In Leaked Audio, Flock CEO Tells Cops Backlash to the Company Isn't Real
404media.co316 points by Frieren 2 days ago
316 points by Frieren 2 days ago
> “I give my wife a lot of credit. She was, like, you should never apologize,” Langley said. “Sure, people make mistakes. I've made a lot of mistakes in the last nine years. I made a lot of mistakes this summer. But we do good work.”
So this guy admits he did things that he shouldn't have then contends that he shouldn't have to say sorry for them? Am I reading this right? Isn't the point of an apology to acknowledge the bad outcome and signal to aggrieved parties that the offender will try avoid repeating the negative behavior? If yes and this guy is refusing to do it then what does that say about his world view?
Well, at least he won't have to apologize to his wife for throwing her under the bus.
That highly depends on the receiver. Currently in any public setting there is more or less no instance where "being sorry" will help you.
Utilitarian view, sure. Outrage sells, some people are addicted to outrage. They don't want an apology, they want to see people burn. Under no circumstances ever apologise to them (or lawyers).
Wisdom and self-reflection has no value in current political climate. It requires the correct audience.
It's a certain personality type, and nothing new. I've met people like this my whole life. For them, apologizing runs the risk of signaling weakness (and for sure, there's the other personality type that will take that message from an apology). So you can introspect and acknowledge mistakes you made to yourself, and maybe to some confidantes, but never to others.
Actually, introspection is out as well
https://www.businessinsider.com/marc-andreessen-zero-introsp...
> Great men of history had little to no introspection.
These people are completely detached from reality. How do they think we know the thoughts of these so called great men?
> How do they think we know the thoughts of these so called great men?
Many have biographies and autobiographies. Is not hard to spot.
Yes, exactly. In other words, they were introspective.
Introspection isn't a requirement to write an autobiography, and certainly not a biography. Just because someone can't stop talking about themselves and their accomplishments doesn't necessarily mean they analyze their inner thoughts and feelings for deeper meaning.
I would wager that a great many of those people had the introspection to eventually understand where they stood in the world and played the role and probably eventually believed it themselves (because often you must to be successful).
"A great king would not self doubt so I will not self doubt".
He'll say whatever will sell or raise his profile.
His blog in 2007, which people loved:
https://pmarchive.com/guide_to_personal_productivity.html
Search for "Anti-Todo" and read that section. Then tell me he doesn't believe in some introspection.
> It's a certain personality type, and nothing new. I've met people like this my whole life. For them, apologizing runs the risk of signaling weakness (and for sure, there's the other personality type that will take that message from an apology). So you can introspect and acknowledge mistakes you made to yourself, and maybe to some confidantes, but never to others.
Is that type narcissism?
I don't think we need a diagnosis for "asshole"
We do. Asshole is more subjective and narcissism is an attempt at describing some specific type of assholeness that you know exist in various individuals and that you can spot by checking if it matches a few characteristics. You can now better spot them and avoid them if you want or look for knowledge about how to handle this type of person if you have to.
Apologizing is admitting guilt and that's just never a good time in the vicinity of lawyers. It's their job to prove guilt, not yours.
Depends on whose lawyers we're talking about. Honesty is generally a reasonable policy when speaking to your own (which has nothing to do with apologies, of course).
Did you miss the part about "But we do good work" ?
In his twisted mind, he did nothing wrong, therefore no apology needed. It's a classic case of delusion mixed with relative morals and pretty much it's the best case of "Rules for thee, but not for me". Because, he blurred his house on Google maps, because, privacy is fundamental...just for him. Fuck everyone else.
I mean, it works for the president of the US. I think this attitude is a lot more common than people would like to admit.
Only due to the cultural shift over the past 10 years, I would say. You also see it coming out of “streamer” culture, as well as evangelical “prosperity gospel” culture, where any means justify the ends of acquiring wealth - and no shame need be felt.
IMO there's an ongoing battle between two very different concepts of what speech means.
1. I speak "X" because I believe X to be true. I am virtuous because I am correct, and honest.
2. I speak "X" because that is is the current signal for demonstrating loyalty in the in-group. I am virtuous because I demonstrate allegiance and membership.
_____
In the first case, you apologize for an error because it's how you get back to a state of being correct. (Or if you don't apologize, it's because you double-down and insist it isn't an error.)
