They're also getting banned fast. The city level should be the most accessible government for change.<p>There's been over 70[1] documented wins.<p>Don't feel like this is a lost cause, it clearly isn't. If everyone who was going to comment on this thread instead or additionally got involved by going to a city council meeting and explaining the problems to friends/family, many more cities could reject them.<p>[1] <a href="https://deflock.org/council/#wins" rel="nofollow">https://deflock.org/council/#wins</a>
They're not getting banned fast, and regulation isn't a lost cause. Flock, in particular, is getting contracts cancelled primarily in ultra-liberal municipalities, and that's in large part because of their public relationship with the current federal administration. But ALPRs are going up everywhere; they're a commodity technology. We canceled our Flock contract (I wasn't psyched about that) and we're ringed by munis that use ALPRs from vendors that haven't made themselves political flashpoints.<p>I'm fond of pointing out on HN that the muni I live in is likely one of the 10 most progressive-leaning in the country (it's the most progressive-leaning municipality in Chicagoland). Even here, Flock had an ardent cheering section, of normal people who think expediting the interdiction of stolen vehicles (which are vectors of violent crime) is a perfectly reasonable thing for a city to invest in.
Trying to push back on this in my local community, two things I have found, below. Hopefully helpful to others.<p>1) I tried posting on Craigslist's "Community" section, in a simple attempt to reach out and connect with others who may be concerned. The posts were automatically blocked before even being published on the site. I tried multiple versions of this (i.e. with links and without, with pictures and without, etc.), from multiple accounts. Same result every time; the posted did not go through.<p>Obviously the word "Flock" would be easy to filter on, but if memory serves, even my very pared-down attempts that only used "surveillance" or "cameras" were blocked.<p>Why would Craigslist stop Flock-related posts from going through? The only answer I can think of is something along the lines of a National Security Letter. Certainly others here are much better informed about this realm than I am. Any other possibilities or perspectives, I'd be interested in hearinng.<p>I would also be interested in seeing what results other people get when they attempt to post on this issue to Craigslist.<p>2) So far my initial efforts to reach locally out via online contact channels to the City Council for more information have not been fruitful, and seem to be getting stonewalled (I'm not giving up yet though). In the meantime, I was able to do find the Flock contract, initial proposal, and other related documents using the City Council's agenda and minutes search tools. These search tools seem to vary by city, but may be worth looking into in your area.
This list isn't exactly describing "bans," this is a city contract rejection list - otherwise known as a "just deploy in commercial parking lots abutting major thoroughfares" restriction.
We had success in our county and town canceling contracts, but that doesn't mean they are banned from private land.<p>I'm not totally sure, but it may even be the stupidest of all possible outcomes: they still exist, the cops can't access them, and their only value is selling private information.
Seeing commenters defending privatized mass surveillance tech in 2026 is crazy.
Yeah, I'm not a fan of these things. If they were just ALPRs, I could probably give them a bit of slack -if they tightened up their security-, but all the other stuff they do, makes them pretty much untenable.<p>However:<p><i>> This makes AI powered cameras like Flock's distinct from traditional surveillance or traffic cams, which require someone to manually look over footage in order to find a specific vehicle or individual.</i><p>Is a bit misleading. These days, anyone can give an LLM footage from any source, and get this kind of information.
What LLM can I get and feed hundreds of hours of video into that will give me the position of a specific vehicle alongside when that happened?<p>An LLM isn’t going to help you here, but basic Computer Vision and a SQL database has been a solution _if you have the cameras_. I wrote a license plate reader as a university project using OpenCV almost 20 years ago.
If you were able to write one 20 years ago, I dare say an LLM could whip one up super-fast. Or just search the internet and tell you where to find one.<p>One of the risks of LLMs is that a lot of tasks go from "an expert could do this easily given a few weeks" to "anyone who thinks to ask an LLM can do this easily and get results the same day"
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Automated License plate readers are a half century old at this point: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_number-plate_recognition" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_number-plate_recogni...</a>
why wouldn't codex or claude just reach for whatever FOSS <a href="https://github.com/openalpr/openalpr" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/openalpr/openalpr</a>
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Yes, an ALPR is basically just a glorified [thing that an ALPR does]
Dropbox stock is trading at 50% of its initial price 5y ago when it went public, maybe the public markets also don't understand the difference between rsync and Dropbox.
