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"Most everyone you meet is not a criminal"
Uncomfortable facts certain bigots dont want to understand.
Yeah but from the PoV of the government everyone you meet could be a future criminal. They could have hateful thoughts towards the INGSOC party or towards Big Brother. They could even be allies of Emmanuel Goldstein. How else do you expect the government to keep you safe from such criminals, brother?
To be fair, if you work in the UK government then everyone you meet on a daily basis is in high likelyhood a criminal.
If they're not laundering money, trafficking people or avoiding taxes, they're likely a visitor who has come to commit bribery. Oh sorry, "lobbying".
"If most everyone you meet is not a criminal, the definition of 'criminal' is not yet sufficiently comprehensive."
Edit: added scare quotes because it's difficult to be sarcastic on the internet these days.
You think the definition of criminal is wrong unless the majority of people are defined as criminals?
I guess I should've included a sarcasm warning. But that's certainly a view a certain type of powerful people seem to hold. Richelieu's famous (probably apocryphal) quote and all that.
Tech bros pushed us to believe that disagreeing and arguing instead of voting is the right way.
So we are now distracted while they reshape the world with hunger and death
How constrained must one's thinking be to think like this? There are massive actual issues, and they're not your hated group of choice's fault.
Ah, the famed "Nuh-Uh" defense. The fact is, Tech companies and the bros that head them have all of the money, all of the connections, and all of the information. Those of us not on that side of the equation do not. They may not be the initial cause of so many problems but they certainly have accelerated and deepened a great many of them in their race to extract (somehow) even more wealth from the societies that host them. We aren't nearly angry enough at them IMO.
That's all you need for baseless claims.
Why are you on a YCombinator subdomain if this represents your beliefs?
So now that the "trial" has failed we're going to stop doing face scanning, right? ...right???
In the UK it has worked at other places
"He said 103 arrests has been made so far and there was one false alert which did not result in an arrest.
Supt Luke Dillon said overall crime figures in the Fairfield ward, where the pilot has been held, fell by 12% per cent.
"We're seeing reductions in almost all crime types, certainly in shoplifting and robbery," he said. "
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c2056r07rjlo
I’m more interested in whether these arrests were appropriate, the suspects convicted of a crime by a jury of their peers.
I am not certain that is relevant for this particular use of cameras.
People are being matched against an existing watchlist so the people arrested are those the Police would arrest anyway if they found them.
Is that the case? Or is it the case that because the computer said so, the arrest was made?
Honestly I find the correlations that LFR has worked in other places very weak.
For example the falling of the crime figures could be just because there where more officers around attending the camera's. Or actually that just there being a camera already has a deterring effect, I assume the perpetrators didn't know it was LFR.
I also wonder if the resources spend in a traditional way would have been more effective. I think 3 month trail to make 103 arrests seems a bit low, but I am not familiar with the normal "arrest rate" in that area.
If it's not working it's because there isn't enough of it, silly.
"Last month BTP announced it was extending the trial for a further four months and expanding the deployments to include London Underground stations. "
No, because think of the children. /s
The surveillance will continue until morale improves ... or collapses, depending on your perspective.
100% success!
Good news: rolling these facial scans everywhere in the country should lead to dozens of false positives.
Where's our buddy Garrett Langley or even YC's Garry Tan to come to the defense of the privatized surveillance state?
Pretty much all I ever read about these systems is heinous false positives. I've currently set up automation to pull the local data that includes police activity. One of the towns over from me has, at least, 6 Flock cameras (probably more) for a locale of less than 2000 people. I've not once seen anything related to ALPR or any camera system providing any influence on assisting a crime. You'd think Mr. Langley would be begging police chiefs around the US to put in a positive spin to public information around these digital watchers.
But the morons buying these systems are also the morons taking state tax dollars to buy SWAT vehicles for 100s of thousands of dollars because they want to cosplay GI Joe. Yet... You want a park? Or something that's actually useful in your local community? Fund raise it yourself is the response.
I’m very against this type of pervasive surveillance, but that number seems implausible. The police may have only loaded a small group of suspects into the system, only targeted specific individuals, or some other reason we’re not aware of. The police protecting some criminals wouldn’t be a departure from standard practice in the UK.
That was my first thought. They scanned roughly 1% of the UK’s population. No way they didn’t identify any wanted criminals unless the set of wanted criminals scanned for was only a tiny fraction of the overall list.
"Scanned" faces in this instance isn't unique people.
500,000 individual checks could have been for the same person. While that is extremely unlikely, it's also unlikely they scanned 500,000 unique people.
Security theater is out of control. I just returned from traveling abroad to some major cities in Europe and getting back to NYC, it's the only city I've been in that let's the cops run wild and fly helicopters low over the city. Not so the cops can do any actual work but so they can take a 2 minute short cut to their private helicopter base instead of flying over the water. No person I have ever met enjoys the sudden loud noise from helicopters flying just above their head in the middle of the day/night. There are campaigns against it[0], and people despise cops. It would be such an easy win to gain some better relations with the communities and yet the cops keep on doing it.
The cops keeps doing it and the rich join in on holidays to take a shortcut to JFK from downtown Manhattan. The city were 9/11 was apparently a big deal wants to you feel like you're in a war zone all the time for shortcuts and a few $ savings on helicopter fuel.
This to me is the ultimate security theater environment, where the state is constantly pressing a false sense of FUD.
[0] https://stopthechopnynj.org/
You’re conflating private helicopter rides (which are annoying and frequent) with police ones, which are generally pretty necessary. I’ve only seen them out in my neighborhood after serious crimes where a suspect hasn’t been caught.
No I'm not conflating them, I see the NYPD tags on the map flying directly over Brooklyn to their helicopter base 5+ times a day. [0]
No they are not necessary, the East River is right there to fly over. I also have never read "cops failed to catch criminal due to long helicopter route back to base over East River" as a headline or a logical train of thought.
I'm guessing you're related to, or are a police officer yourself. Which means you're conflating truth with misdirection.
