People who are worried about theft from their doorsteps, people breaking into their homes, and so on. I mean you can say "not worth it" but I think the pitch is very easy to understand really.
On NextDoor app the other day someone posted a video of a semi trailer, that obviously had taken a wrong turn, completely tear up their front landscaping and didn't stop. Being able to record it, this is the draw for a lot of people.
Is anyone in this thread cognizant of some data that shows whether divestment has a correlation to actual crime data? I would really like to know.
There have been a lot of people talking about divesting. But, I wonder how much has actually occurred. And, whether in places where it has occurred, there has been demonstrated uptick in crime, or whether there are places where crime has risen alongside a marginal reduction in police forces (due to attrition, or whatever).
I would really like to see a factual discussion because it feels like the arguments are generally coming from a bias on both sides and the crime wave happening could be occurring because of number of contributing factors, not just divestment.
Well, first you'd have to find some place where it happened. I don't think there was much in that way, howls to the contrary notwithstanding. What people mean by the terms they throw around is a little inconsistent so I'm not going to hazard a guess as to exactly what the article writers think.
Also this one... "Racial profiling is at the heart of Amazon Ring’s business model."
There's a liberal tendency to hyper-focus on race and see everything in the lens of race only. Ironically, I don't think this helps racial injustice that they are set out to resolve.
I think that is just a cheap deflection as this does pretty much normalize people having video cameras surveilling their neighbors as the discussion about the measure itself is delegated to a side show.
Not a conspiracy, they are just a bit clumsy about it.
I've been avoiding Whole Foods, but I've heard Trader Joe's isn't much better. This, which I knew but hadn't thought about in a while, convinces me that Trader Joe's is much better.
People really have a tough time swallowing the fact that their hardware is backdoored, I'd just give up on trying to get HN to care. It's only attractive when you can Tweet it from iPhone and then go back to working on dotnet projects, so most people here will downvote you out of principle.
For sure criminals would fully be in favor of this idea, as that's who the police tend to go after.
Disclaimer: My wife runs a police intelligence unit that catches actual criminals from ring info, like those people stealing the packages from your front door or breaking into your house.
Disclaimer2: I fully do not trust Amazon with the info, but I do trust the police having the info to catch criminals, as thats what they do with it.
Disclaimer3: The police only get ring videos that are forwarded to them from ring users, they have no generic access to ring data. The victims of crime tend to forward videos of the criminals in hopes the police can catch them.
My wife actually wrote her thesis on the win win aspects of this for fighting crime [1]
People should be free to volunteer their own footage when they or their neighbors have been victims of a crime. Police should not be free to pull footage without asking or telling the owner of the camera.
That's actually how it works, the police only get info forwarded to them from ring users. The police have no access unless the video is forwarded to them from a ring user.
It's a false choice. If you say no, and the police really want it, they can subpoena Amazon and compel them to turn over "your" footage. You would never even learn that it happened.
You shouldn't trust a 3rd party with your personal privacy. Please don't draft all of your neighbors into the digital dragnet.
Wouldn't they subpoena Amazon directly, who by virtue of this partnership is likely to oblige? The owner of the camera would have no agency in that transaction.
Or if the ex's neighbor across the street did, right? Hopefully that neighbor cares about the ex's privacy as much as they do, or no crimes occur within half a mile of them.
Perhaps the phrasing is imperfect. However, there is a trade-off in the opposition of allowing Ring owners to voluntarily share their video footage with law enforcement organizations in support of solving crimes and administering justice. Implicit in that trade-off are outcomes favorable to criminals. That is, of course, not the only consequence. But surely it is one of the outcomes. So, said simply, there is some support of criminality implied.
That probably depends a lot on jurisdiction, DA, the police and the people of said jurisdiction. SF gov kind of treats this as 'part of the fabric of life' but not all places see things the same as the example set by SF.
Bored suburban cops. They have bait packages and everything around here. They caught the woman who stole the passports out of our mailbox, so they seem to be doing some good.
Amusingly enough, my wife's response to the website in the OP was "Gee, that's some pretty good ad copy for Ring. Should we get one?"
Some jurisdictions do, particularly in smaller cities like suburbs, where police staff aren't fully occupied with higher priority calls. However, many bigger cities are simply too understaffed compared to the past, and ignore property crimes as you say. This is especially true in West Coast cities like SF, Portland, and Seattle.
