Societies have functioned for millennia without Flock, and there is nothing especially dangerous that it solves.
In fact violent crime in the United States has dropped by a record 9.3% just in 2025 (the largest single year decline in U.S. history). It’s not like there is some pressing crisis.
As far as I am concerned, this guy can get bent.
What's funny though is the idea that giving up your privacy will remove crime. Ha.
- Benjamin Franklin
Funny how a defence of representative government's authority is turned into a warning against government exercising that authority in the wrong way. :)
If you are bewildered, consider the “crime” of black men voting, women voting, LGBTQ+ existing, labor unions, and the list goes on. All of these things would have potentially been impossible in a “crime-less” society. We’ve seen how the FBI has infiltrated civil rights movements in the past, does it really take that much imagination to think they would have just made gathering/organizing illegal if they could? Especially with the surveillance state we have today.
Consider the protests, and yes the rioting, if you were able to stamp that out would we ever make any progress forward?
Flock is a poor solution to a failure of the judicial system.
Compassion for the criminals comes at the expense of the peace, safety, and well-being of everyone else. There seems to be little compassion for the vast majority who act right, but have to put up with all of it, which ends up eroding public trust and keeps us on a downward spiral.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/15/nyregion/shoplifting-arre...
As an ancedote to, they recently trialled face recognition cameras in the area I work in.
Given that, why did the police not do anything when my friends phone was stolen?
In comparison, in the much smaller city of Cambridge, the police assigned an officer to the case and went and tracked down my friends' stolen airpods. In London I don't think they even lifted a finger!
If the west is going to go down the authoritarian route, I'd rather it actually worked. I think we have a more fundamental issue that no one is willing to address--because it's not profitable. Removing our privacy achieves nothing for citizens.
Something wrong with your numbers there.
(I admit, this was just the first result on Google :))
I remember being in a fast food restaurant. A lady left her purse on her table and went to the bathroom. 8 year old kids walk to school in the city (with backpacks almost as big as they are).
or another way of thinking of it: what will be done for you will be done to you
The US has many flaws, including its most recent speed run into out and out fascism. But it is also the greatest immigrant integrator ever.
Although I don't think that's the choice anyway. A crime-free society will simply not happen.
There was a period of time where walking into Home Depot was like gambling in a casino with regard to inventory not being tampered with. It was genuinely really bad. There was a day when I couldn't find any sand, despite their system indicating sufficient inventory. I have to assume people were just walking out with it on carts. You'd have to steal a lot of sand to catch a felony charge. Seeing four flock cameras as you turn the corner in front of the store is probably helping to send a strong "please don't steal from me" vibe.
I'm guessing the sand was on a pallet out back. It's the type of item that doesn't get stored on the top rack, like other items do. Too heavy.
And under eg. communism where oversight is balooned to society self-harm you still have crime. And "bribery" is alias for communism and other dictatorships.
So, it is just better to give up on Flock spy[hard]ware.
Mass surveillance itself is a high crime. A society without crime will have no mass surveillance.
The problem with Flock and similar solutions is not about what they collect, but more about who and how uses it. The same applies to pretty much all government surveillance - it is acceptable it is collected, but absolutely unacceptable that it often accessed and used in ways obscure to person of interest.
You may then take the contents within and whittle away the hours delving into them and connecting to the present.
But here's a little sample.
"Security without liberty--is prison."
Also, Poor Richard's Almanac may be worth a perusal. Have fun!
> Some engage in shoplifting as a trade, while others are driven by addiction or mental illness
> Mr. Filpo said he had become accustomed to escorting people out of the deli who are shoplifting, many of them homeless. Cleaning items like laundry detergent, priced from about $8 to $11, are the items that are stolen most often, he said.
> Shoplifting is a crime of poverty, said Arielle Reid, supervising attorney of the Decarceration Project at the Legal Aid Society, New York’s largest provider of criminal and civil services for indigent clients. It can’t be solved by a continued reliance on “the heavy hand of law enforcement,” she said.
6,000 catch and release arrests is a massive waste of resources. Not arresting them at all with effectively legalize shoplifting, which is the end of retail, so it seems like the logical solution is to stop slapping these people on the wrist who clearly don’t care about another meaningless arrest on their record.
Doing nothing and continuing to release these people to do it again, is quite silly.
Everything in here is unfounded. Unless you have sources?
Less violent crimes still erode public trust. Do I really need to dig up a study on this, when we have to show our receipts to someone at the door at Costco and Walmart, have Flock cameras going up everywhere, extra cameras in your face when in front of certain grocery items, personal care items behind lock and key, etc. These are all signs of a lower-trust society. When it gets bad enough we see retail stores simply closing, food deserts, etc… we have seen all these things in high-crime areas for a long time.
Companies wouldn’t waste money on escalating measures of inventory security if their inventory wasn’t at risk, based on their own shrinkage data.
[0] https://www.ussc.gov/research/research-reports/recidivism-am...