Flock did not put the woman in jail. The police and DA put her in Jail. This is not a failure of the technology (do they have confidence levels?). This is a failure of how police are outsourcing their reasoning and decision making to an AI camera service that seems to fail at the tail.
But Flock gives police overconfidence to commit actions instead of having due diligence. It is like the best student in your classroom tells you 2 + 2 = 5, and you naturally feel compelled to believe him, even there is clear evidence against the claim.
This is also comparable to self-driving car: Waymo's system has achieve the level of "less error than human on average" long time ago, but they are still only doing slow expansion. Why? Because when AI is involved, human naturally expect them to be almost 100% correct, not just barely better than human, otherwise why bother use AI (and all the troubles to legalize for AI) in the first place? So in this case, I guess the police just blindly trust the AI being 99.99% correct.
Flock isn’t an “AI” though? It doesn’t put together a case and say “yes, this is the criminal”. It’s not a crime-solving AI.
It’s a camera system, and data can be queried by police. They have to search for something. So the cops searched for a vehicle matching the description in the general area, seemed to take the first one, and called it a day.
That’s not an AI-uncanny-valley. That’s the equivalent of (pre-flock/cameras) looking at vehicle registration list and assuming the one at the top of the list must be it.
The automation-trust is a legitimate concern but it’s not applicable here.
I don't know the details on how Flock is internally designed, but I suppose AI is at least involved in the image recognition and correlation, at least to this scale. I also don't know exactly why Flock misidentifies Issacs' car in this case, because I don't find it in the article or the interview, but I assume it is due to a mislabeling of the plate number or the car damage imagery, which is related to AI. Correct me if I'm wrong.
Flock didn't misidentify Isaacs' car in this case. It correctly identified that her car was vaguely near the accident, and the police incorrectly concluded that it was the one involved in the accident.
Correct, but what's more, there is a lack of accountability issue that's part of it. When people are not held accountable for the screw ups, then processes don't or are very slow to change. That's how you can just call it a day, regardless of the harm done to innocent citizens.
Flock is not an AI. That they have AI features on certain products does not mean "Flock" is an AI. That's the fallacy of composition.
Flock does have AI components (this one seems LLM based). Basically every ANPR system will also use some level of AI.
Also, on "reality would like a word". Why not just speak normally instead of using what seems like a high-school grade comeback?
The main Flock related issue here is that officers treat results that come out of the systems as gospel. The same thing has happened with face recognition systems. There is also the broader issue of access controls to Flock, 5A, and whether places should be building up a technology so powerful (surveillance infrastructure can easily be used for evil).
I said that because your position is absurd, and clearly false. Flock is an AI company, period. They use a multitude of different ai types in their “AI OS”.
And the issue is absolutely not just cops taking what they say as gospel; that’s a teeny tiny itty bitty fraction of the issue, which is in itself reductive. This is a massively multifaceted issue and to state otherwise means you don’t understand the scope.
I have made no comments on this thread before the one above.
So saying you said something because my non-existent position is "absurd" and "clearly false" indicates massive levels of confusion.
You then go on to imply I haven't read the article, using an acronymised swear (I'm not a pious person but clearly directing a swear to someone makes a message come off as aggressive), even though your understanding of what I said is based off non-existent messages. (This is quite ironic).
Flock is a company. Companies are a type of organisation: it makes no sense to describe a company as AI, as AI is a type of computer system. It may make sense to say Flock is an AI-based company, but calling them "AI" in itself makes no sense.
I can't find anything indicating that an LLM was used in this case, and this county seems to mainly have Falcon cameras (https://www.scribd.com/document/983922612/250730110407Flock-...). Reverse engineering seems to indicate these are powered by non-LLM AIs like Tensorflow vision NNs. These have been around for ages, and notably no-one is alleging these models hallucinated etc.
People also (perhaps wrongly) use "Flock" to refer to the camera system. CrendKing explicitly calls "Flock" a "camera system". A system of cameras is not AI, and the point of the comment seems to be that it's inappropriate to bring up LLM related AI fears about this system.
I don't feel we are asking too much of police and lawyers here: yes, you can use technology and tools (such as Flock) to help you do your job more efficiently, but that doesn't mean you can turn your brain off.
Perhaps more facts will come out, but if we take the article at face value, the cops are at this woman's house, looking at her car and can see with their own eyes that the car right in front of them has obviously not been in an accident. All that is required is for these cops to rub two brain cells together and they will reach the conclusion that Flock misread a license plate.
It's also worth emphasizing that this wasn't for a parking ticket. The extremely low level of care with which these public servants are conducting a manslaughter investigation is somewhat alarming.
> It is like the best student in your classroom tells you 2 + 2 = 5, and you naturally feel compelled to believe him, even there is clear evidence against the claim.
Yes, but it is still your fault. “I am dumb and I was deceived” is no valid defense, least of all for a police officer.
I'm not saying the police has no fault. Using AI assist without secondary verification is never good idea, at least not in 2026. But you can't argue Flock the technology itself, and especially Flock the company, are totally innocent, just like you can't say the "guns are just tools like hammer, it only depends on who uses them", and the gun industry.
It is not even clear from the article that there were anything wrong with the output. She has a car of that make. And it doesnt appear to be in dispute that she drove nearby.
It simply is the case that “being nearby” in itself is not enough evidence that you were involved in a crash. Especially when the colour doesn’t match and the vehicle is not damaged.
The fundamental problem here is that the police are very bad about false positives. Flock gives them a ton of data--but that doesn't make it magically perfect. No surprise there was a similar car nearby--there are a lot of similar cars. Flock shows them the similar cars and they pick the closest without any investigation.
> But you can't argue Flock the technology itself, and especially Flock the company, are totally innocent
For the sake of argument, let’s suppose that Flock is 100% evil/guilty/blameworthy in this case. Even in that case, two things are still true:
A) Flock has no authority to arrest anyone
B) Flock has no authority over the police
The buck has to stop somewhere. It’s counterproductive to focus on what Flock did, compared to what the police did. And I say that as someone who is not a fan of Flock.
So next time start your first post with that, otherwise you lead us on this wild goose chase only to find that you mostly agree, it's a foundational part of discourse.
> It is like the best student in your classroom tells you 2 + 2 = 5, and you naturally feel compelled to believe him, even there is clear evidence against the claim.
It’s more like normal people don’t know that 97.8% accurate isn’t 100% - despite how good of a score that would be on a test.
Law enforcement is predominantly made up of normal people.
I would say US law enforcement are made up of mostly abnormal people with lower intellegences, higher aggressivness, and a propensity to lie and deceive. They tend to push actual normal people out for not playing ball with their own corruption.
The number one demograph for domestic violence and abuse are cops, they are not just a randomly selected group of people that chanced into law enforcement as a career.
Absolutely, law enforcement in the US is disproportionately not normal people. The system is designed to reject smart people who are not aggressive and have empathy. The system is designed to accept people who will uphold the design of the system.
> The number one demograph for domestic violence and abuse are cops, they are not just a randomly selected group of people that chanced into law enforcement as a career.
Be sure you don’t have the causation backwards - or that it doesn’t flow strongly both ways!
It attracts certain people - and being around that crowd and power pushes some number of people over the line that were near it.
See also: stimulant use, abuse, in the construction industry.
> It is like the best student in your classroom tells you 2 + 2 = 5, and you naturally feel compelled to believe him
Closer analogy: The dumbest student in a class tells you 2 + 2 = 5 and you believe them.
Even more apt analogy: You're the dumbest student in the class, the second-dumbest student tells you 2 + 2 = 5, but you lack the critical thinking skills necessary to know whether that student is smart or not so you just believe them.
While you are technically correct (which we all know from Futurama is “the best kind”), that is neither helpful nor consolation to the affected, and I wish these kinds of comments didn’t dominate the top spot in HN discussions. They’re the “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” of tech.
Yes, the system is broken even before we get to Flock (or whatever tech) but Flock makes it worse. If a bad tool is badly used to cause harm, it’s fair to criticise its existence. You can’t fix police abuse with a snap of the finger, so you need to start but taking away the tools which facilitate it.
If it were your ass which had been thrown in solitary, would you be pleading with your lawyer to “go easy on Flock. Sure, they allowed a major disruption and trauma into my life, but they’re just a tool”?
Then the right fix is to fix the system, e.g. imposing accountability. Removing tools is just a band aid. Why is the tool bad? A tool does what it's designed to do. You can use it properly or improperly. There should be no conflation of regular civilians with supposedly trained government officers.
They can have their tools back after they show they can use them responcibly.
If a kid has shown themselves to be repeatedly irresponsible, when they ask for a circular saw you don't just give it to them and turn away. You make them explain what it is for and ensure they know how to safely use it. And if they start swinging it around wildly in opposition to what you said, you take it away, they are obviously incapable of using it right.
Yes, of course the better fix is to fix the system but one thing at a time. You’re on a giant boat that has left port years ago and a leak just sprung; you should absolutely get back to port and fix the processes that allowed the leak to open but first you have to close it.
If someone released a hammer that when held a certain way would cause your hand to explode and it kept happening over and over, the solution wouldn’t be just to tell people to hold it better, it would also be to recall the tool and fix it so the issue were less likely or impossible to occur. And if it can’t be done, then maybe the hammer shouldn’t be released again.
