> In 2023, the Texas Legislature unanimously passed a law raising auto insurance costs for Texans by $1 to combat rampant catalytic converter theft.
> The Motor Vehicle Crime Prevention Authority, led by a board mostly appointed by Gov. Greg Abbott, has turned the $1 fee hike into at least 3,200 Flock cameras.
More coming. Meanwhile, secure your EV!!! Batteries will be next!!!
My comment may sound cliché, but I genuinely believe this, no material possession is worth more than a human life. A catalytic converter can be replaced, a life cannot.
Not true in which direction? If another state allows it, which one? Lots of states apply stand-your-ground against robbery, but robbery is a threat to a person, not just property.
Nobody is forcing people to risk their lives to infringe on other people's rights. Whenever I see a news article about a criminal killed in the act, I never think "I wish they were alive.", I think "I wish they never went down that path in the first place that lead to that scenario."
Those people are still in control of their actions, with the exception of those with untreated mental illnesses who are even more likely to be a danger to you if apprehended.
> A catalytic converter can be replaced, a life cannot.
So don't go around stealing catalytic converters. Same deal with states with "stand your ground laws". It's astonishingly easy to not get shot: don't invade someone's home.
And on the "replacing" part- on whose dime? What if someone's only means of transportation is affected, and they lose wages or outright lose their job? Are you going to pay for it? Of course not.
No, a better reason to not allow shooting of common thieves is that you don't want ordinary people shooting randomly at each other. The government / police should be able to handle this, but they either don't care or are incompetent.
Which leaves the ordinary upstanding citizen stuck between a rock and a hard place. The Man extracts taxes from their earnings, and thieves who ruin lives get a slap on the wrist because "lives are oh precious".
I was referring to homes. This situation likely could've been avoided by not engaging in recklessly stupid behavior like road rage and escalating the situation (with one's family present, to boot).
Also, a news article of some random altercation doesn't change anything about what I said: It's simply impossible to be shot (or clubbed, or beaten up, or whatever) by someone in their home for invading, if you never invade people's homes in the first place. So don't do that. And don't steal catalytic converters either.
> It's astonishingly easy to not get shot: don't invade someone's home.
The clear, plain-English implication of what you're suggesting is: your risk of getting shot (in the US) is, to a large extent, directly correlated to your invasion of other people's homes.
Except that there's no evidence to support this. According to FBI data from 2015-2019, the ratio of criminal gun homicides to justifiable homicides (as in self-defense) was 34:1.
Over 10,000 innocent people are killed by guns every year in the US, including more than 1,000 young people. This excludes suicides, which itself is a number that you'd probably be wise to pay attention to.
Is the context of this discussion unclear to you? Do I need to place conversational guard clauses for you? Or are you just interested in nitpicking? Do I really need to clarify that there are other ways of dying or getting harmed, including other ways of being shot, that have nothing to do with this? Do I have to preface every comment with an obvious disclaimer?
Obvious disclaimer: It is completely obvious that freak incidents occur, that there are other ways to die, that there is no way to guarantee the future or that harm will never come to you, and that there are exceptions to just about every statement.
But one CAN choose to avoid deliberately putting themselves in situations where harm can befall them, such as comitting crimes like breaking into someone's home, or stealing someone's property. It should be completely obvious that one stands better chances in general by not doing things that make other people obscenely angry.
> Over 10,000 innocent people are killed by guns every year in the US, including more than 1,000 young people. This excludes suicides, which itself is a number that you'd probably be wise to pay attention to.
Out of a population of 349,000,000 people. Sad, but most people can live their lives and be completely unaffected. Stop being sensationalist.
> Obvious disclaimer: It is completely obvious that freak incidents occur...
Are you really now characterizing incidents of gun violence and suicide as "freak incidents"? They just happen, like a random bolt of lightning in a clear sky that strikes a person out taking a walk?
> Out of a population of 349,000,000 people. Sad, but most people can live their lives and be completely unaffected. Stop being sensationalist.
The figure I cited was for gunshot deaths of innocent people. Every year, over 100,000 people are shot in the US. More Americans die every year due to guns than they do because of auto accidents.
You can dismiss this as miniscule compared to the size of the population, and refuse to compare the numbers in the US to other developed nations, which shows how absurdly more risky the US is versus the rest of the "civilized world".
But what you can't do is pretend that gun violence doesn't have an impact on people that isn't measured in deaths and gunshot victims. Because there is plenty of evidence that the threat of gun violence has a major impact on the lives of Americans. For example, more than a third of Americans have avoided going to certain public places or events out of fear. See: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40205802/
Other statistics, with citations, that I'm sure you'd dismiss:
It's good to be able to stand your ground if that becomes necessary, I think. When I took concealed carry classes, they taught me to aim towards the center of mass to maximize my chances of a hit that would disable the attacker and to keep shooting until they stop being a threat.
But I also think that it is often more-useful and much, much safer to know how to de-escalate when that's possible. When I took martial arts classes, they taught me that the first step towards winning a fight was to avoid fighting to begin with, and always calm things down one notch at a time. If, and only if, that becomes impossible, then: Kick the snot out of them until they stop being a threat.
And running away can be useful: An attacker's ability to do harm decreases with distance. When I took army basic training, we trained a lot on running. They taught me that being able to run reasonably-quickly for reasonably-long distances was a skill that most people lack. Just keep running and the attacker will probably get tired and give up long before you do, which generally resolves the threat. If the threat persists after running away, then: Use the element of surprise and just turn around and stab them until they stop being a threat.
---
This is not an exhaustive list of methods and it is possible for any of them to go wrong. It's also possible to do nothing at all as a response and still have a very bad time of things.
It's a complex world. We've got billions of other people with different backgrounds, different problems, and different ideas of how they're going to get a little further ahead today than they were yesterday.
If we all had all of the answers, then we wouldn't have the kinds of desperation that leads to these problems to begin with.
Or basic simple profit for sociopaths. Organized criminal rings have turned catalytic converter theft into a multi-million to billion dollar+ industry. Its basically steal from the POOR middle-class and make the sociopaths even more rich.
Nobody desperate will dare steal from the gangs since its not just death, but PAIN before death.
Laziness mostly. It takes at least a decade of sustained exhausting mental and physical work to become a doctor, becoming a thief is mostly opportunity.
Yeah. There were times in my life I would have put my life on the line (and that of the thief) to defend my vehicle and the tools within it. Those fed myself and my family. I would have had no reasonable means to replace my tools, and barely reasonable means to replace the damage a catalytic converter theft would have caused me.
Today it's trivially easy for me to say "property can be replaced, a life cannot" since I am exceedingly privileged. I would not put my life, or anyone else's on the line to defend anything but my and my family's personal safety. But I remember what it was like to not be so ridiculously privileged. So I get it.
Only someone who has never lived a hard day in their life can spew such stuff at other folks. It's entirely circumstantial.
The laws should reflect the prior case, not the privileged one. At least if you want to disincentivize criminal behavior.
Or you could have a society with a welfare safety net or even viable forms of transportation other than a private car. It appears that places where that happen also tend to have much lower crime rates as an added benefit.
This is a very normal commercial insurance problem. Sure, you can supplement it by buying a gun and staying up all night defending your truck, but the family ain’t gonna be happy if you bought the gun in lieu of insurance, especially if you lose that gunfight.
I would like to agree, but that's not how insurance works, at least in the U.S.
You get your catalytic converter stolen, and you will pay for it three times. The first is you paid for the original one. Then you paid for insurance to cover its theft, and likely your payments over the years have already paid for the catalytic converter a second time. And then after it's stolen, your insurance rates will raise such that you are paying for a 3rd (maybe fourth) converter, just on a monthly plan now.
Now, of course, shooting the thief is only cheaper if you don't invest much in your weapons and training, and don't face any legal scrutiny afterwards and need to hire a lawyer.
You don't have to engage the burglar, you just need to shoot a gun, usually once (use a shotgun, it's especially effective) under a car b/c the blast will render the perp deaf temporarily.
Sometimes(but usually not) you get some good mechanics' tools. But the best part is the laugh, watching someone running away with their pants full of shite.
> I would have had no reasonable means to replace my tools, and barely reasonable means to replace the damage a catalytic converter theft would have caused me.
But if you had died in the interaction, and let's say the thief at that point even left the goods and decided to leave, that would have totally been a win outcome, because the property with which you provided your livelihood was saved… wait…
> Only someone who has never lived a hard day
Yeah right…
I never understood why people forget this:
- Life is more valuable esp. if "you + property" combo is the livelihood. Okay, let's make this simpler. Probability of tools replacement ≠ 0; definitely >0. Possibility of you being replaced after death =0. Yup, it's not >0 yet, folks.
