Given technology's march forward, it seems that higher resolution cameras would enable tracking systems to determine unique car identities by the pattern of imperfections in the vehicle, much like biologists sort leopards by their spots.
IOW, I think removing license plates just buys some time.
Let's talk about those unfortunate migrants who are having their lives ruined. In West Oakland, much ado was just made about ICE attempting to pick someone up near an elementary school [0]. Some locals swarmed the cops to try to protect the poor man from being "kidnapped."
Turns out ICE conducted a targeted immigration enforcement operation to arrest Gonzalo Ramirez Martez, whose rap sheet includes multiple arrests for DUI, domestic violence, driving on a suspended license, etc. I don't know of a developed nation that wouldn't deport a habitual drunk driver who beats women.
In my county, every local ICE apprehension has been the result of targeted operations against criminals with substantial records, to include domestic violence, rape, aggravated assault, and meth trafficking for the cartels among others. No exceptions have been found by the local press, and it's not for lack of trying.
Is my life better because these criminals are being deported? Yes. So long as one "side" pretends it's all innocents being kidnapped, the rest of us will ignore you, because it's obviously and demonstrably not the case. I don't want woman-beating violent felons in my immediate location, and if an American were doing the same thing in another country they would absolutely deserve to be sent home in handcuffs.
Do I have trepidation about the methods being used? Sure, it's why I'm in this thread. But let's not pretend there's no benefit to what's going on, because it seems pretty clear to this observer that removing repeat offenders is a good thing.
What are you talking about? For all intents and purposes it is all innocents, and you know it. Arguing otherwise is just that - an argument, said just to try to "win" for your "side".
You're advocating that we assume everyone is a violent criminal so that we can jail that 1 in 9,000 that actually is dangerous. Guilty until proven innocent. You can't get more un-American than that, really.
Look, you asked 'is my life better?' and the answer is yes. I haven't seen any of these supposed innocent people being deported everyone keeps bringing up. What I have seen is people with significant criminal records being deported from my county, something I am great with. Violent felons who beat women or work for cartels don't need to be here, and so far every single person apprehended here has ended up having a substantial record.
I have also seen effectively zero retractions, corrections, or updates on press articles about these supposedly innocent people once their criminal histories become publicly available. Well, CBP or HSI or ICE will put up an announcement, but little good that does. It's no wonder people think ICE are the forces of evil when they never learn the "local father" is a registered sex offender or a violent drunk.
I absolutely share your concern over profiling driving patterns, but I don't think hyperbole is useful, and for me it immediately puts a person's credibility near zero.
Imagine trying to keep an animal like that out of food it's not supposed to have (to include fish tanks). The dang things would probably learn to pick locks with their cute little hands.
Raccoons are also social animals so they like to maintain good relations. My mom is friends with wild raccoons and they never try and break in even though they know there is food inside. The raccoons try and open the sliding glass door but they don't become home invasion robbers if they don't find food outside and can't get in through the door. What's funny is that her cats like to watch the raccoons for entertainment and will touch paws on glass but if only a screen door separates them the cats get very upset and frighten the raccoons who just want to be friends. Their intelligence seems to help them get along, like there's one raccoon that my mom has named and it comes when called and can understand my mom through the Ring doorbell. It understands that it is her voice but not her presence so will wait like a dog that has taken obedience. The raccoon is disabled having only one eye, so it survives through intelligence like befriending my mom and is the friendliest of all the raccoons.
Why would a stop for an outstanding warrant have negative value for your community? If word got out that OPPD will come down hard on anyone with warrants, perhaps people with warrants would stay away from your community. I'm not sure I see the downside; deterrence is a good thing.
Analogy: criminals know Target stores have a policy to prosecute all shoplifters, so when there was still a shoplifting subreddit that fact would be regularly trotted out and criminals were warned by their peers (the best kind of testimonial) to stay away. I would love it if my neighborhood had that reputation.
A failure to appear warrant is generally someone not showing up to court to pay a traffic ticket. It's essentially municipal debt collection work. I'm not saying it's bad to catch people with outstanding warrants; i'm saying that OPPD curbing a car and making an arrest has a simple logistical cost, and that cost swamps the minuscule value of helping a neighboring suburb collect ticket revenue.
Our police have real work to do. If we had a special magic beepy device in all the police cruisers that lit up when someone with an outstanding warrant drove past, we would not prioritize that enforcement work to the exclusion of the real work. But since OPPD doesn't know that they're going to end up burning 5 hours on a failure-to-appear warrant when they curb a car on a Flock alert, that's what Flock essentially had us doing.
I honestly think this argument is probably pretty portable to a lot of different municipalities. It's not a function of anything Flock itself deliberately does, but rather a simple function of pretextual or preemptive stops on cars: you are probably going to end up making a whole bunch of failure-to-appear arrests. And I think in pretty much every community where killing camera contracts is on the table, failure-to-appear enforcement will be perceived as net-negative, a distraction from preventing serious crime.