[0] https://globe.adsbexchange.com/
Those tags are far more likely the NYPD drone-as-first-responder flights they do launch quite often. The FAA gave NYPD beyond line of sight drone operations with NYPD ADS-B tags. [1]
Instead of misunderstanding things, assuming it supports your preconceived beliefs, then making further unwarranted assumptions about others to reinforce your misguided world view, simply google to see if those tags are helicopters.
Don’t project your incorrect beliefs onto others.
[1] https://www.skydio.com/blog/faa-issues-revolutionary-approva...
I am not misunderstanding anything. My beliefs are not incorrect. They are helicopters, I know what a helicopter sounds and looks like.
And furthermore, you're ignoring the entire issue is that PEOPLE OF NEW YORK don't enjoy helicopters flying overhead their city.
You are simply attempting to invalidate my statements but your links prove absolutely nothing in regards to the issue.
Instead of misunderstanding things and assuming your pro-helicopter bias supports your preconceived beliefs, then making further unwarranted attacks about my statements to reinforce your pro-security theater world view, simply google to see if those tags are helicopters. YEP! They are.
Don't project your FUD about what a helicopter is onto others. Don't reply to me and call me a liar and tell me I don't know what a helicopter is.
Your linked post is from 2 years ago, this has been going on for much longer than 2 years. Take your propaganda elsewhere.
Making up more items?
You claimed "No I'm not conflating them, I see the NYPD tags on the map flying directly over Brooklyn to their helicopter base 5+ times a day. [0]", as if this proved your point.
I posted a demonstrable source for those 5+ tags, which can be double checked by looking at NYPD flight logs. You realize there are public flight logs, right?
Now you'll tell us the secret magic helicopters are not logged and these tags are not from the drones, or yet another round of disprovable angry claims.
I think businesses can cope with less than a helicopter crash per year.
Businesses don’t have ears and brains. I’m not sure wtf your point is, mine sure as heck wasn’t some left field calculation about economics of crashing planes and helicopters. You would be fine if they hovered a helicopter above your house 24/7 for security theater?
16 deployments for 6 months at rail stations - they must have been off 99% of the time to only scan 500k faces.
For scale 500k people is 2 days of Liverpool Street Stations daily average
How many unique faces though
A lot of those are going to be the same people day in and day out, the article says 500k faces, not people. You also have to filter out those people where the cameras aren't getting an image good enough to scan.
The article doesn't say, and I haven't seen the cameras, but it's not like you're getting every single person parsing through those stations.
But, yes, the numbers seems low.
They're quite tall an positioned just after the barriers so I would believe they're quite effective on capturing faces. https://images.ctfassets.net/pjshm78m9jt4/29ok6Erlnhk6WIqP3w...
BTP say [0] that "the images and biometric data of those who don’t cause an alert are automatically and immediately deleted." - if that's true, they shouldn't be able to tell that it's the same faces being scanned multiple times so it has to be 500k total scans rather than, say, 500k unique faces across 2 million scans
[0] https://www.btp.police.uk/police-forces/british-transport-po...
You could still delete while maintaining the ability to tell if a face has been seen before, by using some fingerprinting + one way hash function
And they allow people to walk around them with a labelled route, so you see all the criminals just walk around it.
Perhaps not many criminals use train stations during the day, for example, people probably deliver drugs by bike or car so they don't walk around a busy place stinking of weed.
How many known criminals have biometrics of them in the first place?
Of the criminals that do have identifiable biometrics, do they operate in that area?
We also don't know the false negative rate. Perhaps it's very high in order to keep the false positive rate as low as possible.
These are things pulled out of thin air that could easily explain why 500,000 face scans (not people) provided no arrests/identifications.
The biggest reason probably being as you said... it was clearly marked. Honestly I would be shocked if they found a criminal dumb enough to walk past it, but not dumb enough to have yet to be caught.
It's called sampling. It works. :)
I've had an idea in the back of my head but I'm no businessman so have this one for free.
Build an AI model, train it from the catalogues of JD Sports and Sports Direct (and other brands like Stone Island etc.) and how to detect balaclavas, illegal electric bikes and e-scooters. Have it link to cameras and do a percentage chance using machine learning on chance of crime. Also increase the percentage if a 'wheely' is done (riding only on back wheel).
Would minority report the majority of crime in this country in one fell swoop.
Could call it ScroteScanner.
Some would call it discrimination but the majority of ASB I see around my area are people dressed/using those exact things.
If they start to catch-on (unlikely) then worse case we have a fancier looking society with gangsters in suits again.
Its like Shazam for Scrotes
Indeed.
Set up some automated scanners for cyclists jumping red lights in the City as well.
Hm, would depend if they're on rented or own bikes.
Rented you're charged by the minute so there's a financial incentive even for non-scrotes.
If you jump a red light you are a scrote.
We also need a points-based system on the tube, if you’re walking slowly in tunnels blocking traffic at rush hour because you’re staring at your phone you get a point. 5 points and you get a 6 month ban from the tube.
Yes. Also 10 years in jail if you litter.
Let’s not be too harsh, 3 years should be sufficient.
Are you seriously excusing bad behaviour on the basis that there was a financial incentive to behave badly?!
Not excusing it but it's a large reason to why people skip red lights on rented bikes and electric scooters. It's more of a reason than just doing it because you're not afraid of the law.
I don’t think that’s true given how many people do it with their own bikes.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cm270ldjl37o
The only mention of red light jumping is the victim’s opinion that it’s a factor.
Can we make the city scanners look like the ones in HL2?
They should just round up and imprison all the people who walk in my neighbourhood.
Some would call it discrimination but the majority of people who commit crimes in my area are people who can walk. I rarely see the wheelchair crowd pulling off B&Es.
Oh, or people who wear clothes. Criminals seem to like wearing clothes. Point proven: you never see nudists shoplifting Old Navy.
People who make comments like this don’t have to deal with walking stereotypes committing crimes in broad daylight and it’s so fucking annoying for people who do.
And let me remind you those criminal stereotypes are stereotypes for a reason.
I would rather all my shit get stolen at gunpoint and my local grocers close due to rampant shoplifting than put a single innocent man in jail over some bullshit “minority report”-esque pre-crime algorithm someone with three squares and reliable housing decided was a good idea.
