5 ms·

WPD won't replace stolen Flock cameras, citing public trust

113 points by erikschoster 1mo ago

ranger_danger 1mo ago
So they will be replacing them with Axon cameras I presume?
- iAMkenough 1mo ago
  Looks like they’re actually listening to their community, so maybe not.
- ofjcihen 1mo ago
  I feel like I’ve seen this exact reply in multiple Flock threads.
  - ranger_danger 1mo ago
    Probably because you have... several towns have said they were doing exactly this already in response to Flock opposition, as if it helps the matter.
Tostino 1mo ago
I posted this in another thread, and had my comment instantly flagged. Love this site. Worth looking at how these cameras got approved in the first place. My county's ALPR interlocal passed on the consent agenda in December 2024, one block vote alongside forty other items, no discussion, and went through consent again in April 2025. Nothing was "hidden", it's just that "public" here means a 300 page agenda packet and a four hour YouTube video with no transcript, completely unreadable in practice. So I spent a week and a half building a pipeline over what the county already publishes. It pulls the CivicPlus portal (agendas, minutes, item metadata, outcomes) and the YouTube channel, does ASR plus diarization, then aligns the transcript against the published agenda so the passage carries the item it happened under and whatever outcome the minutes recorded for it. Search is hybrid lexical and semantic, and the video is synced to the transcript so any claim can be checked against the recording. The speaker attribution and the alignment was the hard part. Roughly two thirds of passages have no reliable name attached, and diarization gives you clusters rather than identities, so I mark confidence and basis rather than guessing a name. Alignment is very messy because the published agenda order and the order things actually get taken up diverge constantly, and the recorded outcome is often just "Approved the Consent Agenda" for an item that never got discussed. There is a labeling admin area to improve the dataset after initial collection At my county meeting on Aug 25th (in a few days) I'm bringing up the fiscal side. Ours was approved under an item title that said no funding was required. No accounting has been done of what enforcement costs when someone takes a camera down. Prosecutor and court hours. Jail time, or just holding, if the state charges it. Lost future wages from otherwise upstanding citizens who now have a felony. None of that was in front of the commissioners when they approved it, and none of it is in front of them now. Most counties run the same portal software and post to YouTube, so this should generalize. Code is at https://github.com/Tostino/civic-watch https://github.com/Tostino/civic-watch and the Pasco instance is at https://pasco.watch https://pasco.watch if anyone wants to point one at their own county. Happy to help if anyone wants.
- estearum 1mo ago
  You should start with the lede: "I built a tool to help you understand how/if your community has agreed to deploy Flock cameras. You can try it out here: [ ]. The hardest part of this was..."
  - Tostino 1mo ago
    Yeah, that would have been a smarter way to get my point across.
- NegativeLatency 1mo ago
  Looks neat, any chance you'd be willing to share how much this costs to run?
  - Tostino 1mo ago
    You need a GPU for the ASR and diarization. I have an unraid box with an old GPU that I threw it on. So it's sitting in my closet and the ongoing cost is practically nil. There was a few dollars in LLM calls on initial ingestion using deepseek flash. Only fractions of a penny to ingest new data as it comes.
- dredmorbius 1mo ago
  <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7807998 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7807998>
  - Tostino 1mo ago
    I'm not saying downvoted, i'm saying flagged. Like almost anything posted related to this surveillance state YC is invested in building.
    - dredmorbius 1mo ago
      Irrelevant distinction per this guideline.
heythere22 1mo ago
https://archive.ph/VMVf6 https://archive.ph/VMVf6
lokar 1mo ago
A weird take. They seem oblivious to the fact that real problem is not distrust of flock, it’s distrust of the police. They are in a situation where the public just barely trusts the local police, and a new surveillance system pushes them over the edge into hostility. They need to be working to gain much more trust.
- estearum 1mo ago
  Police are bounded by evidentiary laws and warrant requirements, all of which legitimately do stand up in court. Flock is not. So no, actually Flock itself is the problem. If Flock were willing to sign some consent decree that its data can only be accessed by police with a valid judicial warrant, for example, they probably could've headed off this entire mess. But instead they called people "terroristic" for pushing back. Completely braindead move from the CEO.
