lisp2240 1 day ago

In the 2000s I knew a guy who was transitioning to software development after working in HR at a large American police department. He told me you couldn't become a cop unless you had a mental illness. They psychologically screen candidates to filter out people who have too much empathy. They would reject you if you said you had a close relationship with your mother, for example. They wanted people with aggressive tendencies. They loved it when someone had a superhero tattoo or had a parent die when they were a child.

People always comment that we need to do more screening before people become cops, do more training. The screening and the training are the problem.

  • grepex 1 day ago

    It sounds like that guy may have been exaggerating a bit. Aggressive people are a liability. Especially in law enforcement. Not just to the department but to fellow officers. They stir shit up and it is dangerous and annoying.

    Cops do need more training, like dramatically more training. I think the screening process is trying to solve a really difficult problem. You don't know if/how someone will be corrupted when they have a little bit of power. Or how they will change over time.

    • adjejmxbdjdn 1 day ago

      I’m pretty sure the commenter you responded to agrees aggressive people are a liability and that’s the problem with current hiring(or at least the hiring contemporaneous to when they heard this).

      From my own personal conversation with a hostage scenario trainer for the police, he said de-escalation forms only a tiny percentage of his training because that’s not what the cops want, even though he would make that the majority of the training given a free hand, since de-escalation doesn’t just increase the chances of the hostages being safe, but also the cops and the first responders.

      • grepex 1 day ago

        Yes, I'm sure they would agree but I'm pointing out that the department/agency would agree as well. I don't think that departments were actively seeking out aggressive people, but rather seeking out people who could handle getting aggressive when a situation calls for it. Someone who can't get aggressive is likewise a liability.

        I do see what you are saying regarding de-escalation. It seems like one of those things that is easy to mistakenly dismiss as "easy" and focus on something like firearms or tactics training.

      • pseudohadamard 23 hours ago

        It's very different in other countries. My partner is a psychologist and was at a scene where police were called in, she commented afterwards that they were using established de-escalation techniques that she was very familiar with to defuse the situation (I didn't recognise any of it, she's the expert here). So they'd apparently had fairly extensive training in de-escalation as well as experience in applying it.

    • lisp2240 15 hours ago

      They do not need more training. They training they already get trains them to be aggressive and abuse people. We need less of that, not more.

NoDodgeQuestion 1 day ago

Can a native English speaker explain what "I saw a shiny thing" means?

  • avgDev 1 day ago

    They see a good looking attractive woman and spy on them. Their low IQ vanishes completely and all the blood rushes to their pants.

    They are like a toddler in a toy store and want the shiniest thing.

  • overtone1000 1 day ago

    It's a metaphor. He was comparing seeing the woman to seeing an attractive or valuable object like a coin on the ground or a jewel.

  • mrguyorama 1 day ago

    The police officer is saying that he is so brain damaged or otherwise incapable of self control, rational thought, and restraint, that an attractive woman existing in his presence caused him to immediately commit many crimes to see her again.

    Pay close attention to how he insists that she was coming on to him. He genuinely believes that. He lives in a fake reality that he adjusts in whatever way will make him happiest because he has spent so long in a system that has zero repercussions or accountability.

    He probably shouldn't be allowed to own a gun.

    Men like this know they are doing bad things. They don't care. There are no repercussions. They do not feel bad about doing these bad things.

    See also: https://www.bwss.org/abusive-men-describe-the-benefits-of-vi...

    Basically, these people just choose to not care about other people. They know they are hurting someone. But minor personal convenience is more important to them than not hurting another person.

avgDev 1 day ago

Just unacceptable all around.

I've studied criminal justice before CS, and after getting to know cops I decided it isn't for me. The culture is awful. It is like high school, a lot of drama, sleeping around, many divorces, abuse of power and just screwed up mentality.

What makes this story worse is this for me: "The detective investigating Roman told the man “you’ll get past this bro” during his arrest, and later told the victim that he was "remorseful" and urged her not to post about the incident on social media, according to body camera footage obtained by 404 Media."

The detective urged the victim not post about it.....both should be stripped of badges immediately and never get certified again.

  • ishouldbework 1 day ago

    To be fair, the full quote is

    > I can’t tell you what to post or not post, but if you could refrain from posting anything until my investigation is over, I would appreciate it.

    emphasis mine, given that, "The detective urged the victim not post about it" seems like taking things bit out of context.

  • jazzyjackson 1 day ago

    You’re focusing on the bad behavior of a couple individuals but the bigger story is the license plate cameras going up all over the country may be used just as easily to stalk ex girlfriends as they are to solve crimes.