I honestly can't tell if this is ragebait or you believe this.<p>My friend, if you have a database of license plates extracted from single images taken by multiple cameras, YOU ARE TRACKING UNIQUE VEHICLES ACROSS A REGION.<p>Terabytes of data don't matter because you don't need to search terabytes, you need to search a few MB of text data. You don't even have to store the original video.
You’re moving the goalposts. The original point of this thread is that Flock AI technology is hardly needed to efficiently search traditional video footage for license plates.
Ok, so you don’t understand that ALPR is two commodity technologies: object detection and OCR.
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> Assuming they have access to terabytes of regional video surveillance but don't have their own compute besides what the LLM will buy for them<p>Amazing how you can move the goalposts to make things impossible, isn't it? Where in the world did "without compute" come from? Are they not even allowed a decent desktop computer?
Any competent llm would write a script using opencv to extract the license plates.<p>I did this with Gemini 3, mostly for fun and to test it's capabilities. Teslausb records all dash cam videos and auto syncs it to my nas when in wifi range. Yolo and opencv extracts and does ocr on any defected license plate, and puts it all on a map, along with trip information. Not particularly useful or interesting, and not something I would have done pre-llms, but the difficulty was basically writing a one paragraph prompt and using some free tokens
I think there's a limit to how misleading.<p>There's a very important difference between "anyone could walk through my door and steal my stuff" and "this person walked in my door and stole my stuff".
That's interesting, because the ALPR part of Flock is what caused all the problems here; the rest of it, of characterizing vehicles with attributes beyond just plates, wasn't really problematic at all.
Personally I don’t mind having Flock cameras or other surveillance to make it easier to stop crime. Right now in many cities there is simply no consequence for various crimes - especially property crimes. But I want these tools to be protected - requiring imminent danger or warrants for access. I don’t think the answer is to get rid of them entirely.
What makes Flock bizarre is that it's a private business, and this is precisely how police departments are getting around a lot of traditional gates and checks on this sort of thing.<p>Police setting up a 1984 monitoring system throughout your city, tracking every car, person, activity -- yields lots of questions, oversight, concerns, debate, challenges, etc.<p>Some private business doing the same, and then letting the same police use it at will as a paying customer -- yay, all of the invasive monitoring with none of the oversight.
And of course, it's compounded by being pooled. Like RealPage, ALPR services like Flock, Axon Fleet Hub, and Motorola Vigilant VehicleManager offer data laundering so that organizations that shouldn't be talking can communicate.<p>Privacy laws now.
The real joke is that the 1984 system was already in place long before flock. We all carry phones. Either from tower records ot google advert tags, private industry already tracked our every movement. Licence plate readers? Why bother when every car now has bluetooth enabled and so is constantly prodcasting its LAP id. (Some cities have tracked cars this way for over a decade, mostly for traffic management.)
That's actually the one thing that <i>does</i> make sense: police has <i>always</i> wanted to be able to do this, but they legally can't. But they can reward a private company willing to do it for them, so that they can "ask for the data" without ever breaking the law.
The police can, in fact, operate cameras in public spaces and they have done so for decades. ALPRs have been widely deployed since the 1990s.<p>I'm frequent surprised by how many people think that privacy laws block the police from recording their activities in public. For whatever reason, Flock is getting a lot of press, but this is hardly a new field.
ANPR has not been widely deployed since the 1990's in the US and the US court system has consistently held that the degree to which a technology automates monitoring, searching, etc is very relevant to whether it violates people's reasonable expectations of privacy for very obvious reasons.
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_number-plate_recognition" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_number-plate_recogni...</a><p>> However, ANPR did not become widely used until new developments in cheaper and easier to use software were pioneered during the 1990s. The collection of ANPR data for future use (i.e., in solving then-unidentified crimes) was documented in the early 2000s.
“Fascism should rightly be called corporatism, as it is the merger of corporate and government power.”<p>- Benito Mussolini
Nah. Fascism only tolerates one power, that being itself. It can emerge from either the state or corporate side, and necessarily subsumes or destroys the other, just as it subsumes or destroys unions, families, friend networks, communications, and anything else that can establish power. That doesn't mean the merger of two of them is the defining feature.
That’s true of every system of government
Corporations generally tend to only tolerate the state to the extent that guns or courts mandate that they must. How many billions of corporate dollars have gone to fund campaigns to deregulate, to skirt authority, to do whatever is necessary to make sure profits go up?
Fascism was corporative, but in Italian the word has a very different meaning compared to the English one.
