Comment by tptacek

We knew this going in with Flock: that with full sharing to Flock's network of law enforcement agencies, we'd be trusting our data to every one of tens of thousands of tiny, often completely unaccountable police departments around the country, many of whom wouldn't give the slightest possible fuck about whether they were contravening our own department's general orders. That's why we disabled sharing, first to any out-of-state departments, and then altogether; PDs that wanted data from us could simply call us up on the phone like human beings.

It was implied, both by our department and, more vaguely, by Flock, that sharing was reciprocal: if we didn't enable it, other departments wouldn't share with us. That's false; not only is it false, but apparently, to my understanding, Flock has (or had?) an offering for PDs to get access to the data without even hosting cameras of their own.

That obviously leaves Flock's own attestations of client data separation, and I get the cynicism there too, but basically every municipality in the country relies on those same kinds of attestations from a myriad of vendors, and unlike Flock those vendors have basically nothing to lose (since nobody is paying attention to them).

I think you can reasonably go either way on all this stuff. But you can't run these stacks in their default configuration with their default sharing and without special-purpose ordinances and general ordinances governing them.

I write this mostly to encourage people who have strong opinions about this stuff to get engaged locally. I did, I'm not particularly good at it (I'm a loud message board nerd), and I got what I believe to be the only ALPR General Order in Chicagoland written and what I know to be the only ACLU CCOPS ordinance in Illinois passed.