In the second case, you don't apologize because the "error" was merely a strategic misstep of over-triggering the dirty out-group, and anyway caring about them too much is suspicious.
I think this is almost at the truth. My view is that everyone values two frequently opposing things: truth and social reward. Whether you behave like (1) or (2) depends on which you value more, and how much pressure is being applied from either direction. I like to think that most people usually value being correct over social reward but this is not always the case, and frequently this difference in values results in totally unproductive arguments. There is no persuading someone who defends a position for social reward. The best thing you can do is try to make their position seem absurd and silly as a social punishment, and hopefully witnesses will think agreeing with you will result in higher social reward. I believe this is also why high profile debates are frequently just two people slinging insults back and forth. This is actually what a significant number of people find persuasive, since it determines whether their social circle will reward them or punish them for their beliefs.
Tea party of the early 2010s also played by this rule. Lots of "I cannot recall"s which translates to "I won't even acknowledge wrong doing so why would I apologize?"
MAGA is the cultural descendent of the Tea Party so yeah this tracks. The birth of vice signaling.
Everyone debating a maga person now must be trained to deal effectively with the "I haven't heard about that" defense that will inevitably come up
It seems to me that corporate entities will also pay any amount of money rather than admit wrongdoing.
This will fade. People are tired of it and will start to ostracize this antisocial behavior.
not as long as sociopaths own social media
Or people get sick of it and opt out. There is lots of evidence that trend is accelerating
The president is unlikely to feel consequences for the attitude, but Langley likely will as Flock enterprise value trends towards zero.
Flock Offers Employees Buyouts as Customers Flee - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49762835 - September 2026 (45 comments)
Cities terminate Flock contracts at record pace in August - https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/08/cities-terminate... - August 28th, 2026
If there is something the president has truly shown me is that just because consequences look inevitable, does not make them so. He exemplifies the ability to avoid consequences and responsibility.
I only trust that consequences will arrive when they actually arrive.
He isn’t avoiding consequences. Only delaying them.
If he can delay them long enough that he dies of old age first, he will have avoided them.
Wish I could have that hope. I don't believe he will ever experience consequences for the vast majority of things he's done. Even if he does finally receive some justice for one thing, it's a practical impossibility that he will experience justice for everything he's done.
And I honestly see no reason to believe he's simply delaying consequences. He was out of the presidency for four years during which time he was convicted of multiple felonies. Is that a consequence? Was that justice? It didn't end up meaning anything.
No, he is avoiding them. He was found guilty of 34 felonies related to election interference in the Stormy Daniels hush money case. Judge Juan Merchan declined to sentence him to any punishment whatsoever. He was then re-elected president. He will never face any consequences for those crimes.
The Supreme Court has ruled that (Republican) presidents are above the law. Official actions can't be prosecuted, but you have to ask the court what official means on a case-by-case basis, making the ruling implicitly partisan. Trump will thus never face consequences for his crimes in office.
Trump is an admitted (Access Hollywood) and convicted (E Jean Carroll) sexual predator. He has paid several million dollars to E Jean Carroll for raping her but that is the extent of any consequence he has suffered. He continues to be president.
I highly doubt apologizing would’ve had any effect on the outcome. He never had any intention of changing the direction of the company.
this is honestly why i don't trust guys who are "wife guys" (also extends to "family guys")
aka the guys who bring up their wife all the time regardless of the situation.
its really not masculine and makes me trust that "man" less
billions of people have spouses. it isn't a big deal. stop bringing them in as a deflection mechanism to soften whatever shit they're gonna say next lol
I think his point is that the people that are against the technology will never change their mind, regardless of what you do to assuage them. It's a lost cause.
Everyone and every business makes mistakes. We don't go on an apology tour every time we make a mistake. On the net he believes he's doing good in this world.
For instance, a mistake he spoke about was not providing strict enough guards on operators, allowing them to conduct unlawful searches. He's since corrected that and looks for new ways to restrict and audit platform access. What's the point of dwelling on this? Is the anti-flock lunatic cutting down cameras going to read the press release and think "gee, Flock is turning a new leaf", obviously not. It just adds more fuel to the fire taking away from the good work they do.
Correct, flock is broken at a conceptual level and that means really no amount of implementation details will fix it.
That doesn’t mean that flock should just keep doing what they’re doing. Quite the contrary - flock should not exist. It is anti-American to its core, and there’s no salvaging it. Flock can only exist if it changes in every way possible.