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>These days, anyone can give an LLM footage from any source, and get this kind of information.<p>Is a bit misleading itself, to do this at scale requires all those iffy data centers.
Can anybody find trustworthy stats that these actually reduce crime? All I see are occasional anecdotes about how they were used to find one person one time.<p>Skeptical me seriously doubts this is an effective solution for crime. But maybe that's because this country has a history of being willing to do a million expensive and privacy violating things, and only if it's a punitive measure.
UK cctv and China's system are probably the closest examples?
I don't have stats, but most police have made it pretty clear that they're used for investigations that would otherwise have very little to go on.<p>I don't think anyone other than the manufacturers have made claims of cameras reducing crime. You can put all the AI bells and whistles on them, but they're still just cameras.<p>They're a fallback option, not a dragnet. The police are generally reactive to reports of crime, not proactively trying to piece together the details of everyone's lives and nail them the moment their dog poops on the sidewalk. No AI can even do that anyway and it would be a waste of money.<p>There are two vocal camps of people on these threads that are eroding HN: fearmongerers and grifters. I don't understand how it got this bad, but that's the real crisis here.
If they don't reduce crimes what do they do? Oh right they track inconvenient people
You are absolutely correct but you won't get anywhere here.<p>I have relatives who are cops and lawyers and city councilmen. No cop is sitting in a back room somewhere tracking all the cars on every street trying to do, uh, whatever it is people here are claiming they are going to do to them.
I don't get why any of these devices are still intact...
Because most of the American public is not as reflexively anti-Flock as HN would lead you to believe. People acting like cameras recording their activities in public is some sort of grave privacy violation are not the norm.<p>Cameras recording tour activity in malls, and on public roads has been the case since the 90s. Flock became a lightning rod of attention due to ICE, but they don't actually represent any change from the status quo.
Right? The installers conveniently made them within baseball bat range.
Luckily, we don't have them where I live (small West Texas town).
Are you willing to potentially be prosecuted to make a point that will ultimately come down to, "The cameras you destroyed are replaced with newly purchased units"?<p>The way to beat this isn't vandalism, it's getting them banned from every municipality and county in the country, while fighting at state levels for more bans.<p>It's also silly talk from kids online, just like "Don't vote, burn your local Wal-Mart" is only meant to impress other online children. The rest of us know that you'll neither vote, nor burn down the Wal-Mart.
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These horrific things are multiplying exponentially in my (rural GA) environs. There are a dozen of them along every conceivable cycling route I could take, and far more if I drive somewhere. If you think this is a city thing meant to deter urban crime, the explosive proliferation of Flock cameras in quite rural and suburban areas may shock you. I find them in the darndest of places, near but not on county lines, adjacent to minor bridges, etc. And next time I go through there, there are more. They seem to be procreating.<p>As others have pointed out, they're not just ALPRs or traffic cameras, and their use-cases, official and unofficial, are extremely dynamic and expanding fast. They are not the only thing of their kind, but they justly earned the lightning rod status for their conspicuous cooperation with the administration's immigration thuggery and the douchy--but highly consequential--pronouncements of their CEO. Moreover, there's a ticker tape of daily news about police misuse of Flock's database, mainly for stalking exes and things like that.<p>This _is_ a stop on the way to a Chinese-style surveillance state, and there's nothing inevitable about it. But it will happen if we allow it to happen.<p>Ben Johnson's video on the security vulnerabilities, linked in the article, always deserves an explicit shout-out. It's likely to intrigue the tinkerers here:<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uB0gr7Fh6lY" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uB0gr7Fh6lY</a>
Benn Jordan, you mean. Good video.
These things proliferate where people trust the government or see the government as a means to the end of getting one over on whoever is bad for them.<p>So the Nth generation group of townies that run any given rural shithole will happily slap them up, the government represents them as far as they're concerned.<p>And meanwhile in some snooty inner ring Chicago suburb that fancies themselves "progressive" (but in what direction?) they slap up the same damn cameras because they see it as a means to make more efficient the enforcement of the myriad of rules on which their enclave depends and they are wealthy and well represented so they have no fear of it being used against them.<p>Rural Georgia probably has a little of column A, little of column B going on.
It's legal for any random citizen to build one of these surveillance networks, right?
Correct, at least in the US you can record people in public pretty much at any time.
That's a great point. We should build a network that tracks all cops to make sure they don't get up to no good while off duty.