This “it’s just a tool, the proper solution is to rework civilisation” defence is frankly as tired as it is ignorant. The way you fix the system as a whole is via a lot of small fixes.
Then it seems that you are somehow implying that it takes many years to merely enact and impose real accountability rules. I think it's not a tech problem, or scientific problem, with unknown solution. It's a social/political problem.
I don't it's about an innocent skill issue like you imply (holding a hammer the wrong way). It's an ethical issue of bad actors in the government, together with an accountability issue of the system preventing holding those bad actors to account.
AI cameras are just one tool; there are other tools, too. Where do you draw the line for which tools deserve the removal for your kind of reason? Perhaps degun the police departments because guns also get abused? How do you decide in a principled way that AI cameras are somehow special compared to other tools?
> Then it seems that you are somehow implying that it takes many years to merely enact and impose real accountability rules.
It doesn’t have to, but historically we can observe that the longer something has been entrenched as the norm, the harder it is to change (authoritarians regimes take advantage of this too, by making it appear some things are older than they are). Which is why it’s doubly important to resist when something new with bad consequences is introduced.
> I don't it's about an innocent skill issue like you imply
There was no “skill issue” implication. If anything, the opposite is the point.
> AI cameras are just one tool; there are other tools, too.
This is just whataboutism. Yes, there are several tools which are problematic. The submission is about this one, which is why we’re discussing it. We can’t discuss everything that needs to change in every conversation. That’s called focus.
I very much agree with what you say on automation bias.
Certain technology just has too much potential to be misused / people repeatedly prove they can't use it properly. It also comes with risks of making authoritarian takeover easier.
However, here, it seems they used Flock a bit like a regular ANPR. The actions they took independent of Flock show there are better stories to use to criticise this technology.
Which makes Flock cameras even worse right? It provides false confidence to law enforcement to make decisions that can change someone's life for worse. I don't understand why people hate the NSA spying on them and yet support Flock cameras.
The question is whether Flock does provide false confidence to law enforcement, or whether it provides a media hook to cover the ways in which bad police departments routinely misbehave.
A lot of people coming to this story seem to have the idea that it's unthinkable for someone to spend 13 days in jail when they have clear evidence they're innocent, so there must be some novel explanation for how this could happen. But as any criminal defense lawyer will tell you it's very thinkable. She was ordered to report to jail on a Friday afternoon, the standard stratagem cops use to ensure people they don't like spend at least a weekend behind bars. She was denied bail, even though she made no move to flee in the months where she knew the police thought she did it, because the courts in many places view mandatory pretrial detention as a punishment for presumptively guilty people.
If you give a toddler a gun and it shoots someone, it's the toddler's fault, not the gun's right? But you don't give toddlers guns. You don't say "well toddlers just need to be more careful".
I don't think ANPR systems should be held responsible for matching number-plates or car models. That's their job, and police have had access to such tools for many many years. It seems relatively clear that Flock was providing a commonplace technology here, that was misused.
Indeed. It’s insane to see these arguments implying the contrary. The institution committing the violence is the one responsible for the outcome.
If a random person walks into a police station and accuses a random stranger of murder, and the police put that stranger in jail based on that alone, the main problem is not the accuser.
But in this case, it wasn't a random person, it was a police-vetted system. Of course the authorities are to blame, but Flock hold a lot of responsibility, too.
It shouldn’t have been vetted then. It’s again the fault of authorities who approved that.
A scientist who uses an LLM to write a paper remains responsible for its contents. And authorities that outsource police work remain responsible for what comes from that.
Sure it shouldn't have been approved, but it was approvied through misleading marketing and a huge and expensive lobbying effort. Flock spends a ton of money convincing cops and legislators that their product works well, is useful and safe. That was always a lie and they have to be held responsible for it.
It is always both. A product that can be abused to this extent is a bad product.
I have never released a single product that has seen people die through common user misuse.
The standards for solutions shouldn't get _lower_ as the stakes get _higher_.
If a private company can puts hundreds of tons of payload into orbit without ever causing someone to accidentally be imprisoned a company that sells cameras on a stick shouldn't either.
of course it's the absence of common sense in the law enforcement but on the other hand this technology is thought to be faultless and it takes resource to put it right
There was a senate hearing a few days ago where this woman testified. Also Benn Jordan and Chad Marlow from the EFF were htere. I was happy hearing them put into words the problems on the national stage.
Interestingly, conservative Republican sheriff Ross Teeple also spoke against the idea of networked/data-storing ALPRs and Flock in particular at that hearing.
But seriously, privacy must not become a sided issue. Attacks on privacy are bipartisan, the defense of it would be weakened if it was not bipartisan. Civil liberties protected by the constitution should not be controversial.
Had the 'evidence' been a random dashcam rather than Flock cam, this wouldn't even be a story beyond severe police incompetence.
Flock didn't fail to inspect the car for damage and not find any, flock didn't take 13 days to conduct a cursory review of evidence, flock didn't fail to request cell tower triangulation data and rule out her being in the location of the accident...
I get that people feel their privacy's invaded by being filmed, but this story doesn't appear to have any more to do with Flock than what the officers had for breakfast or the brand of air freshener she had in her car at the time.
A random dashcam does not serve the police someone's identity on a platter. It had to be a stupid "smart" object for such an inexcusable offense to be committed.
With dumb camera footage, the cops looks at the plates, visual indicators, etc. That does not make them more competent or less prone to abuse. But here, Flock's software literally told them this woman was the one they were looking for, despite no evidence supporting this.
This is 100% both on the police and on Flock. Some technologies don't deserve to exist. Facial recognition and ALPR is one of those, because the error rates are too high and the stakes are too high.
> A random dashcam does not serve the police someone's identity on a platter.
Nor does Flock - Flock merely provides a photo and timestamp, which should have been scrutised like any other evidence.
The Flock data showed:
- Car of same make/model nearby at similar time to the accident
- Possible colour match (eyewitnesses gave varying reports on the colour of the perpetrating vehicle). But a match could have been ruled out in minutes had police inspected paint transfer onto the struck vehicle
- A number plate non-match (first three characters were reported to 911 and did not match)
- That's all!
So police didn't do their job (scutinise the evidence), and possibly worse, they may have fabricated evidence (since police claimed Isaacs' vehicle was damaged, but it was in factory-new condition) - which may explain why they're shifting blame to Flock!
That's exactly the same. Suggesting an output is the same as serving a suspect on a platter. I'm sure there's many studies about how humans (except statisticians) are not comfortable with confidence intervals.
A computer software is supposed to deliver reliable, predictable, reproducible results. When it does not every now and then, it's a bug. When your entire system is built in "recognition" and "confidence" and leads to wrongful arrests, it's not a bug. You are just not making computer science. You are making a power abuse machine.
Except of course the entire reason the police picked her in specific is because of information flock gave them.
Could they have, you know, double checked it? Yes, obviously. But they didn't.
I agree that this story is more about the incredible incompetence of the police involved than flock attempting to record everyone and everything, but flock giving the police an excuse to stop looking and arrest an innocent is by no means irrelevant.
I would say part of it could be on flock depending on how flock displays information and details in responce to a query.
Simply flagging a photo for review, no. But if it was like "this single person matches your search parameters exactly and here is their name, address, and current location", which could heavily imply guilt through overconfident displays of information.
At no point does a cop have to look at the photo(s), the timestamps, confirm the plate, see if the person who owns the car is driving it, or see the dozens of other cars in that area at the time that should also be of potential interest. They enter the query and get a single answer so obviously accept it as likely perpetrator.
The police should have thought “okay a car was seen within several miles of an accident - so what?”
Their conclusion (after 5 minutes) would have been (obviously) that there’s not so much as a strand of chewing gum connecting the car to the accident, or making it stand out from dozens of others, and they’d promptly get back to searching for the car that actually was involved.
> Regardless, the true takeaway of Isaacs’ experience is that ALPR technology, whether it’s from Flock or any of the other competitors in this space providing the same functionality (Axon, etc), is dangerous not only because it is so easily abused by police (or even by hackers) to invade the privacy and liberty of citizens, but also because it enables a lazy police department to outsource basic critical thinking to machines and then take action based on a single data point to ruin a person’s life.
The accusation that some machine made any decision here goes beyond the reporting in the article. It seems concocted to raise AI alarm. All we have is that it supplied accurate data that police then abused. That isn't in the vicinity of "outsource[d] basic critical thinking to machines".
I want such general government surveillance banned, but the machines in this story had no more volition than a breathalyzer.
The machines matter, because we know how human behavior works. We know that if you give humans an automated tool that works most of the time, they get lazy, to the point where they make more mistakes than if they had no automation at all.
Flock isn’t an automated tool though; you don’t give it a crime, and it gives back an automated package saying “this is who the criminal is”.
As far as I know, it lets law enforcement query for things against the data. Can be specific (like a license plate) or more general (like a dark colored mid-sized SUV around <location> at <time>).
To get where this story is at, cops here must have done the latter, and taken the first name off the top of the pile and patted themselves on the back, and then waited 7 months, and went and arrested her. Unless there’s an explanation for a 7 month delay, it seems designed to allow defensive evidence to spoil.
There isn’t an uncanny-valley of automation here. There is just lazy, grossly-incompetent, bad-faith, and malicious cops/investigators.
