In my opinion, there was never any doubt that there would be over-policing. Rather, people doubt that they would belong to the over-policed parties. I hear similar arguments about NSF funding from my relatives: "yes, funding has been illegally cut, but it will not be cut for the people I know, only for the 'bad' researchers."
Overpolicing is the term used by one side that claims that any disparities in crime rates along demographic lines are due to an excess of police activity rather than any other factors.
Malfeasance is the $10 word that's probably more appropriate here for the actions of officers intentionally abusing the systems their authority grants access to.
Being anti police is a bit of a wedge in US politics, it's privileged to say we don't need as much police because the poorest communities are often who need it most.
Abusing surveillance tools has nothing to do with legitimate policing, so "over-policing" is probably the wrong word.
> Being anti police is a bit of a wedge in US politics, it's privileged to say we don't need as much police because the poorest communities are often who need it most.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say here, but it sure sounds bad. Poor communities have frequently suffered the most from police forces, since by and large police are designed and funded by the wealthy to protect their interests.
> Rather, people doubt that they would belong to the over-policed parties
I don't think the people recording regular police interactions and refusing police instructions when stopped ever had any doubt about being over-policed.
> NSF funding from my relatives: "yes, funding has been illegally cut,..."
How is a cut illegal? Does any additional dollar in funding have to persist for all of eternity. For reference:
If the Office of Management and Budget follows a president's order to cut NSF funds and they violate the Anti-Deficiency Act, it's literally a crime. If the president orders the violation in order to achieve some political outcome, that's also bribery and extortion.
In this mafia regime it's a case of 'throw it on the pile,' but it doesn't change the fact that this stuff is wildly illegal. The president's job is to be the dumb unthinking agent of Congress and to execute the laws they pass on behalf of the people.
If you feel there should be cuts to nsf, then congress should do so (as enshrined by law). Not executive fiat by the president. Per the constitution the congress has the power of the purse.
My understanding is that congress chooses how much money should be distributed to each organization (e.g. NSF) each year, and preventing that money from being distributed is not legal. If I understand correctly, your table is of appropriation from Congress, not distribution[1]. I am open to being corrected if I am wrong.
> The request proposes $4 billion for NSF, a 54% cut from the fiscal year 2026 enacted level. The amount echoes last year’s proposal of $3.9 billion, which Congress soundly rejected, funding the agency at $8.75 billion.
Appologies, but I don't see how this supports your point. It actually seems to support the claim that the reduction in NSF awards is illegal because it states that the request was explicitly rejected by Congress
Congress approved it which is why it's the funded that amount. You don't care about the legality of it. You're trying to back into a position that you read in some article and trying to come off as just an impartial judge who cares about procedure and rule of law.
Most people are like this. They care about "cuts" but don't know the amount. They don't even consider the amount, just the direction has to be up and to the right. And they'll even try to spin "cuts in projected growth" with "cuts".
There was an audit trail for improper access using the technology and a lawsuit. How is this "lack of accountability" and "lack of public oversight"? Here are the 100 instances:
Because the cops that did this won't face any real consequences. Will they be fired? Maybe. But will they stop being cops? Almost certainly not. Will they face criminal or civil penalties? Almost certainly not. Will they keep all benefits related to being a cop? Yes.
That's what's meant by a lack of accountability. Cops abusing their authority to pester people they don't like has been happening for nearly as long as there has been cops. But in modern America they have extra protections and one of the most powerful unions in the US which shield them from all real punishments.
Just being caught abusing the system is meaningless.
Why don't you see how the lawsuit plays out? What do you think it should be? Post a compelling TikTok and put the bad cop in jail? This is due process.
> Cops abusing their authority to pester people they don't like has been happening for nearly as long as there has been cops.
I think on net cops are good. We grant them power and put in reasonable guards for them to not abuse that power. And when they do there are remedies, like this guy is pursuing.
1. It's lack of accountability because nobody involved seems to have been fired or even disciplined.
2. It's lack of public oversight because an attorney filing a complaint about an unlawful arrest noticing a suspicious photograph from a month after the incident and then compelling the police to turn over evidence isn't oversight.
Accountability would have started with the officer, who knew very shortly after arresting the victim that the arrest was unlawful, being placed on leave almost immediately. But since it progressed to this point, accountability would look like literally any administrative action being taken whatsoever once the improper use was discovered.
Public oversight would have looked like that audit trail actually being read internally to determine whether there was a legitimate use for the searches in the first place. An audit trail that never gets looked at unless you're getting subpoenaed isn't "oversight".
Try FOIAing a body cam, and filing a complaint. You might get action before the next Ice Age. Record a cop doing something blatantly illegal and try finding a willing prosecutor. In practice there's no accountability.
This guy seemed to do it. I also have better things to do than record police and refuse instructions.
> Record a cop doing something blatantly illegal and try finding a willing prosecutor.
