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That's not a Flock error. That's a law enforcement error. Flock isn't responsible for a bogus warrant in the system. The woman probably has a good case for dam

• cdrnsf 2mo ago
  How often are police actually held accountable for anything?
  • fluidcruft 2mo ago
    Likely never again with this Supreme Court.
  • NewJazz 2mo ago
    The municipalities that employ them are held accountable (and often prevented by unions from firing them).
• shimman 2mo ago
  No this is bad logic. Flock is absolutely responsible and they should not be releasing or selling products that are this poorly made. Saying that the responsibility is only on the user is extremely myopic. It's also dismissing the role Flock has in how they make and design their software. If they can't handle this maybe they should be disbanded as a company or nationalized for better public control.
  • fluidcruft 2mo ago
    The flock cameras were clearly misused. Misuse is 100% user error.
    • shimman 2mo ago
      Then you should design systems to ensure this type of user error doesn't happen. I'm sorry but this is software and all these excuses are straight up pathetic. If you don't know how to design a system to prevent this, DON'T MAKE IT! Good grief our industry is absolutely pathetic with these excuses.
      • fluidcruft 2mo ago
        Did you actually read the article? It's like you are demanding a car to not drive when you push the gas pedal.
        • shimman 2mo ago
          No it's more like demanding crumple zones, seat belts, and third brake lights. Just because you have zero standards or ethics does not make this acceptable at all. This was a purely created system that was purposely designed exactly for these outcomes. You do not have to create such a system. There can be more accountability. Have standards please. This is impacting real human lives here because you refuse to have standards.
          • fluidcruft 2mo ago
            The article is about how the operator of the system failed to correct the targeting after the first event so the Flock cameras found the same car a second time. If your point is that pulling her over at gunpoint is a flawed procedure that's valid. But that has nothing to do with anything Flock cameras are doing.
            • _DeadFred_ 2mo ago
              As sophacles put it so well: "Flock amplifies existing bugs. Sounds like Flock is the error." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49262204 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49262204
            • shimman 2mo ago
              Dude the Flock cameras created this outcome. This is why the profession needs to have licensing and civilians should be able to sue said software devs for this amount of negligence.
  • lukan 2mo ago
    "Flock is absolutely responsible and they should not be releasing or selling products that are this poorly made." I am not a fan of flock, nor police surveillance state, but what could they have done better here? "Milwaukee police later admitted the alert should have been cleared out of the system days earlier, but an employee simply forgot to remove it. " The system seemed to work as intended - that numberplate was flagged for investigation with homicide - and gave the alarm as intented, nothing more. The problem was wrong data given to them by humans.
    • JoshTriplett 2mo ago
      > I am not a fan of flock, nor police surveillance state, but what could they have done better here? Flock should stop existing. I hope people help them with that, enthusiastically.
      • genewitch 2mo ago
        don't worry, Axon wants to put all 90,000 CCTV cameras into a database for dragnets, too. And i'm sure there will be startups, possibly even mentioned here, that want the same thing. There's a lot of money in cyberstalking and real stalking. see: Facebook's valuation
      • nickthegreek 2mo ago
        Legislation is how that happens. There is no other way. And these stories are what help get that ball rolling in the direction we want.
        • esseph 2mo ago
          > Legislation is how that happens. There is no other way. There are plenty of ways if you are creative enough. Somebody could start putting Flock executive license plates in with erroneous police data.
    • nogridbag 2mo ago
      Yeah I'm confused. The title of the article is wrong. There was no "Flock Camera Glitch" according to the article. The human in the loop did not properly delete an invalid license plate number from one of the databases the flock system checks against. The issue issues are with: 1. Human in the loop 2. Third party database police use for homicide info 3. Police response I don't see what the license plate reading technology has to do with any of this. It seems like the only thing working reliably.
  • daedrdev 2mo ago
    Them is flock responsible for reducing auto thefts and should be counted too?