- When you are going for a life-losing/taking-possibility escalation level, maybe don't forget it's a two-way street..
No, I believe a combination of the police, state governments, and federal government should be able to handle a) street-level policing and b) shutting down the illicit trade of catalytic converters, without using invasive measures like flock cameras.
The stolen goods have to be sold and bought somewhere. If they can't accomplish this with the vast resources available to them, (amongst other longstanding issues), then we should probably rethink this whole taxation thing.
Okay: It's astonishingly easy to not get shot from committing crimes specifically home burglary or stealing expensive things from people. Other things may still befall you, because life is random like that, but if you don't do those specific things, I guarantee you won't get harmed as a result of doing those specific things. I make no other guarantees.
Doesn't quite roll of the tongue, does it?
> If anything, it's astonishingly easy to get shot in the US of A.
No, not really. It's easier than other countries, but I'm afraid you've bought into media sensationalism. The country has a population of 349,000,000 people. There will be crazy incidents. And they won't happen to the vast majority of people, at least, people who aren't doing stupid things like home burglary.
The way the news talks about life in the US is completely out of touch.
I myself have pulled into random driveways perhaps hundreds of times. The way the news discusses it, I should be dead probably a hundred times over.
The problem is they never discuss all the other times people do that and nothing happens, which is nearly all of the time.
> The country has a population of 349,000,000 people. There will be crazy incidents.
By that logic, any country with a similar (or larger) population should have similar (or larger) gun deaths per capita as the USA, right?
Take India - population 4.3x but 15x fewer gun deaths per capita. Or Japan - 0.35x the population and 1500x fewer gdpc.
(Admittedly Brazil scuppers my counter-argument slightly - population is 0.6x but gdpc are 1.3x. Poverty and availability of guns seems to be the key rather than "random chance".)
Brazil has entire areas within the largest cities dominated by para-statal organizations that often are in shooting wars within themselves, with the government, or just decide to go on a terrorism spree against the civilian population.
This sounds great in theory, and I used to agree, but:
a. There's no guarantee against escalation, a property crime turns into a violent crime very easily.
b. Property crime can have a deep psychological impact on the victim - something the perpetrator gives zero fucks about.
c. The police and justice system in 2026 don't care about prosecuting property crime. Having no recourse at all if you're being robbed (a common situation when defending your own property is effectively illegal because of the risk to the perpetrator) is grossly unfair.
It's not just $2k lost here. There's a lot to be said about the immeasurable value of a high-trust society.
As another commenter said: It's incredibly easy to not get shot; don't burglarize someone's home the same way you wouldn't jump in front of a moving train.
Holding the threat of death over people isn't the way to a "high-trust society." Maybe you think it's the way to something similar, but you have to give up the word "trust" because it doesn't apply here. If the only reason I think a man isn't going to rob me is because I will shoot him if he does, I don't trust that man.
A society which only has low crime because everyone is able to use lethal force to defend themselves and their property isn't one I would call higher "trust" than one that maintains the same crime levels without that threat.
Correct, the "No object is worth someone's life" is easy to say. However if you want a high trust society, it needs property rights. That only comes through enforcement of some sort.
Obviously it'd be better if we lived among angels.
We don't.
So, either citizens bear force, or they plead with the government to wield their force. But, force is there, either way, keeping people in line. It has never been any other way.
I was once beaten senseless by a group of 3 young men when I decided to walk an early-morning walk to get some smokes from the store down the way, in a sleepy small city in Ohio.
There was nothing that I was doing that was wrong in any way. I was quietly minding my own business when they came up from behind me with other ideas.
I lost hours of my memory and years of my mental health. I gained years of occasional intense neck pain that consistently put my mind in very dark places, and thousands of dollars of medical bills.
They gained two unopened packs of Camels and the pocket knife that I apparently failed to effectively utilize. I still had my wallet and my phone.
(I'd probably have a very different story to tell if I'd shot them all dead, but I don't have that story. I was not equipped to do that so there is no direct comparison here for me to make. It is my hope that I never have the opportunity to make such a comparison.)
In your other comment you state that you've taken 3 different types of combat training (concealed carry, martial arts, army basic). I am curious if you did all this training after the incident with the 3 young men or before?
I got involved in martial arts for a few years after I was attacked for no particular reason by people who were much older than me when I was a little kid, twice in short succession, and my parents felt that this was a good way to help with that kind of situation. I don't know if that was the best response that they could make but I don't disagree with it.
Army training happened later, in a just-post-9/11 world where I was feeling strongly patriotic and also looking a meaningful job. It had its ups and downs.
Concealed carry classes happened much later, after the incident with the 3 young men, wherein: Either the previous training didn't help, or I was doomed anyway, or both.
I remember everything up to the first hit very clearly. I'd seen these folks way over there doing whatever they were doing, but I didn't suspect any trouble in that little town. I just kept walking. Soon, I heard a set of footsteps right behind me -- at least one of them closed the gap quickly. Before I could formulate a plan (including "run"), I got hit hard and it gets murky. I do remember standing and facing them under a street light and saying "What in the fuck do you think you're doing?" as a means of negotiation; this clearly did not work.
After that, I remember a blur of fast-walking back to my apartment. They were gone, like they'd never been there, but I scared because I was sure that they were watching me go home. I went around the back side of the building, deviating from my normal route home, watching my back as well as I could in that state.
I got home and I was satisfied that nobody had followed me as I re-locked my front door, and for a period of time (I don't know how long), I didn't think anything else happened. I forgot that I needed cigarettes. I eventually looked in the mirror and saw that it looked like I'd been hit by a car, and later noticed dirt all over my clothes. I called my ex-wife for advice, and then called the police who showed up and took a report and promised to do ~nothing else, and then called my boss for a ride to the hospital.
None of any of the training I've ever had really covered dealing with a surprise attack from three motherfuckers at once. It wasn't exactly ideal.
I still can't walk around in public with headphones on. I wasn't wearing them that night, but it was something that I occasionally enjoyed and that concept is subsequently dead to me.
"None of any of the training I've ever had really covered dealing with a surprise attack from three motherfuckers at once. It wasn't exactly ideal."
Not much will, I practiced Krav Maga for years and we train for 3:1 , but a surprise attack that knocks you unconsciouses is hard to plan against. But it does teach you to be ultra-aware of your environment, who's around you, what attack surfaces are risky, objects you can use to defend yourself.
You may know this already, so maybe it would help someone else.
As a smoker, your financial impact on the healthcare system and insurance prices and whatnot is far greater than the financial impact of the hypothetical loss of a catalytic converter that other commenters are using to justify the homocide of the imagined thieves.
Thus, according to those larpers, your beating may have been justified. That’s without even getting into the violence you’ve visited upon others via secondhand smoke.
It's almost never $2k and then they go to live a normal life.
You don't shoot them there they steal yet again and maybe harm someone in the process.
I was a victim a theft a few times and violent assault 2 times. Although I managed to escape both times and could afford to replace my property I wish someone else shot them or I had a chance to do it - as a favor to future victims.
Your daily reminder that many people don't see lethal self defense as an unfortunate last resort. They active want to be put in a situation where it is justified so they get to enjoy killing another human, as seen on TV.
Well, truth is that back in the days before socialism, when human beings "evolved" instead of "becoming socialists", us humans would go out every night with the intent of whupping up and/or killing everyone in sight and sometimes even possibly cooking and eating them! So we've developed inborn mechanisms (some more than others) to attack and fight.
But we're not the only ones: all other animals do the same. Only now, that we've turned into Democrats, is there hope for our kind, now that we know every life is precious and irreplaceable.
this is so untrue, gullible and naive. so if I steal your home, your car, your food, your water, and everything material, and you end up starving and dead or stranded on the side of a ride in a desert where no ones coming to help you - are you are saying that is ok since that stuff can be replaced?
You absolutely can cause death to a human and take a human life through material theft.
Ah, but that’s not the choice. The choice is whether there exist probability p, life L, and material possession m such that the possession is worth more than p times L.
The conclusion that there is no such triad seems clearly absurd since we allow people to build things for us the construction of which offers them a non-zero chance of death.
It is reasonable to say that a precise frontier is not describable because of Sorites but to say no triad exists implies that you only participate in an economy consisting exclusively of zero risk behaviour[0] That seems improbable.
Once we’ve dealt with that, perhaps we may be able to conclude that catalytic converters exist on one side of the frontier or on the other side or perhaps we might say that they lie along the Sorites boundary.