I think what we're seeing is that flock is presented to police as a reliable technology that can be trusted for this sort of thing. If a random person had snapped a picture they would have questioned it.
But they didn't question the quality of the evidence. And there is a reason for that.
The irony of someone who doesn't know the facts but has strong beliefs replying to me, exactly like the article writer, is, well, a strong example of how hard it is to make progress when so many people have a vested interest in not moving.
I do know "the facts". The fact is that the vast majority of handguns are never used in a suicide or murder. Ergo the average handgun is not "likely" to be involved in one.
The statistic you are reaching for but misunderstanding, is that they are more likely to be used in a suicide or murder than in home defense against an intruder.
A personally-owned handgun is statistically most likely to simply never be used, or only used at a range. The number of personally-owned firearms that are ever involved in a murder or suicide is literally a fraction of a percentage.
No, the fact I was "reaching for" was that they increase the number of occurrences.
More guns in houses, more murder/suicides.
I think guns are as cool as the next guy but I'm willing to maybe consider my personal enjoyment from playing with a gun isn't worth the cost to society.
Piles of evidence that humans tend to treat AI as infallible, just like the police did here. They didn't use this as a point for further investigation, they saw the match and said "let's go get her" without so much as looking at the damaged vehicle for paint transfer, which should be remedial-level police instruction.
Modern AI was and is a mistake. It's only going to get worst before it gets better.
Unfortunately, our current government in the US is hard AI-pilled (oh, sorry, "super-intelligence-pilled"). They use it every day to present propaganda to the public via social media.
Ban AI use in all branches of government, and in policing. At least until there are ethical standards put in place that are very heavily punished when violated.
Also, state and federal level politicians should be prohibited from using social media in anything other than a purely personal basis without mention of political office or without speaking on the topic of politics. Want to post cool pictures of your family? Go for it. Speaking to your constituency? Must be strongly vetted for ethical violations, and punishable by immediate removal from office and a 10-year blacklist.
Volition has nothing to do with it. A breathalyser doesn't point to a person and say this is the likely drunk, so that comparison is fatuous. These identification systems do point the finger.
the problem here appears to be that police officers are generally of average or below average intelligence. combined with the fact that they face no consequences for incompetence, you have the perfect mixture for nonsense like this happening.
I expect the solution they will settle on is to form a department for interacting with technology like this, who understand its outputs are not edicts.
you can't really expect any meaningful police reforms (such as liability and insurance) because anyone who is in any position to enact them is perfectly fine with dumb muscle that holds a monopoly on violence and is deferential to them. in fact the public disliking the police is an ideal outcome for those decision makers as it gives them more leverage over the police.
The problem is that they're treating the output of the AI algorithm as 100% fact. Countless examples of Flock matching incorrectly or police otherwise using the match found by Flock as "here's who to go arrest" and not "here's a starting point for further investigation".
Partial matches, correct matches but no investigation into things like paint transfer, it's happened way too many times (hint: one is too many times for things that can incarcerate people).
It's like they're speedrunning unworthiness to hold the monopoly on violence. This is how you get riots and revolutions. Sadly, today's Western world is complicit and complacent. Nobody who is pro-surveillance state will change their mind until it affects them or someone close to them.
Wait, was she not arraigned for 13 days? The article makes it sound like it wasn’t until 13 days after the arrest, and her lawyer presented evidence, that she was let out. That… that can’t be right. It varies from state to state, but generally you are required to be arraigned within 24-72 hours of arrest. And then they are required to give you bond (a no bond hold can happen but is very rare and I don’t think any jurisdiction allows that outside of murder).
Was she just given an extremely high bond she couldn’t afford? Not that that’s much better than no bond at all, but I’d really like to understand the details here.
She was never arraigned. The arrest was made on a no‐bond warrant claiming she was a danger to the community, since the incident being investigated was a hit‐and‐run resulting in three deaths. This necessitated a bond hearing to determine whether enough evidence existed to detain her pre‐trial. Her lawyer submitted forty photos of her completely undamaged vehicle, but the testimony of the experts was that her car showed signs of collision and subsequent coverup, and the judge ruled that the prosecution had met the necessary burden for detention. However, what her lawyer presented in the hearing led the prosecution to reinvestigate the collision with a team of state investigators instead of regional investigators, which led to reevaluation of the 911 calls and witnesses with a more accurate description of the car.
At this point, Flock (and similar services) should be considered agents of the state, given the rates at which police are using them as such.
When is someone gonna spin up a predictive AI that attempts to tell if someone is going to commit a crime, and sells that to PDs, just so we can really dive headfirst into the Minority Report.
The key thing she ought to have done was not answer the door, or given any sign she was there. She should have rung an experienced criminal attorney immediately, and moved to an undisclosed location that wasn't a hotel, with a new cell phone, and let her lawyer negotiate with the police to discover what their laziness has led them to believe.
When the police come and want to arrest you for triple manslaughter you just don’t open the door, and they shrug and you can let a third party “negotiate” with them for you?
In the US you should not interact with police at all for any reason unless you are forced to. They have essencially immunity from any liabilty and can legally lie and deceive people, while civilians can be punished for even an accidental lie. They also have a profit motive to arrest people and require no legal knowledge.
US cops can and do regularly get fet cleared for abuses because "I didn't know I wasn't suppose to violate their rights!" Meanwhile for civilians "ignorance is no excuse for breaking the law."
A search warrant is not the same as an arrest warrant. If you have a lawyer they can negotiate your surrender into custody at an appropriate time for a prompt appearance before a judge for a bail hearing (e.g. Tuesday morning, not Friday afternoon). Having an attorney beforehand short circuits a lot of delay while you try to find one and arrange for a bail surety.
Her lawyer did in fact negotiate her surrender into custody after the arrest warrant was issued, and there was a bail hearing, but the judge ruled against her, which is why she was held with no bond.
She (correctly) never spoke to the police, other than an initial denial when they seized her car, and was never Mirandized or interrogated. By the time they knocked on her door (reportedly at 3AM), her car had already been seized since she lived in an apartment complex with an outdoor parking lot. But she wasn’t arrested until months later.
it could have been a so called no knock warrant where police just ram your house door and enter your house. but what I don't understand is that it took from the impounding of the car to the incarceration of her seven months I would have assumed that she lawyered up to get the car back and deny the allegations
What I gather from hearing her lawyer talk about it is that the prosecution’s case seemed (and was) weak, so the lawyer counseled her to wait a few months to see if the case would be dropped. Then when nothing happened, they filed a writ of replevin to get her car back. Immediately afterward the arrest warrant was issued and she had to surrender herself to the police.
Well the next step obviously is to get in touch with the lodge these police officers belong to, talk to the grandmaster and convince him to organize a conciliation night with you as a guest. When you leave, whisper in the ear of the officer in charge of your case "I'm hungry, and I only use pressure cookers. If you behave I'll invite you to the diner".
Not a lawyer but I have some knowledge of criminal law in general. There are a lot of details left out, but I do think she is likely to get a decent settlement. Though the Flock/AI part of it isn’t really the reason.
So, when you get arrested, you are required to be arraigned by a judge, and that judge has to find probable cause for arrest. That requires the prosecution to present evidence to the judge that a crime was committed and you probably did it. It’s a very low standard of proof, but it does have to happen. And then you are required to get bail, outside of very extreme cases. It depends on the jurisdiction, but all of that has to happen relatively quickly after arrest, like 24-72 hours. If she didn’t get bail until 13 days after the arrest, that’s a pretty cut and dry civil rights violation. If they didn’t get a probable cause determination in that time period, that’s a civil rights violation (unless they got an arrest warrant prior, which they might have in this case).
If she did get bail within a couple days, but it was just so much she couldn’t afford it, then it gets murkier. Because at that point thats not the police or the prosecutor, that’s the judge. Similarly, if the prosecutor presented the evidence they had to a judge for a probable cause determination (or the arrest warrant) and the judge granted it, that’s on the judge. You would have to show the prosecutor and/or police lied or presented inaccurate information in court. If not… at that point you have two independent branches of government screwing up.
People don't like to hear this, but we're going to need to become technologically literate as a society. Your local bread shop is going to need to use facebook. Your dentist is going to have to learn to use the latest x-ray machine, not the one they still have from 1992. And yes, your police are going to have to know that ALPR cameras aren't magical criminal identification devices.
> “…Isaacs only managed to be released “when her attorney was able to present photos to the judge of her possessed vehicle–which, contrary to the claims of the troopers who possessed it, showed no damage.””
I had no idea that cameras were walking the streets and arresting people in America. Only the police should be able to do that. They are clearly far more competent. Oh wait-I just read the article...
> Police didn't care that Lindsey Isaacs' car was the wrong color, and wasn't damaged. They still arrested her because of Flock data.
This is literally the first sentence of the article.
You can dislike public surveillance, but statements like "Flock camera data put this woman in jail for 13 days" blatantly ignores the the fact that Flock didn't put anyone in jail, a bunch of cops who very clearly knew that it wasn't her.
> The Flock camera, meanwhile, had recorded Isaacs’ car and its license plate several miles away from the site of the accident, sometime around the time of the incident.
Blaming a tool, when the cops in question are clearly willing to grasp to whatever piece of "evidence" makes their job "easier" is a giant cop-out and excuse for the people who are abusing it.