The police where I live are generally good, and I imagine that's the case many places. Treating police as the enemy, or a punching bag, is unfair and counterproductive.<p>(I can't speak to any places that might have a lot of corruption or ill intent.)<p>Places that aren't too corrupt, you'd be better off encouraging a partnership among citizens, police, lawmakers, and other officials. Which is how it's supposed to be. Everyone in the government has their respective duties, and they operate within a framework that's ultimately decided by the people.<p>If, for example, police propose certain surveillance, to help keep everyone safe, within their scope, then sometimes someone with different or larger scope might need to say, yes, but there's also these other considerations. Eventually a decision is made by the public or their elected representatives, and everyone nods with respect, and aligns, and continues their respective duties within the frameworks.
Are you one of those guys who hates the cops until you need one? Do you also forget that cops are people, too?
How backwards. Parent poster <i>is</i> talking about treating cops closer to how regular people are being treated.<p>If you're <i>really</i> committed to fairness, you'll take away the off-duty/unofficial privileges and immunities that they have which are <i>not</i> shared with "people too."
I used to hate the cops until I needed one, and then they were horrible to me and didn't solve my problem and actually started a reverse investigation against me for the thing I reported someone else doing, so now I hate the cops even when I need one.
Only in free countries. Many authoritarian regimes don’t let people take pictures in public.
Is there such a crime as creating false positives for the panopticon?
>there has been widespread public backlash to cameras that track everyone, whether or not they've been suspected of a crime.<p>Well, duh. It doesn't know your plate from anyone elses so your plate gets recorded along with everyone else. If you go about a normal person's business then there is no harm and nothing happens.<p>I'm sure someone will decide harm is being done even when nothing happens.
Everyone should do their best to take down or disable every one they see in my opinion.
Meanwhile in Texas we can’t even have red light cameras to automatically ticket people willing to kill you just to catch a light.
"Meanwhile in <location> we can't even have Flock cameras to automatically catch people who may have killed someone"<p>Hopefully the absurdity of broad scale surveillance can't be so easily lost in hyperbole
That is ridiculous. Some level of surveillance is necessary to bring the society closer to the optimal state.
Having been in Texas last month these cameras are all over your state. I saw them everywhere from the smallest city to houston<p><a href="https://imgur.com/a/P7WxKpU" rel="nofollow">https://imgur.com/a/P7WxKpU</a>
Make sure you're not looking at traffic control cameras. These are used to monitor traffic for the traffic lights.
They're all basically turned off by law, just not removed
Honestly I like that policy. What's the legality of flock in Texas?
They owe George orwell’s estate a royalty for this idea.
"Security" will be redefined.
archived: <a href="https://nonogra.ph/flock-cameras-track-more-than-your-license-plate-and-theyre-spreading-fast-06-28-2026" rel="nofollow">https://nonogra.ph/flock-cameras-track-more-than-your-licens...</a>
Consider using that one as well as archive.org(when no paywall), archive.today, megalodon.jp, archive box?
As a voter and taxpayer, I never asked for this.
If a certain group of people think that it should be their right to take others rights away and turn society into a dystopia for perceived security, then for the same reason it should be other individuals rights to assert that their rights should be protected by taking the first group's rights away to install or do whatever they think they can do for convenience/security's sake.<p>This includes "ancestry tests", security cameras with AI in them, upload IDs to "verify", and even social media where you are allowed to upload pictures with others in them.<p>And since we "supposedly" live in a democracy, we should be allowed to have a vote to decide on this, the group that wins is the majority, right? I don't understand why we're allowing our rights to erode before we have an informed election about this, in democracies.
What right is being taken away? Nobody ever had the right to not be recorded in public.<p>Furthermore surveillance isn't just an all or nothing thing. For example, the government can record your activities in public without a warrant, but they can't subpoena your phone calls without a warrant. That degree of surveillance has more checks and balances.<p>How you somehow try to go from recording people <i>in public</i> to "ancestry tests" is a pretty nonsensical argument.<p>> And since we "supposedly" live in a democracy, we should be allowed to have a vote to decide on this, the group that wins is the majority, right?<p>No, you'd have to win much more than the majority to change the constitution, which defines a lot of privacy rights. But if you have enough votes, then sure you could change the constitution.
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There is no expectation of privacy in public. It's really that simple.
There may be no expectation of privacy in the sense someone may see you and take your picture.<p>There is an expectation you are not constantly tracked everywhere you go by a nationwide surveillance apparatus, that your location is not constantly monitored, indexed and shared. Unless you expect to live in an Orwellian distopia.