The cop wasn't doing anything illegal, from the article: While standing in a private parking lot in Sussex, Wisconsin, on May 4, 2025, Napoleon Jones witnessed a traffic stop made by an out-of-county police officer. "It just didn't sit right with me,"
Yeah dog, "just didn't sit right" doesn't really hold up.
Are you aware of any current country or any country throughout history that has granted the government powers like this and hasn't been abused? I think you're mistaken to blame lack of accountability and lack of public oversight. I think it's simply not possible.
The next step would be blunt "fuck you and your constitutions and amendments, we're in charge here, we own the guns (both police and army), the media, the businesses, and we won't go away peacefully regardless of your elections". It is already happening here in Serbia which used to be a civilized country.
To some extent, the U.K. They’ve had flock-style cameras for years, and while there is of course police abuse there’s far greater accountability. Brits are more comfortable with the idea of police having those powers - but of course that’s partly to do with the fact their police don’t have guns, so are generally less terrifying.
I'm pretty sure license plate readers and other surveillance tech have been abused constantly in the past, but we see more articles about Flock because they have better logging & auditing compared to smaller competitors or government-owned cameras.
I personally blame Y Combinator for looking at Flock and going "Well, there is potential for abuse, but that's a risk we're willing to impose on society to make some money."
Don’t know why you’re downvoted but this venture funding is exactly what makes the scale and centralization of surveillance possible. You can’t build this sort of system out without the debt financing provided by the vc industry.
For example - I don’t have links to substantiate this yet - but I’d bet the same playbook that’s always used was used here as well. Flock cameras were provided to cash strapped police departments at a very low cost - unsustainably low for any other non vc funded company to compete with - in order to juice growth and build the scale/network effect to make the system valuable.
Not enough people blame VCs and the people that fund evil things. They are accessories. They knew this would happen, let's not pretend they didn't.
They are just shameless because making money has been canonized as a greater moral good than being a decent human being. We need to bring back name and shame.
Sooo many will tout something along "fiduciary duty to shareholders" to explain why evil must happen. Just search for it in comments here on HN, and you will see it again and again, as if everyone's hands are twisted.
You are confused. Yes, lots of people say that here, but the intention is almost never to justify immoral behavior. Rather the goal is to delegitimize capitalism by blaming it for the immoral behavior.
Well, doing the most immoral and reprehensible thing on the edge of what’s lawful is a guaranteed “blue ocean” strategy so it’s inevitable that the most sociopathic will take the opportunity
They are the reason these companies exist. When it comes to the creation of large for-profit technology companies, they decide what comes about and what doesn't. The blame is on them.
They also fit startup logic in a peculiarly perverted way: try all the nasty stuff compartmentalized into a low stakes stealth mode start up, then become an acquisition target once you've got the perverted PMF of having a benign looking product that hides the evil within. Clean hands for the acquirer.
They are more than a accessory. You wouldn't say someone who funds a contract killing is merely an accessory to murder. VCs should likewise be considered as principal offenders, unless there is proof that the company was not transparent with the VCs.
They're more than accessories, that nearly writes them off as being innocent looped-in bystanders. Y Combinator has a vested stake, they want to encourage a maximalist Flock-centric police force. They directly profit off police that are incapable of doing their job without extreme, abusive tools at their disposal.
You could argue that YC has more of a conscience than other investors like A16Z. But I'm not sure how much I believe that seeing Gary Tan's moral indifference towards startups that are the incarnate equivalent of the Torment Nexus.
The law is properly a limit on behavior, not a grant for acceptable behavior. It defines in which situations the state will ultimately employ its monopoly on violence to compel compliance.
This is a vastly smaller set of situations compared to what a health society would consider acceptable.
There is a huge gulf between what the law allows, and what being a decent person requires, and that gulf is called "being a scumbag."
We should not alter the law to prohibit everything in that gulf, because it would create an authoritarian society ripe for abuse, relying on controls like mass surveillance and the erasure of civil liberties.
However, we can and should name, shame, and socially/commercially outcast people who gleefully engage in the art of being a scumbag.
> trying to make money
It is indeed possible to make money without funding evil things.
Its a camera bro, reading the same license plates your can read with your eyes. If you care about your precincts policies go take it up with them. You may as well go after companies selling firearms to police.
There is a massive difference between a human making observations and 120,000 cameras (at last count) coordinated through a single company's computer systems. This surveillance state enablement is as anti-American as it gets.
There wasn't for anyone who paid attention. That "logic of surveillance" article a few years ago got it 100% correct: surveillance is immediately used against those who object to its use.
I think Flock could be very useful to track actual criminals. However, any queries to the system must require a warrant and publicly available track record.
It would be even easier to track criminals if we required all people* in the country to wear always on devices with GPS, always on cameras, always recording audio that are illegal to disable or turn off.
But that would be OK as long as a warrant was required to access it, right?
* - All people unable to pay the government to disable the device.
You don't need a special speedy system. A regular warrant is just fine. A warrant in this case would never have been granted because there was no suspicion of wrongdoing. There's already processes for expedited search warrants outside of business hours, the problem is that warrants are simply never required to use these services.