Any piece of evidence requires some form of critical examination; that is what law enforcement's job is. If you're just going to go with the first theory/piece-of-evidence they find.... they're not doing their job (and violating peoples constitutional rights through sheer laziness).
That’s all true. But we’ve known police and prosecutors are like this forever. No need to give them tools to be even lazier and that make it easier for them to abuse us.
Thats what always been portrayed in films and stories for so long.Police never solved cases. There were detectives involved specialist who solves crime. While only job of police is to arrest any suspicious person, take them to station, then to court, then to jail. Essentially they are just drives carrying criminals. The very first loose evidence and suspect, that it arrest them question them, torture, if officer is lucky, that person is the criminal or one who just accepts blame. All their effort is solving as fast as they can to maintain record and stars on their shoulder
Right. It's not even clear to me what the alternative critical position is here (for gp)? At the end of the day, the company is not putting you in jail, the cops who do are simply their customers.
"Flock is bad" metonymizes the situation, but doesn't let anyone off the hook.
Multiple things can be bad at the same time and cops have a demonstrated record of failures such that add a system like flock is most likely going to lead to more injustice, not less.
Absolutely not all cops and prosecutors, or even the majority of them, are this lazy. Every tool is a tool that lets them "be event lazier" and make it "easier for them to abuse us". Removing any tool that let bad-actors be lazy is not an alternative for removing the bad-actor themselves.
This situation the equivalent of an eye-witness saying "Ya, I think it might have been this person I know, Tom!" and a cop/prosecutor taking that at face value and arresting Tom (and the system that allowed that to happen).
The people who make decisions and take action so (grossly) negligently need to be held accountable and face consequences. Blaming the tool (whatever tool it is) is giving the people who have the actual responsibility an escape hatch to avoid accountability.
As the child of a public defender who has heard some STORIES: they absolutely are not doing the work. Not because of some inherent trait, but because they are all (prosecutors and defenders) assigned a workload that forces shortcuts and allows negligence with no chance of consequence.
All public defenders and most prosecutors are happy to admit anonymously that the justice system is 90% gears grinding people. They ALL know an innocent person that pled guilty to end the grinding. Judges too. You can find plenty of court videos on YouTube of people pleading guilty while saying they didn’t do it but need to get on with their life. The judge will explain to them that they can’t accept a guilty plea from someone who claims innocence, and the defendant then folds. Everyone in the room knows that there is more to the story, but no one is willing to do the work.
You'd think with tech being a force multiplier and all it'd be real easy for agencies to shed the supposed few and far between 'bad apples'. They should be able to do more with less bodies, with flock and other tech helping them, right? It seems to me the entire system failed this woman and waiving it away as a single lazy cop gives the system a pass.
There is no real mechanism for holding them accountable and the consequences of these tools include death (it only takes one perceived wrong move for officers thinking they've bagged a felon to ventilate you. Hell not even that, see that officer who mag dumped his own car after he mistook an acorn for a gunshot.) This lady is quite lucky that it was only 13 days, if she had a career that's probably hosed but it might not be totally life ruining if she has a strong support system.
But whats the difference on the ground here? Are we meant to take the transitive property here if you will and say there is actually nothing wrong with the Flock company itself and what it enables?
I think there's a combination of selection bias and survivorship bias with bad cops.
When it is made pretty clear that as a cop you won't face consequences for your malicious and/or incompetent actions, you're going to select for people who find that very appealing. Similarly, the people who don't like that kind of system might leave, allowing for a reinforcement the malicious and/or incompetent behavior.
Sorry, when you're in a position of such power (and the ability to wield deadly force backed by the government is as powerful as you get), you don't get to be ambivalent about the misdeeds of your coworkers.
Even if the system is only 5% bad, that's too damn much.
I mean, have you seen what ICE is doing these days? And how many local agencies are happily deputizing their officers to do that same work?
From the same article : “what else would you call the account of a woman who was arrested by incompetent police based on nothing more than a single Flock camera piece of data, and held in jail for 13 days”
When the headline of the article is explicitly blaming Flock, and not the cop/DA/judge who never even looked at the evidence available, it is 100%, whether on purpose or not, letting/helping the cops point the finger at another party.
The headline is what 99% of people read, and remember.
I prefer to discuss the actual material. If you want discuss what you believe other people believe about just a headline, let’s do it somewhere other than a thread discussing content specifically from the article.
What a weird thing to say. The headline is supposed to be the takeaway of the material. People are certainly allowed to discuss an article's choice of headline (which is what people remember), and should give no care to you telling them to go elsewhere.
I didn’t say that discussions about headlines aren’t allowed.
I pointed out that this thread is a discussion about the content of the article, and I prefer to discuss content in a discussion about content. I would also point out that the argument about the content of the headline is just a repeat of the argument I was rebutting. It added absolutely nothing to the discussion.
People with any knowledge of publishing know that the headline writer and the article writer are two different people with two different goals. It doesn’t make sense to use a headline written for one purpose by one author to critique the content of an article by a different author.
As to the assertion that a headline is “what people remember”, that has never been my experience. Plenty of people have asked me if I have read the piece in x publication about y topic. No one has ever asked me if I read the article headlined z. The headline is so inconsequential that many reputable publications will use multiple headlines for the same article depending on when and where it is seen.
If you weren’t aware of this, apologies for being so direct. Now you know. Stop remembering only the headlines. The article is the content, not the headline.
There will always be cops willing to misuse whatever they have access to.
Part of it is holding cops accountable in these situations. Part of it is limiting or stopping the use of these systems so cops don't have as many opportunities to abuse them.
The point is that if the flock surveillance data hadn't existed in the first place, we wouldn't be in this situation. Everybody knows police will abuse this kind of surveillance technology, regardless of how accurate it is.
> The point is that if the flock surveillance data hadn't existed in the first place, we wouldn't be in this situation.
Yeah. After all, the police are known for never arresting people based solely on very tenuous and easily disproved evidence. This damn flock surveillance data!
> Everybody knows police will abuse this kind of surveillance technology
Only here that is literally not the case. There was a real crime and the surveillance technology provided the relevant evidence.
It proved that Isaacs’s car was at a particular location at 9:51 p.m... about three miles from the crash scene. It did not prove that her car was the crash vehicle, that she was at the crash, or that she was the driver who caused it. did you bother to read teh fucking article?
> critical examination; that is what law enforcement's job is
Critical examination is the judiciary's job, not the police's. Jordan v. City of New London established that police departments can and do deny employment to prospective officers who possess excessive cognitive ability.
Flock did not put the woman in jail. The police and DA put her in Jail. This is not a failure of the technology (do they have confidence levels?). This is a failure of how police are outsourcing their reasoning and decision making to an AI camera service that seems to fail at the tail.
But Flock gives police overconfidence to commit actions instead of having due diligence. It is like the best student in your classroom tells you 2 + 2 = 5, and you naturally feel compelled to believe him, even there is clear evidence against the claim.
This is also comparable to self-driving car: Waymo's system has achieve the level of "less error than human on average" long time ago, but they are still only doing slow expansion. Why? Because when AI is involved, human naturally expect them to be almost 100% correct, not just barely better than human, otherwise why bother use AI (and all the troubles to legalize for AI) in the first place? So in this case, I guess the police just blindly trust the AI being 99.99% correct.
Flock isn’t an “AI” though? It doesn’t put together a case and say “yes, this is the criminal”. It’s not a crime-solving AI.
It’s a camera system, and data can be queried by police. They have to search for something. So the cops searched for a vehicle matching the description in the general area, seemed to take the first one, and called it a day.
That’s not an AI-uncanny-valley. That’s the equivalent of (pre-flock/cameras) looking at vehicle registration list and assuming the one at the top of the list must be it.
The automation-trust is a legitimate concern but it’s not applicable here.
I don't know the details on how Flock is internally designed, but I suppose AI is at least involved in the image recognition and correlation, at least to this scale. I also don't know exactly why Flock misidentifies Issacs' car in this case, because I don't find it in the article or the interview, but I assume it is due to a mislabeling of the plate number or the car damage imagery, which is related to AI. Correct me if I'm wrong.
Flock didn't misidentify Isaacs' car in this case. It correctly identified that her car was vaguely near the accident, and the police incorrectly concluded that it was the one involved in the accident.
Correct, but what's more, there is a lack of accountability issue that's part of it. When people are not held accountable for the screw ups, then processes don't or are very slow to change. That's how you can just call it a day, regardless of the harm done to innocent citizens.
Ahem, reality would like a word about flock not being AI.
https://cybernews.com/privacy/flock-ai-os-investigate/
Flock is not an AI. That they have AI features on certain products does not mean "Flock" is an AI. That's the fallacy of composition.
Flock does have AI components (this one seems LLM based). Basically every ANPR system will also use some level of AI.
Also, on "reality would like a word". Why not just speak normally instead of using what seems like a high-school grade comeback?
The main Flock related issue here is that officers treat results that come out of the systems as gospel. The same thing has happened with face recognition systems. There is also the broader issue of access controls to Flock, 5A, and whether places should be building up a technology so powerful (surveillance infrastructure can easily be used for evil).
I said that because your position is absurd, and clearly false. Flock is an AI company, period. They use a multitude of different ai types in their “AI OS”.
And the issue is absolutely not just cops taking what they say as gospel; that’s a teeny tiny itty bitty fraction of the issue, which is in itself reductive. This is a massively multifaceted issue and to state otherwise means you don’t understand the scope.