Actually, the supreme court ruled that police have to get a warrant to view cell tracking data and attach a location tracking device to cars.<p>Flock is a clever workaround that should be illegal, but before that can happens we can get them removed at the city council level.
Both of those two above cases involve tracking people both in public and in private. Furthermore the former involved compelling a company to fork over private information.<p>Traffic cameras, by comparison, only record people's in public. A police officer isn't violating privacy laws by standing at an intersection and writing down the plates of cars passing by is he? Flock is just automating that task.<p>The whole reason why we have license plates is to facilitate monitoring cars. If we really think that people have a right to keep their vehicular activities private, then surely the bigger privacy violation is the fact that we require cars to display unique identifiers in a prominent manner?
Of course there is.<p>You can take notice of beautiful women in public. You cannot take upskirt photos.<p>You can eavesdrop on a conversation at the park. You cannot put mics under all the benches.<p>Privacy is a situational continuum of invasiveness. Just because there is no expectation of privacy from the state in using public roads does not mean we should tolerate corporations building profiles analyzing the comings and goings of citizens.
Do you agree with that, or are you just deferring to an overly simplified interpretation of the law?<p>No law is that simple. You can be photographed when you’re out in public most places, yet stalking is also illegal most places.
There was an implicit expectation that, although people could take your picture, there weren't a million people roaming around taking everyone's pictures all the time because it takes a few seconds to take someone's picture.
There should be. Other countries have one and they seem no worse off for it.
I have strong expectations, in fact; I need the state to respect that.
do you wear a skirt or a kilt? now about the no expectation of privacy in public ..
There should be.
Got these installed all over local parking lots for wallmart, home depot, ross, every exit solar panel and camera. Was wondering if there is some sort of quickly blinking infrared light or something that would make it visible to a naked eye of a cop, but not to a recording camera. I bet you would sell millions of those license plate holders in a heartbeat.
these are being mapped, i will like to see a GPS route option to avoid flock cameras, but I suspect they will end up flooding all intersections.
Like that paparazzi fabric that saturates the image?
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Solution to the Flock problem:<p><a href="https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/vandals-strike-cut-flock-cameras-in-goshen/ar-AA26sb6S" rel="nofollow">https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/vandals-strike-cut-flock-c...</a>
Amazing innovation and dynamism.
We need some way to address the low level crime in the US. If you look at cities in east Asia, they're both much larger than typical US cities and much safer. It -is- possible to have safe large cities. The fact that we don't is a choice.
Don't we? Crime rates have been dropping for decades.<p><a href="https://usafacts.org/answers/what-is-the-crime-rate-in-the-us/country/united-states/" rel="nofollow">https://usafacts.org/answers/what-is-the-crime-rate-in-the-u...</a><p>But if the choice is between liberty and safety, then Americans are supposed to choose liberty, that's why America is what it is.<p>Ben Franklin famously said, "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
What's even more amazing is that they had these safe cities without [Flock, Motorola, Axon]. I guess we will never know how they did it, but at least we get the Chinese surveillance state.
It is possible. What keeps japanese cities safe'er', is not the cameras though.
It’s the culture. Every Japanese person is always aware that they are “a part of society.”<p>Even the Yakuza participate in society. When they have big disasters, the local mobsters are usually helping people out, before the authorities can get going.
A lot of the neighborhoods where Flock is being deployed aren't even bad by higher standards, so I'm not sure what this has to do with anything.
East Asia built a uni-culture by being extremely racist against outsiders. I don't think you can get away with that anywhere else.<p>A friend of mine (white guy) married a Chinese woman and when they visited China they were subject to slurs and dirty looks in public.<p>There's a whole category of videos on social media of Japanese furiously angry at Westerners acting like fools on their subways. They're not happy about it.
I’m an Indian with a Taiwanese-American wife. I’ve never experienced even the mildest amount of racism in Taiwan. Everyone was kind and friendly to me. And Taiwan is very safe.<p>I’m not going to pretend that an anecdote fully captures a problem but considering I spent over a month there just living a normal life I imagine that if the problem were widespread I’d have many chances to experience it.<p>My elderly parents were there for two weeks too and they have nothing but positive things to say.<p>And finally, my wife’s cousin married a White man from Ireland and he has loved the place for the many years he’s lived there.