The thing I like about this argument is that it's insensitive to people's priors about law enforcement. Whether or not you like your PD (I very much like OPPD), this argument should have weight!
The key observation here, again, is that any arrest has a very high fixed cost.
I don't know, I think paying your traffic tickets is about the least you can do downstream of very occasionally being caught for habitual dangerous driving behavior. Breaking the "municipal debt collection" breaks the deterrent effect of traffic tickets.
I agree that in the abstract maybe there are better things some cops could be doing, but it seems like a vaguely reasonable use of some traffic enforcement resources. It's not like this taking away from murder investigations.
There's a prisoner's dilemma defecting thing going on here, right? You'd want neighboring municipalities to enforce warrants out of Oak Park.
It literally does take away from violent crime investigation! Remember, I'm not making a moral argument about the legitimacy of traffic fines. In fact, that's one of our big issues in Oak Park. I'm saying that police departments make prioritization decisions, and Flock cameras structurally undo those decisions by throwing alerts on cars (which would not otherwise have been curbed) that produce warrant arrests.
The key thing to understand is that an arrest eats half an OPPD officer's work day, so if OPPD is arresting someone, you want the juice to be worth the squeeze.
Your traffic cops would otherwise be participating in murder investigations? My understanding is that these are different specializations and they don't overlap.
No real objection to "the data source is bad," but I think the solution there is improve the data source rather than willful blindness.
I didn't say "murder investigations". We have a very small number of detectives, who do not conduct traffic stops, but the overwhelming majority of our force (and of all the police work done here) is patrol, all of which do conduct stops.
We don't control this data! It's good to want things, but whether or not you think it's good that LEADS isn't good enough for real-time enforcement, it is not.
I think lots of upstanding citizens have forgotten to pay a ticket at some point (as in, I've done it, as have some other people i know, and none of us are criminals or even dangerous drivers. My ticket was for a one-day expired license plate sticker, btw). The cop doesn't even know from the license plate that the person driving is the owner of the car, and so they don't even know that the driver actually has a warrant until after they're stopped.
Mr. Flock Person, how about a feature request to alert only on 'interesting' warrants? I wonder if that's even possible — it might be a binary flag on the plate data. Hm. If so, that would be a serious bummer and something perhaps the legislature should look into remedying (such a change would require funding after all). A will-extradite flag seems like it would be useful.
I know there's Flock staff commenting on this thread (which is great, regardless of how you feel about Flock) but just for context: Flock alerts in Chicagoland municipalities are driven by LEADS and the lookups are on license plates, not people, so they can't actually filter out failure-to-appear stops.
Right, that's why I was thinking the legislature would have to get involved. An extension to available license plate data would require approval and funding.
I think law enforcement everywhere in the US would like a way to make ALPR more useful for targeting higher risk offenders and leave the revenue generation warrants to times when the subject is being arrested for a different offense. Such an extension would maximize the utility of the investment that's already been made in ALPR hardware, software, and services.
Arresting people who are wanted on outstanding warrants is “real work.” Fund the police if there is too much work for the police to do. Letting criminals drive around with impunity is not an acceptable approach.
I hate this trend because I use em dashes a lot in my writing. Someone tell the AIs to throttle back on them a bit — people might think I'm using AI when I'm not.
I don't understand how people use or got used to using em dahshes? How do you even type them? theres no button for it so are you manually inserting, copy pasting it and why not just use a hyphen - instead of an en dash? Was this taught in schools or is it some form of technical writing?
Shift-Option-Hyphen. I don't know where I picked up the habit of using them. I think back in the day before there were such characters I used double hyphens, but it's been a minute — using the keyboard shortcut is essentially reflexive now.
It's the poor man's semi-colon, because a lot of folks never learned how to use it correctly. Now a lot of word processors automatically turn a double hyphen to the em-dash--and here we are.
I'm looking for convincing decoy ALPR cameras because I don't think my HOA will go for a real setup, and I've got concerns over the product's security. I want the appearance of surveillance if I can't get the real thing. Being on a Flock/ALPR tracking app/site would be a huge win.
There is no benefit to signaling one's virtue in this scenario. It's like having a sign in your yard that says "Proudly Gun-Free Household".
> My neighborhood is very safe and we have no such cameras.
Good for you.
> why do you think cameras are the only solution?
Straw man.
I want to deter criminals from even thinking about targeting my neighborhood. The appearance of surveillance might serve as a powerful deterrent. Inclusion on a site that warns criminals where ALPR cameras are located would be a boon to this effort. Convincing decoy camera housings, the subject of my post, might be enough to get the neighborhood listed without actually having go forward with a full Flock installation.
Let me be extremely clear: there's no member of the set of humans that actively avoid ALPR cameras that I want coming to my home uninvited. Not a single one.
That's not the case globally[1]. And there is a lot of oil money causing confusion. But, regardless of what the true situation is, continually burning fossil fuels with reckless abandon, is not the way forward for humanity.
IOW, I think removing license plates just buys some time.