The problem with stereotypes isn’t that they are usually right (they’re not), it’s that they’re sometimes (usually) wrong.
The other problem is that stereotyping an entire social group simply alienates the members of that group. They perceive that society doesn't trust or value them, so in response they don't trust or value society. See e.g. racial profiling in the London Met's use of stop-and-search powers.
If your ultimate goal is harm-reduction, then stereotyping is irrational.
Unfortunately it seems most of the people who I've spoken to that advocate for prosecution-by-stereotype don't want to understand the nuance involved in causing groups to become disenfranchised. In the eyes of the people I've spoken to there is never any reason to commit a crime and if you associate with people who do then you're no better than the criminals.
It's a serious lack of empathy and understanding.
If you seriously want to arrest people based on stereotypes, you deserve far worse than annoyance.
People on illegal escooters or illegal electric bikes are already committing crimes, there's rarely a decent reason to be wearing a balaclava in the city.
As I said, machine learning to take all these pointers into perspective.
In the age of everything being filmed in a panopticon, I look at the teens wearing balaclava and wonder where they bought theirs. Good on them for having a modicum of privacy.
I think what makes this resemble a moronic idea is it’s a thin veneer of an invention based on your personal stereotyped perspective.
The real challenge, if you wanted to work on the meat of the issue, is that we need to reduce crime without catching the innocent in the net, without having a chilling effect on legal behaviour and people’s rights, and without normalizing the mindset that we should just precrime people.
One of the core points of Minority Report is in the film’s title: that even if technology becomes 99.99% accurate, we are still damned by the destruction of due process and the presumption of innocence.
I think ideas like yours belong in the incinerator.
While what you say has merit in isolation, you're replying to a post where the person says "they're already doing illegal things". If the cameras pick up people "breaking the law", using further algo on that seems... sensible?
EG, the gatekeep is 'already should get a ticket or something'.
I actually oppose all cameras, and think we should just have more police in the streets. It's how policing used to be done. Human judgement.
The balaclava thing is stupid, but you're missing the point that they're already doing something illegal. If you think anti-ebike law is stupid then that law should be repealed, not ignored.
There are degrees of crime though. Is going after e-bikes really important enough to justify a surveillance panopticon?
I mean, in some places jaywalking is a crime. Do we really need to spend resources going after jaywalkers?
The unlicensed ebike, while not a serious problem, is a really annoying one in certain places, and everybody suspects that it's not a wave of people doing it but in fact a fairly small number of people doing antisocial things over and over again. Who are relying on being untraceable and on a versatile getaway vehicle.
https://theedinburghreporter.co.uk/2025/11/thirteen-e-bikes-...
Note that "illegal motorbike with no plates" is an offense that you can detect just by looking at it. There's no "pre" in the crime. The problem is either stopping them or tracing them.
..And the broken windows theory of prosecuting minor crime to deter major crime worked pretty well in Guiliani New York.
Is arresting someone for (what fact about?) their scooter actually making society better?
Comments like these reinforce my belief that the UK is a panopticon because UK residents sincerely want one and not because the government is corrupt.
Yes, they actively make public spaces unpleasant and dangerous. Town centres are on their knees as people don't want to go there anymore due to ASB like this.
Wow! How bad does a scooter have to be for people to avoid the whole town center?
It's not just them, you've got ebikes going 30mph, kids/teens congregating on bikes in balaclavas. Come look for yourself and see if you don't feel intimidated.
Oh! I live somewhere like that. I just don't be intimidated by things unless I have a reason to be intimidated. Although scary looking people congregate sometimes, they've never actually harmed me so I don't avoid the whole area. And the few times I've ever interacted with a scary looking person, they were chill.
Tendency to fear has to be one of those personality axes. Studies found that political conservatives have larger amygdala (the part of their brain that governs things like fear) so maybe this is something similar.
AH! THE YOUTH!
https://www.edinburghnews.scotsman.com/news/police-report-th... (hospitalized woman)
https://www.pressreader.com/uk/edinburgh-evening-news/202609... (killed dog)
https://www.edinburghlive.co.uk/news/edinburgh-news/edinburg...
https://news.stv.tv/east-central/schoolboy-charged-and-teens...
https://www.deadlinenews.co.uk/2025/04/28/police-scotland-gi... (hospitalized kid)
All fun and games until someone gets seriously injured or their dog killed. I had a run-in a couple of years ago with some kids on a motorbike trying (unsuccessfully) to knock me off my pedal bike.
And the problem with this is that the scooter doesn't have a license plate, is it?
In London people are scooters are often mildly annoying.
You are correct, despite what you will see on HN/reddit the UK electorate are united only in wanting more authoritarianism at any cost.
brexit proved that the UK would rather stab itself than show accord with anyone
- illegal motorbike (ebike not complying with type restrictions)
- no plates (enables evading liability for damage or injury caused)
- underage riders / no license (danger to self and others)
- no helmet (personally I'm least bothered about this, but it is a legal requirement and safety issue if you're doing high speeds on a motorbike without one)
The "no plates" leads to hit-and-run incidents in which people have been seriously injured and a dog killed. There have also been incidents of these underage illegal riders getting themselves killed or seriously injured; while that's their own fault it's not something we should entirely shrug off.
Yeah, this is kind of a general problem (online ""safety""), but the ebike kids are also a real problem. And not just in the UK.
Trouble is you'd be scooping up 90% of boys in a certain race, class, age bracket, because those ballys and bikes and Nike tech are effectively fashion at this point even if you're doing nothing wrong. And if that's the case you don't need AI you can just wait outside the school gates and arrest everyone.
Those are the types likely to be committing a lot of the crimes. Come to a working class town and see for yourself, or go on any local town Facebook group or council page and look at the comments.
I'm in Tottenham I don't need to go to your town to get the point. However the point remains, you can't just arrest an entire social cohort.
It'd be much more effective to close the gaping loopholes which allow importing, selling, and servicing unrestricted and unsafe ebikes and escooters (currently you just need to have some small print informing riders that they should be insured, licensed, and only use them on roads where mopeds are permitted - even though no-one actually does that).