For example Seattle has lost hundreds of police officers in the last year due to the push for defunding, hostile attitudes towards police from activists/local politicians, and the opportunity to have a less stressful/better paying job elsewhere after a very rough year dealing with near-daily rioting. At present, the city has only around 1000 officers and it is expected to lose some more due to the vaccine mandate. This is around half of what the average city has per capita, and in the last decade the effects of a lenient city attorney, crime-friendly local government focused on "restorative justice", and falling per capita officer counts has led to a massive increase in crimes. Just like in SF, people have given up on even reporting them since even if someone is arrested, the city attorney will just release them anyways, and insurance claims require a deductible. Even businesses have given up on crime reporting (example: https://tinyurl.com/4nhn45bw).
A good overview of the Seattle situation can be found in a couple documentaries, "Seattle is Dying" (https://youtu.be/bpAi70WWBlw) and "The Fight for the Soul of Seattle" (https://youtu.be/WijoL3Hy_Bw). The city's transformation from a safe clean city to what it is today took place in a decade. I expect it can also be fixed just as quickly with only a small set of changes like a) doubling the staff counts at the police department b) replacing the activist city attorney with a moderate c) enforcing existing laws d) cleaning up drug dens and theft rings masquerading as homeless encampments e) increasing the number of patrols and beat cops f) using technologies like facial recognition.
After the Koch and Dinkins admins, NYC had descended into a high crime city and it was thought it was 'endemic' but then Giuliani was elected (before he went off the rails) and cleaned up the city in one administration, so much the citizens hired him again. So, it's possible with the right recipe of Mayor, DA and Police Commissioner to do it pretty quick --but the citizenry have to have "had it" with crime, so they elect a tough on crime admin.
>For those of you who down vote this post, I'm guessing you support criminals?
It takes a certain amount of stunted moral development to so fully invest yourself into this binary. A total lack of caution around unlimited state power. A total lack of awareness of the privilege you have to be able to ignore or encourage that unchecked power.
"If you aren't for frictionless sharing of your home video feeds with police, you must support criminals" is something straight out of an Orwellian dystopia.
You see nothing wrong with an intimate relationship between the violent, white-supremacist infiltrated[1] arm of the state and a monopolistic corporation that imposes such severe time constraints on its workers that they regularly have to pee into bottles[2].
> For those of you who down vote this post, I'm guessing you support criminals?
This is the sort of black-and-white attitude that allows corruption and abuse of police resources to go unpunished.
I disagree with you because police don't go after criminals. They go after suspects. The duty to determine if a person has committed a crime falls on a judge and jury.
Yeah I lost the author right here in these two totally incompatible statements.
> As a part of the partnership, police promote Ring products and engage with Amazon’s neighborhood watch app, Neighbors. In exchange, Amazon provides police departments with an easy way to request and store footage from thousands of residents at one time
You have no expectation of privacy in public or in someone else’s domicile with some specific exclusions (like bathrooms or bedrooms). And sure, maybe you could argue this for basically any indoor residential camera (though I would disagree)
But here is where I lost him
> Amazon + Police surveillance partnerships function with no oversight or accountability.
This statement and the one above it are completely incompatible. The oversight is literally done by the owner of the camera.
It seems built into the application. And I will admit I myself have avoided these, and instead used Wyze cams with rtsp only specifically because of that mistrust (and the principle that Amazon can comply without my consent, even if they don’t currently)
There's a difference between "no expectation of privacy in public" and a permanent record tracking your every movement, fart, and sneeze in public. Combined with gait and facial tracking, it can become very problematic.
> The oversight is literally done by the owner of the camera.
But that isnt what is being discussed by the author. He is specifically calling into question private Ring cameras. Which citizens are free to buy and put up.
And the "lack of accountability" was the Amazon Neighbors app, where users are given specific agency on whether they want to provide recordings/access to LEO's or not.
>Not if the footage is subpoenad.
Again not really called into question within the article and is a thing for any hosted service. Or for that matter...something you also self host. Similar to a warrant.
> Disclaimer3: The police only get ring videos that are forwarded to them from ring users, they have no generic access to ring data. The victims of crime tend to forward videos of the criminals in hopes the police can catch them.
That’s fascinating. How exactly are you so intimately familiar with Amazon’s inner workings? You’re fully confident that this system can’t be abused because of… what experience, exactly?
Edit: yes. I fully and unequivocally support criminals. I figure if a silly cop propagandist is going to respond to this post, that will be the first silly vague salvo against not wanting to give cops full control of society, so skip to rebuttal(2)
Because my wife runs the intelligence unit of a police department, and they only get ring videos forwarded to them from victims of crime. And some of those crimes are horrific, like armed home invasion robbery, and those videos have led to capturing those criminals.