0: we are not unreasonable. We might even choose to consider imperfect information about the risk, the risk being at a Pareto optimum, the risk being at Wins Against Replacement optimum, etc.
A great example of this triad is driving a car: many people choose to do so every day and a small but not insignificant fraction of them will die because of it.
It's easy to say that. Not so easy to take responsibility for those views and compensate the victim which is often forced to work several months to cover the damage, may lose their job or their life is otherwise negatively affected.
"Let's not harm the thief but force the victim to cover the damages" is what it comes down to and imo it's a very immoral stance.
Civil forfeiture, sure but the property taxes are presumably to offset the lack of income tax, neither of which is thievery outside of a Zerohedge comment section.
They frequently already are. Even here in Canada[1] where any kind of "carry" is generally not allowed. Shockingly, thieves often don't care about gun laws though.
Your link refers to a single robbery which explicitly requires that you threaten another individual. "Thieves" encompasses far, far more than robbery, crimes where you needn't threaten someone else and carrying an illegal firearm becomes a liability.
Burglars in particular tend to target empty houses precisely to avoid confrontation. To bring a weapon only make sense if there is a chance of getting shot at.
Isn't "crime, done with the involvement of a firearm" also often more harshly punished than the plain crime itself? If a burglar is targeting empty houses, this would give them a strong incentive to not bring a firearm.
I think that world largely exists. There are some counties in Texas where crime is essentially negligible.
I live a few minutes away from one of the facilities where capital punishment is administered. The local community is extremely pleasant. I don't bother locking my doors at home or at the grocery store. The only place any real crime occurs is within a few hundred yards of the interstate. Target and Home Depot get robbed occasionally, but that's about it around here. I don't think it's physically possible to steal from my local Home Depot without ending up in the flock database. The geometry and overlapping coverage they have is pretty crazy now. You can tell they waged a full scale war against an army of meth addicts and won decisively. Every time I go into that store looking for a Milwaukee product, I find it in stock and unmolested.
At no point do I worry about a western style shootout with a bandit. The most prolific criminal around here has 4 legs and only really cares for the contents of particular trash cans and gardens.
Texas has among the highest crime rates in the country, 17th for violent crime, even worse for property crime. Given the wealth of Texas, having such high crime rates is even more embarrassing (crime and poverty go hand in hand, but Texas doesn't have that excuse). In short, you're talking out of your ass.
That's also true. But one of the arguments of the "law and order" types is always that more police, and more aggressive police with more power to imprison people, reduces crime.
A wealthy state like Texas has a lot of cops and a lot of prisons. And, those cops are given incredible leeway in how they do their job.
Texas is a case study in whether "law and order" Republican policies work, and the evidence indicates it doesn't. We're just killing people in capital punishment cases for the joy of killing, not because it reduces crime. We're spending half our cities funds on militarized police because we want our private prisons full, not because it keeps people safer.
Most extremely Republican states with lax gun laws and capital punishment are poor states, with less money for cops (though they still imprison people at a high rate, they often fund it with slave labor).
There are ways for states to spend money that reduces crime, but Texas chooses to spend it on violence, instead.
sadly private prisons means there's money to be made on imprisoning innocent people. Making a business out of everything creates perverse incentives. Also AFAIK unsure about US, but for example in Brazil there's a shadow work force with tax break incentives from the government for prisoners to be able to earn to pay for their needs, and its more akin to modern slavery than any kind of "Correctional" theories might imply.
Similarly cops many times get incentivized to fill in quotas, and end up making up stuff to get paid more.
Also all the companies around making money around these problems, have 0 incentives to make the problems go away, quite the contrary are incentivized to make these problems visible and acute enough that their services remain warranted to be required.
Lobbying being legal, means Capital owns Democracy. Big money can buy out and make careers of any politican morally-lacking enough to sell their constituents wellbeing to some shameless Corp that will set him up for life and give him the money needed to get the votes, etc etc
Try researching rural vs urban, most of this crime happens in urban areas, Houston, Dallas etc. Texas rural rates of crime are significantly less than Texas urban and the US overall.
There are people with guns both in the rural areas and the urban areas, and capital punishment is not restricted to cases in rural areas (in fact, it's much more likely to be sought against black or brown defendents for crimes in urban areas).
If guns and capital punishment reduces crime, it doesn't matter whether the crime happens in rural or urban areas. If it works Texas, the whole damned state, should have remarkably low crime, but that's not the case at all.
You're having a different conversation than the one I'm having.
What an insane trade off. Seems like a few bait cars and a couple of trackers would be plenty to figure out where the converters are getting fenced. Obviously there is a small number of buyers driving the entire catalytic theft economy.
EV batteries weigh hundreds of kilos. They typically require a mechanical workshop with a hoist to remove, not something your typical theif could easily steal on a street corner.
It’s hard to say. As the economic got better, trade policies stabilized and the price of commodities and therefore the metals in a converter dropped in value. As the price of the metals went down, the thefts dropped nationally. Texas thefts seemed to have dropped inline with the national trend. Since the supply side issues are picking up again, the thefts are going up likewise.
I doubt it helped much directly. The nationwide ring that was dismantled recently was busted partially due to surveillance from a pole mounted camera though. The article title initially baited my rage, but I can plausibly see how LPRC's could be used to track catalytic converter thieves.
Jeez, in not normally cynical but the Japanese buyer faced no charges and this has bad optics:
> Janice Ayala joined Dowa Metals & Mining America as their Chief Compliance Officer on March 3, 2023. During Ayala's 27-year tenure at the Department of Homeland Security, her most recent role before joining Dowa was as Director of Joint Task Force – Investigations. This agency oversaw the investigation into both DG Auto Parts and Dowa.
Doesn't seem especially likely, does it? People report the thefts in unmonitored neighborhoods. The police... check the nearby intersection cameras for any vehicles passing between 11pm and 4am?
As much as I think the tech needs to be regulated to prevent abuse, if I was a driver in San Francisco I’d try to only ever park my car directly in view of a flock camera.
I was a construction superintendent a couple of decades ago and had a rented backhoe stolen overnight after I had parked it directly under cameras.
This was in Sunland Park, New Mexico which is basically Eastern El Paso.
The police weren't interested in getting camera footage at all. They also weren't very interested in following the backhoe tracks through the sand that went through a backyard gate at this trailer house a few hundred feet away containing cerement mixers, junk, and dozens of bicycles in different states of repair.
I came back to that job a few months later to check on some things and there was another backhoe parked in that backyard yard. I called the police. They said "what crime are you reporting? stop calling if you don't have a crime".
Number of LPR Deployments by taskforce investigators 42,878
Number of vehicles recovered from LPR detection 1,963
Number of Cleared Cases – Catalytic Converter Theft 1,658
Number of arrests from LPR detection 569
Number of identified/documented prolific catalytic converter theft offenders 266
Number of Catalytic Converter Theft bait operations 236
The problem is they don't define "deployments". There are ~13,500 ALPR cameras and they do thousands of plates per hour and neither of those numbers matches the deployment. My best guess is it is a targeted search and so a vehicle is recovered or a case is cleared 2-3 times out of every time they search the database.
Regarding actual reduction, as another comment said, the amount of crime fluctuates with metal prices. But at least they can lock the people away.
Strange that someone else’s question “Did it reduce catalytic converter theft?”, directly relevant to the article, got downvoted to death. Not sure if we’re meant to have discussions here or just dutifully complain about topics that are fashionable to complain about.
I wondered that too. It doesn't say, but does state: "Data from the license plate readers, known in law enforcement as LPRs, was searched 62,000 times in 2025, leading to about 1,660 cleared catalytic converter theft cases, a report from the authority said."
Also, how many missing people are there? finding 10k seems quite a lot. “one of the most effective ways Flock has been able to help find, just last year, over 10,000 missing persons”.
The term "missing person" calls to mind someone who is in serious danger, but a majority are something minor, like someone quitting a job without notice or taking an unannounced trip. The vast majority are resolved by finding the person alive.
Flock helping close 10K cases doesn't surprise me at all, but it doesn't meant those people wouldn't have been found without it. It may mean less work for the police, but the police don't usually put a lot of effort into a missing person without evidence they're in danger.
When I worked for Flock, if Flock was searched in relation to a given case, if that case had a disposition, Flock considered themselves to have contributed to the solving of that case, regardless of what the search was or its relevance to the actual case. Searched for a car that was actually entirely unrelated but later police arrest someone in the act? Flock: "our cameras were involved in the resolution of the case".
