Comment by schlap
5 hours ago
These companies build this tech in SF and Seattle, cities with some of the gnarliest public safety problems in the country, then turn around and sell it to smaller towns where it does more harm than good.
Most places in America don't have problems that surveillance solves. They have problems they already know about and won't act on. Cameras don't fix homelessness or addiction or underfunded services. They just make life harder for regular people.
But that's the whole appeal for bureaucrats. Buying a product looks like doing something without having to do any of the actual work.
"Cameras don't fix homelessness or addiction or underfunded services. They just make life harder for regular people."
In what way do cameras make life harder for regular people? If anything rampant crime (and progressive legal systems' unwillingness to lock up repeat offenders for a long time or at all) makes life much harder for regular people than a camera just sitting there.
A few months ago a woman was harassed over a crime she did not commit, by a police officer using her vehicle driving in a large general area as proof she committed the crime. Officer demanded she admit to a crime she did not commit.
Additionally, the surveillance apparatus enables parallel reconstruction. When law enforcement gathers evidence via illegal means, they can then use the drag net to find cause to detain/search unrelated to the original crime, in order to have cover to gather evidence they illegally gathered prior, aka a loophole for civil rights.
By mis-identifying them, leading to 5 months of jail time for a person who has done nothing other than be in public. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/30/us/north-dakota-facial-re...
Biased policing means these systems are used to target minorities, activists, and people with "controversial" beliefs: https://www.aclu.org/issues/national-security/discriminatory...
Surveillance tech can alter peoples behavior. I know I'm personally more stressed when I know I'm being filmed, even if I'm doing nothing wrong.
https://academic.oup.com/nc/article/2024/1/niae039/7920510?l...
Untrue at a population level, just compare anxiety disorders and self-reported anxiety between USA and China.
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"Police used AI facial recognition to arrest a Tennessee woman for crimes committed in a state she says she’s never visited": https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/29/us/angela-lipps-ai-facial-rec...
The plural of anecdote is not data
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There's zero proof anywhere that these devices do anything about crimes. How could they? A camera can't lock someone up.
They provide law enforcement timely information about the location of wanted (e.g., stolen) vehicles. Law enforcement can act on that information. If law enforcement does not have that information, it cannot act on it.
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1) Surveillance needs to be reviewed. Even if reviewed by AI, eventually that reviewed work needs to be reviewed by a human if we're going to maintain the fiction / friction of "human in the loop". The "hits" will include false positives, unless the system is overtuned so that it rarely kicks an event.
1a) Review will take time / resources which could be spent on human policing, harming the community.
1b) Some jurisdictions may prefer "broken windows as policy", the notion that they can construct a "reasonable suspicion", given enough garbage (some of it outright garbage, the point being there is so much of it nobody cares; don't need to do an accurate drug test until trial, right?).
2) False surveillance hits will make it through human review and result in injury to innocent humans.
3) Police forces already lack the money / manpower to investigate potential crimes.
4) Police forces already "prioritize" other matters than the mentally ill setting their houses on fire or releasing plagues of rabbits into their neighborhoods (actual things that have happened to me!).
feels somewhat dystopian, no? the big brother is watching everywhere you go. no way this can go tits up
I think this echoes very true in a lot of places, not just in the US. Here in the UK I'm pretty sure the police/the state more broadly know perfectly well who is doing a lot of the low level quality-of-life crime in most areas, but for structural reasons either can't or won't bother acting in many instances. Investigative work has never been easier: oftentimes there's multiple cctv angles of offences being committed, endless digital records, etc., but unless something can be done with this information in the real world, it's useless and actually takes resources away from other areas of public services.
Increasing the quality of the panopticon has all the downsides we talk about regularly on HN, and if you can't do anything useful for society with the data, it only ends up hurting people.
> They just make life harder for regular people.
"Making life harder for people [in the other tribe]" has become a core platform for a great many politicians. There's growing movement advocating that one of the major purposes of government is to grief people you don't like. Looked at through that lens, blanketing small towns with these things, with a plan to use them against "Those People," makes complete sense.
> These companies build this tech in SF and Seattle, cities with some of the gnarliest public safety problems in the country
I live just outside Seattle. I worked for Flock.
Flock is a company based in Atlanta GA.
Also worth pointing out that Seattle and SF - despite their portrayal in the media - aren’t particularly violent places. Their violent crime rates are less than half the leading cities.
Both Seattle and SF have lower violent crime rates than Salt Lake City.
N.b. property crime is different and is a much less reliable metric. Both cities are ranked higher for property crime, but still below the famously dangerous Salt Lake City.
Axon, on the other hand, does have a decent sized Seattle presence.
Agreed. I live in a city that's top 5% of safest cities in CA and these cameras have sprouted up everywhere. I reached out to my cities representative about it and he ignored my outreach (nice thing about instagram - that "read" indicator!). The most blatant is one that just points into the Home Depot parking lot. I don't see them at target.
It's gross but I think the cohort of America that watches Fox News all day probably loves these things because they've been brainwashed with crime reports that are disproportionate from reality.
I believe home depot themselves put up these cameras.
Cringe. I'll try to shop at other hardware stores going forward, thanks.
> But that's the whole appeal for bureaucrats.
I don't think it's the bureaucrats. You should hear the Flock CEO talk. They have made it very public that their direct intent is to influence government policy in sweeping and total fashion to enable their service to be the mass surveillance tool of the near future. They sincerely believe that people will look back on them as the saviours of mankind.
> These companies build this tech in SF and Seattle
Flock's headquarters and largest offices are in Atlanta. They also have an office in Boston.
Ring's headquarters were in Santa Monica until post-acquisition they moved to Hawthorne, CA.
Arlo's offices are in Carlsbad and San Jose. Ok, finally an office in the Bay Area (one of two main offices), but still not San Francisco.