Providing private mass-surveillance as a product for our government is, fundamentally, broken. It’s not a good idea, and no amount of twiddling will make it good. Similar to how running a hit-man business is fundamentally bad. Doesn’t matter how many background checks I do on the hitmen. Doesn’t matter if I extra triple check they’re only murdering bad people. The concept itself is immoral and deplorable.
hear hear. imo the constitution should be read as eyes open tradeoffs. the 4th amendment is an clear one and this is a great case for it: its not that flock couldnt theoretically reduce crime. it that the reduction isnt worth giving up the power to the government to do so.
this. and note that while it is likely true that bots were driving awareness of the anti-flock campaign, that does not mean that the anti-flock campaign is wrong - in his cognitive dissonance, he is affirming the consequent.
Flock's value proposition is essentially Uber's, except instead of evading taxi regs Flock lets your LEOs evade the need to get warrants.
> looks for new ways to restrict and audit platform access. What's the point of dwelling on this?
Well, for one, seeing if anything changes. "Auditing tools" could be the loud part and "that are completely unused" is the soft part.
This is definitely not the person to be afforded the benefit of doubt.
If allowing unlawful searches to be done is just a little whoopsie, then all the actions by those "lunatics" you're complaining about are even less than a little whoopsie.
Flock does not do good work.
Flock enables mass surveillance of a type that destroys liberty, and is opposed by sensible people who understand freedom, history, and who respect the brave men and women who have fought for our rights.
Flock is defended exclusively by pathetic, weak little men who are afraid of their own shadows, and who (wrongly) believe that unchecked government power is a good thing.
Have you ever lived in a red state? In a rural area? "Never apologize, especially when you know you're wrong" is a foundational principle in many cultures and households.
I live in a very rural area, and most people are sort of overly apologetic about their mistakes. The ones that refuse to acknowledge their mistakes or apologize are what we call "assholes".
In a rural community, being labeled as an asshole has real repercussions. A neighbor down the road is moving away because of this. He called the cops on a guy who was trying to catch some horses that got out of their pen when the man looking for his horses pulled into his driveway to then back out and turn around. The place he bought was my neighbor's grandpa's farm. There was an old barn with a wooden door inside that my neighbor asked to buy from him (his grandpa had carved his and the grandma's initials on it when they were dating). So the asshole said sure, for $25k. When my neighbor said no, the asshole burned the door. He's an asshole, and because of that nobody would help him when he needed help with his crops because his combine died.
Now he's leaving. Community is important when there's not much of it around.
But I digress. I'm not sure geography or politics has anything to do with emotional maturity.
I live in a rural area in a red state and it's quite the opposite. People are perhaps maybe a bit too apologetic. I think the unwillingness to apologize or acknowledge oneself as wrong is a symptom of emotional immaturity rather than political persuasion.
It is more contextual than a simple binary, especially the emotional context. If the event triggers their shame more than their identity, you get the larger than required apologies. If their identity is the primary thing that is triggered, they will get defensive and double down. It's not just a rural thing.
Yeah that's just human nature I fear. Nothing to do with politics or geography
Crazy to be self aware of it and blatantly not give af
It can be both. Never admitting fault is very much core to MAGA but it's somewhat neutral with other major political ideologies. Being emotionally immature may also make people remorse-averse.
"I may not be right but I am never wrong" -- a quote from a conversation I had w/ someone in Austin, TX
This attitude is also very common for law enforcement or prosecutors.
In some careers, admitting fault can open you up to lawsuits or additional consequences.
Yes, but in the case of prosecutors it can be very messed up. When someone is wrongfully convicted and there is very unambiguous exonerating evidence, prosecutors will fight overturning convictions.
It's bad enough to wrongfully send someone to prison, but to keep fighting for wrongful imprisonment when it's shown they made a mistake is downright evil.
Better not prosecute people who cut down the cameras then, since that's part of the non-real backlash.
True. Such people clearly don’t exist and it’s obviously a company product failure and the company should be paying fines and penalties.
> Langley suggested during the session with Rausch that eventually the opposition to Flock will die down: “Whenever this industry finds a highly effective tool, it has to go through this period of intense debate. But then you get on the other side. I think right now we’re not at the bottom, but we’re real, dang, near close to it and about to come back up on the other side.”