This site is pure horse crap and has gotten exponentially worse every year. I rarely open the comments anymore but every time i do i am disappointed to see it is just reddit liberal idiots with no curiosity
I posted a comment on a different (and completely irrelevant) post about some skill claiming to unlease the superpower of Claude Code, asking, is there any evidence aka benchmark that shows it's any better than vanilla Claude Code that is statistically significant?
Dead silence. But not downvotes -- easily got to -4.
It seems like HN got more 'Reddit-like' in the last year or two, at least it resembles that platform in the way people use voting not as a way to encourage good argument style and punish bad (eg. ad hominem) but rather to vote with their feelings.
There are also a ton of one-line comments now, some that get upvoted to the top. That's 100 percent Reddit and 0 percent intellect.
I've been active here since 2009 and it started to get worse around 2016, and much worse in the last 2 years. Before 2016, any flippant, pointlessly cynical comment would be downvoted to oblivion. There were almost none that didn't get dead'd quickly. Now on political topics, those are the top half of comments.
There were always negative objection comments (like the famous dropbox one), but those are different. Many of these new cynical comments are not objecting, they're concurring with a poisonous cynicism.
I remember making this topic in late 2016 regarding it:
It has been a few years now, probably mid to late 2010s if I had to guess. I'm sure someone with enough interest and tokens could do some kind of sentiment/data measurement in order to back up our anecdotes.
I hope that the sustained negative publicity of Flock prevents it from successfully metastasizing outside the United States. I think this is one way in which Trump’s campaign to make the world distrust America helps. American surveillance systems abroad ought to be absolutely political suicide.
Well, the debate about the Bill of Rights itself was that the Constitution does not explicitly authorize those activities the first place (which is why they were amendments) and that listing any of them would imply that things not explicitly listed were somewhat endorsed.
But I do know the Founders had no clue about computers, networks, cameras or license plates so they certthad no opinions about Flock cameras when they drafted the Bill of Rights. The Founders were all rich white men who were more than happy to dragnet to find unauthorized non-whites so who really knows what was in the spirit of the Bill of Rights.
If you remove the technology that they wouldn’t understand, the founders wouldn’t consider Flock to be some absurd concept: a sheriff asking a night watchman standing on the road into town “did you see George go by riding Samuel’s horse?”
It’s a reasonable question, it’s a public road, and it doesn’t violate George’s privacy in his person, home, papers, or belongings.
How about "Give me an instant heat map of all of George's movements the past year across all 13 states. With a particular focus on parking up near any and all brothels"
Almost every house in my neighborhood has 1-2 cameras pointing around their houses. When there's an issue, my neighbors share the footages with the group, and that's so useful. And I live in a very very democrat state/city.
Also, we should definitely address the privacy and access control issue with Flock. Removing the cameras isn't the right solution.
"Right to privacy" isn't a specific right in the US. Furthermore, being in the middle of a public roadway in a registered vehicle shouldn't confer the expectation of privacy, per Katz. Probably the closest case law is Carpenter, which only covers cell data and was specifically meant to apply narrowly to that type of info.
> being in the middle of a public roadway in a registered vehicle shouldn't confer the expectation of privacy
And this is where US caselaw and my personal beliefs about privacy start to differ. Why can't we expect some level of privacy in a public place? There are some countries that confer that, to certain levels.
“Why can't we expect some level of privacy in a public place?”
Because it’s a public place. We already have laws covering things like harassment, voyeurism, etc; so existing legal conduct in a public place should remain legal.
> Why can't we expect some level of privacy in a public place? There are some countries that confer that, to certain levels.
The US used to be one of those countries, then 9/11 happened and the loudest folks (or at least the folks with the most money to influence law) started eroding privacy and now more folks just accept our current state and views like OP’s.
It’s really interesting…you can even watch a TV crime drama series, like Law & Order, and see the privacy erosion in the TV show. That transition is basically a reflection of what happened in the US.
That's an erosion of privacy where you have (had?) an expectation of privacy. In the US, you could always be recorded in public, excluding narrow exceptions for things like voyeurism or harassment.
I discussed above how Carpenter is not narrowly restricted to cell phones.
The fact of being in public or on a vehicle isn't the key point. It's that electronic systems aggregating location data are 4th amendment protected. Which was established in Carpenter.
The aggregation creates a comprehensive system.
Aggregated location data over months creates a comprehensive chronicle of your life that's categorically different from someone observing you on one street corner. Aggregation changes the constitutional analysis.
So to my original point, the Flock camera does not violate any rights. Even the system aggregating the data, like Google or your cell provider, doesn’t violate any rights.
It’s only the government searching that database without a warrant that would be unconstitutional under some hypothetical future case.
To have a high trust society you need to know who you are dealing with. That's why we don't cover our faces when interacting with others or walking around.
Same with driving. If anything there is too much privacy - we should know who drives irresponsibly, is a danger etc.
Privacy is about being in your home away from others, correspondence etc. Once you are interacting with others it's not a feature.
Carpenter v. United States and the supporting opinion written by John Roberts in 2018 reaffirms that ongoing electronic surveillance requires a search warrant and constitutes a violation of the 4th amendment.
I don't live in the US, but it seems that constant monitoring via government sanctioned facial recognition technology falls under that umbrella.
Good thing that there isn't a court in the United States that exists solely to make those kinds of distinctions and revise previous interpretations of the law in order to apply them to an evolving legal landscape.
Flock cameras using facial recognition to surveil citizens in public spaces without a warrant is a 4th amendment violation under any rational reading, and it is up to the American people whether they want to live in country that no longer holds itself accountable to the law or not.
It really has no impact on my life beyond the looming existential crisis of the world's largest military and nuclear power slowly becoming a rogue fascist state.
Good thing the courts are already upholding the constitutionality of Flock in US v Jackson and Schmidt v. City of Norfolk. If it reaches the SC, I think it'd be easy to see a limit similar to Carpenter on scope and duration of the searches of the database without a warrant, but recognize fundamentally that collecting the data itself is not violating anyone's rights.
As just mentioned, being watched in a public space doesn't constitute a violation of the 4th Amendment. Under any rational reading, you are not being searched.
It really has no impact on anyone's life, especially if they participate in any part of society. Your phone records, credit cards, and every social media and email account are all far more invasive tracking and without even the veneer of accountability. Even for criminals, it hardly makes a difference if they pull an ID from Flock, your cell records, or the bodega security camera and Ring doorbell footage people would happily offer to a cop. Investigating a crime by looking at a security camera is not fascism, just like deporting an illegal immigrant or dispersing a riot isn't fascism.
Glad you mentioned Carpenter. I've been spending a Lot of time getting to know it and related cases lately (Chatrie)
Roberts did use the word 'narrow' in the Carpenter opinion. That part is accurate. But read what narrow actually meant: the Court said it wasn't overturning all of third-party doctrine at once, and wasn't addressing every possible surveillance technology.
It was not saying 'this principle only applies to cell phones forever.' The actual holding was that a warrant is required whenever someone has a legitimate privacy interest in records held by a third party.
That's not phone-specific. Roberts even wrote that the ruling must account for 'more sophisticated systems already in use.' He was explicitly anticipating future applications.
Chatrie v. United States, decided June 29th this year, just 2 months ago, is exactly that next application:
Chatrie v. United States, decided June 29, 2026, 6-3:
SCOTUS held that when police use a "geofence warrant" demanding that Google hand over location data from all devices near a crime scene during a specific time window constitutes a Fourth Amendment search requiring a warrant backed by probable cause.
Yes, and all this ties nicely to Flock:
Google/Flock can collect the data - constitutional.
Google/Flock can sell the data - constitutional.
There’s the potential for searching the database to require a warrant, but the cameras themselves, and being recorded on a public street (which everyone’s crying about) has no reasonable pathway to being unconstitutional.
That's a great point. We should roll up some of the privacy laws we've made into actual rights secured by amendments, instead of just wishing we weren't living in a police state.
I'm still upset that we have a TCPA to protect consumers from spam calls, and then refuse to ever enforce it.
IMO this discussion must not leave out the fact that the comprehensive surveillance of the public movements of all citizens only became possible over the last few years. While there already was a ton of effort spent in this direction, governments were still limited by their employee headcounts and the reliability of image recognition. So while there might not be an existing decision that this practice is in violation of specific rights, it's completely possible that judicial systems are lagging behind the new options that governments now have thanks to technological progress.
Such extensive surveillance is likely a necessary precondition for governments to be able to take any number of horribly authoritarian steps against their populace. Given the likelihood that this leads to violations of all other rights, I find it hard to argue that these cameras don't violate people's rights.
For the first, assumably you think you can’t be observed coming or going from a riot? That’s not true.