I don’t know if I would consider a month long vacation as evidence. Taiwan is pretty famous for have lower labor classes that they import from places like the Philippines and while people are friendly, they are still generally looked down upon. Not dissimilar to places like Japan, Hong Kong and Singapore. So I think racism is a pretty loaded and broad word and people typically think about it in purely an American context, it’s more common around the world than people think in all kinds of shades.<p>Ultimately I do agree with the original thesis around monocultures.
Well, certainly my experience on the ground is far more meaningful than someone’s statements without evidence. Just googling around it seems that American policing is generally considered fairly racially discriminatory so performing racism on its own is not getting us less crime. Taiwan doesn’t seem to have that problem as extensively.<p>And I’m an Indian who grew up in and spent the majority of my life in India as did my parents. I’ve lived in a few countries for years and stayed in many for months. My frame of reference is unlikely to be the American context for racism.
I don’t think anyone is arguing that Taiwan or Japan are uniquely or universally racist. The point is that many highly cohesive societies have clear social hierarchies and stronger in-group preferences than Americans (or other groups) often recognize.<p>Taiwan’s treatment of many Southeast Asian migrant workers is a commonly discussed example. People can be welcoming to tourists and expatriates while still having structural biases toward certain groups. Those aren’t contradictory observations.<p>Likewise, we wouldn’t dismiss concerns about women’s safety in India simply because a visitor spent a month there and had a wonderful experience. An individual’s experience matters, but it doesn’t settle broader questions about how different groups experience a society.<p>My opinion comes from having spent a lot of time around Asia and more than a month of “tourism”.
> <i>I don’t think anyone is arguing that Taiwan or Japan are uniquely or universally racist.</i><p>The original comment used this as the explanation for why there's low crime. Here's a reminder of the context we are conversing within.<p>> > > > <i>East Asia built a uni-culture by being extremely racist against outsiders. I don't think you can get away with that anywhere else.</i><p>I think "extreme racism to outsiders" is detectable within a month. I am as outsider as they come - being a brown-skinned South Asian Indian[0]. I also think that "I don't think you can get away with that anywhere else" means "uniquely". I guess we could argue about whether "extreme racism" means "universal racism" if you'd like but I don't think it's interesting as an explanation for safety. And the other statement I'm replying to there is<p>> > > > <i>A friend of mine (white guy) married a Chinese woman and when they visited China they were subject to slurs and dirty looks in public.</i><p>My wife's cousin is married to a White Irish man who has lived there over a decade. This is not his experience anywhere in Taiwan, in particular, as opposed to the GP's China experience.<p>I think his decades of living there prior to and then after marrying my wife's cousin probably provide some experience. There's a lot of Planet of Hats thinking from Westerners visiting Asia. But different countries there are clearly different, just like France and Switzerland are different.<p>And in the end, if racism is not unique then it cannot explain difference in crime outcomes. To quote the great sage pj evans: "Cars have windows and can move. Houses have windows and can't move. So it's not the windows that make the car go. It's something else entirely."<p>And as a little epilogue, we may consider other countries with a foreign-born populace similar to Taiwan's: Poland, Argentina, Uruguay, and South Africa. None of them match Taiwan's broad lack of crime while having a similar degree of foreign-born people.<p>Which brings us again to whether the windows make the car go or not.<p>0: website in profile, feel free to take a look at my face
I think we’re talking past each other.<p>I’m not claiming “Taiwan is extremely racist, therefore low crime.” I’m saying cohesive societies often have stronger in-group preferences and social expectations than Americans tend to recognize, and those coexist with being welcoming to many foreigners.<p>Your experience and your relative’s experience are perfectly compatible with that. One or two positive anecdotes don’t tell us much about how a society views every minority or lower-status group any more than one bad anecdote proves pervasive racism.<p>As for crime, I agree it’s obviously not explained by a single variable. That’s a much stronger claim than I was making.<p>No desire to look at your profile but I hope the point I am trying to argue for is clearer to you.