So your wife has access to [Amazon surveillance product x], therefore the existence of [trivially producible Amazon surveillance product y] can’t be possible.
Is your wife the head of the police intelligence unit of The World?
Cool, I wasn’t aware that Amazon and regional police were the same organization. I was under the impression that a multibillion dollar corporation could keep secrets from a an HN poster’s wife, but I guess your point that she’s some sort of cop negates that
The point of contention is how amazon and local police interact with each other, specifically what constraints amazon has on its data sharing with local police. Wife of an HN poster or not, testimony from someone who directly works with those constraints on a daily basis should matter, I believe.
The point of contention is indeed how Amazon interacts with local police. I am pointing out that one second-hand example of one police force and their access to one technology does not necessarily describe an entire surveillance apparatus and its possible uses.
No, I’m not. I mean, it’s just words written on the internet, the whole thing could be made up, right? My opinion is that the police as an institution needs technology to keep up with the world, especially if we want a smaller police force with better training, higher qualifications and accountability. Sensible regulations must be passed and enforced in order to minimize the risk of abuse, which is really where I think the ball is being dropped here. Without governance, corporations bear the burden of figuring out the sensible thing, and people are (rightly) suspicious of their judgement.
> …My opinion is that the police as an institution needs technology to keep up with the world, especially if we want a smaller police force with better training, higher qualifications and accountability…
Do you think that that’s the goal? I personally view “tech that makes cops’ jobs incredibly easier” as a thing that doesn’t lead to “cops quit in droves to support newfound theoretical efficiency”
I don’t believe that people will leave the police force voluntarily, either. But I do think that, now that the idea of sizing down the police force is politically viable, more efficient policing will put extra weight behind the idea by making it harder to justify oversized personnel budgets. Obviously, if we fail to follow through with down-sizing, we run the risk of ending up with a more powerful police, no less corrupt. Well, I think we just need to take that risk and try - most meaningful social achievements require balancing two or more levers at the same time.
Make policing cheaper, more efficient. Continue pressuring with the ongoing cultural/political shift, cheaper policing adds weight to the argument that we don’t need as many police officers. Less officers, less assholes. If that’s clear enough for you, I’d like to add that I do not owe it to you to come up with a perfectly viable policy to solve policing in the US. You may feel that acting the entitled critic without putting your own ideas on the table gives you an air of superiority, but in the long term, you’ll find that people are increasingly less willing to engage with you in debates.
I think the old adage "don't talk to the police" extends to not providing them a video feed of your property. People should be free to do what they want with their video, but you're putting yourself at unnecessary risk.
"don't talk to the police" is the situation for when you are a suspect or potential suspect for a crime. Do not talk to them, do not allow them to enter your property etc.
It doesn't (necessarily) apply when you want the police to catch a criminal who committed a crime against you.
You do not always know when you are a potential suspect of a crime, or that you will not be in the future. Nor do the police need to actually suspect you of a crime to harass you. If the police come to you and say "we suspect a crime has occurred in your neighborhood, can we have your video?", you don't know whether you are the suspect in that crime, or if the crime even occurred.
If someone has stolen something off your porch and you have identifying evidence, get the video yourself, and select the portion that identifies the thief. Give them a still photograph of the thief's face and/or their vehicle. Giving them a lengthy video that captures your own activities is "talking to the police" in the bad sense.
the problem in my state is the troopers are just as apt to go after any infraction they see.
they may not be able to catch the guy that stole your tools, or fuel, but they will easily turn on you for any low hanging fruit evidence they perceive while in contact with you
"Criminals would be in favor of this" is a discussion-killing point to make in basically anything about crime and law. Some other things that criminals would be in favor of:
- the right to not be obligated to testify against themselves
- the right to a speedy trial
- the right to a lawyer
- the ability to appeal judgments against them
- the ability to walk away free when the police have gathered evidence illegally, even when that evidence clearly proves they did it (the "fruit of the poisonous tree" doctrine)
- the very idea that certain methods of gathering intelligence are illegal
- the idea that it's better for them and their nine buddies to go free than that one innocent person be punished
- the deprecation of the rack as a method of extracting confessions
and so forth. It's uninteresting that criminals support a justice system that is not fully skewed in favor of the government - people who care about a free and just society also care about those things, and those are the arguments to engage with.
