zlacker

>>hhs+(OP)
The slide into hell is steep and slippery. I’m afraid we’re in a dark period of history that’s only going to get darker.

I want proponents of this tech to explain something to me. Why has the rate of stochastic terrorism only increased since the NSA and Palantir started spying on all of us? Isn’t the whole point of this to preempt those kinds of things?

>>therob+mi
What is the counterfactual? Without knowing the number of attacks prevented by these tools, we don't know what the baseline would be.

>>stri8e+Ql
For the record: they prevented essentially nothing in our muni. We're 4.5 square miles sandwiched between the Austin neighborhood of Chicago (our neighbor to the east; many know it by its reputation) one side and Maywood/Broadview/Melrose Park on the other, directly off I-290; the broader geographic area we're in is high crime.

We ran a pilot with the cameras in hot spots (the entrances to the village from I-290, etc).

Just on stolen cars alone, roughly half the flags our PD reacted to turned out to be bogus. In Illinois, Flock runs off the Illinois LEADS database (the "hotlist"). As it turns out: LEADS is stale as fuck: cars are listed stolen in LEADS long after they're returned. And, of course, the demography of owners of stolen cars is sharply biased towards Black and Latino owners (statistically, they live in poorer, higher-crime areas), which meant that Flock was consistently requesting the our PD pull over innocent Black drivers.

We recently kicked Flock out (again: I'm not thrilled about this; long story) over the objections of our PD (who wanted to keep the cameras as essentially a better form of closed-circuit investigatory cameras; they'd essentially stopped responding to Flock alerts over a year ago). In making a case for the cameras, our PD was unable to present a single compelling case of the cameras making a difference for us. What they did manage to do was enforce a bunch of failure-to-appear warrants for neighboring munis; mostly, what Flock did to our PD was turn them into debt collectors.

Whatever else you think about the importance of people showing up to court for their speeding tickets, this wasn't a good use our sworn officers' time.

>>tptace+Vp
Can you elaborate on why you're not thrilled about Flock being removed?

>>squigz+7r
The metro area is blanketed in ALPRs and we were the only ones actually writing real policy about them. Now we don't have any ALPRs and can't build policy or shop it to any of our neighbors. We had harm reduction for the cameras and a plausible strategy for reducing their harm throughout the area, and instead we did something performative.

>>tptace+Is
Why is it better to reduce the harm of a practically useless anti-crime device than remove it entirely?

>>squigz+lt
That's a good and reasonable question. The answer is: the cameras weren't going to do any meaningful harm in Oak Park (they were heavily restricted by policies we wrote about them, and we have an exceptionally trustworthy police department and an extremely police-skeptical political majority). But you can drive through Oak Park in about 5 minutes on surface streets, and on either side of that drive you'll be in places that are blanketed with ALPRs with absolutely no policy or restrictions whatsoever.

Had we kept the cameras, we'd have some political capital to get our neighboring munis (and like-minded munis in Chicagoland like Schaumberg) to take our ordinances and general orders as models. Now we don't. We're not any safer: our actions don't meaningfully change our residents exposure to ALPRs (and our residents weren't the targets anyways; people transiting through Oak Park were) because of their prevalence outside our borders.

What people don't get about this is that a lot of normal, reasonable people see these cameras as a very good thing. You can be upset about that or you can work with it to accomplish real goals. We got upset about it.

>>tptace+Ut
Why do you have political capital to convince neighboring counties to copy your legislation, but not to copy your decision to remove the cameras?

(And you can still pass legislation restricting cameras even when they aren’t in your county…)

>>chatma+uh1
Because regulating cameras is an easier sell than disabling them, because ordinary people do not share HN's priors about surveillance technology, like, at all.

>>tptace+Sh1
I'm not sure I agree with this, unless by "ordinary people" you mean a particular group. In my experience, the vast majority of members of oppressed or marginalized groups are strongly against these things. The only people I know who defend it are those that can hide behind "if I'm not doing anything wrong what do I have to hide"

>>squigz+Vx1
It's not like we're going to have to argue about this in the abstract for long. Check in with me in a year and we'll see: are there more ALPRs or less ALPRs in the near west suburbs of Chicago? I would put money on a lot more. Dozens more were getting rolled out in our neighboring munis right as we announced we were canceling our contract.

>>tptace+Hq2
I'm sure you're right, but that doesn't imply to me that "ordinary people" are okay with surveillance technology. At least 1 other explanation would be that they don't understand the implications.

Anyway, we'll check back in a year and see: are they actually effective and used responsibly? I would put money on "no"

>>squigz+Er2
I'm not wondering about it; I've watched the two sides of this issue play out. Progressive activists turn out with stuff about surveillance and resisting the Trump administration (I'm sympathetic!) and liberals (we only have progressives and liberals here) turn out talking about public safety and how the camera enforcement is less racist than human discretionary enforcement (I'm sympathetic to that argument too, but as I've noted elsewhere on the thread: the cameras aren't effective here).

This played out over years here; I attended all the board meetings, transcribed them, took notes, kept tallies of who was saying what. I was involved in our last election and the two mayoral candidates squared off on this issue (among several others).