For the fourth, a Flock camera existing is not inherently a search, just like how a database of cell records is not unconstitutional (Carpenter, Chatrie, Katz).
Is the 14th just a nebulous due process argument? Again, the camera existing is not an unconstitutional, see 4th.
Texas has a gubernatorial election coming up in November. We'll see if Texans are ok with surveillance or actually want to punish the people responsible and restore some sense of freedom.
So to fight abuse and overreach by your leaders, you can:
- give up your car/vehicle propery
- let an LLC take ownership
- reside in the privacy protections of LLC and corporation
I don't think any successful case has happened yet where flock et al have pierced the corporate veil to get address information, nor dug into insurance records to find who the LLC-license plates belong to.
i don’t think that will help anything. surely flock and similar companies use facial recognition features? particularly at every stores parking lot that has these in it?
and i’d be more shocked if the same stores weren’t already sharing their own inside cameras facial recognition directly with companies like flock already.
and from what we’ve seen, these companies cameras are linked up with names from frequent shopper cards, cc data, what people buy, when they buy it, etc…
These camera also monitor the ambient Bluetooth output of phones in cars that pass by to identify who exactly was in the car at the time. Don’t think the LLC will hide that unless your phone is also owned under an LLC
I use my phone on airplane mode a lot, and also in a faraday cage bag. If you need directions, You can use use radio and pop in the directions then use just airplane mode and navigate and it will still place you via gps. If you want music use an AUX cable.
If you want privacy give up some of your convenience. If you're refusing to give up your convenience, than you have chosen to give up your privacy. I find it distasteful with people who have given up project their failures onto everyone else who haven't given up.
are you assuming that every time you're recorded by a flock it would be capturing your face as well? do you have evidence behind that? i.e. what about on highways or fast moving spaces or far spaces where your face isn't even visible.
sure maybe in store parking lots it sees your face. at least you add a step between it and the car's registered owner and make them do extra work. I don't think falsely equivocating "they track your face so just give up on all aspects of privacy" is true. that's you having given up and projecting your opinion and equivalencies on all opposing arguments since you have dissonance from having given up.
also it feels deceptive to then equate that everyone also has a shopper card, credit cards, and personal spending data too - not everyone is giving up their personal data and given up like you. I feel like just because you've given up you're using your pessimistic attitude to falsely dismiss other people who haven't. there's plenty of people who would actually be protected from a private car scenario because they might not have shopper cards or personal transactions in some company databases.
oh, if it seems like i don’t think we should have privacy, i apologize. that’s not at all what i meant.
my point is, going after flock alone is not even close to enough. i’ve read articles that say flock logs dents/scratches/paint fades/etc… on cars as well.
we would be absolutely ridiculously naive to delude ourselves that they’re not pairing up and merging data with all of the other similar aggregators such as grocery stores, gas stations, etc.. who we know for absolute certain are absolutely actively collecting and using facial recognition, apps, bluetooth, wifi signals, frequent shopper cards, credit card data, etc… we know for sure they’re doing this. and we’d be crazy to think flock isnt merging this data, especially considering that every grocery store parking lot is crawling with the little video surveillance pods.
i think we’re being ridiculous framing this as simply a flock issue. there are countless surveillance companies doing this all over… not just flock. while it’s one of the more ubiquitous, we need to stop more than just flock. this has to be stopped at the root.
but yes, i do think it’s wise to use flock as the vehicle to raise awareness, but we’d be naive af to imply it’s “just flock” and that something like an llc would be anything other than trivial for their surveillance aggregation to overcome.
hmm, sorry as well if I came off a bit strong. I can see that there's a bigger issue at hand of a holistic set of entities and groups targeting us and surveilling us in as many changes as they can. where I struggle to understand you is when you talk about all the ways we could be watched but where I am hearing some resigning. OK so what if the stores have facial recognition? Wear a mask or protect your face. It isn't illegal to hide your face. Bluetooth and wifi, so what, do you know you don't need to have those on when you enter into a store.
I have been slowly over the years improving my phone use behavior, and now most of the time I don't feel like I'm in an emergency state where my phone needs to be used and not on airplane mode, I use cash more though I also use a credit card too. At least using a credit card and still doing the car-llc protection thing means a police officer won't be harassing you and easily fining you by license plate (I experienced cop harassment in Dallas last year being a Pakistani-muslim looking man, when they were hotly accusing muslims in the area of sharia law twice police pulled me over in white neighborhoods where I lived and cost my thousands in lawyer fees with 0 responsibility on their side - "qualified immunity"). I felt safe and protected not owning a car after that.
If I decided to not do anything at all, I would have epxposed my self to continual harassment. This is one part of the whole solution. Who cares if all those groups and entities are doing all those things, protect yourself against them all theres a way to do so in all scenarios. You lose when you feel powerless and pessimistic, not when you acknowledge all the risks and choose to do one thing at a time as you can.
Given how unpopular these cameras are, and how sloppy their security has been, I have come to assume there's boatloads of bribery happening. I can't come up with any other explanation for how willing police chiefs and city councilors and mayors are to get yelled at at city council meetings and how wantonly they're giving away the privacy of their constituents.
I'm guessing that as scrutiny increases, we'll begin to hear about questionable, at best, sales tactics, if not outright bribery. Trips, sponsored speaking/training engagements that puts money in the pockets of cops and policymakers, etc. The whole thing stinks of it.
It’s been proven (at least in the Minnesota flock conference) that flock pays politicians and police as private contractors and commissions them on any potential contracts they bring to flock
The only mistake Flock has made in terms of general acceptance is leaving them closed-access. The right way to build this empire is to set all the cameras as public. When they're wide-open and everybody is free to watch (along with ads, of course) not enough will care about the privacy because they want to track their cheating boyfriend, Amazon delivery, and get live traffic and weather info.
It's important that the cattle pays for its own imprisonment. For example a cow's milk gets sold to pay for the fence. If the farmer where to pay for the fence out of his own pocket, he would be creating negative karma, but if the cow pays for it, its a form of consent. You are are the Cow in this story.
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[ 0.27 ms ] story [ 16.7 ms ] thread> In 2023, the Texas Legislature unanimously passed a law raising auto insurance costs for Texans by $1 to combat rampant catalytic converter theft.
> The Motor Vehicle Crime Prevention Authority, led by a board mostly appointed by Gov. Greg Abbott, has turned the $1 fee hike into at least 3,200 Flock cameras.
More coming. Meanwhile, secure your EV!!! Batteries will be next!!!
Fire away, I guess.
Not true.
Except poverty, ignorance, hunger, addiction, untreated mental illness...
Otto's "I blame Society" speech from the movie Repo Man:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3b5Q7b8YXo
So don't go around stealing catalytic converters. Same deal with states with "stand your ground laws". It's astonishingly easy to not get shot: don't invade someone's home.
And on the "replacing" part- on whose dime? What if someone's only means of transportation is affected, and they lose wages or outright lose their job? Are you going to pay for it? Of course not.
No, a better reason to not allow shooting of common thieves is that you don't want ordinary people shooting randomly at each other. The government / police should be able to handle this, but they either don't care or are incompetent.
Which leaves the ordinary upstanding citizen stuck between a rock and a hard place. The Man extracts taxes from their earnings, and thieves who ruin lives get a slap on the wrist because "lives are oh precious".
https://www.fox5atlanta.com/news/florida-road-rage-incident-...
Also, a news article of some random altercation doesn't change anything about what I said: It's simply impossible to be shot (or clubbed, or beaten up, or whatever) by someone in their home for invading, if you never invade people's homes in the first place. So don't do that. And don't steal catalytic converters either.
> It's astonishingly easy to not get shot: don't invade someone's home.
The clear, plain-English implication of what you're suggesting is: your risk of getting shot (in the US) is, to a large extent, directly correlated to your invasion of other people's homes.
Except that there's no evidence to support this. According to FBI data from 2015-2019, the ratio of criminal gun homicides to justifiable homicides (as in self-defense) was 34:1.
Over 10,000 innocent people are killed by guns every year in the US, including more than 1,000 young people. This excludes suicides, which itself is a number that you'd probably be wise to pay attention to.
Obvious disclaimer: It is completely obvious that freak incidents occur, that there are other ways to die, that there is no way to guarantee the future or that harm will never come to you, and that there are exceptions to just about every statement.
But one CAN choose to avoid deliberately putting themselves in situations where harm can befall them, such as comitting crimes like breaking into someone's home, or stealing someone's property. It should be completely obvious that one stands better chances in general by not doing things that make other people obscenely angry.