In particular, it is vital that anyone who cares about a free and just society care about those things so that the government cannot simply declare people as criminals on a whim.
This is even more critical in a jurisdiction where criminals, either those still serving their sentences or even those who have completed them, have their voting rights removed.
To clarify, police can’t simply access Ring camera footage at will. They have to send out a request around a certain incident and Ring users are free to choose if they want to contribute their footage.
The article mentions this:
> In exchange, Amazon provides police departments with an easy way to request and store footage from thousands of residents at one time––allowing for massive warrantless surveillance.
“Massive warrantless surveillance” doesn’t make sense because police don’t need a warrant to ask people if they’d like to volunteer footage of an incident.
Amazon is volunteering their customers, however. If the police can identify Ring customers through the tools provided by Amazon, that's definitely outside the bounds of an ordinary business relationship, regardless of the legalese in the TOS. Even if the police can't identify customers, only request anonymous tips, that feels only a little less insidious, more along the lines of signing customers up for spam or selling purchase history.
I don't own any kind of security system or surveillance camera, and even I find this site and its claims incredibly skewed and hyperbolic. Let's examine each major point on that page:
1. "Racial profiling is at the heart of Amazon Ring’s business model. In partnership with the police, Amazon profits from and therefore fosters a culture of racist fear mongering."
Nope, what's at the heart of Ring's business model is people's rational and completely legitimate desire to a) be safe, b) not fall victim to crimes, c) be made whole by bringing criminals to justice, and d) deter criminals by those consequences. This requires the cooperation of the police, city prosecution, and local governments of course - but having surveillance footage is a big benefit and peace of mind to residents, and a major aid to those involved in preventing and investigating crime.
No, facial surveillance technology is not racist. First off, facial recognition algorithms do not take race as an input factor to make any kind of determination. Disparate outcomes, either in terms of arrests, commission of crimes, or false positives/negatives, does not make this (or any other) system racist as long as explicit discrimination is not being performed based on race. This is the same debate that's had between equity (equality of outcomes) and equality (equality of opportunity) in other situations. For example, college admissions are not racist just because some races have low representation relative to their population size. However, affirmative action is a systemically racist policy because it explicitly discriminates based on race. A similar line of thinking applies here. Secondly, false positives are fixed easily by having a human in the loop to verify matches, which all implementations of facial recognition in America use. Therefore, the false positive rate is no worse than humans and we still get the benefit of locating suspects from a large search space quickly and efficiently, so they can be brought to justice by police departments that have limited staff and resources.
3. "After the murder of George Floyd millions of protesters took to the streets to oppose police violence and systematic racism. Cops used heavily invasive surveillance tools to identify, track, and even arrest activists exercising their First Amendment rights."
There isn't any expectation of privacy in a public place. I can film you, you can film me, we both can film cops, cops can film us, and so on. That seems reasonable. It is also laughable to claim that those being arrested in these "protests" were merely exercising their first amendment rights. In my city, and numerous others across the country, we had mass rioting and people purposely antagonizing the police and looking for violent confrontation. We saw property damage, vandalism, arson, blockades of basic infrastructure, physical violence, many deaths, and even an attempt to seize public land and declare it a separate sovereign nation (CHAZ/CHOP). Just perform a web search for what happened in DC, Minneapolis, Seattle, Portland, and other cities in the days following the George Floyd incident and the rest of the year. A violent riot is not a protest, and participants in those crimes should have been arrested and prosecuted more quickly, if anything.
4. "While activists call for the defunding of police forces, Amazon is doing everything they can to solidify themselves as an extension of law enforcement."
White leftist activists may be calling for defunding of police forces, but minorities don't want that. An overwhelming majority of Black Americans want to retain local police presence (https://news.gallup.com/poll/316571/black-americans-police-r...). The push for defunding is entirely a luxury belief...
To your point 4: "Defund the police" is one of the stupidest slogans ever invented. It is practically designed to make the argument easy to attack and to motivate opponents.
The actual nuanced goal - Get police out of the business of non-police tasks, and leave those tasks to professionals who specialize in those areas (mental health, social work, etc) - is something that almost everyone actually agrees with. But it's hard to get past the stupidity of the original slogan.
The slogan is so bad that I can’t help but think the people who thought of it actually want to “defund the police”. Not in a ‘well what it actually means is’ kind of way, but the actual, ‘get rid of the police’ kind of way.
When less ideologically rigid people use the same slogan, they make sure to explain the slogan doesn’t actually mean what it says.