So every other law enforcement tool has also been subjected to russian troll farms and eventually the fake furor dies down?
Or is he admitting that those of us who don't stand to make billions off of a private surveillance network are actually the real humans here?
Historically it was an easy step going from "these people are not real" to "these people are now dead".
What does this mean? Flock CEO will start... killing people?
He already has been. Flock cameras routinely draw the police into situations where they're not need and cause shootings/high speed chases that end in dead bodies.
In yesterday's video from Benn Jordan [0] there was a Flock employee that told 911 multiple times "I'm not sure if they are armed." when reporting that a few people were filming from the perimeter of a Flock office building in Georgia.
He also said several times that "we're under lockdown here."
/shrug Seems like he was certainly trying to cause some form of harm.
Flock sucks.
0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OP5GDiLZ1Nw
https://youtu.be/OP5GDiLZ1Nw?t=1130 if you want a timestamp.
Do you think he will shut down LEO access to its systems if the government decides to have a purge of the undesirables, or two?
>What does this mean? Flock CEO will start... killing people?
No, he'll merely facilitate that, at scale.
IBM technically didn't kill any Jews too in WW2[1].
[1]https://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/mar/29/humanities.hig...
More like another reason for cops to mow down protesters. True Citizens would never protest something so obviously beneficial to everyone /s
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Good did not hit an officer with her car, and was driving away from him when she was shot through the side window of her car.
Pretti was legally armed and was shot and killed while face down on the ground.
This is all corroborated with video and contradicts statements from the involved federal agents. Charitably they were “mistaken”, realistically they lied to cover themselves.
There are many more instances where federal agents lied about what happened and their accounts were later refuted by eyewitness testimony and video. Just in those cases the victims did not die. Look up all the cases that were thrown out of court because government’s case rested on falsehoods.
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How are people so chill about police killing anyone? These people are literally paid by the community, to protect the community. Anyone dying at their hands is an insane level of failure, we shouldn't need hundreds of examples when every single instance should be an outlier in the data.
They either believe it could never happen to them and/or believe the protestors deserve it. Usually both.
Following your logic, how many people must the police murder without provocation before it constitutes "mowing down". Please, give an exact number
These aren’t the only two protesters shot by federal agents in the past year, they’re just two that died from it. More have been shot and killed, but they were targets of ICE stops, not protesters.
There are more cases of people being shot by ICE agents, then charged, then charges dropped because agents lied and/or evidence was tampered with or destroyed.
I watched the videos of Good and Pretti being killed. It looked like vengeful executions than anything else. It should deeply bother everyone of any political party.
What's questionable about them? If people in power see that they can callously murder people and everyone is as apathetic what do you think will happen next?
>Do cops really "mow down protestors"?
Yes [1].
>The only cases I could find are ...
I am aware that Google's search quality has gone down, but surely not to that extent.
Or, as kids say today: skill issue.
> Alex Pretti who was armed at the time and arguably resisting arrest
> arguably
As argued by the people who killed him, of course.
In any case, ICE are not police, i.e. not cops, so I dunno why you would derail the discussion to ICE if you are talking in good faith.
Cheers.
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"Illegal alien" is a term used throughout federal immigration law, e.g. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/8/1366
"Alien" is the term referring to the person. "Illegal" is merely a status.
It's arguable that "illegal alien" is itself dehumanizing, implying that a person can be legal or illegal merely by existing, when in reality, it's the actions they perform which are legal or illegal. In this case, the action is entering the country without following proper procedure, which is more like trespassing, except at a country-level rather than individual property level.
Shortening the label to "illegal" removes the last vestige of reference to the target as a person and further cements the idea that a person's existence can be good or bad.
That doesn't make it exempt from being dehumanizing. Indeed codified dehumanization is one the primary mechanisms by which it is realized.
The current regime is openly racist and dehumanizing towards many groups, so that doesn't necessarily mean anything.
That's just some kind of language bifurcation by political affiliation in the US. The right-wing term for immigrants who didn't enter the US through ports with documentation is indeed "illegals", though it seems the word "immigrants" is as pejorative among that crowd. The left-wing term for immigrants, both domestic and international and irrespective of arrival method is "transplant" and is fairly pejorative as well. I don't think "transplant" is any more specifically humanizing.
It's just that documentation-status matters to one, and does not matter to the other.
