(We’ve recently had some high-profile political fundraisers in my town. Our state’s FOIA is halfway powerful, and a few of us were considering publishing maps of the routes they and they security details took, to illustrate how these products compromise our safety. But that strikes me as more of a fun publicity stunt than anything that would force the county.)
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40227280
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41927777
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45506690
Cards on the table that I was not a full-throated supporter of cancelling our Flock contract, for complicated reasons, but past that I'll take a fair bit of credit for the harm-reduction work we did, which ultimately created the procedural tracks we used to kill the contract.
Short answer for how we did it: message board nerding.
You're interested in getting the cameras taken down in a Wyoming muni. One advantage we had in Oak Park that you might not in WY is that our cost function priced bogus stops of Black drivers very high. So, if I was strategizing killing cameras in a major metro suburb, my strategy would be:
(1) Create procedural rails to collect your own transparency data on stops.
(2) Do the analysis to trace "real" stops to crimes meaningful to your muni (for us: enforcing failure-to-appear warrants for neighboring suburbs was not high-value work for OPPD, so many of the "legit" stops had negative value).
(3) You'll be left with some subset of real crimes cameras were involved with, and in only a subset of those will the cameras have been meaningful.
One thing that complicates Flock deployments in Illinois is that they depend on the ISP LEADS database as their hotlist of stolen vehicles, and LEADS is not maintained well enough to use as a real-time information source (or even a week-by-week granular source), so we had a bunch of bogus stops.
A super important thing I think everybody should know about Flock cameras:
You do not in fact need to be enrolled in Flock's sharing system to get data from neighboring muni cameras. In fact, I think Flock even has a product you can buy that just gives you access to sharing data without even owning cameras.
Since "we need to share our data to get access to other muni's data" is the only reason to have sharing enabled on these things, it should be pretty easy, as a political lift, to turn sharing off.
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.
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 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.