Ideally, you'd go back in time and do this before the problem really took off - but failing that, you could introduce scrappage/swap schemes to incentivise taking existing bikes out of circulation.
To tighten things up further, you might think about making safety certification mandatory, and force delivery platforms to take responsibility for ensuring that their riders are using only certified bikes.
Deal with the source of the problem rather than wasting police time on chasing down every teenage cyclist or bringing back sus laws.
Hook this up into the facial recognition tech they're in no doubt are already using, and then you could also collect data from people's social profiles, ensure they vote for the right parties and generally don't get into trouble like opposing mainstream political ideas and such things.
I've spent a whole of 15 seconds thinking about this and I don't foresee a single drawback here, lets just try it and see if we can prevent future crimes 100%, because then the future will have been saved.
The degree to which the British underclasses adopted a dress-code in the late '80s (quite conveniently, for the authorities), is a social phenomenon that should be studied. They openly self-discriminate, willingly reducing opportunities and outcomes. Was it just evolutionary adaptation (tracksuits make it easier to run in dangerous situations), or was it pursuit of a tribal sense of belonging?
Hah, you could argue it was heavily influenced by Italy. You had the posh Milanese young people wearing brands (also as tribal markers). Same phenomenon, but at the opposite end of the class system. The British 'football casual' crowd were obsessed with that fashion in Italy.
IMO they're really just aspiring to be able to afford high-end versions of the same clothing. It's the opposite of trying to look poor. Misguided, obviously
They could just make sentencing tougher and keep criminals in prison.
The strongest predictor (by far) for committing a crime is having a prior criminal record.
Don't you think that isolating people in poor conditions amongst hardened criminals might make them more likely to commit crime when they get released?
It's "fell swoop".
In this case it fits. It's a foul idea.
We already have plenty of gangsters in suits. They travel in taxis and chauffeured cars, not on e-scooters.
I would love to see a similar model trained on the Forbes 30 under 30 to catch all the young financial creatives wearing Patagonia gilets.
It would probably pay for itself.
Having lived in shitty neighborhood all my life (not in the UK tho'), I find this pretty laughable. First off, you would be surprised at how petty criminal caught on police tactic fairly quickly and find way around them. But in general, you will just get petty criminal. Sure they are a nuisance, but more a symptom than a cause. And let's say we do just that. You arrest thousand upon thousand of balaclava-wearing, e-scooter driving dudes. What do you do then ? Most of them will have to be released because, well, they didn't do anything. You might catch some of them with minor charges like drug possession or possession of a knife or something. You successfully wasted thousands of police and justice man-hours for a few petty charges which won't change anything. “Solving” crime is a hard problem, and one with 0 simple solutions and many, many things we have to work on as a society. Your idea is a net negative in prertty much all aspect.
I think you're missing the real intent of their proposal, which is not to give them due process and release them. Their other comments make it very clear they just want certain people to be gone from their local spaces.
There is plenty of criminology research, including research focussed on long term use of surveillance cameras in London, that supports what you've said.
- Many perpetrators are committing crimes with alcohol and drug impairments, mental disabilities, and as "crimes of passion". You could point 1000 cameras at the scene of the crime and many perpetrators are not going to notice nor care about the cameras. Unfortunately for surveillance camera proponents it's typically the crimes most warranting prevention and investigation (e.g. crimes such as assault) that are impacted least by surveillance cameras. Surveillance cameras instead have been found to have some deterrent effect on minor property crimes (e.g. theft of bicycles or cars) but whether the state is going to invest the resources into investigating and convicting someone who stole a <$1000 bicycle is questionable especially when insurance exists and the onus can then be placed back on property owners to do more to secure their property from thieves.
- Perpetrators were being convicted without use of surveillance cameras and can continue to be convicted without use of surveillance cameras. There may be some argument that surveillance cameras help reduce the cost of getting a conviction (e.g. less evidence needing to be captured?) but not much support to the idea that conviction rates are higher. Quite often the courts, corrections system, government (for funding), etc will push back for a number of reasons--lack of funding for courts to hear minor cases, lack of funding for correction systems, correction systems being found in their current state of funding to have adverse impacts on future criminality, etc.
- The cost-benefit of operating surveillance cameras versus the cost-benefit of spending on other areas of policing (or just public spending in areas such as education and welfare) is hotly debated. Total cost of ownership for each surveillance camera is typically a lot more than people may expect, particularly due to the labour cost of reviewing and processing stored surveillance camera footage. There are of course all the other obvious costs too--camera equipment every X years, poles, cabinets, electricity conduit installation, data cable conduit installation, wireless repeater installation including leases, backhaul data costs, data centre hosting costs, labour costs for support/operations staff--none of this is cheap. What if this same funding was instead invested in other programs--would there also be reduced crime levels some years in the future?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed-circuit_television#Crim...
Technically you are proposing targeting poor people with extra steps. charming.
Finding these people is not the hard part, they're walking around everywhere. The police either don't care or aren't allowed to enforce the law.
Are you a flock investor? That what I expect a flock investor to sound like.
You may want to check your numbers and remember there is a huge negativity bias on crime.
It seems the sense of safety is often different from the actual numbers especially when stereotypes are involved as shown in parent comment regarding to e-scooters. To such an extent that there is the phenomenon called the crime decline paradox.
https://www.kcl.ac.uk/news/public-perceptions-of-crime-at-od...
You also need to factor in how the police won't actually turn up for most crimes, so there is no point reporting unless you need to do so for insurance policies.
Also, clicking through, you can see the whole report is some panglossian delusion aimed at making Reform supporters look bad.
Do you have sources for that?
I see how it could be read as a political coloured article however since you are already "clicking through" you might want to continue clicking to the actual data sources. The takeaway I had from the article is that in any political group people are misjudging the crime rates it is not relevant to the discussion what political ideology is at a higher rate. If you search online there is a wealth of different articles about this topic from multiple political standpoints and different countries where unrest is growing around crime prevention and perception.
So much effort to protect little girls. Yet if you get stabbed, say clearly that you've been stabbed, they will not believe you. Then they will arrest your dead body.
