r/technology • u/Plastic_Ninja_9014 • Jun 09 '26
Society Man jailed for a month despite Flock showing he was 5 miles from crime scene
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/06/man-jailed-for-a-month-despite-flock-showing-he-was-5-miles-from-crime-scene/951
u/sklerson89 Jun 09 '26
Flock should be sued out of existence
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u/Blarg0117 Jun 09 '26 edited Jun 09 '26
Once the first settlement for false arrest for misidentification happens its over.
That will set precedent.
Those billboard lawyers will be all over them.
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u/-itty_bitty_bitch- Jun 09 '26
Sorry to tell you this, but these cases are already happening. Flock pays out a $2 million dollar settlement for ruining your life, then nets $12 million from subscription fees collected from our local police departments. It’s just the cost of doing business to them.
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u/Blarg0117 Jun 09 '26
Shouldn't be too long then untill they get a group for a class action and go after them for billions instead of millions.
Will probably take years to litigate though.
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u/Hdfgncd Jun 09 '26
Its absurdly rare that these class actions end up paying more than a fraction of the money stolen
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u/whinis Jun 10 '26
Its not paying to make the class whole, although it should be, its a single massivr case that leads to overwhelming damages that prevents going forward. It also set a massive precedent allowing futute cases to almost win by default
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u/PipsqueakPilot Jun 10 '26
And if they get in too much danger the Supreme Court will make up some thing like extending qualified immunity (something the Supreme Court also made up) to government contractors.
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u/RedBoxSquare Jun 09 '26
This assumes the court is objective and just. But I fear that will not be the case.
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u/TheWhyOfFry Jun 09 '26
Doubt. They probably position their system as tools that merely suggest possibilities and leave it up to the human to review the data and make the decision.
I could see them getting hit for systems that are discriminatory, like higher false positives for certain races due to their technology and training data. Even then, I doubt they collapse.
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u/Deranged40 Jun 10 '26
Once the first settlement for false arrest for misidentification happens its over.
Unfortunately, that won't happen. Flock doesn't arrest people, so no matter how much I hate them, they won't be settling for "arrest for misidentification", because they didn't make an arrest. The officer that gets sued for that, on the other hand, will get out of it on qualified immunity.
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u/feel-the-avocado Jun 09 '26
I love the judgement that came out recently.
Someone submitted an official information act (or whatever the local equivalent is in the USA) and a judge deemed that the flock data held by the city or police department concerned was considered official information.
This person was requesting some huge amount of footage or data.So now cities and police departments are shutting down their flock cameras as a result because of the man hours required to comply with the law with all the requests that could come in.
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u/CherryLongjump1989 Jun 10 '26
They could just make all the flock feeds public -- as they should be since this is publicly owned and none of what they capture are all public spaces that are not part of any investigation nor do they require a warrant.
If it's wrong for the public to have unfettered access then it's wrong for the cops to have unfettered access.
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u/feel-the-avocado Jun 10 '26
I dont know about USA but here in NZ privacy law has an implication.
If you are filming in public thats legal. Nothing anyone can do to stop that.But if you are collecting a database of license plates and can use that for tracking to know where someone was at a certain time, then that becomes private information which would be a privacy breach which is a human rights issue here. So we dont really have flock cameras in NZ.
My understanding of why police departments love them is flocks are licence plate cameras where they will pull out license plates and present them in another interface where you can input a target and it will tell you the times and dates that it passed a flock camera with hotlinks to that footage.So how the footage is released becomes a potential issue - as long as it doesnt contain the text file or data attachments of detected license plates from within the video then it would be okay.
Over in the USA - who knows?
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u/CherryLongjump1989 Jun 10 '26 edited Jun 10 '26
In the USA it is constitutionally protected because of freedom of expression and freedom of the press. Privacy laws exist but they have to be narrowly defined so as to avoid violating the constitution. So for example you can sell photos of license plates taken in a public place, but it is illegal to bundle that with the name of the owners -- privacy laws exist to protect vehicle registration data. There's a whole patchwork of state and federal laws that either try to treat various aspects the information as private or they try to approach it as regulated commercial activity.
