Comment by JumpCrisscross
3 months ago
Could someone who’s been successful at getting these banned at the local level speak to how they did it?
(We’ve recently had some high-profile political fundraisers in my town. Our state’s FOIA is halfway powerful, and a few of us were considering publishing maps of the routes they and they security details took, to illustrate how these products compromise our safety. But that strikes me as more of a fun publicity stunt than anything that would force the county.)
I have been able to get them deactivated in two cities. They have not yet been physically removed but that is looking like a likely near-term outcome.
Flock has been a "side project" that's been eating about as many hours as a part-time job since late June. I have spoken at city council meetings in two cities, met individually with city councilors, met with a chief of police, presented to city councilors in Portland, am in almost daily conversations with ACLU Oregon, have received legal advice from EFF, done numerous media interviews, and I have an upcoming presentation to the state Senate Judiciary Committee. I may also be one of the reasons that Ron Wyden's office investigated Flock more carefully over the Summer and recently released a letter suggesting that cities terminate their relationship with the company.
All of which is to say I've been in it for a while now and have had some wins.
Good and bad news: it's a lot easier to fight it now than it was in June, but it's still going to take more effort than you probably imagine.
You'll need a team. I'm one member of a community working group. We have a core group of about a half-dozen active organizers. We have filed (and paid thousands in fees for) tons of public records requests, done a lot of community organizing and outreach, built partnerships with adjacent activist organizations, and done original technical research.
There are a couple of different strategies to pursue that can kick these things out of a community. My recommendation is to find the one that you like best, and find other people that like other ones, and pursue them in parallel.
Depending on your local police department, you may find them to be surprisingly cooperative, or you may find that they dig in and start putting in an equal amount of effort to block yours. I've had both. Odds are that your city councilors are not aware at all of what Flock is or how it works, so your first step is to raise awareness. I strongly recommend starting with an approach that makes you seem like a reasonable, honest, and reliable member of your community.
I realize this comment isn't super helpful by itself. I'm a bit distracted at the moment and I don't think I could figure out how to write a helpful, comprehensive, and yet concise comment here on this. I need to put together an info packet for people that want to get efforts like this one started in their own community. In the meanwhile, you should be able to email contact@eyesoffeugene.org and I'm happy to provide advice and assistance to anyone that wants to take this up in their city.
Would you be open to consulting for a group that's trying to do the same in west Wyoming?
> There are a couple of different strategies to pursue that can kick these things out of a community
Would love to hear more about these, even if it's just a wall of links or brief thoughts.
> Would you be open to consulting for a group that's trying to do the same in west Wyoming?
Absolutely!
Re: Strategies
- Public records requests (aka FOIAs, though FOIA is technically for federal stuff): this has been a big one for us. File a request for the contract, a request for the locations, a request for communications, requests for the network audit, and more. PRRs take practice, but I can put you in touch with someone that's become an expert at them. Some requests may come with price tags attached and in some cases they can be expensive. Usually that means either the agency is fighting you or something in the request needs to be reworded.
- Comms: set up a site (go with something quick and easy for multiple people to use), we've had good luck setting up a community chat on Signal (now with almost 100 participants). I've spent a pile of hours just assembling different slide decks that digest lots of Flock info into smaller bits for people learning about it for the first time.
- Show up: things got rolling here when a couple of people used the public comment period at local city council meetings. Local media often monitor city council meetings, and if you're a new face and you're saying something interesting, there may be a brief interview afterward.
- Gather intelligence: we've gotten to know our local politicians pretty well. You'll want to keep some notes on where everyone stands on it, who can be moved, who prefers individual meetings, talking points they may be responsive to.
- Engage with other local activist groups. Flock s a problem that affects people with lots of different political opinions.
- Try meeting with your local police department chief and just initiate a conversation about it. They may not be as pro-Flock as you'd expect. You at least want to figure out where they stand on it and let them see you as not a direct opponent from the get-go.
- Make contact with your local chapter of the ACLU. In our case, they've filed a lawsuit on our behalf over a public records request that the city refused to fulfill and the county DA denied on appeal.
- Write lots of emails to local officials, offer to meet them for coffee. They can be hard to reach initially, but once you get that initial meeting, if it goes well, they know who you are and they'll answer your texts. We are now having frequent text chats with city councilors and police commissioners and even state legislators.