It was one case, hardly systemic yet. Shit happens, mistakes are made.
What saved his reputation, but not his ass, was that he was overstimulated teenager recording snapchats of everything. Footage from CCTV or surveillance cameras wouldn't change anything.
I was thinking about this with flock cameras the other day...what's our actual ROI? Was the world horrible before and these initiatives are going to close a monster crime gap or is this just a giant fishing expedition ... just because?
It would be interesting to see how these are justified internally. If I had to guess, it’s either excess budget being channeled into “something” or a justification to reduce street patrols/street crime.
ROI won't be measured in crimes stopped, since they're not actually intended to do that. It will be measured in votes changed or blocked.
I truly think it's safetyism. People seem to have a lower and lower tolerance for risk as society gets safer.
Since governments are run by people, this safetyism has become enshrined in law, typified by nonsense like criminalizing free-range parenting and mass surveillance.
its one of the value function that makes it almost impossible to evaluate.
Lets imagine that catching someone in the Interpol list of wanted terrorists is a huge catch. You would expect the avg catch rate to be almost 0 but once one is caught the avg value of the system becomes very easy to justify.
Its the same idea as having photos of known terrorists in airports and train stations to see if guards recognise someone. But with the added benefit that the facial recognition should not miss them.
If the evaluation function is it costs X to run each day and we caught Y number of criminals who robbed phones worth Z > X then the system will come off pretty badly in terms of ROI.
That’s the good faith model.
In reality, Flock cameras are bought for “law enforcement”, using taxpayer dollars (therefore free to the people making decisions) and enable both feelings of omniscience and the ability to stalk exes.
So ROI is pretty good when the I comes from someone else and the R is and random act of spying that makes the operators feel powerful.
Cynical, I know, but not empty cynicism I hope. All evidence leads me that way.
The question is if the value of the database (to any party, present or future) of all collected data is greater than the value of catching that one guy (or one guy every few years).
That’s not hard to value, it just doesn’t make Flock look particularly good. If these actually work well, you would expect the average catch rate to be nearly 100%. We had decent rates just having humans look, Flock should be clearing those like crazy if it works.
It doesn’t. I had a car stolen, called it in as they pulled away. I live a block from a Flock camera, 2 others apparently captured it. Car wasn’t intercepted, car was never recovered, no arrests were ever made. They could have put up scarecrows and it would have done as much good for a lot cheaper.
It’s a bad evaluation function. A lot of the cost of crime isn’t directly the crime, it’s the economic deadweight of trying to deter the crime. Every car needs anti-theft parts, lots of people buy home security systems, armored cars to do bank drops, etc, all this stuff we pay for that exists solely to try to stop crime.
Flock would look great if it worked so well it made armored cars and car anti-theft obsolete. It won’t, but if it did the ROI would be crazy.
That only happens because you’re poor. If you were someone the police would have done more. My friend that is rich, always has an easy with with police when some problem happens.
The real ROI is the change in behaviour of people constantly surveiled. We know people change their behaviour when under constant scrutiny and this why the elites want it.
Not for fishing, it's a control system.
Think back to the capital riots/insurrection/what-ever you want to call it; they used similar systems to identify and arrest those participants. Heavily publicize how many people and who; doesn't matter if you a 63yo grandmom or a pastor, we will find you and prosecute. Showing that you are prosecuting the "normal" people is part of it, show that and you make them less likely to show up to the next thing, less likely to provide support.
The Capital has many cameras owned by the feds, so they could easily do that. Chicago, Atlanta, LA not so much. When anti-ICE action takes place with protestors in black block, going under umbrellas, makes it hard to identify and prove. With strategically placed cameras, you can see what cars came in the area. You get statistical data that shows if they are there normally there. Get enough abnormality and you get enough for a search warrant.
Seems strange to use prosecuting a group of people attacking the democratic process, the basis of the country and a clearly treasonous act, as an example of cameras being used to “over” prosecute to intimidate the public.
Why should it matter if you are a 63yo grandmom or pastor?
They're not wrong that it was done very publicly, regardless of whether you believe (as you and I clearly do) that they were right to be prosecuted. Luigi Mangione is another example of the panopticon being visibly flaunted by the state, and they were more explicit that time about showing it as deterrence. Literally gave so much surveillance footage to the media to prove how much they could see.
I am not understanding the significance of the panopticon claim. It's common knowledge that camera price and bandwidth and digital storage prices have gone down significantly over the years, and quality has gone up.
That the government has used them to prosecute a man who assassinated someone or a large group of traitors does not seem to be an indictment of the capabilities.
An example of the government combing through records to pile on trivial charges to throw at a peaceful protestor or otherwise "over" charge them to create a chilling effect seems more apt for a discussion about the dangers of a panopticon.
Sure, in that case let's use Cop City in Georgia. That feels more like "authoritarian state seeks to quash dissent". Plenty of grey area there, plenty of overreach by the State to shut them up.
I'm of the opinion, consistent with principles of the Founders and at least one Constitutional amendment (or the interpretation of it by millions of people) that the people should have the literal, physical power to overthrow their government. If that becomes physically impossible, there is no remedy for a government that decides to reject democracy and citizens' rights to freedom.
It happens that the J6 rioters were on the wrong side of truth and history, but I would rather some of them get away with it than live in a perfectly effective panopticon.
Good?
You mean the group that live-streamed themselves trying to overthrow the government? Yeah this isn't the same thing at all
Same for chat control in the EU and all the dystopian post 911 spying agencies.
it's there to keep the well behaving citizens in check.
very authoritarian at the core.
Can we cut to the bone a little bit? The recent crime panics are not about a partner assaulting their live-in partner or a random home burglary. There is no real "ROI" to be had.
It's purely about the unease of living in chaotic cities, the random stabbings, the shoplifting, the visible homelessness etc. Flock is the stopgap here.
Partly the "feeling" of chaos is just that, a feeling, driven significantly by algorithmic feeds feeding us every random crime from around the country 24/7. Husband murders wife in a murderous rage? No one hear's about it. Mentally ill man murders a woman on the train in a Tier 2 city, immediate nationwide breaking news.