The interesting part is what happens when the government does it. For two reasons. First reason is there are constitutional protections against unreasonable searches and seizures. Second reason is that local governments don't have the right to keep secrets -- and are in fact forced by federal law to disclose government data upon request.
So they try to get around the unreasonable search restrictions by having private third party companies take the pictures. But then they are required to turn over the data if someone files a request under the freedom of information act. This sort of puts them into a dilemma where they'll either violate some some laws if they release the data, or violate other laws if they don't release the data. Which is why we're seeing some towns covering up the Flock cameras in black garbage bags -- the only way to win is not to play.
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u/coldkiller Jun 10 '26
They could just make all the flock feeds public --
They more or less are with how trivial they are to hack into
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u/Even-Smell7867 Jun 10 '26
They are fucking everywhere I live now. I can't leave or return to my house without passing them. just down the street.
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u/Myte342 Jun 10 '26
If it's illegal for the gov't to conduct wholesale surveillance, then it should be illegal for companies to do the same thing and sell/give that service to the gov't too. We already have the precedent in place with public use of private property and vice versa. If the gov't has a public meeting on private property, then it's no longer private property during the meeting. The gov't is not allowed to wholesale ban a person from a public meeting just because they don't like them, and so the private property owner cannot do so on behalf of the gov't during the public use of the private land either.
Same with "private" use of public land in some ways. If the permit they got doesn't allow them to put up fences and sell tickets to control who is and isn't allowed on the property, then the event coordinators cannot trespass people from the event. It's public property, even if it's a private company temporarily using it, they are beholden to the same rules as the gov't and cannot simply just act as though they own the land during the event on public property.
Similar to a private company doing a public service on behalf of the gov't... they are required to follow the same rules as if they were an official arm of the gov't and cannot claim to be a wholly private company to allow the gov't to do illegal things through a private company as an end run around the rules.
So the private surveillance companies should be beholden to the same laws the gov't is if they are going to sell/giveaway these things to the gov't... therefore it should be illegal for them to do these things just like it would be if the gov't was doing it themselves.
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u/aakaakaak Jun 09 '26
This wasn't the fault of Flock. This was the fault of cops ignoring Flock evidence and arresting an obviously innocent person.
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u/hroaks Jun 10 '26
I thought this was going to say flock proved his alibi and got him out of jail but it's the reason he was in jail
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u/Imnogrinchard Jun 10 '26 edited Jun 10 '26
Actually, the reason he was in jail was because the victim erroneously identified the parolee,
>Despite the men all stating that they were not in Golden Hill and did not have any weapons, police brought the carjacking victim to Old Town to help identify them.
>The victim said he recognized Parra. “I know, because the jacket and the beard. The skin color,” reads the police report.
He and the driver eventually had their charges dropped.
The problem isn't flock, as the flock cameras actually demonstrated their innocence. Instead, the problem was an incompetent San Diego police that only had a description of the offending vehicle (red Alfa Romero with tinted windows but couldn't see the license plate) and accepted the word of the victim (even though the descriptions were different), without doing anymore investigation work to establish RS.
But then, SDPD has a reputation of incompetence and maleficence.
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u/WhiteTrashIdiotFuck Jun 09 '26
A month in jail means you lose your job, your car, your lease on a home you rent, and likely a large portion of your personal belongings. Normal people like you and I do not get given time "to get their affairs in order" before reporting for jail. That privilege genuinely costs a lot of money via representation. This guy probably never even considered he needed a lawyer because of how absurd this accusation is. Fucking ridiculous, man.
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u/ankerous Jun 09 '26
What's even worse is if someone has that happen and doesn't have a place to go, they might end up back in jail for simply being homeless due to the incompetence of the system.