    • tibiapejagala 1 day ago

      Like the guns they carry, may be used just as easily to shoot random people as they are to stop mass shooter. Or there are other information systems available to the police for decades where you can check employment, place of residence, phone number, owned cars, criminal history etc. that can be misused as well.

      The US has a problem with zero accountability for cops. Literally zero.

      They should be thrown into jail for serious misuse of restricted tools and should not be able to work in any enforcement job ever again. This would solve the problem really fast. We are going to have discussions about how flock is bad, like we had with stingray devices, yet nothing is going to change as nothing can be done about the root issue.

cucumber3732842 1 day ago

Cops abuse every system that's given to them, to varying extents. Whining about lack of access controls and rogue (i.e. not using to do their job properly) cops is implicitly saying that this system could/would/should exist if it has "proper" access controls, whatever that means. It's like seeing a slave labor gulag and saying that the prisoners need better recreation ad more frequent laundry. To say these little things like access controlled need to be fixed is advocating for turd polishing. Even with proper access controls the purpose of these systems is to create misery at the hands of the state. The turd is still a turd.

  • srustagi 1 day ago

    > to varying extents

    Is doing an INSANE amount of heavy lifting here for that generalization but yeah point taken.

    • cucumber3732842 1 day ago

      I think these systems are probably less abused on a per officer basis than tazers but that's just a guess. Obviously neither is great.

quickthrowman 1 day ago

If he didn’t say “Because I wanted to have sex with her,” he is lying. He wanted to have sex with her so he stalked her. I bet this is several orders of magnitude more common than hat is reported among police with access to databases.

bko 1 day ago

I recently listened to the Flock CEO on All In podcast, and he mentioned an ironic thing about Flock and it's audit trail is that it serves as a honeypot to root out bad police.

Flock basically knows what a malicious request looks like. The simple example he gives is someone pinging the same license plate every day without putting it on a watchlist, because the officer doesn't want others to know. They started rolling out auto-detection of bad-faith queries and flagging those to supervisors.

If you figure that some percentage of cops are dirty, a simple easily detectable honeypot is extremely effective in identifying them and firing them. I guess the hard part here is actually holding the cops that abuse the system accountable but that's also likely solvable. It's a huge liability for the police force. Usually the ones that are protecting dirty cops are the police unions, but that's a whole different conversation

It's also important to note that Flock is just a license plate reader. It doesn't record video or do any facial recognition. And storage typically gets deleted between 1 and 7 days and is up to the precent to set.

https://singjupost.com/transcript-all-in-interview-with-floc...

  • chaps 1 day ago

    Flock is not just a license plate reader. They have many products. Here's an article today that includes a decent deep dive into the code of one of its new projects that's... definitely more than just license plate reading.

    https://www.wired.com/story/flock-safety-os-investigate/

    • bko 1 day ago

      From the article:

      > The code describes 45 tools at the AI’s disposal, giving it access to plate scans and camera metadata, arrest records, case files, dispatch logs, ballistics results, and commercial databases that contain Social Security numbers, dates of birth, phone numbers, email addresses, relatives and associates.

      Sounds like they're shipping an AI that can use external datasources like an MCP. By this regard, Claude does exactly the same thing. Give it access to a database with social security numbers and it'll query them for you.

      The rest of the things described in the article is all a byproduct of having a database (typically kept around for 1-7 days) of cars, their license plates, locations and some physical description of the car. For instance:

      > vehicles that left one city for another and returned within a week, made repeat roundtrips over 14 days, or passed through three areas in sequence.

      If you have still photos of every car passing on particular street corners, this is just a query. They're just taking photos and reading license plates. And they started getting some description of the car, like unusual things. The CEO talks about that as well. From the interview:

      > A car drives by, we take a still image of the vehicle, we read the license plate, and the system’s gotten more sophisticated with time. We can detect things like a roof rack or a bumper sticker or dent or damage, but that’s at its core what the technology does...

      > So it’s pretty cool technology, and pretty effective, because if you think about what happens on a 911 call, most people don’t instinctively look at the license plate and remember it. They see the thing that was unique about the car — oh, it had damage on the right side.

      I would definitely recommend the interview if you want to learn more.

      • chaps 1 day ago

        Friend, even after listening to that interview you still insisted on saying that flock ONLY does ALPR and only now that you've been given an example of where you were wrong, you suggest that I listen to the thing that clearly didn't inform you enough?

        Your goalposts are quite mobile.

        • bko 1 day ago

          I said it doesn't do facial recognition or video. Sure there's an image so it's reasonable to catalog color and stuff, but that's relatively new. It's not a big gotcha that you think it is

          It's entirely reasonable imo since you have no expectation of privacy on the road. I can take pictures of cars that drive by my house. I don't even know what were arguing about here.

          • chaps 1 day ago

            You literally said, "It's also important to note that Flock is just a license plate reader."