The other part though is a real dissolution in how we take care of our mentally ill. Complex topic [1].
I think complaining about Flock is complaining about the symptom. Today we dogpile on Flock to get it cancelled, tomorrow the public will reach for something else. We have to fix the underlying disease, which is a combination of the two factors above.
[1]: https://time.com/6265241/america-care-of-mentally-ill-people...
Some of this stuff does feed into the perception though. Flock provides more footage for media to clip, for example. Or you can look at Ring cameras and people getting worked up about joggers or neighborhood kids because now they get alerts and have neighborhood chat groups, etc.
Let us also acknowledged that we're living in the safest time in history and modern American cities are extremely safe, despite the unhinged propaganda from the right.
I don’t think public parks in the 1950s in America were filled with used heroin needles and homeless people strung out or defecating.
You can correct me if I’m wrong though.
From my understanding cities like NYC were actually in a really bad shape in 1950s and after compared to now, until around the 90s
Edit: actually, from what I find in the 1950s there was even ongoing heroin epidemics, in addition to gang warfare, and of course racial inequality
Good news! They aren't filled with used heroin needles today as well!
There definitely was recorded incidence of this - Washington Square Park for example - but the main reason for the difference today was due to vagrancy and loitering laws, as well as 1930s Dust Bowl governance, that no longer exist for human-rights reasons.
Very easy to keep the parks 'beautiful' when you could just shift anyone undesirable to a prison, asylum, or skid row.
N.B. Littering also wasn't seen as a social failing in 50s America, so there's a bit of a juxtaposition there versus the contemporary reality.
The usual retort here is that the anxiety driving the adoption of Flock can't be seen in crime statistics (which is mostly measuring partner/family crimes ala "murder rate is down").
The random smattering of shoplifting is never reported, the unhoused man in a fit of rage yelling at passers-by is never filed with the police. But in the privacy of the voting booth, people will vote for more Flock cameras.
Instead of waving off concerns we should be addressing them better.
We can't address concerns if they aren't based in reality.
"the unhoused man in a fit of rage yelling at passers-by is never filed with the police"
Good. That's not a crime.
I think you're saying that because you imagine the only alternative is for the police to come in and beat the homeless man up. But simply accepting it, or state violence aren't the only two options.
If we don't make better governance possible, we make Flock inevitable.
Fortunately, at least for now, "Governance" doesn't involve the state coming in to do anything to someone who's not breaking the law. Homeless people have enough problems, they don't need the police to harass them and shoo them away constantly (even without violence).
Just because much of the public think of the homeless as an eyesore that they don't want to see, and they make them briefly face uncomfortable realities, doesn't justify blanketing cities with cops and cameras.
Flock is simply the public saying we don't trust the government in being able to keep us safe, so lets hire AI to do it.
"shooing them away constantly" is also not the only option, but the bare point is the sidewalk has a purpose and it isn't housing. If the government can't enforce that, what else can it not enforce? The unhoused person needs better options and incentives and there are people far more qualified than me to tell us what they are, but they all agree the street is about the worst place for them.
I don't disagree, but reflecting solely on your comment, I wonder if we should try and capture/record such disorder as a preliminary step to coming up with better ways to tackle it?
It probably loops back to better mental health care provision? But might also relate to provision of social housing? Or any number of things. These sorts of indicators can feed into a 'gross happiness quotient' to help us focus on improving society for all of us, not just feeding the greed of the billionaires which a lot of Western society seems to be subservient to right now.
But why is there a need to measure it in the first place and then only react to it?
You already came to the proper conclusion by just thinking about it for a few minutes. Let's just skip building out a surveillance state, and put that money directly into mental health & housing initiatives instead.
We can acknowledge that and also acknowledge that a lot of petty crime goes unreported/unresolved because the police can't do anything, and that our target should still be 0 crime and folks are entitled to be upset about any amount of crime. Recent example I have is a work truck behind my neighbors house in the alleyway. Parked for less than 5 minutes, went inside a garage to look at something, came back, and someone had already walked off with their tools. I sort of got the guy who did it on video which I provided to the person who was victimized, but who knows if anything ever really came of it. Probably not. Does that actually show up in crime statistics? I bet it doesn't.
What is also missing here is that even if there is not criminal activity occurring, there is a general influx of highly anti-social behavior occurring that feeds in to the perception that higher rates of criminal activity occurring. This is very noticeable when you see people casually running red lights, driving without registration, yelling and screaming at people on the street or at the bus stop, and more. Even if I'm unlikely to be a victim of a crime, I don't feel safe when these anti-social behaviors are occurring, people are shoplifting and now going to CVS feels like going to a third-world country.
Framing this as right-wing propaganda I believe is a mistake and if you are a leftist it just loses elections for you because even if the folks who are concerned about crime levels are wrong (they're not though) the perception matters much more than reality. Denying the perception implies you deny the reality too and fewer people are going to vote in favor of candidates who tell them that what they see for themselves isn't happening.
So many people's heads are no longer in reality. Perceptions and this fantasy world people have constructed (and right-wing propaganda feeds) is driving election results, not the real world. If you are politician who is part of the shrinking population who is actually still in reality, how do you win? You can't go on TV and acknowledge the phony "high crime" non-reality, any more than you can go on TV and say the moon landings were fake. But, pretending falsehoods are true wins elections. We're in a dark period.
Do you live in a city? I do. Come to Columbus and stand at the bus stop not a half mile away from my home where people are tweaking out and walking around in the middle of the street, there are piles of garbage everywhere, drivers are blasting through red lights, and everything at the CVS is locked up. Last week someone stole a car and drove it through the best park in the city and ran over a historic marker. I guess it's not a big deal right? We're probably privileged to have a park. Yea? Jeez what were the social circumstances that led these people to steal this car and drive through a park. Society has failed them. It's my fault they did it I bet? That's the message that the DSA and more left-leaning groups are sending to Americans and most are seeing through the bullshit.
Also your comment about "shrinking population" - you are referring to white Americans right? You're welcome to go look for yourself to see Trump's election results from the last election and see how he increased voter share across blacks and hispanics (and maybe more). How is this "shrinking population" happening when Trump also had the most votes of any president in American history? Maybe the population isn't shrinking in the way that you think.