"Transplant" is certainly not any kind of mainstream left term in the USA, and this is the first time I have ever heard the claim. The left counterpart of the right's "illegal immigrant" is instead "undocumented immigrant" vel sim.
It is amusing to talk to actual border officials, because the term in their lingo for people running across from Mexico is usually simply "alien", which always makes me think of The X-Files theme tune.
Haha, I have an Alien Number so I'm familiar with that. "Transplant" as the word for "immigrant" is pretty common in coastal California. Here are a few examples that should illustrate:
* The Bold Italic[0] - a popular San Francisco essay magazine talking about transplants
* Eric Adams is quoted by the WaPo prior to announcing his candidacy for mayor[1] (he was eventually elected mayor):
> “Go back to Iowa,” Adams, who is expected to be a top Democratic contender in New York’s 2021 mayoral race, told transplants. “You go back to Ohio! New York City belongs to the people that [were] here and made New York City what it is.”
* Great Replacement Theory is reframed[2]:
> ...multi-decades-old Black businesses and Black-owned or traditionally Black folk-rented homes are being replaced by a new population–some call them transplants.
I think it's pretty common lingo these days on the left. If you ask an LLM what a "transplant" is in the context of people, it can easily describe the term[3]. I say that only to say that it is commonly enough used as such that it is recognizable.
0: https://www.thebolditalic.com/the-last-black-man-in-san-fran...
1: https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/01/21/adams-brook...
2: https://ourtimepress.com/say-it-aint-so-developers-target-sm...
3: https://claude.ai/share/bf6cfb17-314a-4e4b-b3eb-e99bbed07e86
Your citations for “transplant” being used for illegal immigrants is people being told to go back to Ohio? None of your examples are about people who would typically be called immigrants, and as someone in coastal California I have never heard the term used for international movement.
I think you have very deeply misunderstood a pretty straightforward term.
I’m not saying people say “transplant” for illegal immigrants. I’m saying that all people hate migrants and the left-wing acceptable term for that is to rename them “transplants” - which seems straightforwardly true. I’m a foreigner so I can easily see this Nacireman trait that is less visible to you as a local because you are used to expressing the anti-migrant sentiment in words that are socially-acceptable in your milieu.
It is OK to simply admit that you didn't understand the context in which "transplant" was used and its (ir)relevance to this particular thread. To post three separate replies where you are reaching for a way to avoid admitting this by concocting some fantastical left-right difference, is not convincing anyone otherwise.
I am simply conversing with people who are directly responding to me. But I hear you, and we will likely not encounter each other again on this site.
> It is amusing to talk to actual border officials, because the term in their lingo for people running across from Mexico is usually simply "alien", which always makes me think of The X-Files theme tune.
Along similar lines, it makes me think of Men in Black.
Transplant means anyone who moves into your city, in my experience. It has a kind of NIMBY ish or anti gentrification tone, like "NJ transplants don't understand like real new yorkers" but I don't think it refers to immigration specifically.
Exactly, either a domestic or international migrant. While right-wing ire is usually focused on international migrants, left-wing ire doesn't discriminate between domestic/international. It's build the wall rhetoric but oriented more towards localities as opposed to the US as a whole.
transplant isn't inherently pejorative. People who move cities will frequently refer to themselves by this moniker.
I've always literally never heard it used to refer to someone who migrated from another country. Only someone who moved domestically.
> transplant isn't inherently pejorative. People who move cities will frequently refer to themselves by this moniker.
A standard that also covers the n-word.
> I've always literally never heard it used to refer to someone who migrated from another country. Only someone who moved domestically.
Migrants are migrants. Anti-immigration sentiment restricted to domestic immigration alone is nor specifically more acceptable than that for foreigners.
I have never heard the word transplant use that way. I prefer to simply use "immigrants."
I have heard liberals emphasize "undocumented" instead of "illegal" which makes sense to me.
That's normal to say "immigrant" if you're neither right-wing nor aiming to use it pejoratively. The blue-tribe pejorative for immigrant is "transplant".
It's pretty common, I'd say, in the zeitgeist. As an example here's a popular content creator (Conan was on his show): https://www.youtube.com/shorts/vQ6TOleoCTY
It's really not that different in use. A right-wing commentator might say "Immigrants need to assimilate and put down roots here, not just bring their own culture here" whereas a left-wing commentator might say (as you see in the above clip, paraphrased): "Transplants need to put down roots here and volunteer to join the community"
It's everywhere though. Not to detract from the massive problem of mass surveillance, but just recently when that data center in Russia got, and those derpy images of "stats about Russian" bots were circulated, I saw a lot of "the right-wing support is not organic" stuff.