  - lokar 1mo ago
    I’m not sure people think that way, or even understand the details. But they see lots of stories about police officers misusing the system.
    - estearum 1mo ago
      I think people understand "rich tech CEO putting cameras everywhere offers no assurances of people's privacy and legal rights, instead opts to call them terrorists" perfectly well The fundamental issue is that Flock doesn't care about people's privacy or rights. That washes out in a variety of ways including CEOs' statements, product-level security controls (thus creating the horror stories), and lack of legal commitments to protections. I would personally be in favor of a fairly widespread camera network that had significant legal protections built in. Flock has demonstrated – in every possible way – they cannot possibly be the providers of such a system.
  - matherial 1mo ago
    The police have SWAT teams, guns, and jails, Flock does not. So I think the state security apparatus is a part of the problem, because if they don't like you and have access to surveillance technology, the outcomes can be far more severe than if Facebook doesn't like you, or the CEO of Flock doesn't like you.
thangalin 1mo ago
https://i.ibb.co/WWWYznHX/flock-future.png https://i.ibb.co/WWWYznHX/flock-future.png ;-) Also: https://dave.autonoma.ca/blog/2019/06/06/web-of-knowledge/ https://dave.autonoma.ca/blog/2019/06/06/web-of-knowledge/
otterley 1mo ago
Mods: To reduce ambiguity, can we change "WPD" to "Winona, Minnesota PD"?
- dredmorbius 1mo ago
  Email suggestions to the mods at hn@ycombinator.com. Mentions-in-comments are a no-op. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36526450 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36526450>
wegwerper 1mo ago
[dead]
veec_cas_tant 1mo ago
Obviously an unpopular opinion on this site, but I wish we had speed cameras, red-light cameras, and ALPRs everywhere. Cars are incredibly dangerous and large numbers of people drive them like absolute lunatics. There should be absolutely no expectation of privacy when using public streets. That position doesn't even account for the footage helping immensely with other investigations.
- steviehicks78 1mo ago
  I would totally agree with you if I trusted the government
  - Groxx 1mo ago
    Yeah - this is the important part. With a truly benevolent government I think this may in fact be the best option... But not only do you have to trust the government now (and you likely should not), you also need to trust the government far into the future (which you absolutely cannot do) because the tools will still exist. Don't accept tools that are also strong weapons for oppression.
    - barbazoo 1mo ago
      OP made the mistake and included ALPRs in their list IMO. Because I'm having a hard time imagining how a sensor triggered red light camera could be used for oppression.
      - Groxx 1mo ago
        Have them take pictures of every car, now you've got half of what flock offers. It's the widespread remote camera installs that are the main problem there. If they kept data locally and had to be collected by hand, it might be fine - that's difficult enough to grow to monitor everyone all the time. Aside from using film though, I'm not sure how that would be achieved. (To be clear, I really do think we should be prosecuting speeding (and tailgating) MUCH more than we do. Far more death and damage occurs from it than we should allow. But ubiquitous networked cameras are not the way we should do that.)
Varelion 1mo ago
A good sign, but I wonder if this will hold.
josefritzishere 1mo ago
That sounds like a viable path to ending mass surveillance.
1vuio0pswjnm7 1mo ago
Alternative to archive.ph No risk of CAPTCHA or geo-blocking No cookies, no Javascript, text-only curl -A "" -Haccept: https://www.winonapost.com/news/wpd-wont-replace-stolen-flock-cameras-citing-public-trust/article_06a67859-2d97-414b-aa8f-d8751ad214bb.html \ |egrep -o '(og:image.*https://.*..image.jpg)|(<p[ ]class=\"p1\".*div>)' \ |sed '1s/^/<meta charset=utf-8>/; s|og:image\" content=\"|<a href=|; s|\.jpg|&>Photo</a>|' > 1.htm firefox ./1.htm #links https://www.winonapost.com/news/wpd-wont-replace-stolen-flock-cameras-citing-public-trust/article_06a67859-2d97-414b-aa8f-d8751ad214bb.html

113 points by erikschoster 1mo ago

ranger_danger 1mo ago

So they will be replacing them with Axon cameras I presume?

iAMkenough 1mo ago
Looks like they’re actually listening to their community, so maybe not.
ofjcihen 1mo ago
I feel like I’ve seen this exact reply in multiple Flock threads.
- ranger_danger 1mo ago
  Probably because you have... several towns have said they were doing exactly this already in response to Flock opposition, as if it helps the matter.