Perhaps you should actually read TFA. Here’s another one. https://cybernews.com/privacy/flock-ai-os-investigate/
I have made no comments on this thread before the one above.
So saying you said something because my non-existent position is "absurd" and "clearly false" indicates massive levels of confusion.
You then go on to imply I haven't read the article, using an acronymised swear (I'm not a pious person but clearly directing a swear to someone makes a message come off as aggressive), even though your understanding of what I said is based off non-existent messages. (This is quite ironic).
Flock is a company. Companies are a type of organisation: it makes no sense to describe a company as AI, as AI is a type of computer system. It may make sense to say Flock is an AI-based company, but calling them "AI" in itself makes no sense.
I can't find anything indicating that an LLM was used in this case, and this county seems to mainly have Falcon cameras (https://www.scribd.com/document/983922612/250730110407Flock-...). Reverse engineering seems to indicate these are powered by non-LLM AIs like Tensorflow vision NNs. These have been around for ages, and notably no-one is alleging these models hallucinated etc.
People also (perhaps wrongly) use "Flock" to refer to the camera system. CrendKing explicitly calls "Flock" a "camera system". A system of cameras is not AI, and the point of the comment seems to be that it's inappropriate to bring up LLM related AI fears about this system.
I don't feel we are asking too much of police and lawyers here: yes, you can use technology and tools (such as Flock) to help you do your job more efficiently, but that doesn't mean you can turn your brain off.
Perhaps more facts will come out, but if we take the article at face value, the cops are at this woman's house, looking at her car and can see with their own eyes that the car right in front of them has obviously not been in an accident. All that is required is for these cops to rub two brain cells together and they will reach the conclusion that Flock misread a license plate.
It's also worth emphasizing that this wasn't for a parking ticket. The extremely low level of care with which these public servants are conducting a manslaughter investigation is somewhat alarming.
> It is like the best student in your classroom tells you 2 + 2 = 5, and you naturally feel compelled to believe him, even there is clear evidence against the claim.
Yes, but it is still your fault. “I am dumb and I was deceived” is no valid defense, least of all for a police officer.
I'm not saying the police has no fault. Using AI assist without secondary verification is never good idea, at least not in 2026. But you can't argue Flock the technology itself, and especially Flock the company, are totally innocent, just like you can't say the "guns are just tools like hammer, it only depends on who uses them", and the gun industry.
> the police has no fault
Gross lack of due diligence: it has full fault.
Untrained officials: graver systemic fault.
> company, are totally innocent
How clear is the uncertainty of the output?
> How clear is the uncertainty of the output?
It is not even clear from the article that there were anything wrong with the output. She has a car of that make. And it doesnt appear to be in dispute that she drove nearby.
It simply is the case that “being nearby” in itself is not enough evidence that you were involved in a crash. Especially when the colour doesn’t match and the vehicle is not damaged.
The fundamental problem here is that the police are very bad about false positives. Flock gives them a ton of data--but that doesn't make it magically perfect. No surprise there was a similar car nearby--there are a lot of similar cars. Flock shows them the similar cars and they pick the closest without any investigation.
> But you can't argue Flock the technology itself, and especially Flock the company, are totally innocent
For the sake of argument, let’s suppose that Flock is 100% evil/guilty/blameworthy in this case. Even in that case, two things are still true:
A) Flock has no authority to arrest anyone B) Flock has no authority over the police
The buck has to stop somewhere. It’s counterproductive to focus on what Flock did, compared to what the police did. And I say that as someone who is not a fan of Flock.
So next time start your first post with that, otherwise you lead us on this wild goose chase only to find that you mostly agree, it's a foundational part of discourse.
Software developers approving AI PRs without reading them: This is the way the world works now. Get with the times.
Police approving AI PRs without reading them: This is the way the world works now. Get with the times.
Cops regularly frame people and get caught only because of cameras that the cops are too stupid/incompetent to disable or avoid. This goes both ways.
> It is like the best student in your classroom tells you 2 + 2 = 5, and you naturally feel compelled to believe him, even there is clear evidence against the claim.
It’s more like normal people don’t know that 97.8% accurate isn’t 100% - despite how good of a score that would be on a test.
Law enforcement is predominantly made up of normal people.
You might see where this is going.
I would say US law enforcement are made up of mostly abnormal people with lower intellegences, higher aggressivness, and a propensity to lie and deceive. They tend to push actual normal people out for not playing ball with their own corruption.
The number one demograph for domestic violence and abuse are cops, they are not just a randomly selected group of people that chanced into law enforcement as a career.
Absolutely, law enforcement in the US is disproportionately not normal people. The system is designed to reject smart people who are not aggressive and have empathy. The system is designed to accept people who will uphold the design of the system.
> The number one demograph for domestic violence and abuse are cops, they are not just a randomly selected group of people that chanced into law enforcement as a career.
Be sure you don’t have the causation backwards - or that it doesn’t flow strongly both ways!
It attracts certain people - and being around that crowd and power pushes some number of people over the line that were near it.
See also: stimulant use, abuse, in the construction industry.
> It is like the best student in your classroom tells you 2 + 2 = 5, and you naturally feel compelled to believe him
Closer analogy: The dumbest student in a class tells you 2 + 2 = 5 and you believe them.
Even more apt analogy: You're the dumbest student in the class, the second-dumbest student tells you 2 + 2 = 5, but you lack the critical thinking skills necessary to know whether that student is smart or not so you just believe them.
While you are technically correct (which we all know from Futurama is “the best kind”), that is neither helpful nor consolation to the affected, and I wish these kinds of comments didn’t dominate the top spot in HN discussions. They’re the “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” of tech.
Yes, the system is broken even before we get to Flock (or whatever tech) but Flock makes it worse. If a bad tool is badly used to cause harm, it’s fair to criticise its existence. You can’t fix police abuse with a snap of the finger, so you need to start but taking away the tools which facilitate it.
If it were your ass which had been thrown in solitary, would you be pleading with your lawyer to “go easy on Flock. Sure, they allowed a major disruption and trauma into my life, but they’re just a tool”?
Then the right fix is to fix the system, e.g. imposing accountability. Removing tools is just a band aid. Why is the tool bad? A tool does what it's designed to do. You can use it properly or improperly. There should be no conflation of regular civilians with supposedly trained government officers.
They can have their tools back after they show they can use them responcibly.
If a kid has shown themselves to be repeatedly irresponsible, when they ask for a circular saw you don't just give it to them and turn away. You make them explain what it is for and ensure they know how to safely use it. And if they start swinging it around wildly in opposition to what you said, you take it away, they are obviously incapable of using it right.
Yes, of course the better fix is to fix the system but one thing at a time. You’re on a giant boat that has left port years ago and a leak just sprung; you should absolutely get back to port and fix the processes that allowed the leak to open but first you have to close it.
If someone released a hammer that when held a certain way would cause your hand to explode and it kept happening over and over, the solution wouldn’t be just to tell people to hold it better, it would also be to recall the tool and fix it so the issue were less likely or impossible to occur. And if it can’t be done, then maybe the hammer shouldn’t be released again.
This “it’s just a tool, the proper solution is to rework civilisation” defence is frankly as tired as it is ignorant. The way you fix the system as a whole is via a lot of small fixes.
Then it seems that you are somehow implying that it takes many years to merely enact and impose real accountability rules. I think it's not a tech problem, or scientific problem, with unknown solution. It's a social/political problem.
I don't it's about an innocent skill issue like you imply (holding a hammer the wrong way). It's an ethical issue of bad actors in the government, together with an accountability issue of the system preventing holding those bad actors to account.
AI cameras are just one tool; there are other tools, too. Where do you draw the line for which tools deserve the removal for your kind of reason? Perhaps degun the police departments because guns also get abused? How do you decide in a principled way that AI cameras are somehow special compared to other tools?
> Then it seems that you are somehow implying that it takes many years to merely enact and impose real accountability rules.
It doesn’t have to, but historically we can observe that the longer something has been entrenched as the norm, the harder it is to change (authoritarians regimes take advantage of this too, by making it appear some things are older than they are). Which is why it’s doubly important to resist when something new with bad consequences is introduced.
> I don't it's about an innocent skill issue like you imply
There was no “skill issue” implication. If anything, the opposite is the point.
> AI cameras are just one tool; there are other tools, too.
This is just whataboutism. Yes, there are several tools which are problematic. The submission is about this one, which is why we’re discussing it. We can’t discuss everything that needs to change in every conversation. That’s called focus.
The people who say there are problems with Flock are perceived as excusing the human police officers.
The people who say there are problems with the human police officers are perceived as excusing Flock.
Who is responsible for the area inside a square, the width or the height? It is not an additive relationship.
The technology is not a neutral thing here. Automation bias¹ exists and is especially problematic in this context.
And if your country happens to have a police force that is historically bad at its job, giving them that power seems like a really stupid idea.
¹: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automation_bias
I very much agree with what you say on automation bias.
Certain technology just has too much potential to be misused / people repeatedly prove they can't use it properly. It also comes with risks of making authoritarian takeover easier.
However, here, it seems they used Flock a bit like a regular ANPR. The actions they took independent of Flock show there are better stories to use to criticise this technology.
