
bko33 minutes ago
I agree, police unions are mostly to blame, but unfortunately a downside of collective action. How we allow public sector unions at all is baffling to me.
tomkarhoabout 1 hour ago
> an ironic thing about Flock and it's audit trail is that it serves as a honeypot to root out bad police.

That's like saying the SS served as a honeypot for genocidal maniacs.

FireBeyond29 minutes ago
Flock is putting huge PR spin on this. They will not disable features that are illegal for your agency to use in your state. They will give you training on it.

And they identify lots more than just license plates. What license plates were visible inside the YMCA children's gym? Or at public pools on the pooldeck?

Garrett has also said that he sees false positives as a better outcome than false negatives, because the latter doesn't advance Flock's mission towards "a world with no crime, thanks to Flock" (with unironic apologies to Minority Report).

bko10 minutes ago
Private corporations shouldn't set or interpret the law. They can sell technology but that's up to the jurisdiction to set policies. What a dystopian vision you have where corporate ceos start telling police what's legal and illegal
pstuart37 minutes ago
This assumes that the chain of management within the police believes in accountability, which bring to mind a famous quote about assumptions.