I understand what you're saying but it seems like a complete non-sequitur given the context of the conversation, which I'll reproduce here in threaded fashion in case it's not visible in your client.<p>> > > We need some way to address the low level crime in the US. If you look at cities in east Asia, they're both much larger than typical US cities and much safer. It -is- possible to have safe large cities. The fact that we don't is a choice.<p>> > East Asia built a uni-culture by being extremely racist against outsiders. I don't think you can get away with that anywhere else. A friend of mine (white guy) married a Chinese woman and when they visited China they were subject to slurs and dirty looks in public. There's a whole category of videos on social media of Japanese furiously angry at Westerners acting like fools on their subways. They're not happy about it.<p>The claim is precisely what you're saying you're not claiming. So you must understand that I am having this conversation in that context. Though I suppose we can both interpose unrelated facts into the conversation and claim contextual irrelevance in the motte and bailey style. Here are a few I present for discussion:<p>2 + 2 = 4<p>The sky is blue
> Though I suppose we can both interpose unrelated facts into the conversation and claim contextual irrelevance in the motte and bailey style. Here are a few I present for discussion:
2 + 2 = 4
The sky is blue<p>The “motte and bailey” accusation followed immediately by schoolyard sarcasm is an odd combination. If you’re going to accuse someone of rhetorical gamesmanship, it’s probably better not to end with rhetorical flourish instead of argument.
PRC has a demographic issue with missing women that engenders resentment of the foreign devils.
The pot calling the kettle black…
Poverty and lack of economic opportunity are the biggest drivers of street-level crime. Good thing we have all these AI layoffs.
A choice that has tradeoffs. Assuming we're talking about the sorts of places that lean heavily into surveillance I don't want to live there and their views on the role of the government is one of the reasons.
You're correct that it is a choice. Flock would barely move the needle on stopping crimes caused by the mentally ill and drug addicted.
By low level crime you mean unlawful surveillance?
My small city was safer before flock.<p>Before, if the cops asked for witnesses to come forward, they always got someone because they had a good reputation and were trusted.<p>A few years of the people saying no to flock and the cops and city hall ignoring us has destroyed that trust.<p>Now, when the cops ask for help, they get told to go flock themselves.<p>I'd suggest a better way is to reform policing. They need to start working for all the people, not just the Epstein class.
How much of that is addressed by a strong social-safety net? How are addicts and homeless people handled? How about general poverty (a known driver of crime)?
That sounds pretty racist though…<p>Is the anti-prosecution narrative
> much safer<p>They have severe consequences for criminal behavior and no subculture that elevates criminality.
What is the trade off though and are Americans willing to make it? What sort of social conditions lead to more low level crime? This sort of complaint is nothing new btw.
You're getting loads of replies that seem to knee-jerk defend US cities purely to oppose Flock. And let's be real and admit that adding more cameras does little to improve this. My whole neighbourhood has a panopticon of surveillance cameras on every property, yet there have still been home burglaries and several cars stolen.<p>Many Asian cities are safer -- and they undisputedly are -- for cultural reasons. You can't create culture through surveillance.
US cities are plenty safe. The fact that you think otherwise is propaganda you’ve been successfully served. I live in Nyc and visit other cities often.
You must live in a different New York City than the one I visited. I had the safety calibration of Tallinn, Estonia and Dubai, UAE.<p>The subway was extremely hostile. People were regularly drugged out of their mind. I saw one guy try to drink a Coca Cola upside down and spilled it all in the bus. Another crazy chased my limited mobility Estonian friend who wanted to visit nyc alongside me when she went alone for groceries.<p>Could it be that your frame of reference is broken and/or you’re numb to it?
You saw someone try to drink a soda upside down and spill it? We are going to need more than a Flock cam to stop that heinous act, perhaps a Flock robot arm that could grab the criminals arm and turn it right side up, or just restrain them while the authorities are on the way.
I saw a tall man on L train stomping aggressively through the car and yelling bloody murder that he is gonna "stab the next mf I see", while attempting to swing punches at random people. The whole train ended up getting evacuated, and the train line got delayed. That was last winter. Between then and now, I saw people threatening others on the subway multiple times.<p>The most recent incident was a few weeks ago on Q train, where a seated man was screaming at the woman across from him (who was trying to do her best to ignore him), how he was gonna kill her and "the rest of her people" (whatever that means).<p>But please tell me how stuff like this never happens.<p>And I am not even a subway hater overall, I take it daily, and it is my preferred method of transportation. And no, I am not taking subway into deep and shady parts of bronx or brooklyn, as heavy majority of my rides are contained between Dekalb/Jay St Metrotech (aka dt brooklyn) and midtown.<p>It just sounds like crazy talk to me, when someone claims that the safety cams in subway cars are not, at least, somewhat helpful. At least newer A/C train cars have those cams now, and, I hope, it will lead to prosecution of serial subway harassers.
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You’re describing a spilled soda as a safety issue. The other person isn’t the one with a broken frame of reference.