Something is driving people into bubbles so they only talk about the other, never with. And both agree that "centrists", "normies", etc. are the most despicable of all. Seems like a recipe for something.
Idk seems like a lot of cross-aisle discussion happens in this forum. The tech world in general is somewhat a clash of cultures across the spectrum from anarchists to neofeudalists.
In fact, just look at this thread…
My experience has been more talking past each other and being downvoted. Which is why I rarely engage anymore.
Most of the comments here are focusing on crimes in urban areas. The town I live in has a population of about 6,000. It also has low crime. But the municipal government has installed several flock cameras. I struggle to understand how these benefit me, as a citizen of the town. They definitely make me feel uncomfortable whenever I drive past, knowing that someone, somewhere is likely tracking and cataloguing my movements.
Apparently you are paid to feel that way. Or you aren't real. (According to Flock CEO.)
Maybe Flock isn't real? I mean, if birds aren't real, flocks can't be either.
Clearly a company denying that the public comprises real people with real autonomy should be entrusted with privacy issues.
It seems to be a typical case of unscrupulous people getting ahead. The more ruthless, the fewer obstacles, the easier they can beat competition. The more they grow, the more they get affirmation of "doing well", which only reinforces their corruption.
Yep, Florida ordering you to remove every one of your cameras from state highways didn't happen. Entire states moving to ban your product isn't a thing. And of course there are no tanks in Baghdad.
The anti-Americanness Langley exhibits boggles my mind.
I would say that his views are very in line with modern American values. At least the values of those who actually have power.
More like South Africa. American values are very much against concentration of power. Something those concentrating power will be reminded of.
Authoritarianism is as American as sliced bread. It's in the country's bones, starting from its founding, and continuing forward through segregation, the red scares, and into today.
Two years ago, half the voters were explicitly asked if they wanted more of it, and they said 'absolutely'!
I won't say America is founded on authoritarianism. I will say it's founded in the practice of letting businesses run how they see fit, though, with minimal oversight from the government. . . So flock is doing what we value as a nation, just not for the reasons you claim.
The America i believe is the one that gave me 1st, 2nd, and 4th amendment. I will vote to keep it that way. Even if that means voting for a different party every time, including libertarian. Sucks that there's no good option, and there's only 1 guy in the congress i believe in his honesty.
The Flock CEO is another example of investor blindness to founder weirdness. It used to be a positive signal if a founder was a bit odd. But compared to current tech industry leaders, what's odd?
Garrett Langley scares the normies. That's fine if your audience is just cops. But it doesn't go over well with the public at large. By many accounts Steve Jobs could be a raging asshole, but he never showed that face to the public. But if the people advising you are accelerationists with a thing for the antichrist, you're going to be clueless about what normal people think of you.
Flock (YC S17)
Is this "unreal backlash" in the room with us right now?
As with most antistate issues today, there is a mix of bots/institutional interference (both foreign and domestic), and real people. Both can be true.
Yeah, I don't think so. The backlash is 100% real people. I don't know a single pro-Flock person but I know 100s that want to go take them down.
Unless you've been very careful to only surround yourself with people who share your exact views, you probably do know some. They just don't speak up, because: what's the point debating it with you?
Data centers and Flock are the two things uniting left and right protesters.
Also food safety.
For example, community supported agriculture programs cross traditional political boundaries.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/who-likes-flock-ai-cameras-...
35% of Democrats are pro-Flock.
54% of Republicans.
If someone doesn't know a pro-Flock person, he/she is living in a bubble. Agreed with the first responder: You likely know multiple people, but they're scared to reveal themselves.
I've got no opinion on Flock, but I certainly agree that it is a lot easier to affirm the world view of fundamentalists than to debate them in real life. Especially since they tend to get aggressive and are vindictive long-term.
No matter what it is, if the other party holds the strict belief that they can't be wrong, I avoid to debate them privately.
> I've got no opinion on Flock
And this attitude is exactly why they get away with it.
I think this point is most accurate. I know a few pro-Flock people - most are either working for a YC company or are in the process of their application.