> 2. Disparate outcomes, either in terms of arrests, commission of crimes, or false positives/negatives, does not make this (or any other) system racist as long as explicit discrimination is not being performed based on race.
This definition of racism, and bigotry more generally, is too narrow to be useful. For some well known examples look up how applicants from certain ZIP codes were more likely to be denied financial services. Or how resumes with certain names were less likely to be hired despite the same experience. Race wasn't an input in those decisions yet the end result is obviously racist.
You seem like a critical thinker, so please consider this question:
If companies and government agents generally aren't even unintentionally racist, how do you explain people of color's significantly worse outcomes?
It's because of racial differences in IQ, which are proven beyond a shadow of doubt. Even with racist policies that discriminate against non-blacks, black students perform worse, and it's not dependent on wealth levels or any other metric.
Right, except the community here refuses to apply the same standard of evidence that they apply to other topics, because they don't like the conclusion. Ironic because they make fun of anti-vaxxers and flat-earthers, when they're really just as unreasonable given topics that hurt their feelings.
One Ring / Police program I am aware of provides cameras to victims of domestic violence when they find a new home. A common issue is that the abusive former partners try to find out where they live and often succeed. So answering the front door is in of itself a terrifying experience. So are they against 'that'?
I live in a city near Oakland and Ring is an incredibly helpful tool. The alerts around porch pirates and burglar breaking into houses make the aggravated crime situation of the past two years almost tolerable. I often see videos in the Neighborhood app in which potential burglars detect the camera and turn around. Other times, they cover the camera as soon as they notice it, but hopefully they have been recognized by then. From my experience, these devices truly help when it comes to crime prevention and keeping the neighbor safe.
How much of that benefit do you think is attributable to the networked aspects of Ring, vs., say, a similar level of coverage of non-centralized cameras?
I guess this could come off as a loaded question, but I'm genuinely interested in the perspectives of actual users.
Many people see it as a novelty. I know a bunch of people with "dog cams" in their house, even wired up with speakers so they can talk to the dog during the day. With the ring, people who have it tend to be fans of it. As a luxury item, that kind of makes sense to me.
I'm not familiar with Ring but I would say the ease of clipping and exporting/forwarding the evidentiary footage is the the part that makes it easy to use. A platform like FB or ND where the police have a presence make it easy for inhabitants to send the footage with little friction to the PD units.
>In exchange, Amazon provides police departments with an easy way to request and store footage from thousands of residents at one time––allowing for massive warrantless surveillance.
I am confused by this, though I'm pretty sure it is the author who is intentionally combining verbage though?
The link this post connects to is about how people submit their own photos/videos of porch thieves + suspicious people to the police. You could argue this is bad on its own but certainly not what "massive warrantless surveillance" invokes. Everyone reading that line without scrutiny will assume it means police departments are somehow watching your own Ring without permission.
With widespread surveillance, more petty crime is detected and more petty criminals identified. Repeat offenders tend to be detected enough times to reach the felony threshold and sent to prison.
The argument has been made in The Atlantic that Black people have a right to be more successful at petty crime.[1]
Wow, what a strange article. A profile which attempts to paint an unrepentant serial thief and drug addict as the woeful victim. Also, I can’t imagine anything more noxiously racist than perpetuating the view that certain groups of people can’t be held to the same standards and laws as everyone else.
I had a £250 GPS tracker in my (pricey) electric bike, and it got stolen.
No worries - I tracked it. It was on it's way up the M40 motorway. I called the local police. But it was already out of their jurisdiction.
An hour later, it stopped. It had ended up in the back-garden of a house in Aston, a suburb of Birmingham. Jurisdiction: West Midlands Police (I think). So I rang them - I gave them the actual address.
"I'm sorry, we can't just go ringing the doorbells of people based on that, and we certainly can't go searching their back-garden. And we have more important things to do than search for bikes; do you have any idea how many Porsches and Ferraris are stolen in the West Midlands every week?".
Suppose I come to Aston, and ring the doorbell myself? Will you assign an officer to make sure the thieves don't try to kill me? "Nope."
My replacement bike is a Ferrari, with no GPS tracker.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 160 ms ] threadIf anyone has any form letter they recommend, I can add it to a website I'm working on: https://vocalvoters.com/
Why would anyone pay for these things to publish a feed from your front door to anyone Amazon wants to share it with?
If your CEO thought they could just access Ring camera feeds at random, they were misinformed.
They lost me right there.
Is anyone in this thread cognizant of some data that shows whether divestment has a correlation to actual crime data? I would really like to know.