This is all just off the top of my head real quick, I am probably forgetting at least one important strategy. But each of these can take a lot of time and each benefits from different skill sets, so that's where having a small group of people is really helpful.
Rather than trying to set up a hierarchical, official organization, we decided early on to just run as an ad-hoc informal "working group", and each of us would just pick up whatever tasks we were most interested in. That has worked out really well.
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I've written about how we did it in Oak Park, IL:
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45506690
Cards on the table that I was not a full-throated supporter of cancelling our Flock contract, for complicated reasons, but past that I'll take a fair bit of credit for the harm-reduction work we did, which ultimately created the procedural tracks we used to kill the contract.
Short answer for how we did it: message board nerding.
You're interested in getting the cameras taken down in a Wyoming muni. One advantage we had in Oak Park that you might not in WY is that our cost function priced bogus stops of Black drivers very high. So, if I was strategizing killing cameras in a major metro suburb, my strategy would be:
(1) Create procedural rails to collect your own transparency data on stops.
(2) Do the analysis to trace "real" stops to crimes meaningful to your muni (for us: enforcing failure-to-appear warrants for neighboring suburbs was not high-value work for OPPD, so many of the "legit" stops had negative value).
(3) You'll be left with some subset of real crimes cameras were involved with, and in only a subset of those will the cameras have been meaningful.
One thing that complicates Flock deployments in Illinois is that they depend on the ISP LEADS database as their hotlist of stolen vehicles, and LEADS is not maintained well enough to use as a real-time information source (or even a week-by-week granular source), so we had a bunch of bogus stops.
A super important thing I think everybody should know about Flock cameras:
You do not in fact need to be enrolled in Flock's sharing system to get data from neighboring muni cameras. In fact, I think Flock even has a product you can buy that just gives you access to sharing data without even owning cameras.
Since "we need to share our data to get access to other muni's data" is the only reason to have sharing enabled on these things, it should be pretty easy, as a political lift, to turn sharing off.
Why would a stop for an outstanding warrant have negative value for your community? If word got out that OPPD will come down hard on anyone with warrants, perhaps people with warrants would stay away from your community. I'm not sure I see the downside; deterrence is a good thing.
Analogy: criminals know Target stores have a policy to prosecute all shoplifters, so when there was still a shoplifting subreddit that fact would be regularly trotted out and criminals were warned by their peers (the best kind of testimonial) to stay away. I would love it if my neighborhood had that reputation.
A failure to appear warrant is generally someone not showing up to court to pay a traffic ticket. It's essentially municipal debt collection work. I'm not saying it's bad to catch people with outstanding warrants; i'm saying that OPPD curbing a car and making an arrest has a simple logistical cost, and that cost swamps the minuscule value of helping a neighboring suburb collect ticket revenue.
Our police have real work to do. If we had a special magic beepy device in all the police cruisers that lit up when someone with an outstanding warrant drove past, we would not prioritize that enforcement work to the exclusion of the real work. But since OPPD doesn't know that they're going to end up burning 5 hours on a failure-to-appear warrant when they curb a car on a Flock alert, that's what Flock essentially had us doing.
I honestly think this argument is probably pretty portable to a lot of different municipalities. It's not a function of anything Flock itself deliberately does, but rather a simple function of pretextual or preemptive stops on cars: you are probably going to end up making a whole bunch of failure-to-appear arrests. And I think in pretty much every community where killing camera contracts is on the table, failure-to-appear enforcement will be perceived as net-negative, a distraction from preventing serious crime.
The thing I like about this argument is that it's insensitive to people's priors about law enforcement. Whether or not you like your PD (I very much like OPPD), this argument should have weight!
The key observation here, again, is that any arrest has a very high fixed cost.
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This is the most serious effort I've seen:
https://ij.org/press-release/judge-rules-lawsuit-challenging...
Not exactly trying to get new legislation passed but working within the courts to set some boundaries.
This article might point to a way: https://neuburger.substack.com/p/cities-panic-over-having-to...
request every shot taken outside of police depts and compile a list of private plate numbers for all the cops, watch shit change hella fast
Why do you think this would work? First, even where Flock data is FOIA-able, raw camera feed data probably isn't ("probably" because I don't know the law in your state, just Illinois). Second, what do you think you'd find?