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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
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 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.
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.
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
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 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.
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!
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
> “…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.””
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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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.
> 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.
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> 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.
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.
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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?
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Would depend entirely how Flock is marketed and represented to the people who buy them and whatever training Flock provides.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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
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
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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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Man, this just feels like proving RMS right all over again, as usual, when it comes to our rights in the digital world.
We must not listen to anything RMS said because he ate his toenail hair and creeped on women.
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!
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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.
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It's pretty clear that flock is presented as reliable evidence to the people acting on it.
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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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.
(Source: around 13:00 in this interview with her lawyer, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6F_0iIaXGqA)
> "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)
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?
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.
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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.
> 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.
Video about the same thing
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkUJbJCFjN8
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?
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.
Police departments are very hard to sue when they acted on 'honest' confidence in incorrect beliefs. Incompetence is rarely punished.
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.
> “…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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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.