            You're spreading misinformation about what these things are and aren't. It's fucked up. But I'm hopeful that you can do better.

            Also, please, for your sake -- submit a FOIA request for footage taken from a public camera. It'll get denied because public records laws consider this sorta information private. Your oversimplification is intellectually silly.

            • bko 1 day ago

              My brother in Christ, I am wealthy enough to live in a rich neighborhood w cameras. Others are lucky enough to live in gated communities. We have cameras for the wealthy and elite, I'm trying to expand who we care for in society.

              Of course we shouldn't let some random person foia these records. These are for police matters only. What are you even arguing for?

              • SaucyWrong 1 day ago

                You are completely unhinged.

              • chaps 1 day ago

                Fucking yikes, bro.

  • dudu24 1 day ago

    I'm sure once Flock notifies departments of these bad apples, they will take swift inaction.

    • bko 1 day ago

      I agree, police unions are mostly to blame, but unfortunately a downside of collective action. How we allow public sector unions at all is baffling to me.

      • mrguyorama 1 day ago

        Ah yes, the problem is that the workers have too much power!

        Not that, you know, there is clear evidence that police departments just don't put any effort into fixing problems. Ask any former cop.

        Unions aren't magic. In any other industry, they don't let you commit crimes and avoid punishment. You will find that plenty of unions don't have such absurd power, because there is pushback from the companies that work with them. Last I checked, it wasn't the SAG that allowed pedophiles free reign in the entertainment industry, but rather the fact that the industry had so many pedophiles that they could protect and aid each other.

        Did police unions force police departments to have such limited training? To have such hostile and fake training? Did the police union make the cop brag to his buddies about what he did?

        When's the last time the pilot's union tried to defend a pilot who showed up to work drunk as being above reproach? How come rail unions weren't able to prevent measures that punish engineers who are distracted with their phone when they should be working?

        How come other public sector unions, like teachers and nurses, don't seem to have this problem?

  • tomkarho 1 day ago

    > an ironic thing about Flock and it's audit trail is that it serves as a honeypot to root out bad police.

    That's like saying the SS served as a honeypot for genocidal maniacs.

  • pstuart 1 day ago

    This assumes that the chain of management within the police believes in accountability, which bring to mind a famous quote about assumptions.

  • FireBeyond 1 day ago

    Flock is putting huge PR spin on this. They will not disable features that are illegal for your agency to use in your state. They will give you training on it.

    And they identify lots more than just license plates. What license plates were visible inside the YMCA children's gym? Or at public pools on the pooldeck?

    Garrett has also said that he sees false positives as a better outcome than false negatives, because the latter doesn't advance Flock's mission towards "a world with no crime, thanks to Flock" (with unironic apologies to Minority Report).

    • bko 1 day ago

      Private corporations shouldn't set or interpret the law. They can sell technology but that's up to the jurisdiction to set policies. What a dystopian vision you have where corporate ceos start telling police what's legal and illegal

      • lovich 1 day ago

        If there is precedent set saying selling $ITEM is illegal in a given jurisdiction , should a company be selling it?

        Is it dystopian if a company doesn’t sell fentanyl to a police precinct because it’s up to the police to decide and the company should just give them whatever they ask for?

        edit: lol at your response that’s flagged before I could reply. No consistency in morals, just sweeping for destruction of the rule of law.

        In a paraphrase of your own words, it’s just some criticism bro.

      • FireBeyond 1 day ago

        Not for nothing, but I actually worked for Flock. The whole point is to bypass those policies, which is why you have Flock selling to agencies in a state that disallows sharing of data with certain federal agencies and -Flock- being the one to enable that data sharing.

        But to you, "it's not up to them to know the law".

        "Sorry, Officer, I'm reselling my prescription medications, but only because it's not up to me to interpret the law that says I can't."

        Dystopian visions are what Flock is selling, in as many words: "A world where there is no crime, thanks to Flock." Garrett: "A false positive is a better result, because a false negative doesn't contribute to our mission." Meanwhile you're worried that your libertarian fever dream is being pissed on by expecting corporations not to break the laws that they acknowledge they know.

  • m3047 1 day ago

    1) Flock is a company.

    2) One of their products is a license plate scanner / reader.

    3) This scanner / reader consumes camera output which includes license plates.

    3) One of their products is a tracker / alerter / searcher.

    4) The searcher / tracker isn't limited to license plates, it can correlate on other aspects in the photo. These other aspects concern the vehicle, the vehicle occupants, objects and individuals elsewhere in the photo.

    • bko 1 day ago

      The searcher / tracker is limited to license plates or descriptions of the car, not occupants.

      This is backed up by their statements. If you have an alt source supporting your statement please provide