There have been a lot of people talking about divesting. But, I wonder how much has actually occurred. And, whether in places where it has occurred, there has been demonstrated uptick in crime, or whether there are places where crime has risen alongside a marginal reduction in police forces (due to attrition, or whatever).
I would really like to see a factual discussion because it feels like the arguments are generally coming from a bias on both sides and the crime wave happening could be occurring because of number of contributing factors, not just divestment.
The only thing I find more threatening than Amazon's pervasive surveillance is the intended audience this site is catering to.
There's a liberal tendency to hyper-focus on race and see everything in the lens of race only. Ironically, I don't think this helps racial injustice that they are set out to resolve.
However, I do so hate when people clearly use a maligned group and exploit them in their language to further their own agenda.
I've seen similar language used by groups to advocate for the wildest things like remote work, or bike lanes.
Not a conspiracy, they are just a bit clumsy about it.
If incidents like this [0] don't get any conviction, I have little faith that Ring footage of vandalism and package theft will get anything done.
[0] https://youtu.be/arss9V3A1VA
In other parts of the USA and world, they are very much perused, enforced and law enforcement likes the proof.
But then we only have 1-2 murders per year so of course they'll gravitate towards smaller crimes.
Disclaimer: My wife runs a police intelligence unit that catches actual criminals from ring info, like those people stealing the packages from your front door or breaking into your house.
Disclaimer2: I fully do not trust Amazon with the info, but I do trust the police having the info to catch criminals, as thats what they do with it.
Disclaimer3: The police only get ring videos that are forwarded to them from ring users, they have no generic access to ring data. The victims of crime tend to forward videos of the criminals in hopes the police can catch them.
My wife actually wrote her thesis on the win win aspects of this for fighting crime [1]
[1] https://calhoun.nps.edu/handle/10945/56879
Yes, that’s how it works: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/06/ring-changed-how-polic...
> Police should not be free to pull footage without asking or telling the owner of the camera.
They are not free to do that.
You shouldn't trust a 3rd party with your personal privacy. Please don't draft all of your neighbors into the digital dragnet.
Are you positive ring wouldn't tell you that your footage was subpoenaed?
Wouldn't they subpoena Amazon directly, who by virtue of this partnership is likely to oblige? The owner of the camera would have no agency in that transaction.
Users have to volunteer their footage of incidents to the police.
You have a good comment here, but this line really hurts its credibility IMO.
What jurisdiction actually takes this kind of thing seriously? Petty theft, even by organized groups, is routinely ignored.
Amusingly enough, my wife's response to the website in the OP was "Gee, that's some pretty good ad copy for Ring. Should we get one?"
For example Seattle has lost hundreds of police officers in the last year due to the push for defunding, hostile attitudes towards police from activists/local politicians, and the opportunity to have a less stressful/better paying job elsewhere after a very rough year dealing with near-daily rioting. At present, the city has only around 1000 officers and it is expected to lose some more due to the vaccine mandate. This is around half of what the average city has per capita, and in the last decade the effects of a lenient city attorney, crime-friendly local government focused on "restorative justice", and falling per capita officer counts has led to a massive increase in crimes. Just like in SF, people have given up on even reporting them since even if someone is arrested, the city attorney will just release them anyways, and insurance claims require a deductible. Even businesses have given up on crime reporting (example: https://tinyurl.com/4nhn45bw).
A good overview of the Seattle situation can be found in a couple documentaries, "Seattle is Dying" (https://youtu.be/bpAi70WWBlw) and "The Fight for the Soul of Seattle" (https://youtu.be/WijoL3Hy_Bw). The city's transformation from a safe clean city to what it is today took place in a decade. I expect it can also be fixed just as quickly with only a small set of changes like a) doubling the staff counts at the police department b) replacing the activist city attorney with a moderate c) enforcing existing laws d) cleaning up drug dens and theft rings masquerading as homeless encampments e) increasing the number of patrols and beat cops f) using technologies like facial recognition.
It takes a certain amount of stunted moral development to so fully invest yourself into this binary. A total lack of caution around unlimited state power. A total lack of awareness of the privilege you have to be able to ignore or encourage that unchecked power.
"If you aren't for frictionless sharing of your home video feeds with police, you must support criminals" is something straight out of an Orwellian dystopia.
You see nothing wrong with an intimate relationship between the violent, white-supremacist infiltrated[1] arm of the state and a monopolistic corporation that imposes such severe time constraints on its workers that they regularly have to pee into bottles[2].