Which makes Flock cameras even worse right? It provides false confidence to law enforcement to make decisions that can change someone's life for worse. I don't understand why people hate the NSA spying on them and yet support Flock cameras.
The question is whether Flock does provide false confidence to law enforcement, or whether it provides a media hook to cover the ways in which bad police departments routinely misbehave.
A lot of people coming to this story seem to have the idea that it's unthinkable for someone to spend 13 days in jail when they have clear evidence they're innocent, so there must be some novel explanation for how this could happen. But as any criminal defense lawyer will tell you it's very thinkable. She was ordered to report to jail on a Friday afternoon, the standard stratagem cops use to ensure people they don't like spend at least a weekend behind bars. She was denied bail, even though she made no move to flee in the months where she knew the police thought she did it, because the courts in many places view mandatory pretrial detention as a punishment for presumptively guilty people.
If you give a toddler a gun and it shoots someone, it's the toddler's fault, not the gun's right? But you don't give toddlers guns. You don't say "well toddlers just need to be more careful".
Are toddlers being hired to do government work nowadays, including as police officers?
As far as reasoning abilities goes it would seem so.
Depends on if your use of "toddlers" includes metaphors.
Worse, fully grown incompetent and or malicious people!
The police is of course responsible, but you can't wave the responsibility of flock away when it's inconvenient for them
How is Flock responsible in this case?? There may be cases where Flock is responsible, but I don't see it here.
Flock made the matches (Flock mass surveillance system) and let children (the police) play with them. The result is that citizens get burned.
I don't think ANPR systems should be held responsible for matching number-plates or car models. That's their job, and police have had access to such tools for many many years. It seems relatively clear that Flock was providing a commonplace technology here, that was misused.
Indeed. It’s insane to see these arguments implying the contrary. The institution committing the violence is the one responsible for the outcome.
If a random person walks into a police station and accuses a random stranger of murder, and the police put that stranger in jail based on that alone, the main problem is not the accuser.
But in this case, it wasn't a random person, it was a police-vetted system. Of course the authorities are to blame, but Flock hold a lot of responsibility, too.
It shouldn’t have been vetted then. It’s again the fault of authorities who approved that.
A scientist who uses an LLM to write a paper remains responsible for its contents. And authorities that outsource police work remain responsible for what comes from that.
Sure it shouldn't have been approved, but it was approvied through misleading marketing and a huge and expensive lobbying effort. Flock spends a ton of money convincing cops and legislators that their product works well, is useful and safe. That was always a lie and they have to be held responsible for it.
Would depend entirely how Flock is marketed and represented to the people who buy them and whatever training Flock provides.
True, this isn't about flock and it's not even about outsourcing reasoning.
This is the good old police incompetence that you come across once in a while and shake your head.
Where detectives lock on one angle of a case and completely refuse to entertain any other possible explanations
It is always both. A product that can be abused to this extent is a bad product.
I have never released a single product that has seen people die through common user misuse.
The standards for solutions shouldn't get _lower_ as the stakes get _higher_.
If a private company can puts hundreds of tons of payload into orbit without ever causing someone to accidentally be imprisoned a company that sells cameras on a stick shouldn't either.
of course it's the absence of common sense in the law enforcement but on the other hand this technology is thought to be faultless and it takes resource to put it right
There was a senate hearing a few days ago where this woman testified. Also Benn Jordan and Chad Marlow from the EFF were htere. I was happy hearing them put into words the problems on the national stage.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=klE498xFjOY
Interestingly, conservative Republican sheriff Ross Teeple also spoke against the idea of networked/data-storing ALPRs and Flock in particular at that hearing.
Plenty of individuals regardless of politics resent the loss of privacy and the growing thumb of big brother.
That stuff is politics.
They assembled the avengers.
But seriously, privacy must not become a sided issue. Attacks on privacy are bipartisan, the defense of it would be weakened if it was not bipartisan. Civil liberties protected by the constitution should not be controversial.
If parties agreed on things there'd only be one party.
Man, this just feels like proving RMS right all over again, as usual, when it comes to our rights in the digital world.
[flagged]
What is the age-education surface for Flock support?
Had the 'evidence' been a random dashcam rather than Flock cam, this wouldn't even be a story beyond severe police incompetence.
Flock didn't fail to inspect the car for damage and not find any, flock didn't take 13 days to conduct a cursory review of evidence, flock didn't fail to request cell tower triangulation data and rule out her being in the location of the accident...
I get that people feel their privacy's invaded by being filmed, but this story doesn't appear to have any more to do with Flock than what the officers had for breakfast or the brand of air freshener she had in her car at the time.
A random dashcam does not serve the police someone's identity on a platter. It had to be a stupid "smart" object for such an inexcusable offense to be committed.
With dumb camera footage, the cops looks at the plates, visual indicators, etc. That does not make them more competent or less prone to abuse. But here, Flock's software literally told them this woman was the one they were looking for, despite no evidence supporting this.
This is 100% both on the police and on Flock. Some technologies don't deserve to exist. Facial recognition and ALPR is one of those, because the error rates are too high and the stakes are too high.
> A random dashcam does not serve the police someone's identity on a platter.
Nor does Flock - Flock merely provides a photo and timestamp, which should have been scrutised like any other evidence.
The Flock data showed:
- Car of same make/model nearby at similar time to the accident
- Possible colour match (eyewitnesses gave varying reports on the colour of the perpetrating vehicle). But a match could have been ruled out in minutes had police inspected paint transfer onto the struck vehicle
- A number plate non-match (first three characters were reported to 911 and did not match)
- That's all!
So police didn't do their job (scutinise the evidence), and possibly worse, they may have fabricated evidence (since police claimed Isaacs' vehicle was damaged, but it was in factory-new condition) - which may explain why they're shifting blame to Flock!
That's exactly the same. Suggesting an output is the same as serving a suspect on a platter. I'm sure there's many studies about how humans (except statisticians) are not comfortable with confidence intervals.
A computer software is supposed to deliver reliable, predictable, reproducible results. When it does not every now and then, it's a bug. When your entire system is built in "recognition" and "confidence" and leads to wrongful arrests, it's not a bug. You are just not making computer science. You are making a power abuse machine.
It just enables incompetence. If they were forced to do actual police work they would have probably used their policeman brains.
While using one's brain has never been 'the thing', it's positively unfashionable nowadays.
Except of course the entire reason the police picked her in specific is because of information flock gave them.
Could they have, you know, double checked it? Yes, obviously. But they didn't.
I agree that this story is more about the incredible incompetence of the police involved than flock attempting to record everyone and everything, but flock giving the police an excuse to stop looking and arrest an innocent is by no means irrelevant.
Had a random person submitted a pic taken on their phone of a vehicle in the same location the Flock cam did, police would ask:
- Does anything connect this vehicle to the accident?
- Did it look damaged; as though it had been in a crash?
- Did it look like it was fleeing or driving erratically?
- Was there anything suspicious about the vehicle or the driver?
Police would have deemed the photo irrelevant and moved on. But that didn't happen in this case.
Their failure to do so doesn't have to do with source of the image (Flock, shop CCTV, dashcam), but with their inexplicable lack of rigour.
I would say part of it could be on flock depending on how flock displays information and details in responce to a query. Simply flagging a photo for review, no. But if it was like "this single person matches your search parameters exactly and here is their name, address, and current location", which could heavily imply guilt through overconfident displays of information.
At no point does a cop have to look at the photo(s), the timestamps, confirm the plate, see if the person who owns the car is driving it, or see the dozens of other cars in that area at the time that should also be of potential interest. They enter the query and get a single answer so obviously accept it as likely perpetrator.
The lack of rigor doesn't seem "inexplicable" to me- the lack of rigor seems fairly well described in the comment you're replying to.
Can you give an account of the lack of rigor, or is it some kind of holy mystery?
The police should have thought “okay a car was seen within several miles of an accident - so what?”
Their conclusion (after 5 minutes) would have been (obviously) that there’s not so much as a strand of chewing gum connecting the car to the accident, or making it stand out from dozens of others, and they’d promptly get back to searching for the car that actually was involved.
Yeah, I agree that is what usually would or should happen.
But the question is why it didn't happen. Because that is not what happened.
The answer is that it's flock, and that's the point you're "inexplicably" ignoring.
It's pretty clear that flock is presented as reliable evidence to the people acting on it.
Yeah, if things were different, people would react differently.
> Regardless, the true takeaway of Isaacs’ experience is that ALPR technology, whether it’s from Flock or any of the other competitors in this space providing the same functionality (Axon, etc), is dangerous not only because it is so easily abused by police (or even by hackers) to invade the privacy and liberty of citizens, but also because it enables a lazy police department to outsource basic critical thinking to machines and then take action based on a single data point to ruin a person’s life.
The accusation that some machine made any decision here goes beyond the reporting in the article. It seems concocted to raise AI alarm. All we have is that it supplied accurate data that police then abused. That isn't in the vicinity of "outsource[d] basic critical thinking to machines".
I want such general government surveillance banned, but the machines in this story had no more volition than a breathalyzer.
The machines matter, because we know how human behavior works. We know that if you give humans an automated tool that works most of the time, they get lazy, to the point where they make more mistakes than if they had no automation at all.
Flock isn’t an automated tool though; you don’t give it a crime, and it gives back an automated package saying “this is who the criminal is”.