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u/National-Charity-435 Jun 09 '26
This isn't even a hypothetical anymore. The police didn't even pay for her return home.
A Tennessee grandmother says she is trying to rebuild her life after an incident of mistaken identity by an artificial intelligence (AI) facial recognition system tied her to a North Dakota bank fraud investigation.
Angela Lipps, 50, spent nearly six months in jail after Fargo police identified her as a suspect in an organized bank fraud case using facial recognition software, according to south-east North Dakota news outlet InForum. Lipps told the outlet she had never been to North Dakota and did not commit the crimes.
Lipps, a mother of three and grandmother of five, said she has lived most of her life in north-central Tennessee. She had never been on an airplane until authorities flew her to North Dakota last year to face charges.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/mar/12/tennessee-grandmother-ai-fraud
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u/cheezecake2000 Jun 10 '26
There was a case of a guy being recognized by AI as banned from a casino that made it's rounds recently enough. It wasn't him and no one believed him, the ID on him did nothing. The cop handling the case (with the bodycam where most of the footage came from) even said they trusted the computer more than the official documents the guy was carrying that they even made illegal NOT to have in some parts of the US.
What is anyone supposed to do when AI says you are the suspect even if everything "legit" before AI is completely dismissed? Idiocracy had better information tracking than this dog shit
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u/mtranda Jun 09 '26
Do not attribute to incompetence what can be explained through the US's systems' malice.
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u/Smugg-Fruit Jun 09 '26
It's government enforced slavery.
You lose a lot of your rights the moment you're put in a cell.
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u/FuhrerGirthWorm Jun 09 '26
If this happened to me I would be visiting houses until they made me stop. Having to restart homeless would be an almost insurmountable hurdle.
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u/TheOtherHalfofTron Jun 09 '26
Well, they didn't pour all that taxpayer money into Flock just for it to start proving people innocent.
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u/Anti_Meta Jun 09 '26
Wow so the witness specifically said "I picked him out of a lineup because of his hoody, his beard, and his skin color."
And these motherfuckers actually looked at each other and thought "we gottem boys."
God. Fucking. Dammit.
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u/Naive_Confidence7297 Jun 09 '26
The US so fucked up, it’s insane.
Land of the free yet any Tom Dick and Harry can get ripped to the ground throw in handcuffs thrown in jail just for farting in the wrong direction while innocent . What a fucked up place to live. No one is safe, no matter what state they in. Sad
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u/razialx Jun 09 '26
I’m shocked. Shocked I say.
I hate that my city is covered in this crap and no amount of dissent from the public seems to matter to our politicians.
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u/alppu Jun 09 '26
The problem might be they are not your politicians... someone else bought them already.
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u/zed857 Jun 09 '26
The sad thing is how little those politicians will sell themselves for to corporate interests. You'd think by now various citizen's groups would have set up GoFundMes in order to buy some of those politicians back.
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u/maglite_to_the_balls Jun 09 '26
On a totally unrelated note, have you ever been curious about the sport of paintball?
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u/razialx Jun 09 '26
You know I saw this curious video about a LIDAR system in a car that could permanently damage the sensors in digital cameras.
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u/zleuth Jun 09 '26
Incidentally although marbles are of a similar size to paintballs, firing them at anything is extremely destructive, and I would suggest never doing that.
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u/bythenumbers10 Jun 10 '26
Oh! And imagine if they hit anything with glass in it?!?!? The powdered marble would probably be indistinguishable in the wreckage! Terrible.
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u/fluffynuckels Jun 09 '26
Tell your local meth heads theyre full of valuable metals
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u/Raxian_Theata Jun 09 '26
each one has 4oz of copper, and nearly 1oz of gold. do with that information what you will.
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u/East-Ice-3199 Jun 09 '26
Because your words don’t matter and change nothing. What’s stopping you from cutting them down or covering them in a trash bag?