Tostino 1mo ago

I posted this in another thread, and had my comment instantly flagged. Love this site. Worth looking at how these cameras got approved in the first place. My county's ALPR interlocal passed on the consent agenda in December 2024, one block vote alongside forty other items, no discussion, and went through consent again in April 2025. Nothing was "hidden", it's just that "public" here means a 300 page agenda packet and a four hour YouTube video with no transcript, completely unreadable in practice. So I spent a week and a half building a pipeline over what the county already publishes. It pulls the CivicPlus portal (agendas, minutes, item metadata, outcomes) and the YouTube channel, does ASR plus diarization, then aligns the transcript against the published agenda so the passage carries the item it happened under and whatever outcome the minutes recorded for it. Search is hybrid lexical and semantic, and the video is synced to the transcript so any claim can be checked against the recording. The speaker attribution and the alignment was the hard part. Roughly two thirds of passages have no reliable name attached, and diarization gives you clusters rather than identities, so I mark confidence and basis rather than guessing a name. Alignment is very messy because the published agenda order and the order things actually get taken up diverge constantly, and the recorded outcome is often just "Approved the Consent Agenda" for an item that never got discussed. There is a labeling admin area to improve the dataset after initial collection At my county meeting on Aug 25th (in a few days) I'm bringing up the fiscal side. Ours was approved under an item title that said no funding was required. No accounting has been done of what enforcement costs when someone takes a camera down. Prosecutor and court hours. Jail time, or just holding, if the state charges it. Lost future wages from otherwise upstanding citizens who now have a felony. None of that was in front of the commissioners when they approved it, and none of it is in front of them now. Most counties run the same portal software and post to YouTube, so this should generalize. Code is at https://github.com/Tostino/civic-watch https://github.com/Tostino/civic-watch and the Pasco instance is at https://pasco.watch https://pasco.watch if anyone wants to point one at their own county. Happy to help if anyone wants.

estearum 1mo ago
You should start with the lede: "I built a tool to help you understand how/if your community has agreed to deploy Flock cameras. You can try it out here: [ ]. The hardest part of this was..."
- Tostino 1mo ago
  Yeah, that would have been a smarter way to get my point across.
NegativeLatency 1mo ago
Looks neat, any chance you'd be willing to share how much this costs to run?
- Tostino 1mo ago
  You need a GPU for the ASR and diarization. I have an unraid box with an old GPU that I threw it on. So it's sitting in my closet and the ongoing cost is practically nil. There was a few dollars in LLM calls on initial ingestion using deepseek flash. Only fractions of a penny to ingest new data as it comes.
dredmorbius 1mo ago
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7807998 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7807998>
- Tostino 1mo ago
  I'm not saying downvoted, i'm saying flagged. Like almost anything posted related to this surveillance state YC is invested in building.
  - dredmorbius 1mo ago
    Irrelevant distinction per this guideline.

heythere22 1mo ago

https://archive.ph/VMVf6 https://archive.ph/VMVf6

lokar 1mo ago

A weird take. They seem oblivious to the fact that real problem is not distrust of flock, it’s distrust of the police. They are in a situation where the public just barely trusts the local police, and a new surveillance system pushes them over the edge into hostility. They need to be working to gain much more trust.