> Over 10,000 innocent people are killed by guns every year in the US, including more than 1,000 young people. This excludes suicides, which itself is a number that you'd probably be wise to pay attention to.
Out of a population of 349,000,000 people. Sad, but most people can live their lives and be completely unaffected. Stop being sensationalist.
Are you really now characterizing incidents of gun violence and suicide as "freak incidents"? They just happen, like a random bolt of lightning in a clear sky that strikes a person out taking a walk?
> Out of a population of 349,000,000 people. Sad, but most people can live their lives and be completely unaffected. Stop being sensationalist.
The figure I cited was for gunshot deaths of innocent people. Every year, over 100,000 people are shot in the US. More Americans die every year due to guns than they do because of auto accidents.
You can dismiss this as miniscule compared to the size of the population, and refuse to compare the numbers in the US to other developed nations, which shows how absurdly more risky the US is versus the rest of the "civilized world".
But what you can't do is pretend that gun violence doesn't have an impact on people that isn't measured in deaths and gunshot victims. Because there is plenty of evidence that the threat of gun violence has a major impact on the lives of Americans. For example, more than a third of Americans have avoided going to certain public places or events out of fear. See: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40205802/
Other statistics, with citations, that I'm sure you'd dismiss:
https://giffords.org/lawcenter/resources/gun-violence-statis...
But I also think that it is often more-useful and much, much safer to know how to de-escalate when that's possible. When I took martial arts classes, they taught me that the first step towards winning a fight was to avoid fighting to begin with, and always calm things down one notch at a time. If, and only if, that becomes impossible, then: Kick the snot out of them until they stop being a threat.
And running away can be useful: An attacker's ability to do harm decreases with distance. When I took army basic training, we trained a lot on running. They taught me that being able to run reasonably-quickly for reasonably-long distances was a skill that most people lack. Just keep running and the attacker will probably get tired and give up long before you do, which generally resolves the threat. If the threat persists after running away, then: Use the element of surprise and just turn around and stab them until they stop being a threat.
---
This is not an exhaustive list of methods and it is possible for any of them to go wrong. It's also possible to do nothing at all as a response and still have a very bad time of things.
It's a complex world. We've got billions of other people with different backgrounds, different problems, and different ideas of how they're going to get a little further ahead today than they were yesterday.
If we all had all of the answers, then we wouldn't have the kinds of desperation that leads to these problems to begin with.
But we don't all have all of the answers.
I might suppose that it's usually more the former than the latter, but there's degrees to each characteristic.
They perceive that they need things, and they don't necessarily care who they harm to get the things that satisfy this need.
(When we dress it up all nice and back it with corporate layers and an army of lawyers, sometimes we get CEOs.)
Nobody desperate will dare steal from the gangs since its not just death, but PAIN before death.
Who knows?! Companionship?
What about a bad medic? Or a thief that helps homeless people in their free time?
If it was easy, we would have simpler laws and better justice systems...
How do you come by that? By that logic, Joseph Stalin is as valuable as Mother Theresa!
Yourself, not me.
Today it's trivially easy for me to say "property can be replaced, a life cannot" since I am exceedingly privileged. I would not put my life, or anyone else's on the line to defend anything but my and my family's personal safety. But I remember what it was like to not be so ridiculously privileged. So I get it.
Only someone who has never lived a hard day in their life can spew such stuff at other folks. It's entirely circumstantial.
The laws should reflect the prior case, not the privileged one. At least if you want to disincentivize criminal behavior.
This is a very normal commercial insurance problem. Sure, you can supplement it by buying a gun and staying up all night defending your truck, but the family ain’t gonna be happy if you bought the gun in lieu of insurance, especially if you lose that gunfight.
You get your catalytic converter stolen, and you will pay for it three times. The first is you paid for the original one. Then you paid for insurance to cover its theft, and likely your payments over the years have already paid for the catalytic converter a second time. And then after it's stolen, your insurance rates will raise such that you are paying for a 3rd (maybe fourth) converter, just on a monthly plan now.
Now, of course, shooting the thief is only cheaper if you don't invest much in your weapons and training, and don't face any legal scrutiny afterwards and need to hire a lawyer.
Sometimes(but usually not) you get some good mechanics' tools. But the best part is the laugh, watching someone running away with their pants full of shite.
But if you had died in the interaction, and let's say the thief at that point even left the goods and decided to leave, that would have totally been a win outcome, because the property with which you provided your livelihood was saved… wait…
> Only someone who has never lived a hard day
Yeah right…
I never understood why people forget this:
- Life is more valuable esp. if "you + property" combo is the livelihood. Okay, let's make this simpler. Probability of tools replacement ≠ 0; definitely >0. Possibility of you being replaced after death =0. Yup, it's not >0 yet, folks.
- When you are going for a life-losing/taking-possibility escalation level, maybe don't forget it's a two-way street..
There's a classic saying: "When seconds count, the police are minutes away."
...and going back to the original topic, even the Flock cameras aren't going to stop criminals, if that's what you're implying.
The stolen goods have to be sold and bought somewhere. If they can't accomplish this with the vast resources available to them, (amongst other longstanding issues), then we should probably rethink this whole taxation thing.
> It's astonishingly easy to not get shot: don't invade someone's home.
Is pat to the point of naiveté.
People get shot turning into the wrong driveway[1], or knocking on the wrong door[2]. If anything, it's astonishingly easy to get shot in the US of A.
But, you probably meant something like that when you said
> you don't want ordinary people shooting randomly at each other. The government / police should be able to handle this [but don't.
And I agree with that on both points.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Kaylin_Gillis [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Ralph_Yarl
Doesn't quite roll of the tongue, does it?
> If anything, it's astonishingly easy to get shot in the US of A.
No, not really. It's easier than other countries, but I'm afraid you've bought into media sensationalism. The country has a population of 349,000,000 people. There will be crazy incidents. And they won't happen to the vast majority of people, at least, people who aren't doing stupid things like home burglary.
The way the news talks about life in the US is completely out of touch. I myself have pulled into random driveways perhaps hundreds of times. The way the news discusses it, I should be dead probably a hundred times over. The problem is they never discuss all the other times people do that and nothing happens, which is nearly all of the time.
By that logic, any country with a similar (or larger) population should have similar (or larger) gun deaths per capita as the USA, right?
Take India - population 4.3x but 15x fewer gun deaths per capita. Or Japan - 0.35x the population and 1500x fewer gdpc.
(Admittedly Brazil scuppers my counter-argument slightly - population is 0.6x but gdpc are 1.3x. Poverty and availability of guns seems to be the key rather than "random chance".)
a. There's no guarantee against escalation, a property crime turns into a violent crime very easily.
b. Property crime can have a deep psychological impact on the victim - something the perpetrator gives zero fucks about.
c. The police and justice system in 2026 don't care about prosecuting property crime. Having no recourse at all if you're being robbed (a common situation when defending your own property is effectively illegal because of the risk to the perpetrator) is grossly unfair.
I could never sleep at night without thinking about what I have done.'
A life is worth a lot more than $2k for my sanity.
As another commenter said: It's incredibly easy to not get shot; don't burglarize someone's home the same way you wouldn't jump in front of a moving train.
A society which only has low crime because everyone is able to use lethal force to defend themselves and their property isn't one I would call higher "trust" than one that maintains the same crime levels without that threat.
The end state is you can trust others because nobody even wants to or considers it.
Punishing violators is being proposed as how to build the norm that no one wants to steal.
We don't.
So, either citizens bear force, or they plead with the government to wield their force. But, force is there, either way, keeping people in line. It has never been any other way.
I think I would consider myself in that group.
I think some lives are worth negative, and everyone is better off with them dead.
There was nothing that I was doing that was wrong in any way. I was quietly minding my own business when they came up from behind me with other ideas.
I lost hours of my memory and years of my mental health. I gained years of occasional intense neck pain that consistently put my mind in very dark places, and thousands of dollars of medical bills.
They gained two unopened packs of Camels and the pocket knife that I apparently failed to effectively utilize. I still had my wallet and my phone.
(I'd probably have a very different story to tell if I'd shot them all dead, but I don't have that story. I was not equipped to do that so there is no direct comparison here for me to make. It is my hope that I never have the opportunity to make such a comparison.)
I got involved in martial arts for a few years after I was attacked for no particular reason by people who were much older than me when I was a little kid, twice in short succession, and my parents felt that this was a good way to help with that kind of situation. I don't know if that was the best response that they could make but I don't disagree with it.
Army training happened later, in a just-post-9/11 world where I was feeling strongly patriotic and also looking a meaningful job. It had its ups and downs.