If you want to know why Democrats are losing elections despite it being so obvious they shouldn't, your comments and rejection of the reality that many Americans face every day is precisely why. And before you try and accuse me of being some Trump sycophant I have voted for Obama twice, Clinton, Biden, and then Harris and will be voting for Sherrod Brown and Amy Acton here in Ohio. Denying reality because you think that the picture other Americans see must be some right-wing propaganda feed is confusing you. It's simply not accurate. Most Americans do not agree with your point of view. If the Democrats want to start winning elections they better come to grips with reality.
Some American cities like St Louis, Baltimore, Memphis, New Orleans have averaged about 50 homicides per 100,000 per year over the last 10 years. Detroit averaged about 40.
It is not "unhinged propaganda from the right" for people living in those cities to wonder why the rate cannot be under 2.5 per 100,000 like it is in most European cities. Except for a few years in the early 2000s, London's rate has stayed below 2.5 for the last 250 years.
Yes, but nobody likes the answer: American police are both excessively violent and bad at actually policing. It is fixable but it requires doing things differently, e.g. https://www.bbc.co.uk/future/article/20260626-how-scotland-c...
Thanks to the border actually not being wide open due to Trump, all violent crime is down across the US
Delusional.
It's not just politicized propaganda. A lot of unsafety feeling is almost self-inflicted.
In my opinion apps like the Citizen[0] app are some of the worst offenders. They constantly bombard you with scary notifications, creating a constant environment of fear. With that app people are constantly aware of things that are happening in your general area without any real benefit of informing you. It turns the mildly-annoying-but-ignoreable mentally ill person on the street corner from someone that "scares" the 10 people around them into someone that scares 10k people in the area.
Oh, and Citizen is also directly integrated into Axon's Flock-like surveillance product.
[0]: https://citizen.com/
In the UK there is a yearly survey regarding crime and I've not read it for a few years (I've emigrated) but a regular theme used to be that people interviewed personally felt safe and weren't likely to be victims of crime but thought everyone else in the country was less safe and everywhere they didn't live had higher crime than it did.
The public perception of crime is persistently incorrect for many if not most people and this incorrect, emotional rather than evidence-based view of the world is unfortunately what drives political pressure.
Some of this is definitely the BBC's fault. I happened to be over at a friend's one morning and he had it on. It smelt just like right-wing media in the US with big stories on mega important topics like... shoplifting. The crime reporting just felt really amplified up.
Who's the "we" in this sentence? The people who want to keep cities crime-ridden? And why does your opinion matter more than that of the public? I thought these "we" were pro-democracy?
We are pro-democracy, but specifically votes are hidden, the voting booth is a private space, away from the judgmental eyes of privacy focussed individuals common on this forum.
In the privacy of a voting booth, people will vote for Flock to feel safer and simply flooding the headlines will only work temporarily (in fact, there's a good chance Flock simply rebrands)
What exactly have they stopped?
It would be so nice if government projects and regulations came with some sort of KPI. And if they aren’t reached the thing is reverted/removed. With a bit of flexibility of course, to be sure there is room for debate. I’m sure that could be gamed in lots of ways but with the current status quo is just so much vibes
There’s no way they captured Luigi using normal means at a random McDonald’s because of a random ID. I always figured it used some unpublished data and facial tracking and was high profile enough to use in this case with only a flimsy “parallel construction” necessary
They caught him because a customer thought he looked like the suspect.
What a weird conspiracy theory to have of all your options
In San Fransico Car Breakins dropped almost immediately by 50% and 75% in the long run since Flock cameras were introduced
Source please. This does not sound credible. How does scanning license plates stop people from breaking into parked cars?
I haven't validated your statistic (and it's unclear what "in the long run means" since this is a point-in-time thing), but assuming it's true, how do you determine it is causation and not correlation?
https://abc7news.com/post/san-francisco-car-break-ins-histor...
https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/san-francisco/car-brea...
I found some news articles that seem to back up this stat. It wasn't all attributable to the cameras though. It also included targeted enforcement strategy with bait cars and what not.
Well, they aren't really for stopping crime. They're for identifying political dissent so it can be crushed early. Stopping crime requires manpower that costs money, and if they were successfuy they'd have a harder time making the case they need even more surveillance beyond the currently monstrous amount no one could have even imagined 40 years ago.
Flock claims they perform greater than 20 billion plate reads per month and allegedly are used in solving a few thousand cases per year. Their actual usefulness in those solved cases is not quantified. A customer could have used the cameras for a search that returned nothing or produced no additional leads, but Flock could still say they were used in the investigation. So the ROI is not great.
They're absolutely being used to solve crimes and arrest people. Here's two examples:
https://www.cbsnews.com/atlanta/news/flock-cameras-help-iden...
https://www.wsbradio.com/news/local/cobb-police-credit-new-t...
There's some studies showing support but it's very hard to attribute cause to a crime rate that constantly fluctuates and has a myriad of causes
We can probably calculate the investment, but how do you calculate the return? What's the value of solving a crime? Is it solely the value of preventing some future crimes by the suspect, or does it have intrinsic value?
This happened a few years ago before flock. Some idiot drove down the street with a pellet gun shooting at car windows. About five of us needed to pay several hundred dollars a piece to replace the glass.
My street is not "horrible", but everyone on my street would have loved to have a camera that recorded what happened. Even if we didn't get a working license plate number, it would have been useful to see what happened.
It doesn't have to be a "monster crime gap" to get people to vote for these things. It just takes some selfish idiots.
Man we technologists are so bad at dealing with societal issues.
We try to reinvent something that claims that keeps tabs on everyone and for sure will punish you if you don’t behave well but will reward you if do!
The thing has a name. It’s the religion.
This is a take I hadn't heard before, pretty interesting. I wonder if there are already any fiction out there where some widespread religion turns out to be an automated mass surveillance and policing system gone awry. Neat concept
Humans are inherently religious, whether you see it or not. We all worship something.
No, words have meaning and "worship" is not something that everyone does. This isn't an AA meeting where "everyone has a higher power."