estearum 1mo ago
Police are bounded by evidentiary laws and warrant requirements, all of which legitimately do stand up in court. Flock is not. So no, actually Flock itself is the problem. If Flock were willing to sign some consent decree that its data can only be accessed by police with a valid judicial warrant, for example, they probably could've headed off this entire mess. But instead they called people "terroristic" for pushing back. Completely braindead move from the CEO.
- lokar 1mo ago
  I’m not sure people think that way, or even understand the details. But they see lots of stories about police officers misusing the system.
  - estearum 1mo ago
    I think people understand "rich tech CEO putting cameras everywhere offers no assurances of people's privacy and legal rights, instead opts to call them terrorists" perfectly well The fundamental issue is that Flock doesn't care about people's privacy or rights. That washes out in a variety of ways including CEOs' statements, product-level security controls (thus creating the horror stories), and lack of legal commitments to protections. I would personally be in favor of a fairly widespread camera network that had significant legal protections built in. Flock has demonstrated – in every possible way – they cannot possibly be the providers of such a system.
- matherial 1mo ago
  The police have SWAT teams, guns, and jails, Flock does not. So I think the state security apparatus is a part of the problem, because if they don't like you and have access to surveillance technology, the outcomes can be far more severe than if Facebook doesn't like you, or the CEO of Flock doesn't like you.

thangalin 1mo ago

https://i.ibb.co/WWWYznHX/flock-future.png https://i.ibb.co/WWWYznHX/flock-future.png ;-) Also: https://dave.autonoma.ca/blog/2019/06/06/web-of-knowledge/ https://dave.autonoma.ca/blog/2019/06/06/web-of-knowledge/

otterley 1mo ago

Mods: To reduce ambiguity, can we change "WPD" to "Winona, Minnesota PD"?

dredmorbius 1mo ago
Email suggestions to the mods at hn@ycombinator.com. Mentions-in-comments are a no-op. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36526450 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36526450>

wegwerper 1mo ago

[dead]

veec_cas_tant 1mo ago

Obviously an unpopular opinion on this site, but I wish we had speed cameras, red-light cameras, and ALPRs everywhere. Cars are incredibly dangerous and large numbers of people drive them like absolute lunatics. There should be absolutely no expectation of privacy when using public streets. That position doesn't even account for the footage helping immensely with other investigations.

steviehicks78 1mo ago
I would totally agree with you if I trusted the government
- Groxx 1mo ago
  Yeah - this is the important part. With a truly benevolent government I think this may in fact be the best option... But not only do you have to trust the government now (and you likely should not), you also need to trust the government far into the future (which you absolutely cannot do) because the tools will still exist. Don't accept tools that are also strong weapons for oppression.
  - barbazoo 1mo ago
    OP made the mistake and included ALPRs in their list IMO. Because I'm having a hard time imagining how a sensor triggered red light camera could be used for oppression.
    - Groxx 1mo ago
      Have them take pictures of every car, now you've got half of what flock offers. It's the widespread remote camera installs that are the main problem there. If they kept data locally and had to be collected by hand, it might be fine - that's difficult enough to grow to monitor everyone all the time. Aside from using film though, I'm not sure how that would be achieved. (To be clear, I really do think we should be prosecuting speeding (and tailgating) MUCH more than we do. Far more death and damage occurs from it than we should allow. But ubiquitous networked cameras are not the way we should do that.)

Varelion 1mo ago

A good sign, but I wonder if this will hold.

josefritzishere 1mo ago

That sounds like a viable path to ending mass surveillance.

1vuio0pswjnm7 1mo ago

Alternative to archive.ph No risk of CAPTCHA or geo-blocking No cookies, no Javascript, text-only curl -A "" -Haccept: https://www.winonapost.com/news/wpd-wont-replace-stolen-flock-cameras-citing-public-trust/article_06a67859-2d97-414b-aa8f-d8751ad214bb.html \ |egrep -o '(og:image.*https://.*..image.jpg)|(<p[ ]class=\"p1\".*div>)' \ |sed '1s/^/<meta charset=utf-8>/; s|og:image\" content=\"|<a href=|; s|\.jpg|&>Photo</a>|' > 1.htm firefox ./1.htm #links https://www.winonapost.com/news/wpd-wont-replace-stolen-flock-cameras-citing-public-trust/article_06a67859-2d97-414b-aa8f-d8751ad214bb.html