The vast majority of people are not pro-techno fascism and mass surveillance. I think you'd have to work very hard to find that kind of person. People on the left and the right are very united in their hatred of spy cams.
I find it very easy to find people who support systems marketed as empowering police to better catch criminals.
>Yeah, I don't think so. The backlash is 100% real people. I don't know a single pro-Flock person but I know 100s that want to go take them down.
That's not a sound refutation. For example, 100% of published opinion can be 100% anti-Floc, while still being composed of 50% real people and 50% astroturf.
Perhaps you misunderstood my comment.
You made the claim that it's bots, so you're going to need to provide some sort of proof of astroturfing. It's wholly unnecessary since the vast majority of real people despise Flock.
What do people despise about them? I never quite understood what is special about their cameras compared to all the other cameras in public. All camera footage can be fed to and analyzed by AI.
I am a pro-flock real person. I'll get down-voted and likely flagged for saying this so you may believe I don't exist but I do.
Crime has gone down considerably in the last two years.
> The declines were reflected in several of the FBI’s long-term measures. The 2025 robbery rate of 49.4 per 100,000 was the lowest in 20 years, while the rape rate of 36.1 was the lowest since 2012. The murder rate was the lowest in the past 20 years.
I imagine giving police the ability to apprehend violent criminals through technology is driving this reduction in crime. Not a stretch. You can think that this is not worth the tradeoff, but if you think giving police a tool like Flock will not have an impact of apprehension of criminals you have your head in the sand.
https://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/violent-crime-falls-at-hist...
https://www.richardhanania.com/p/flock-mass-surveillance-and...
Supervisor Matt Dorsey in San Francisco is pro-camera-enforcement and I was glad to be able to meet him and thank him for his efforts both for speed cameras and for ALPR in San Francisco. For my part, I'm not wedded to Flock so if people get upset about the brand name, I'm happy if the government uses Axon instead to provide the same outcome. The use of drone policing, ALPR, and speed cameras has substantially improved safety in San Francisco.
Yeah, I am generally pro-surveillance of public spaces and public property, but I think Flock has taken a particularly careless approach to the project. I would much rather have another vendor simply sell the cameras to the municipality and have the government administer the network, rather than have a company like Flock retain the data themselves and make it available to unknown third parties. You can maintain public oversight much more directly that way.
Take flock out of some cities and see if their crime trend continues. I expect you'll find the cameras really don't move the needle much.
In Houston, three cameras near an attempted child abduction had been cut down. Police Chief Noe Diaz said investigators consequently could not use them to identify and track the suspect's red sedan.
Why do anti-flock activists insist that it doesn't help police apprehend criminals. It obviously does. It only makes sense that a police officer having access to cameras that track license plates in real time would help apprehend criminals escaping capture. Come on, you don't seriously believe this. What would have to be true about the world, police, criminals etc of this not to be true.
https://www.police1.com/alprs-in-focus/why-cities-are-rethin...
The issue, of course, isn't how cameras can be used to help apprehend criminals. It's that they can be abused by people who have access to them, in ways we haven't even imagined yet. People don't trust that appropriate safeguards are in place, and it's not clear how to defend against abuses, or that it's even possible. In a society that supposedly prioritizes liberty, privacy, and innocence until proven guilty, such technology should be treated with maximum suspicion.
> Houston Police Chief Noe Diaz said three cameras near the reported attempted kidnapping of a third-grade student had been cut down before investigators could use them to identify the suspect’s vehicle.
That's such a weird way to phrase it. The cameras were, presumably, cut down before the incident?
I'm sure they can help individual cases. It's less clear to me that surveillance societies have less crime. Criminals adjust.
Maybe if you can point to the crime-free paradises that have been enabled by pervasive surveillance, you'd have more people on your side. If you're just selectively pointing out individual cases where they helped, you're not really proving the overall point.
> Why do anti-flock activists insist that it doesn't help police apprehend criminals.
Seems like a strawman, i dont know anyone saying the cameras dont help police solve crimes at all. The issue is you have to balance crime benefits against civil rights, and the benefit right now seems pretty small, but the privacy implications are enormous.
Reducto ad absurdum: mandatory ankle monitors on everyone would help police apprehend criminals. Is that worth it? No? Ok, then where is the line in the sand? Flock's system is effectively tantamount to a gps tracker on every vehicle that uses surface roads.