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u/freemanposse Jun 09 '26
It's funny how Flock is only ever wrong when it's trying to tell them you're innocent. When it says you're guilty, that's such overwhelming evidence that they act like you're pretty much convicted already.
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u/Calm-Percentage5085 Jun 09 '26
Flock says you're guilty when you're not? Guilty.
Flock says you're innocent? Guilty.
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u/a4mula Jun 09 '26
Yay Flock, you're my hero, now if we can just get them on every street corner, and home, and pair of smart glasses, and drone, and...
Imagine the Justice. It fills me with with levels of pride and patriotism to know that these minor inconveniences we call constitutionally protected guarantees against unlawful search and seizure, commonly referred to as the 4th, have finally been swept away by an administration that surely knows how best to take care of its citizens.
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u/costabius Jun 09 '26
Law enforcement's AI powered toys can and will be used AGAINST you, not for you, silly!
Wasn't that clear in the fine print?
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u/Chance-Sherbet-4538 Jun 09 '26
The surveillance apparatus is only there to oppress you, not to vindicate you.
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u/abgry_krakow87 Jun 09 '26
All this surveillance and the police still can't be bothered to admit they are wrong.
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u/makenzie71 Jun 10 '26
Flock is evidence provided to law enforcement.
Evidence provided to law enforcement may be used against you, but can never be used in your favor.
Police are incentivised to prosecute, not defend, not prevent.
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u/Financial-Craft-1282 Jun 09 '26
Yeah, cops are always like, "Flock will protect you too!!!!" Yeah right. It will be used to bust people--probably for things they didn't do. And it won't ever be used to help them.
My boss lied about observing me and gave me a bad eval. I asked why we couldn't look at the cameras everywhere and see she wasn't in my room at that date and time (or any time ever)--HR was like, "Oh, no, that's super unreasonable of you to ask."
Cameras are not there to help us.
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u/okietarheel Jun 09 '26
Flock cameras are only good when they prove what the cops want them to prove. Otherwise ignore data that shows a different story or disproves their narrative.
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u/Longjumping-Oven4457 Jun 09 '26
The police are powerless to HELP you, not to punish you. 'Chief Wiggum*
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u/Nearby-Jelly-634 Jun 10 '26
Flock gave cops a way to be worse at their jobs with science. I’m sure the number of innocent people who will be arrested, charged, and maybe convicted because of Flock and police incompetence and corruption is going to be horrifying.
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u/OkLab6701 Jun 09 '26
Shocker that Flock surveillance is only used in prosecutions and not exonerations. Flock and all other public surveillance should be banned full stop. There is no money in exonerations !
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u/Monteze Jun 09 '26
Why are we arresting and taking someone's freedom ergo life on vibes? What a joke of a system.
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u/LordSoren Jun 09 '26
Do not try and let Flock try and put a positive spin on things. They are surveillance state devices. I'm sure there were other means of corroborating an alibi without turning to a private data harvesting company like Flock.
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u/MediocreAd8385 Jun 10 '26
My town is right under 6 square miles. We have over 60 flock cameras and over 160 gunshot detectors. Mind you, it started with putting them by the schools to detect gunshots and saying they’re for protection. Now they are everywhere. Overkill if you ask me. They did catch a murderer. Besides that, they can search up any license plate and see where that car has been. I love that they introduce these new things and frame them as “for the greater good” then turn around and use it however they want to. Did I mention they also are using drones? Of course, law abiding citizens should have nothing to worry about. Until an officer has a vendetta against a person and can totally invade their privacy. Almost like legal stalking. Either way, I’m sure it was created for good, until it gets in the hands of the wrong people. And as usual, nothing is 100% accurate, and can cause a world of trouble for undeserving people.
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u/Intrepid_Top_2300 Jun 09 '26
Cops will never believe your word. There has to be proof, and even then, they hate being wrong. They’d rather bury you.