These are all lies. Small towns have notiriously higher crime rates than Nyc. We should send the National Guard to your small town and place cameras every where. I dont feel safe in your small town. I moved away from middle America that’s swamped in meth, high murder rate, and racism. Sorry someone spilled a coca-cola though. Your pearls must be powder in your hands by now.
This is false. Urban areas have the highest rate of crime compared to rural and suburban. For example look at the years 2020 and 2021 from this report:[0]<p>Table 8<p>Rate of victimization, by type of crime and location of residence, 2020 and 2021<p>Location of residence<p>Total violent crime Violent crime excluding
simple assault Total property crime<p>2020 2021* 2020 2021* 2020 2021*<p>Urban 19.0 † 24.5 7.7 9.7 158.9 157.5<p>Suburban 16.8 16.5 5.6 5.2 90.5 86.8<p>Rural 13.4 11.1 4.5 4.4 65.6 57.7<p>You can see clearly that urban has the highest rate of crime, and this has been true for decades.[1]<p>Also, many crimes are not recorded at all in NYC, which is why many stores have locked down all their items with a key that requires permission from a staff member to access. I haven't seen this in the small towms I've been to.<p>[0] <a href="https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/cv21.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/cv21.pdf</a><p>[1] <a href="https://ovc.ojp.gov/sites/g/files/xyckuh226/files/ncvrw2018/info_flyers/fact_sheets/2018NCVRW_UrbanRural_508_QC.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://ovc.ojp.gov/sites/g/files/xyckuh226/files/ncvrw2018/...</a>
There’s possibly a fantasy mindset at play where people need a certain identity to be true. As we’ve witnessed on a national scale, humans have great capacity for fantastical thinking to support what a friend of mine calls their “binkie narrative.”
His small town? Tallinn is comparatively tiny to NYC admittedly but Dubai is a fairly large and urban city. I think that it doesn’t quite fit the appellation.
I live in NYC and I don't think it is safe, so there's one person that disagrees with you. Part of the problem in NYC is when you commit a low-level crime the social-justice warriors let the person back out on the street without charging them. This is why when somebody kills somebody in NYC you often hear that the person had been arrested for various things twelve times earlier. Just covering up the "un-safeness" by saying "it's safe" or citing crime stats doesn't change what people can see with their own eyes.
Are you sure these people weren't making plea deals or having their cases dismissed because prosecutors can't try every single low level criminal case? I'm not sure where "social-justice warriors" comes in to play. It's the legal system making choices about what crimes are worth prosecuting.
This is a bail reform propaganda. If you feel unsafe because we dont put deoderant thieves in Rikers then move.
It’s hard to distil to a single comment but I think it might be a poor example given the NYPD takes about double the budget per capita to be less safe than Toronto.<p>I think the only objective conclusion we can come to in a comments section is that going by “I visited there” vibes isn’t going to be useful.
This type of "there is no problem and any evidence is propaganda" denial is why social disorder like rampant petty theft, open air drug use, and people shitting in the streets is destroying these cities.
What about the meth heads shitting in the streets of the small town? Rampant assault and murder rates. What about all the drinking and driving killing people in America. No, no, it’s Nyc that’s scary.
They have laws against those people.<p>When meth heads get arrested, there isn't an army of losers protesting the sheriff the next day claiming it's cruel and unusual punishment and demanding the city give them a free house for them to do meth in.<p>Enjoy your Alcatraz pharmacies while they're still open.
NYC is safer than many cities for sure.<p>But there are approximately zero meth heads shitting in the streets in small towns in the US.<p>I have never once seen a person shitting in the streets in a small town. I saw it within 24 hours of visiting Portland. I’ve never seen that in NYC either to be clear.
Yes, crime in small towns is bad too. Do we agree?
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NYC is quite safe compared to most US cities. It is still more dangerous than most major cities in the developed world.
Really? I lived in Greenwich village until last year and I’d have people threaten to kill me for politely declining to give them change. I live in Park Slope now and there’s violent people on the F line all the time. Maybe wealthy neighbourhoods are super dangerous or maybe you’re just not noticing.
I've lived in major US cities my entire life and have never been a victim of crime. Do you have any facts to back up this seemingly outrageous claim?
> If you look at cities in east Asia, they're... much safer.<p>ah yes, the famously dependable statistics of east Asia, with their famously free press and citizen auditing communities, and the famously dependable impressions of tourists and expatriates...
What do you mean we don't? Our cities seem quite safe...