Flock didn't fail to inspect the car for damage and not find any, flock didn't take 13 days to conduct a cursory review of evidence, flock didn't fail to request cell tower triangulation data and rule out her being in the location of the accident...
I get that people feel their privacy's invaded by being filmed, but this story doesn't appear to have any more to do with Flock than what the officers had for breakfast or the brand of air freshener she had in her car at the time.
The accusation that some machine made any decision here goes beyond the reporting in the article. It seems concocted to raise AI alarm. All we have is that it supplied accurate data that police then abused. That isn't in the vicinity of "outsource[d] basic critical thinking to machines".
I want such general government surveillance banned, but the machines in this story had no more volition than a breathalyzer.
The problem is the police-camera system, of which the camera is an instrumental component
This is literally the first sentence of the article.
You can dislike public surveillance, but statements like "Flock camera data put this woman in jail for 13 days" blatantly ignores the the fact that Flock didn't put anyone in jail, a bunch of cops who very clearly knew that it wasn't her.
> The Flock camera, meanwhile, had recorded Isaacs’ car and its license plate several miles away from the site of the accident, sometime around the time of the incident.
Blaming a tool, when the cops in question are clearly willing to grasp to whatever piece of "evidence" makes their job "easier" is a giant cop-out and excuse for the people who are abusing it.
Any piece of evidence requires some form of critical examination; that is what law enforcement's job is. If you're just going to go with the first theory/piece-of-evidence they find.... they're not doing their job (and violating peoples constitutional rights through sheer laziness).
"Flock is bad" metonymizes the situation, but doesn't let anyone off the hook.
This situation the equivalent of an eye-witness saying "Ya, I think it might have been this person I know, Tom!" and a cop/prosecutor taking that at face value and arresting Tom (and the system that allowed that to happen).
The people who make decisions and take action so (grossly) negligently need to be held accountable and face consequences. Blaming the tool (whatever tool it is) is giving the people who have the actual responsibility an escape hatch to avoid accountability.
There will always be cops willing to misuse whatever they have access to.
Part of it is holding cops accountable in these situations. Part of it is limiting or stopping the use of these systems so cops don't have as many opportunities to abuse them.
No one is letting cops off the hook.
The headline is what 99% of people read, and remember.
Critical examination is the judiciary's job, not the police's. Jordan v. City of New London established that police departments can and do deny employment to prospective officers who possess excessive cognitive ability.
When it is made pretty clear that as a cop you won't face consequences for your malicious and/or incompetent actions, you're going to select for people who find that very appealing. Similarly, the people who don't like that kind of system might leave, allowing for a reinforcement the malicious and/or incompetent behavior.
All public defenders and most prosecutors are happy to admit anonymously that the justice system is 90% gears grinding people. They ALL know an innocent person that pled guilty to end the grinding. Judges too. You can find plenty of court videos on YouTube of people pleading guilty while saying they didn’t do it but need to get on with their life. The judge will explain to them that they can’t accept a guilty plea from someone who claims innocence, and the defendant then folds. Everyone in the room knows that there is more to the story, but no one is willing to do the work.
There is no real mechanism for holding them accountable and the consequences of these tools include death (it only takes one perceived wrong move for officers thinking they've bagged a felon to ventilate you. Hell not even that, see that officer who mag dumped his own car after he mistook an acorn for a gunshot.) This lady is quite lucky that it was only 13 days, if she had a career that's probably hosed but it might not be totally life ruining if she has a strong support system.
If punishing bad actors alone was enough we wouldn't have a ton of 4th amendment case law.
Corrupt, arrogant, bigoted, or with a superiority complex? Way more than half.