Concealed carry classes happened much later, after the incident with the 3 young men, wherein: Either the previous training didn't help, or I was doomed anyway, or both.
I remember everything up to the first hit very clearly. I'd seen these folks way over there doing whatever they were doing, but I didn't suspect any trouble in that little town. I just kept walking. Soon, I heard a set of footsteps right behind me -- at least one of them closed the gap quickly. Before I could formulate a plan (including "run"), I got hit hard and it gets murky. I do remember standing and facing them under a street light and saying "What in the fuck do you think you're doing?" as a means of negotiation; this clearly did not work.
After that, I remember a blur of fast-walking back to my apartment. They were gone, like they'd never been there, but I scared because I was sure that they were watching me go home. I went around the back side of the building, deviating from my normal route home, watching my back as well as I could in that state.
I got home and I was satisfied that nobody had followed me as I re-locked my front door, and for a period of time (I don't know how long), I didn't think anything else happened. I forgot that I needed cigarettes. I eventually looked in the mirror and saw that it looked like I'd been hit by a car, and later noticed dirt all over my clothes. I called my ex-wife for advice, and then called the police who showed up and took a report and promised to do ~nothing else, and then called my boss for a ride to the hospital.
None of any of the training I've ever had really covered dealing with a surprise attack from three motherfuckers at once. It wasn't exactly ideal.
I still can't walk around in public with headphones on. I wasn't wearing them that night, but it was something that I occasionally enjoyed and that concept is subsequently dead to me.
"None of any of the training I've ever had really covered dealing with a surprise attack from three motherfuckers at once. It wasn't exactly ideal."
Not much will, I practiced Krav Maga for years and we train for 3:1 , but a surprise attack that knocks you unconsciouses is hard to plan against. But it does teach you to be ultra-aware of your environment, who's around you, what attack surfaces are risky, objects you can use to defend yourself.
You may know this already, so maybe it would help someone else.
Thus, according to those larpers, your beating may have been justified. That’s without even getting into the violence you’ve visited upon others via secondhand smoke.
But we're not the only ones: all other animals do the same. Only now, that we've turned into Democrats, is there hope for our kind, now that we know every life is precious and irreplaceable.
A mugger may be stealing $50 in your wallet, but the crime is the threat to your life.
You absolutely can cause death to a human and take a human life through material theft.
The conclusion that there is no such triad seems clearly absurd since we allow people to build things for us the construction of which offers them a non-zero chance of death.
It is reasonable to say that a precise frontier is not describable because of Sorites but to say no triad exists implies that you only participate in an economy consisting exclusively of zero risk behaviour[0] That seems improbable.
Once we’ve dealt with that, perhaps we may be able to conclude that catalytic converters exist on one side of the frontier or on the other side or perhaps we might say that they lie along the Sorites boundary.
0: we are not unreasonable. We might even choose to consider imperfect information about the risk, the risk being at a Pareto optimum, the risk being at Wins Against Replacement optimum, etc.
"Let's not harm the thief but force the victim to cover the damages" is what it comes down to and imo it's a very immoral stance.
I have weeds in my yard that are more useful than most of the fancy primates that occupy Congress.
And regardless of state, there's always revenge - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1137450/
[1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/toronto-police-cash-r...
This has to be made up.
I live a few minutes away from one of the facilities where capital punishment is administered. The local community is extremely pleasant. I don't bother locking my doors at home or at the grocery store. The only place any real crime occurs is within a few hundred yards of the interstate. Target and Home Depot get robbed occasionally, but that's about it around here. I don't think it's physically possible to steal from my local Home Depot without ending up in the flock database. The geometry and overlapping coverage they have is pretty crazy now. You can tell they waged a full scale war against an army of meth addicts and won decisively. Every time I go into that store looking for a Milwaukee product, I find it in stock and unmolested.
At no point do I worry about a western style shootout with a bandit. The most prolific criminal around here has 4 legs and only really cares for the contents of particular trash cans and gardens.
For a few to be very wealthy, the many may remain impoverished.
A wealthy state like Texas has a lot of cops and a lot of prisons. And, those cops are given incredible leeway in how they do their job.
Texas is a case study in whether "law and order" Republican policies work, and the evidence indicates it doesn't. We're just killing people in capital punishment cases for the joy of killing, not because it reduces crime. We're spending half our cities funds on militarized police because we want our private prisons full, not because it keeps people safer.
Most extremely Republican states with lax gun laws and capital punishment are poor states, with less money for cops (though they still imprison people at a high rate, they often fund it with slave labor).
There are ways for states to spend money that reduces crime, but Texas chooses to spend it on violence, instead.
Similarly cops many times get incentivized to fill in quotas, and end up making up stuff to get paid more.
Also all the companies around making money around these problems, have 0 incentives to make the problems go away, quite the contrary are incentivized to make these problems visible and acute enough that their services remain warranted to be required.
Lobbying being legal, means Capital owns Democracy. Big money can buy out and make careers of any politican morally-lacking enough to sell their constituents wellbeing to some shameless Corp that will set him up for life and give him the money needed to get the votes, etc etc
If guns and capital punishment reduces crime, it doesn't matter whether the crime happens in rural or urban areas. If it works Texas, the whole damned state, should have remarkably low crime, but that's not the case at all.
You're having a different conversation than the one I'm having.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020%E2%80%932022_catalytic_co...
> Janice Ayala joined Dowa Metals & Mining America as their Chief Compliance Officer on March 3, 2023. During Ayala's 27-year tenure at the Department of Homeland Security, her most recent role before joining Dowa was as Director of Joint Task Force – Investigations. This agency oversaw the investigation into both DG Auto Parts and Dowa.
This was in Sunland Park, New Mexico which is basically Eastern El Paso.
The police weren't interested in getting camera footage at all. They also weren't very interested in following the backhoe tracks through the sand that went through a backyard gate at this trailer house a few hundred feet away containing cerement mixers, junk, and dozens of bicycles in different states of repair.
I came back to that job a few months later to check on some things and there was another backhoe parked in that backyard yard. I called the police. They said "what crime are you reporting? stop calling if you don't have a crime".
Number of times an ALPR was deployed. 61,875
Number of LPR Deployments by taskforce investigators 42,878
Number of vehicles recovered from LPR detection 1,963
Number of Cleared Cases – Catalytic Converter Theft 1,658
Number of arrests from LPR detection 569
Number of identified/documented prolific catalytic converter theft offenders 266
Number of Catalytic Converter Theft bait operations 236
The problem is they don't define "deployments". There are ~13,500 ALPR cameras and they do thousands of plates per hour and neither of those numbers matches the deployment. My best guess is it is a targeted search and so a vehicle is recovered or a case is cleared 2-3 times out of every time they search the database.
Regarding actual reduction, as another comment said, the amount of crime fluctuates with metal prices. But at least they can lock the people away.
Also, how many missing people are there? finding 10k seems quite a lot. “one of the most effective ways Flock has been able to help find, just last year, over 10,000 missing persons”.
Flock helping close 10K cases doesn't surprise me at all, but it doesn't meant those people wouldn't have been found without it. It may mean less work for the police, but the police don't usually put a lot of effort into a missing person without evidence they're in danger.
Our task force made x cat theft arrests
Our task force used flock y times
I posted a comment on a different (and completely irrelevant) post about some skill claiming to unlease the superpower of Claude Code, asking, is there any evidence aka benchmark that shows it's any better than vanilla Claude Code that is statistically significant?
Dead silence. But not downvotes -- easily got to -4.
SMH.
There are also a ton of one-line comments now, some that get upvoted to the top. That's 100 percent Reddit and 0 percent intellect.
There were always negative objection comments (like the famous dropbox one), but those are different. Many of these new cynical comments are not objecting, they're concurring with a poisonous cynicism.
I remember making this topic in late 2016 regarding it:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13016237
But I do know the Founders had no clue about computers, networks, cameras or license plates so they certthad no opinions about Flock cameras when they drafted the Bill of Rights. The Founders were all rich white men who were more than happy to dragnet to find unauthorized non-whites so who really knows what was in the spirit of the Bill of Rights.
It’s a reasonable question, it’s a public road, and it doesn’t violate George’s privacy in his person, home, papers, or belongings.
Are you asking someone who just had their car stolen?
Or are you asking a mom who just found out there's a Flock camera that has been filming her 6 year old daughter playing in a splash pad all summer?
Have you?
From their views, the right isn't trampled. It's a win
It feels like some juvenile "I can't kill you but I can pay this guy $200k to make you go away"
Almost every house in my neighborhood has 1-2 cameras pointing around their houses. When there's an issue, my neighbors share the footages with the group, and that's so useful. And I live in a very very democrat state/city.