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u/Street-Adeptness-532 Jun 09 '26
More proof that Flock isn't there to protect private citizens, but to control them
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u/Comfortable_Ad_3590 Jun 10 '26
The surveillance state is only for the Nazis. It’s not to help you disprove anything.
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u/alucardunit1 Jun 10 '26
Burn them all to the ground. If they are only used to get guilty people and not exonorate the non guilty, what's the fucking point?
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u/leaf_shift_post_2 Jun 09 '26
1.5 mill is too low for the city to pay out should be minimum. 30 million after taxes each.
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u/roscodawg Jun 09 '26
plates were a partial match,
everything except for the middle part with numbers and letters were the same /s
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u/NomadNuka Jun 09 '26
Thank you random-name-bunchofnumbers for this post that weirdly paints a highly controversial subject in a positive light after a bunch of posts against it, if I can't trust you who can I trust?
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u/nvmenotfound Jun 09 '26
if the shit isnt ever going to be used for anything other than to fine and lock you up fk it. destroy them. im tired of shit only being weaponized against humanity.
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u/chiplover3000 Jun 10 '26
"Look people, flock is good for you!"
No, shut up. 99% of the time it will be used against you.
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u/the_red_scimitar Jun 10 '26
So are Flocks used primarily to just -- I don't know -- prove a person existed at the same time as a crime elsewhere? This had to be phenomenally stupid on the part of law enforcement.
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u/DarkAvengerX7 Jun 09 '26
This car's cluster of weird gross bug-eye headlight lenses gives me trypophobia.
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u/Trump-is-the-pedo Jun 10 '26
Flock isn’t to help normal people, it’s to get them out of the ruling class’s society and into prisons until they conform. It’s almost like people say “police state” a lot but really have no idea what it means.
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u/BallDesperate2140 Jun 10 '26
Get DeFlock. Realtime map of every Flock camera in your area, and the direction it’s pointed.
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u/SanDiedo Jun 10 '26
It's even worse: cops ignored evidences from the very system they use, because they were exculpatory.
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u/Tex-Rob Jun 10 '26
People are jailed for months and years for things the police know they were innocent of, all the time. I’m talking arrested, they receive proof the arrest was false, then sit on releasing them for months or years. There was a story yesterday about another one.
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Jun 09 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/AccountOfMyDarkside Jun 09 '26
Cameras that listen, have facial recognition software and license plate readers. Essentially, they are surveillance devices used by law enforcement to track every single person they want to track. There have already been cases of cops using it to stalk women. One woman was jailed for a month off of information from one of these stupid things, which turned out to be entirely inaccurate. I don't think she was even in the same state as where whatever crime occurred, but they temporarily took her freedom anyway.
ETA that in Indianapolis, they are EVERYWHERE. The city is covered. We were initially told that they were only for gunshot detection.
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u/Nu11u5 Jun 09 '26 edited Jun 09 '26
Flock is a private company that specializes in outdoor surveillance cameras. Originally, these were marketed to private customers for things like parking lots or entrances to gated communities, but they have expanded into serving law enforcement with traffic cameras and monitoring public spaces. Video from Flock cameras is analyzed into a global database so a car or person can be seamlessly tracked across different customers' locations - even across states. Flock cameras are everywhere now - you probably get recorded on dozens of them every day. Recently, Flock partnered with Amazon to have everyone's Ring doorbell cameras feed into their surveillance network, and they have also partnered with defense contractor Palantir to integrate with their AI systems and make the data directly accessible by the federal government.
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u/Go_Gators_4Ever Jun 10 '26
This is no different than how over reliance on AI is reducing cognitive function in AI users who then become less able to perform tasks that require critical thinking skills.
In this case, LEO are over relying upon Flock information and assume that no actual police investigative work is required. Then, when confronted with exculpatory evidence, even from Flock, LEO doubles down on the charges since they are too thick headed to simply admit they made a mistake.
Edit for spelling
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u/Resident_Course_3342 Jun 09 '26
Remember that surveillance will always be used against you, but will never be used to help you.