Correlation is not causation. Do you actually have any data or research to support your claim from an unbiased source? A far right blogger is far from unbiased.
FWIW Benn Jordan, who has his own biases, analyzed this data in his latest video and found it had no impact on most crimes but did have a small improvement in clearance rates for one category.
You can imagine that, but at least in my city, no, crime was going down before Flock, and continued its trajectory; Flock did not cause that. Same for, e.g., SF.
SF has (had?) a lot of car thefts.
Suppose there was a technology where, when you report your car as stolen, police would be able to track exactly where this car is currently and it's history over the last 2 weeks.
You don't think this would have ANY impact of police being able to apprehend the thief?
> You don't think this would have ANY impact of police being able to apprehend the thief?
Speaking as a San Francisco resident: No. SF cops give nearly zero shits about recovering stolen property.
Speaking as a USian: Even if it did lead the cops right to the car and provided unimpeachable evidence that what the footage showed was a theft, rather than something legal, I still don't want these electronic mass-surveillance systems to be deployed. Dragnet surveillance is plainly unacceptable.
If -somehow- we can magically build such surveillance systems to be completely unable to provide data that's unrelated to a search warrant or other such court order, I'd reconsider my stance. However, building such a system is simply impossible.
You hold such a ridiculous position I don't know how to argue with it. Cops don't care about crime or stolen property? Why have cops at all? It's like arguing w a third grader
> Cops don't care about crime or stolen property?
Cops have limited resources, so they must prioritize. Even the Supreme Court acknowledges this.
Because of this truth, SF cops give nearly zero shits about recovering stolen property. It has been decided that they spend their limited resources elsewhere.
> Why have cops at all?
Yeah, that's a really good question that folks who are poorly-served by their federal, state, and local police forces often find themselves asking. Folks who are well-served generally ask themselves that question far less often.
This would only work for a few months until car thieves start having a habit of mounting different plates.
Obviously the perfect crime is harder to do in an orwellian society. But happiness and freedom too so nothing good is gained from that.
Suppose there was a pre-pardoned, unaccountable, masked band of brownshirts in Temu youtuber military wannabe gear, stalking the streets with impunity, terrorizing people who aren't white, holding down American citizens and emptying guns into their backs. Suppose they have been given access to every database that the US has at its disposal, as well as sweeping powers to demand data from anyone they choose.
Suppose Flock's license agreement additionally said that they could give data to anyone they wanted to, as it does.
Suppose the leader of these brownshirts frequently talks about his opponents, protestors, etc., as enemies of the state and domestic terrorists.
How great do you feel about this nonexistent mystery technology of yours now?
Congrats! You just hit the clever hypothetical on my anti flock bingo card!
Step one: find two things that differ in nearly every relevant respect
Step two: identify the broad category they share.
Step three: ask, “If you accept one, why don’t you accept the other?”
https://mleverything.substack.com/p/anti-flock-activist-bing...
So your position is that if you can predict someone's arguments (valid or otherwise) before they make them that those arguments are less valid? Maybe if you had pre-countered them but looking at your comments here and the linked blurb that doesn't seem to be the case.
It wasn't a hypothetical, the op was listing things that both literally are happening and that ALPR's (and flock specifically) are enabling. "Hypothetically" was a bit of rhetorical flourish.
This is a myopic view of the situation. Suppose you had $100M to spend. What would lower crime more:
1. Helping to shelter the homeless, deal with mental health issues and make sure people are properly fed.
2. Build a mass surveillance network at the expense of all of the above.
Regardless, mass surveillance is far worse than any amount of car theft.
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Incorrect on all counts: https://www.numberanalytics.com/blog/impact-of-social-welfar...
Obviously investing in social health improves crime rates. That's just common sense (and backed by all historical data).
About 20% of US GDP is social spending. What percentage of GDP will get us where we need to be? Why does California have so many notorious problems when, compared with many other states, its social spending is so generous?
Social systems are not as simple as "give people more money", particularly when millions of people have already been socialized into criminality. Thinking this is a total misunderstanding. Most criminals are not stealing to get bread to feed their family. They commit crimes because a) it's fun b) it's what their peers are doing / needed for their social standing and c) it beats working for a living. Yes, a well-socialized conscientious person would never do this except in cases of severe hardship - but that's not the reality of what's happening.