1. https://theintercept.com/2020/09/29/police-white-supremacist...
2. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/amazon-drivers-peeing-in-bottle...
In many cases police are also criminals and because of their job they are above the law, which to me is much scarier than other criminals out there.
This is the sort of black-and-white attitude that allows corruption and abuse of police resources to go unpunished.
I disagree with you because police don't go after criminals. They go after suspects. The duty to determine if a person has committed a crime falls on a judge and jury.
> As a part of the partnership, police promote Ring products and engage with Amazon’s neighborhood watch app, Neighbors. In exchange, Amazon provides police departments with an easy way to request and store footage from thousands of residents at one time
You have no expectation of privacy in public or in someone else’s domicile with some specific exclusions (like bathrooms or bedrooms). And sure, maybe you could argue this for basically any indoor residential camera (though I would disagree)
But here is where I lost him
> Amazon + Police surveillance partnerships function with no oversight or accountability.
This statement and the one above it are completely incompatible. The oversight is literally done by the owner of the camera.
It seems built into the application. And I will admit I myself have avoided these, and instead used Wyze cams with rtsp only specifically because of that mistrust (and the principle that Amazon can comply without my consent, even if they don’t currently)
> The oversight is literally done by the owner of the camera.
Not if the footage is subpoenad.
And the "lack of accountability" was the Amazon Neighbors app, where users are given specific agency on whether they want to provide recordings/access to LEO's or not.
>Not if the footage is subpoenad.
Again not really called into question within the article and is a thing for any hosted service. Or for that matter...something you also self host. Similar to a warrant.
That’s fascinating. How exactly are you so intimately familiar with Amazon’s inner workings? You’re fully confident that this system can’t be abused because of… what experience, exactly?
Edit: yes. I fully and unequivocally support criminals. I figure if a silly cop propagandist is going to respond to this post, that will be the first silly vague salvo against not wanting to give cops full control of society, so skip to rebuttal(2)
Edit:typos
Is your wife the head of the police intelligence unit of The World?
Are you of the opinion that it does?
Do you think that that’s the goal? I personally view “tech that makes cops’ jobs incredibly easier” as a thing that doesn’t lead to “cops quit in droves to support newfound theoretical efficiency”
Police unions (who entirely derive their power from their memberships) will decide that they want less power?
It doesn't (necessarily) apply when you want the police to catch a criminal who committed a crime against you.
If someone has stolen something off your porch and you have identifying evidence, get the video yourself, and select the portion that identifies the thief. Give them a still photograph of the thief's face and/or their vehicle. Giving them a lengthy video that captures your own activities is "talking to the police" in the bad sense.
they may not be able to catch the guy that stole your tools, or fuel, but they will easily turn on you for any low hanging fruit evidence they perceive while in contact with you
- the right to not be obligated to testify against themselves
- the right to a speedy trial
- the right to a lawyer
- the ability to appeal judgments against them
- the ability to walk away free when the police have gathered evidence illegally, even when that evidence clearly proves they did it (the "fruit of the poisonous tree" doctrine)
- the very idea that certain methods of gathering intelligence are illegal
- the idea that it's better for them and their nine buddies to go free than that one innocent person be punished
- the deprecation of the rack as a method of extracting confessions
and so forth. It's uninteresting that criminals support a justice system that is not fully skewed in favor of the government - people who care about a free and just society also care about those things, and those are the arguments to engage with.
This is even more critical in a jurisdiction where criminals, either those still serving their sentences or even those who have completed them, have their voting rights removed.
The article mentions this:
> In exchange, Amazon provides police departments with an easy way to request and store footage from thousands of residents at one time––allowing for massive warrantless surveillance.
“Massive warrantless surveillance” doesn’t make sense because police don’t need a warrant to ask people if they’d like to volunteer footage of an incident.
1. "Racial profiling is at the heart of Amazon Ring’s business model. In partnership with the police, Amazon profits from and therefore fosters a culture of racist fear mongering."
Nope, what's at the heart of Ring's business model is people's rational and completely legitimate desire to a) be safe, b) not fall victim to crimes, c) be made whole by bringing criminals to justice, and d) deter criminals by those consequences. This requires the cooperation of the police, city prosecution, and local governments of course - but having surveillance footage is a big benefit and peace of mind to residents, and a major aid to those involved in preventing and investigating crime.