As far as I know, it lets law enforcement query for things against the data. Can be specific (like a license plate) or more general (like a dark colored mid-sized SUV around <location> at <time>).
To get where this story is at, cops here must have done the latter, and taken the first name off the top of the pile and patted themselves on the back, and then waited 7 months, and went and arrested her. Unless there’s an explanation for a 7 month delay, it seems designed to allow defensive evidence to spoil.
There isn’t an uncanny-valley of automation here. There is just lazy, grossly-incompetent, bad-faith, and malicious cops/investigators.
> Flock isn’t an automated tool though; you don’t give it a crime, and it gives back an automated package saying “this is who the criminal is”.
Please tell the police that, then, under penalty of being blacklisted if they ever violate it. They're the ones treating it as such.
I think what we're seeing is that flock is presented to police as a reliable technology that can be trusted for this sort of thing. If a random person had snapped a picture they would have questioned it.
But they didn't question the quality of the evidence. And there is a reason for that.
This should be emphasized more. Regardless of how technology could be used, we (should be) are responsible for how it is likely to be used.
Guns can be used for all sorts of things. A handgun in a house is likely to be used for murder/suicide.
> A handgun in a house is likely to be used for murder/suicide.
On an article about people who did no research to actually prove out their assumptions, this is perhaps the most ironic comment to be chastising them.
The irony of someone who doesn't know the facts but has strong beliefs replying to me, exactly like the article writer, is, well, a strong example of how hard it is to make progress when so many people have a vested interest in not moving.
I do know "the facts". The fact is that the vast majority of handguns are never used in a suicide or murder. Ergo the average handgun is not "likely" to be involved in one.
The statistic you are reaching for but misunderstanding, is that they are more likely to be used in a suicide or murder than in home defense against an intruder.
A personally-owned handgun is statistically most likely to simply never be used, or only used at a range. The number of personally-owned firearms that are ever involved in a murder or suicide is literally a fraction of a percentage.
But go off!
No, the fact I was "reaching for" was that they increase the number of occurrences.
More guns in houses, more murder/suicides.
I think guns are as cool as the next guy but I'm willing to maybe consider my personal enjoyment from playing with a gun isn't worth the cost to society.
"A handgun in a house" is statistically extremely unlikely to be "used for murder/suicide."
It increases the incidences of both of those things happening compared to no gun.
The total number is relatively small, but so are deaths from measles. Should we not decrease them where we can?
Piles of evidence that humans tend to treat AI as infallible, just like the police did here. They didn't use this as a point for further investigation, they saw the match and said "let's go get her" without so much as looking at the damaged vehicle for paint transfer, which should be remedial-level police instruction.
Modern AI was and is a mistake. It's only going to get worst before it gets better.
Unfortunately, our current government in the US is hard AI-pilled (oh, sorry, "super-intelligence-pilled"). They use it every day to present propaganda to the public via social media.
Ban AI use in all branches of government, and in policing. At least until there are ethical standards put in place that are very heavily punished when violated.
Also, state and federal level politicians should be prohibited from using social media in anything other than a purely personal basis without mention of political office or without speaking on the topic of politics. Want to post cool pictures of your family? Go for it. Speaking to your constituency? Must be strongly vetted for ethical violations, and punishable by immediate removal from office and a 10-year blacklist.
Volition has nothing to do with it. A breathalyser doesn't point to a person and say this is the likely drunk, so that comparison is fatuous. These identification systems do point the finger.
Police abusing the law? Never.
the problem here appears to be that police officers are generally of average or below average intelligence. combined with the fact that they face no consequences for incompetence, you have the perfect mixture for nonsense like this happening.
I expect the solution they will settle on is to form a department for interacting with technology like this, who understand its outputs are not edicts.
you can't really expect any meaningful police reforms (such as liability and insurance) because anyone who is in any position to enact them is perfectly fine with dumb muscle that holds a monopoly on violence and is deferential to them. in fact the public disliking the police is an ideal outcome for those decision makers as it gives them more leverage over the police.
The problem is that they're treating the output of the AI algorithm as 100% fact. Countless examples of Flock matching incorrectly or police otherwise using the match found by Flock as "here's who to go arrest" and not "here's a starting point for further investigation".
Partial matches, correct matches but no investigation into things like paint transfer, it's happened way too many times (hint: one is too many times for things that can incarcerate people).
It's like they're speedrunning unworthiness to hold the monopoly on violence. This is how you get riots and revolutions. Sadly, today's Western world is complicit and complacent. Nobody who is pro-surveillance state will change their mind until it affects them or someone close to them.
> "Police didn't care that Lindsey Isaacs' car was the wrong color, and wasn't damaged. They still arrested her because of Flock data."
Cue 20 minute 2020 short film Please Hold https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Please_Hold_(2020_film)
Wait, was she not arraigned for 13 days? The article makes it sound like it wasn’t until 13 days after the arrest, and her lawyer presented evidence, that she was let out. That… that can’t be right. It varies from state to state, but generally you are required to be arraigned within 24-72 hours of arrest. And then they are required to give you bond (a no bond hold can happen but is very rare and I don’t think any jurisdiction allows that outside of murder).
Was she just given an extremely high bond she couldn’t afford? Not that that’s much better than no bond at all, but I’d really like to understand the details here.
She was never arraigned. The arrest was made on a no‐bond warrant claiming she was a danger to the community, since the incident being investigated was a hit‐and‐run resulting in three deaths. This necessitated a bond hearing to determine whether enough evidence existed to detain her pre‐trial. Her lawyer submitted forty photos of her completely undamaged vehicle, but the testimony of the experts was that her car showed signs of collision and subsequent coverup, and the judge ruled that the prosecution had met the necessary burden for detention. However, what her lawyer presented in the hearing led the prosecution to reinvestigate the collision with a team of state investigators instead of regional investigators, which led to reevaluation of the 911 calls and witnesses with a more accurate description of the car.
(Source: around 13:00 in this interview with her lawyer, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6F_0iIaXGqA)
At this point, Flock (and similar services) should be considered agents of the state, given the rates at which police are using them as such.
When is someone gonna spin up a predictive AI that attempts to tell if someone is going to commit a crime, and sells that to PDs, just so we can really dive headfirst into the Minority Report.
The key thing she ought to have done was not answer the door, or given any sign she was there. She should have rung an experienced criminal attorney immediately, and moved to an undisclosed location that wasn't a hotel, with a new cell phone, and let her lawyer negotiate with the police to discover what their laziness has led them to believe.
Is that how it works in the US?
When the police come and want to arrest you for triple manslaughter you just don’t open the door, and they shrug and you can let a third party “negotiate” with them for you?
In the US you should not interact with police at all for any reason unless you are forced to. They have essencially immunity from any liabilty and can legally lie and deceive people, while civilians can be punished for even an accidental lie. They also have a profit motive to arrest people and require no legal knowledge.
US cops can and do regularly get fet cleared for abuses because "I didn't know I wasn't suppose to violate their rights!" Meanwhile for civilians "ignorance is no excuse for breaking the law."
A search warrant is not the same as an arrest warrant. If you have a lawyer they can negotiate your surrender into custody at an appropriate time for a prompt appearance before a judge for a bail hearing (e.g. Tuesday morning, not Friday afternoon). Having an attorney beforehand short circuits a lot of delay while you try to find one and arrange for a bail surety.
Her lawyer did in fact negotiate her surrender into custody after the arrest warrant was issued, and there was a bail hearing, but the judge ruled against her, which is why she was held with no bond.
She (correctly) never spoke to the police, other than an initial denial when they seized her car, and was never Mirandized or interrogated. By the time they knocked on her door (reportedly at 3AM), her car had already been seized since she lived in an apartment complex with an outdoor parking lot. But she wasn’t arrested until months later.
it could have been a so called no knock warrant where police just ram your house door and enter your house. but what I don't understand is that it took from the impounding of the car to the incarceration of her seven months I would have assumed that she lawyered up to get the car back and deny the allegations
What I gather from hearing her lawyer talk about it is that the prosecution’s case seemed (and was) weak, so the lawyer counseled her to wait a few months to see if the case would be dropped. Then when nothing happened, they filed a writ of replevin to get her car back. Immediately afterward the arrest warrant was issued and she had to surrender herself to the police.
Video about the same thing
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkUJbJCFjN8
> Jezebel
Well the next step obviously is to get in touch with the lodge these police officers belong to, talk to the grandmaster and convince him to organize a conciliation night with you as a guest. When you leave, whisper in the ear of the officer in charge of your case "I'm hungry, and I only use pressure cookers. If you behave I'll invite you to the diner".
Police Union. Leave the illuminati out of this...we're enjoying the show, too.
Is anyone familiar enough with the legal aspects of this case to have an informed opinion about how much she is likely to get in a settlement?
Police departments are very hard to sue when they acted on 'honest' confidence in incorrect beliefs. Incompetence is rarely punished.
Not a lawyer but I have some knowledge of criminal law in general. There are a lot of details left out, but I do think she is likely to get a decent settlement. Though the Flock/AI part of it isn’t really the reason.
So, when you get arrested, you are required to be arraigned by a judge, and that judge has to find probable cause for arrest. That requires the prosecution to present evidence to the judge that a crime was committed and you probably did it. It’s a very low standard of proof, but it does have to happen. And then you are required to get bail, outside of very extreme cases. It depends on the jurisdiction, but all of that has to happen relatively quickly after arrest, like 24-72 hours. If she didn’t get bail until 13 days after the arrest, that’s a pretty cut and dry civil rights violation. If they didn’t get a probable cause determination in that time period, that’s a civil rights violation (unless they got an arrest warrant prior, which they might have in this case).