• sophacles 2mo ago
  Flock amplifies existing bugs. Sounds like Flock is the error.
• netcan 2mo ago
  IDK. This can be a banal point. Product, technology, implementation, police department, policing method, workflow. These aren't discreet. Incidents involve all of them. Responsibility is on people.Technologies cannot be "found guilty." But... this isnt' a trial. There are consequences to doing policing any particular way, and that's the subject. Doing it this way... using baby skynet for command and control has advantages, like response time. It has disadvantages, like false positives. "Law enforcement error" is technically correct, but not informative about the matter at hand. The error
• oceansky 2mo ago
  Plenty of blame to distribute.
• eclipticplane 2mo ago
  This behavior would not be possible at scale without Flock's technology. There's enough blame to go around to hit Flock and the PD both.
• aftbit 2mo ago
  You should read Normal Accidents. "Human error" is an excuse. It isn't really actionable. Instead of trying to fix the "human error", you must design the system such that it does not permit life-threatening errors. Sometimes that means a tradeoff in terms of efficiency, cost, or something else. Often this tradeoff is not one that people in charge of the system are willing to make, unless they are forced to do so by a larger institution or force. To really drive this home: 1. What steps did Flock Safety take to ensure this warrant was valid and current, and that the plate number was correctly entered? 2. What steps did the police officers take to validate the warrant against the APB hit from the camera? 3. What process is in place to ensure incorrect warrants are not entered or mistakenly kept live for longer than intended? My guess is that the answer to all three of these is basically "none".
  • jkestner 2mo ago
    A human must always be held responsible, but a tool must expose its limitations to enable human judgement. I put this in the same basket as Autopilot, which already fails with its name. I’ve seen too many cases where people intuitively trust the magic technology instead of verifying it. The tool shouldn’t not present itself as magic or AI or whatever the current term is.
  • andrewla 2mo ago
    1. I for one do not want "Flock Safety" in the loop for this at all. Police departments can flag a license plate in the system; that's on them. Flock is just a tool for departments to communicate what would previously have been an APB and have better detection than relying on chance sightings. 2. The vehicle was correctly identified by Flock as being the one flagged, and verified by the local PD that it was the one that was flagged. That said, they could have verified that the flag was still meaningful before converging on the vehicle. 3. This is a real problem and this is really the core of the oversight. When the lawsuit over this is filed, it seems like 80% of the liability should attach to #3, and 20% to #2, and essentially none to #1. It's hard for me to see why Flock is even relevant to this discussion except to drum up outrage.
    • aftbit 2mo ago
• andrewla 2mo ago
  If a human had spotted the license plate that had been flagged with an All Points Bulletin or an Amber Alert the same outcome would have occurred. It's hard to see why Flock is even mentioned in this except for clickbait purposes. From the article, it appears that the vehicle was not misidentified; it was correctly identified but incorrectly flagged.
• ertgbnm 2mo ago
  It's a failure on all fronts. I think it's an indictment of Flock in the same way that full body scans are a scam. If you are always scanning for illnesses/crimes you will inevitably find tons and tons of false positives without ever meaningfully improving outcomes. The juice isn't worth the squeeze. Flock has been around long enough that if it had a meaningful benefit to safety, they'd be able to prove it in numbers. Instead we just have a long list of instances where it has made the world worse.
• lkey 2mo ago
  American police have no obligation to protect, serve, or tell the truth. The police steal more money than all petty thieves every year. Qualified immunity makes accountability a distant mirage. The police operate exactly as they are allowed and encouraged, by the system they labor within, to behave. Your words 'sloppy' and 'error' imply that a 'careful, correct' approach fixes these ills. History and experience shows us that this hypothetical good will not be produced until laws and incentives more broadly, change.
• deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
• duxup 2mo ago
  Her car was flagged as being involved with a homicide. What should the cops have done? Ignored it? I'd argue Flock making that incorrect association is similar to a false accusation and the consequences should be on Flock.