2. "Amazon Sells Police Partners Racist Technology"
No, facial surveillance technology is not racist. First off, facial recognition algorithms do not take race as an input factor to make any kind of determination. Disparate outcomes, either in terms of arrests, commission of crimes, or false positives/negatives, does not make this (or any other) system racist as long as explicit discrimination is not being performed based on race. This is the same debate that's had between equity (equality of outcomes) and equality (equality of opportunity) in other situations. For example, college admissions are not racist just because some races have low representation relative to their population size. However, affirmative action is a systemically racist policy because it explicitly discriminates based on race. A similar line of thinking applies here. Secondly, false positives are fixed easily by having a human in the loop to verify matches, which all implementations of facial recognition in America use. Therefore, the false positive rate is no worse than humans and we still get the benefit of locating suspects from a large search space quickly and efficiently, so they can be brought to justice by police departments that have limited staff and resources.
3. "After the murder of George Floyd millions of protesters took to the streets to oppose police violence and systematic racism. Cops used heavily invasive surveillance tools to identify, track, and even arrest activists exercising their First Amendment rights."
There isn't any expectation of privacy in a public place. I can film you, you can film me, we both can film cops, cops can film us, and so on. That seems reasonable. It is also laughable to claim that those being arrested in these "protests" were merely exercising their first amendment rights. In my city, and numerous others across the country, we had mass rioting and people purposely antagonizing the police and looking for violent confrontation. We saw property damage, vandalism, arson, blockades of basic infrastructure, physical violence, many deaths, and even an attempt to seize public land and declare it a separate sovereign nation (CHAZ/CHOP). Just perform a web search for what happened in DC, Minneapolis, Seattle, Portland, and other cities in the days following the George Floyd incident and the rest of the year. A violent riot is not a protest, and participants in those crimes should have been arrested and prosecuted more quickly, if anything.
4. "While activists call for the defunding of police forces, Amazon is doing everything they can to solidify themselves as an extension of law enforcement."
White leftist activists may be calling for defunding of police forces, but minorities don't want that. An overwhelming majority of Black Americans want to retain local police presence (https://news.gallup.com/poll/316571/black-americans-police-r...). The push for defunding is entirely a luxury belief...
The actual nuanced goal - Get police out of the business of non-police tasks, and leave those tasks to professionals who specialize in those areas (mental health, social work, etc) - is something that almost everyone actually agrees with. But it's hard to get past the stupidity of the original slogan.
When less ideologically rigid people use the same slogan, they make sure to explain the slogan doesn’t actually mean what it says.
This definition of racism, and bigotry more generally, is too narrow to be useful. For some well known examples look up how applicants from certain ZIP codes were more likely to be denied financial services. Or how resumes with certain names were less likely to be hired despite the same experience. Race wasn't an input in those decisions yet the end result is obviously racist.
You seem like a critical thinker, so please consider this question:
If companies and government agents generally aren't even unintentionally racist, how do you explain people of color's significantly worse outcomes?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining
https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/minorities-who-whiten-job-resumes...
I guess this could come off as a loaded question, but I'm genuinely interested in the perspectives of actual users.
Privacy is an afterthought.
Other posters have clarified.
I am confused by this, though I'm pretty sure it is the author who is intentionally combining verbage though?
The link this post connects to is about how people submit their own photos/videos of porch thieves + suspicious people to the police. You could argue this is bad on its own but certainly not what "massive warrantless surveillance" invokes. Everyone reading that line without scrutiny will assume it means police departments are somehow watching your own Ring without permission.
The argument has been made in The Atlantic that Black people have a right to be more successful at petty crime.[1]
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/11/steal...
Same with donations, if X asks for donations, but I don't agree with X, I wish there was a way to find an opposite of X, and donate there instead.
Startup opportunity?
No worries - I tracked it. It was on it's way up the M40 motorway. I called the local police. But it was already out of their jurisdiction.
An hour later, it stopped. It had ended up in the back-garden of a house in Aston, a suburb of Birmingham. Jurisdiction: West Midlands Police (I think). So I rang them - I gave them the actual address.
"I'm sorry, we can't just go ringing the doorbells of people based on that, and we certainly can't go searching their back-garden. And we have more important things to do than search for bikes; do you have any idea how many Porsches and Ferraris are stolen in the West Midlands every week?".
Suppose I come to Aston, and ring the doorbell myself? Will you assign an officer to make sure the thieves don't try to kill me? "Nope."
My replacement bike is a Ferrari, with no GPS tracker.
What a disgusting sentence. Why don’t you learn to control your fawning emotions.