You're probably just parroting David Foster Wallace.
- Morpheus ( Deus Ex, 2000)
That is true of some religions - e.g. moralistic therapeutic deism. It is sort of true of Buddhism because of belief in karma, but that is an automatic mechanism rather than a punishment.
It is not true of Christianity, which promises forgiveness, nor of the other Abrahamic religions.
Not a theologist, but pretty sure that the default destination for the bad Christians is hell.
There is an out-of-hell card you can get if you pay your dues to the local enforcement branch (before you die, they need today’s money not after life checks)
Absolutely not.
Where did you get that from?
I am assuming you are just badly informed but that is really stretching the assumption of good faith.
The Catholic church believes hell is self chosen:
https://ccc.cab/1033
Traditional protestants often believe the same, but there is variety. Some believe all human beings are redeemed, for example.
Some evangelicals do believe in hell for non-believers, but most of those also believe faith is the key to redemption, so you are safe if you are a Christian.
Yeah following on this, when you look at places that actually are low-crime it's almost always cultural. But if all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail I guess.
Fare evasion will be a big use-case for facial recognition at railway stations. I wonder when they will admit it, if they haven't fairly secretively already. Same as bodyworn cameras (initially introduced to reduce assaults, now they admit they're used to tackle fare evasion too)
It really won't be long until your face is scanned well before you get to the barrier, then an alarm goes off and blocks the barrier. Or it detects barrier-pushing then automatically begins an investigation or issues a fine.
And of course there is facial recognition + AI for retail profit maximisation
https://www.edp24.co.uk/news/national/24397770.network-rail-...
Trust the railway as far as you can throw it...
I'm sure somehow this will pivot to enforcing taxes though
This is misleading in so many ways...
Their watchlist was only ~450 people, and it was restricted to people relevant to the transport police. The system was also overt and clearly marked, there were alternative routes that avoided the cameras and even then they were on 3-6 hours per day.
The headline suggests this system is not only invasive but also ineffective. While I agree it's a privacy nightmare, I also think those idiotic deployment conditions set them up for failure. At least we know there aren't many false positives, it could've been worse.
By the way, if I was wanted, I'd just pull my shirt up over my face or wear a facemask
ahahaha. "My magical face detection software worked because (according to our detection software) none of the undesirables came in!"
Where does this end? Drones following each of us every time we leave our homes and otherwise peeking through our windows, doing spectrum analysis, etc.?
Let me off this stupid ride, please.
They won’t need to have drones peek through the window, your router[0] and smart TV should be sufficient to figure out what you’re up to.
(And if you don’t use one of those routers, similar tech is coming to the next generation of cell towers.)
[0]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/paullamkin/2026/08/24/comcast-t...
This is an interesting KPI
I don’t think it’s fair to conclude this doesn’t work at all.
The reason they did not get any arrests could be that sought-for criminals now avoid those stations. Given that there are relatively few of such criminals, that’s hard to prove or disprove (traffic would go down, but only by a slight amount)
It also could mean such criminals already avoided those stations, to start with. Again, hard to prove.
It also might mean people misbehave less now at these stations. So, did the number of incidents at such stations go down?
That, I think should be easier to (dis)prove, but also doesn’t require running live face recognition. Recording and only looking at recordings after an issue is reported would be the better option.
Shouldn't the burden of proof be the other direction, that it's both cost-effective way to prevent crime? And that the cost should include not only pricing but all of the other negative externalities of removing privacy (such as deliberate abuse by bad actors inside or outside the government).
Someone is making a lot of money from it and law enforcement is too thick to see that.
I mean a lot of our lives, resemble 1984, but this is literally the UK, where 1984 was set. And then they are doing all of the 1984 activities with no shame whatsoever.
Hitler was elected democratically. Democracy is non-excuse for the complete destruction of civil liberties.
The cameras in UK are there to remember citizens that they are watched. They are there for when there are peaceful protests to remember citizens that they are watched. Surveillance state created by cameras on the streets and tracking on everybody's phones is perfectly ok for our rulers.
I hear again and again that China is "bad" but I see that western countries copy everything from them... except going after big corporations. We will gather personal data and have files for each citizen, punish peaceful protests, use social media to control the masses but punishing the rich like China does is unacceptable. That seems to be the red line that the West will not cross, the one that protects billionaries.
It's worse in western countries because we like to pretend that we are superior to the "real" authoritarian regimes. Our governments do the same bs but under the veil of "western values".
I mean in here we consume the propaganda of the USA empire, over there they consume theirs. We can say they mistreat Uyghurs and they can say we bomb Arabs. And we think we prefer our empire to theirs and they think they prefer their empire to ours. Everyone involved thinks they have the superior culture, or do you think the Chinese think differently on this?
You realize there's a 3rd way which is "all the cultures/empires are corrupt and problematic" right? It's like the GOP/DEM debate in the US: Yes, there are 2 poles, but that doesn't mean they're the only possible options, just what exists currently. I don't really give a fuck what the Chinese citizens think of their empire or mine, I think both are failing the world and doing the same shit (concentrating power/resources in the hands of an unaccountable minority).
I was talking about how most people think. The large majority of people in each empire would say the other is worse, they will disagree on why but agree on that. You saying they all suck to be honest isn't much better. A more nuanced approach is needed.
UK is not a normal western country in this regard, and haven't been for a generation.
https://www.ltmuseum.co.uk/collections/collections-online/po...
I know someone involved in this. They put up huge signs saying you’re going to be recorded, and offer an unrecorded route to go down if you don’t want to be checked… so obviously all the criminals just go down that route.
It’s the stupidest fucking thing I’ve ever seen. Classic Britain. Wouldn’t want the criminals to be filmed without their consent!
Britain has become extremely soft on crime. For some people it's still not soft enough.
After reading just the first paragraph the tv show “Person of interest” immediately came to my mind
Highly recommend the BBC series The Capture
Is this just a stupid headline? do you think there should be more crimes per 500,000 people seen on a portion of the metro? My metro has 1 million riders a day I don’t think it has even one serious crime per week…?
I think this means we need more cameras!