If she did get bail within a couple days, but it was just so much she couldn’t afford it, then it gets murkier. Because at that point thats not the police or the prosecutor, that’s the judge. Similarly, if the prosecutor presented the evidence they had to a judge for a probable cause determination (or the arrest warrant) and the judge granted it, that’s on the judge. You would have to show the prosecutor and/or police lied or presented inaccurate information in court. If not… at that point you have two independent branches of government screwing up.
People don't like to hear this, but we're going to need to become technologically literate as a society. Your local bread shop is going to need to use facebook. Your dentist is going to have to learn to use the latest x-ray machine, not the one they still have from 1992. And yes, your police are going to have to know that ALPR cameras aren't magical criminal identification devices.
Why? The police still get paychecks and nothing bad will happen to them if they don't understand the technology.
That just ignores knock-on effects.
"using facebook", unironically presented as evidence of "technologically literate" is so funny
And yet plenty of businesses languish because they can't do so.
> “…Isaacs only managed to be released “when her attorney was able to present photos to the judge of her possessed vehicle–which, contrary to the claims of the troopers who possessed it, showed no damage.””
Fucking Florida
So now restore her life to state before arrest.
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I had no idea that cameras were walking the streets and arresting people in America. Only the police should be able to do that. They are clearly far more competent. Oh wait-I just read the article...
and yet, without the camera this woman would not have been arrested.
The problem is the police-camera system, of which the camera is an instrumental component
> Police didn't care that Lindsey Isaacs' car was the wrong color, and wasn't damaged. They still arrested her because of Flock data.
This is literally the first sentence of the article.
You can dislike public surveillance, but statements like "Flock camera data put this woman in jail for 13 days" blatantly ignores the the fact that Flock didn't put anyone in jail, a bunch of cops who very clearly knew that it wasn't her.
> The Flock camera, meanwhile, had recorded Isaacs’ car and its license plate several miles away from the site of the accident, sometime around the time of the incident.
Blaming a tool, when the cops in question are clearly willing to grasp to whatever piece of "evidence" makes their job "easier" is a giant cop-out and excuse for the people who are abusing it.
Any piece of evidence requires some form of critical examination; that is what law enforcement's job is. If you're just going to go with the first theory/piece-of-evidence they find.... they're not doing their job (and violating peoples constitutional rights through sheer laziness).
That’s all true. But we’ve known police and prosecutors are like this forever. No need to give them tools to be even lazier and that make it easier for them to abuse us.
Thats what always been portrayed in films and stories for so long.Police never solved cases. There were detectives involved specialist who solves crime. While only job of police is to arrest any suspicious person, take them to station, then to court, then to jail. Essentially they are just drives carrying criminals. The very first loose evidence and suspect, that it arrest them question them, torture, if officer is lucky, that person is the criminal or one who just accepts blame. All their effort is solving as fast as they can to maintain record and stars on their shoulder
Right. It's not even clear to me what the alternative critical position is here (for gp)? At the end of the day, the company is not putting you in jail, the cops who do are simply their customers.
"Flock is bad" metonymizes the situation, but doesn't let anyone off the hook.
Multiple things can be bad at the same time and cops have a demonstrated record of failures such that add a system like flock is most likely going to lead to more injustice, not less.
Absolutely not all cops and prosecutors, or even the majority of them, are this lazy. Every tool is a tool that lets them "be event lazier" and make it "easier for them to abuse us". Removing any tool that let bad-actors be lazy is not an alternative for removing the bad-actor themselves.
This situation the equivalent of an eye-witness saying "Ya, I think it might have been this person I know, Tom!" and a cop/prosecutor taking that at face value and arresting Tom (and the system that allowed that to happen).
The people who make decisions and take action so (grossly) negligently need to be held accountable and face consequences. Blaming the tool (whatever tool it is) is giving the people who have the actual responsibility an escape hatch to avoid accountability.
As the child of a public defender who has heard some STORIES: they absolutely are not doing the work. Not because of some inherent trait, but because they are all (prosecutors and defenders) assigned a workload that forces shortcuts and allows negligence with no chance of consequence.
All public defenders and most prosecutors are happy to admit anonymously that the justice system is 90% gears grinding people. They ALL know an innocent person that pled guilty to end the grinding. Judges too. You can find plenty of court videos on YouTube of people pleading guilty while saying they didn’t do it but need to get on with their life. The judge will explain to them that they can’t accept a guilty plea from someone who claims innocence, and the defendant then folds. Everyone in the room knows that there is more to the story, but no one is willing to do the work.
They do need to be held accountable, and their access to systems like this needs to be limited and/or stopped.
If punishing bad actors alone was enough we wouldn't have a ton of 4th amendment case law.
You'd think with tech being a force multiplier and all it'd be real easy for agencies to shed the supposed few and far between 'bad apples'. They should be able to do more with less bodies, with flock and other tech helping them, right? It seems to me the entire system failed this woman and waiving it away as a single lazy cop gives the system a pass.
There is no real mechanism for holding them accountable and the consequences of these tools include death (it only takes one perceived wrong move for officers thinking they've bagged a felon to ventilate you. Hell not even that, see that officer who mag dumped his own car after he mistook an acorn for a gunshot.) This lady is quite lucky that it was only 13 days, if she had a career that's probably hosed but it might not be totally life ruining if she has a strong support system.
> , if she had a career that's probably hosed
Why? She hasn't committed a crime so why should her career be damaged?
Lazy, I didn't know. Hard to define.
Corrupt, arrogant, bigoted, or with a superiority complex? Way more than half.
But whats the difference on the ground here? Are we meant to take the transitive property here if you will and say there is actually nothing wrong with the Flock company itself and what it enables?
I think there's a combination of selection bias and survivorship bias with bad cops.
When it is made pretty clear that as a cop you won't face consequences for your malicious and/or incompetent actions, you're going to select for people who find that very appealing. Similarly, the people who don't like that kind of system might leave, allowing for a reinforcement the malicious and/or incompetent behavior.
Sorry, when you're in a position of such power (and the ability to wield deadly force backed by the government is as powerful as you get), you don't get to be ambivalent about the misdeeds of your coworkers.
Even if the system is only 5% bad, that's too damn much.
I mean, have you seen what ICE is doing these days? And how many local agencies are happily deputizing their officers to do that same work?
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From the same article : “what else would you call the account of a woman who was arrested by incompetent police based on nothing more than a single Flock camera piece of data, and held in jail for 13 days”
No one is letting cops off the hook.
When the headline of the article is explicitly blaming Flock, and not the cop/DA/judge who never even looked at the evidence available, it is 100%, whether on purpose or not, letting/helping the cops point the finger at another party.
The headline is what 99% of people read, and remember.
I prefer to discuss the actual material. If you want discuss what you believe other people believe about just a headline, let’s do it somewhere other than a thread discussing content specifically from the article.
What a weird thing to say. The headline is supposed to be the takeaway of the material. People are certainly allowed to discuss an article's choice of headline (which is what people remember), and should give no care to you telling them to go elsewhere.
I didn’t say that discussions about headlines aren’t allowed.
I pointed out that this thread is a discussion about the content of the article, and I prefer to discuss content in a discussion about content. I would also point out that the argument about the content of the headline is just a repeat of the argument I was rebutting. It added absolutely nothing to the discussion.
People with any knowledge of publishing know that the headline writer and the article writer are two different people with two different goals. It doesn’t make sense to use a headline written for one purpose by one author to critique the content of an article by a different author.
As to the assertion that a headline is “what people remember”, that has never been my experience. Plenty of people have asked me if I have read the piece in x publication about y topic. No one has ever asked me if I read the article headlined z. The headline is so inconsequential that many reputable publications will use multiple headlines for the same article depending on when and where it is seen.
If you weren’t aware of this, apologies for being so direct. Now you know. Stop remembering only the headlines. The article is the content, not the headline.
It's both.
There will always be cops willing to misuse whatever they have access to.
Part of it is holding cops accountable in these situations. Part of it is limiting or stopping the use of these systems so cops don't have as many opportunities to abuse them.
The point is that if the flock surveillance data hadn't existed in the first place, we wouldn't be in this situation. Everybody knows police will abuse this kind of surveillance technology, regardless of how accurate it is.
> The point is that if the flock surveillance data hadn't existed in the first place, we wouldn't be in this situation.
Yeah. After all, the police are known for never arresting people based solely on very tenuous and easily disproved evidence. This damn flock surveillance data!
> Everybody knows police will abuse this kind of surveillance technology
Only here that is literally not the case. There was a real crime and the surveillance technology provided the relevant evidence.
It proved that Isaacs’s car was at a particular location at 9:51 p.m... about three miles from the crash scene. It did not prove that her car was the crash vehicle, that she was at the crash, or that she was the driver who caused it. did you bother to read teh fucking article?
Would these sorts of things happen more often with or without the technology?
> critical examination; that is what law enforcement's job is
Critical examination is the judiciary's job, not the police's. Jordan v. City of New London established that police departments can and do deny employment to prospective officers who possess excessive cognitive ability.