Also, we should definitely address the privacy and access control issue with Flock. Removing the cameras isn't the right solution.
You might be right that the issues could be solved without removing the cameras, but they definitely will be solved by removing the cameras.
We'll see.
Working as it was designed to.
1. I don't think Texas was around during the Tea Party, and
2. Property is also a right, so this is just about how much privacy you are willing to sacrifice for how much property.
You got me there, pal ;) I didn't use the exact technical terms you expected, my argument is now void, nooo.
I guess I should go and install one of those cameras right outside my house now.
And this is where US caselaw and my personal beliefs about privacy start to differ. Why can't we expect some level of privacy in a public place? There are some countries that confer that, to certain levels.
Because it’s a public place. We already have laws covering things like harassment, voyeurism, etc; so existing legal conduct in a public place should remain legal.
The US used to be one of those countries, then 9/11 happened and the loudest folks (or at least the folks with the most money to influence law) started eroding privacy and now more folks just accept our current state and views like OP’s.
It’s really interesting…you can even watch a TV crime drama series, like Law & Order, and see the privacy erosion in the TV show. That transition is basically a reflection of what happened in the US.
I believe the current status quo is a direct violation of the 4th Amendment.
The fact of being in public or on a vehicle isn't the key point. It's that electronic systems aggregating location data are 4th amendment protected. Which was established in Carpenter.
The aggregation creates a comprehensive system.
Aggregated location data over months creates a comprehensive chronicle of your life that's categorically different from someone observing you on one street corner. Aggregation changes the constitutional analysis.
It’s only the government searching that database without a warrant that would be unconstitutional under some hypothetical future case.
Privacy is about being in your home away from others, correspondence etc. Once you are interacting with others it's not a feature.
Unless we are agents of certain law enforcement agencies...
I don't live in the US, but it seems that constant monitoring via government sanctioned facial recognition technology falls under that umbrella.
Flock cameras using facial recognition to surveil citizens in public spaces without a warrant is a 4th amendment violation under any rational reading, and it is up to the American people whether they want to live in country that no longer holds itself accountable to the law or not.
It really has no impact on my life beyond the looming existential crisis of the world's largest military and nuclear power slowly becoming a rogue fascist state.
As just mentioned, being watched in a public space doesn't constitute a violation of the 4th Amendment. Under any rational reading, you are not being searched.
It really has no impact on anyone's life, especially if they participate in any part of society. Your phone records, credit cards, and every social media and email account are all far more invasive tracking and without even the veneer of accountability. Even for criminals, it hardly makes a difference if they pull an ID from Flock, your cell records, or the bodega security camera and Ring doorbell footage people would happily offer to a cop. Investigating a crime by looking at a security camera is not fascism, just like deporting an illegal immigrant or dispersing a riot isn't fascism.
Since you’re apparently new here, please familiarize yourself with the HN Guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
“Edit out swipes.”
You can choose to rationalize the actions of fascists all you want, but the rest of the world is not obligated to respect you for it.
In my country we have a word that roughly translates to “lackey to those in power”, but I think I prefer the American English pejorative “bootlicker”.
New wrongs aren't justified by existing wrongs.
Roberts did use the word 'narrow' in the Carpenter opinion. That part is accurate. But read what narrow actually meant: the Court said it wasn't overturning all of third-party doctrine at once, and wasn't addressing every possible surveillance technology.
It was not saying 'this principle only applies to cell phones forever.' The actual holding was that a warrant is required whenever someone has a legitimate privacy interest in records held by a third party.
That's not phone-specific. Roberts even wrote that the ruling must account for 'more sophisticated systems already in use.' He was explicitly anticipating future applications.
Chatrie v. United States, decided June 29th this year, just 2 months ago, is exactly that next application:
Chatrie v. United States, decided June 29, 2026, 6-3: SCOTUS held that when police use a "geofence warrant" demanding that Google hand over location data from all devices near a crime scene during a specific time window constitutes a Fourth Amendment search requiring a warrant backed by probable cause.
There’s the potential for searching the database to require a warrant, but the cameras themselves, and being recorded on a public street (which everyone’s crying about) has no reasonable pathway to being unconstitutional.
I'm still upset that we have a TCPA to protect consumers from spam calls, and then refuse to ever enforce it.
Such extensive surveillance is likely a necessary precondition for governments to be able to take any number of horribly authoritarian steps against their populace. Given the likelihood that this leads to violations of all other rights, I find it hard to argue that these cameras don't violate people's rights.
The first amendment, fourth amendment, and the fourteenth amendment of the US Constitution. You should read it.
For the first, assumably you think you can’t be observed coming or going from a riot? That’s not true.
For the fourth, a Flock camera existing is not inherently a search, just like how a database of cell records is not unconstitutional (Carpenter, Chatrie, Katz).
Is the 14th just a nebulous due process argument? Again, the camera existing is not an unconstitutional, see 4th.
You should read them again.
"These Americans", "Modern Americans".
If you have never heard of that before then someone failed you during your education.
- give up your car/vehicle propery
- let an LLC take ownership
- reside in the privacy protections of LLC and corporation
I don't think any successful case has happened yet where flock et al have pierced the corporate veil to get address information, nor dug into insurance records to find who the LLC-license plates belong to.
and i’d be more shocked if the same stores weren’t already sharing their own inside cameras facial recognition directly with companies like flock already.
and from what we’ve seen, these companies cameras are linked up with names from frequent shopper cards, cc data, what people buy, when they buy it, etc…
If you want privacy give up some of your convenience. If you're refusing to give up your convenience, than you have chosen to give up your privacy. I find it distasteful with people who have given up project their failures onto everyone else who haven't given up.
sure maybe in store parking lots it sees your face. at least you add a step between it and the car's registered owner and make them do extra work. I don't think falsely equivocating "they track your face so just give up on all aspects of privacy" is true. that's you having given up and projecting your opinion and equivalencies on all opposing arguments since you have dissonance from having given up.
also it feels deceptive to then equate that everyone also has a shopper card, credit cards, and personal spending data too - not everyone is giving up their personal data and given up like you. I feel like just because you've given up you're using your pessimistic attitude to falsely dismiss other people who haven't. there's plenty of people who would actually be protected from a private car scenario because they might not have shopper cards or personal transactions in some company databases.
my point is, going after flock alone is not even close to enough. i’ve read articles that say flock logs dents/scratches/paint fades/etc… on cars as well.
we would be absolutely ridiculously naive to delude ourselves that they’re not pairing up and merging data with all of the other similar aggregators such as grocery stores, gas stations, etc.. who we know for absolute certain are absolutely actively collecting and using facial recognition, apps, bluetooth, wifi signals, frequent shopper cards, credit card data, etc… we know for sure they’re doing this. and we’d be crazy to think flock isnt merging this data, especially considering that every grocery store parking lot is crawling with the little video surveillance pods.
i think we’re being ridiculous framing this as simply a flock issue. there are countless surveillance companies doing this all over… not just flock. while it’s one of the more ubiquitous, we need to stop more than just flock. this has to be stopped at the root.
but yes, i do think it’s wise to use flock as the vehicle to raise awareness, but we’d be naive af to imply it’s “just flock” and that something like an llc would be anything other than trivial for their surveillance aggregation to overcome.
I have been slowly over the years improving my phone use behavior, and now most of the time I don't feel like I'm in an emergency state where my phone needs to be used and not on airplane mode, I use cash more though I also use a credit card too. At least using a credit card and still doing the car-llc protection thing means a police officer won't be harassing you and easily fining you by license plate (I experienced cop harassment in Dallas last year being a Pakistani-muslim looking man, when they were hotly accusing muslims in the area of sharia law twice police pulled me over in white neighborhoods where I lived and cost my thousands in lawyer fees with 0 responsibility on their side - "qualified immunity"). I felt safe and protected not owning a car after that.
If I decided to not do anything at all, I would have epxposed my self to continual harassment. This is one part of the whole solution. Who cares if all those groups and entities are doing all those things, protect yourself against them all theres a way to do so in all scenarios. You lose when you feel powerless and pessimistic, not when you acknowledge all the risks and choose to do one thing at a time as you can.
What do you think we do to stop this at the root?
I'm guessing that as scrutiny increases, we'll begin to hear about questionable, at best, sales tactics, if not outright bribery. Trips, sponsored speaking/training engagements that puts money in the pockets of cops and policymakers, etc. The whole thing stinks of it.
But I can't find any evidence of this claim. Who here can help lead to it?