In practice, the odds overwhelmingly favor abuse. And even if the "proper and lawful" version was somehow achieved, it would require constant maintenance, security, and expensive oversight that would also be at risk of degenerating back into abuse.
If abuse can’t be eliminated then it’s about what ratio of abuse to crime reduction is tolerable I guess. If we find 100 taken children while a dirty cop stalks his ex - is that tolerable? I’d say yes. If it became more abused I guess that’s when society needs to decide.
Abuse can be eliminated. It's called requiring a warrant. What's tolerable doesn't matter: we don't need to litigate how willing we are to bend the fourth amendment.
Was just reading into this and it’s infuriating. He was recording another person’s traffic stop in a parking lot. Once the stop was done, he walks to his car. The same officer goes to his car and “pulls him over.” The vet says that you can’t pull someone over in a private parking lot, that’s not a legal stop. Doesn’t matter, he’s arrested and car towed.
He’s kept in jail for 5 hrs before being released for it not being a legal stop just like the vet said. Then that officer tracked him thru flock over 100 times for some personal vendetta.
> Then that officer tracked him thru flock over 100 times for some personal vendetta.
That's not quite accurate according to the article. It was actually worse: There were over 100 searches and some of them were done by officer in question, but some were done by other officers. This was due to lieutenant's order in connection with Jones' citizen complaint. So it wasn't just one officer abusing the system.
This is disgusting, and I continue to argue that we should not excuse Flock Safety for this kind of misbehavior. They created the tech and marketed it to police departments without providing good protections against this kind of thing. Making something cheap and automatic changes how people use it. If this cop had to tail the guy around himself, maybe he wouldn't have done it.
But the far worse problem IMO is that this cop is dirty, corrupt, untrustworthy, and should be punished for stalking this man, and yet he surely will not be. Worst case, he might catch some administrative sanction or maybe be fired - he won't go to jail like he should for this misbehavior.
If you have 1 dirty cop and 100 who ignore his bad behavior, you actually have 101 dirty cops. We need a way to deal with this in our society without resorting to the absolutes of "defund the police" or "back the blue".
Prosecutors are insufficiently independent from cops. The job of prosecutor is often as political steppingstone. Prosecuting cops isn't compatible with that.
sounds like an easy win for a prosecutor for felony stalking.
there needs to be more separation from prosecutors and cops. I know a lot of places now have prosecutors who are actively against cops, that is not what I mean.
the prosecutors are supposed to be unbiased and make decisions on evidence. we know they don't regardless of their political leaning. but that is the standard we (citizens) should hold them accountable. unfortunately there are too may bootlicking voters who just want to feel "safe" and have zero courage of their own even in the voting booth.
we need to stop giving agencies money based on stats. that is one cause to a lot of these problems. then the cops and agencies get all twisted and in a tissy when a tool that made stat pumping easier like right now the flock cameras.
> we need to stop giving agencies money based on stats.
I think you just need to stop giving agencies money based on bad stats. Goodhart's Law is an extremely well-established effect. At the very least, crime rate should be monitored by a separate department.
Maybe have something on the plate that prevents reading from certain angles? There was a ticket dismissed in Quebec a few years ago for an "unreadable plate" because the car had a bike rack hiding the plate but the ticket had the plate number on it so it was not unreadable
I know if you douse these cameras with flammable liquids they burn up pretty well. I’m in support of the same for the people pushing these Flock cameras. Because if you’ve elevated yourself above the rest of us, well then we don’t need you anymore. Tie whomever voted for these cameras to the mast and light them the fuck up.
We need an actual democracy(not rich people's puppets). In this country almost 75% of voting population are against the war in Iran and yet most of congress supports that war.
Video is useful in keeping people safe. Including from the cops. It’s about remaking the system to require court permission every time they access it, process and transparency.
No big deal is it was just video. It's really about the data that can be extracted from the video such as who you meet, when you are home or not and who is at your house, etc. all in realtime.
Making the possession of data this either illegal or too horribly cumbersome.
Flock is just an iteration, and getting rid of that brand won't fix it. And camera tracking of normal citizens is just an iteration -- not the underlying systemic issue that isn't being addressed.
The EU has GDPR. At this point, I want something stronger than that.
Flock is the most successful and well-known company doing this, however they’re not the only one. We need to be really careful to push back against the use of this technology as a whole and not fixate only on Flock. My town doesn’t use Flock, it uses another company’s tech…it’s no better! Don’t give the politicians an out.
Hopefully they remove cops who abuse their powers. While I agree that victims require compensation, ultimately these payouts only hurt the taxpayers who have to cover for these cops who at worst just move to another town to do it again.
Generally those who support the police in general (especially those with the thin blue line American flag displayed somewhere) espouse support for veterans. The clash of a veteran operating legally with police operating illegally helps foster cognitive dissonance and disentangle these two institutions in their mind.
In other words these types of articles are helpful for causing those individuals to confront the issues in their belief structure.
I use them this way all the time with my parents, as they continue to insist that I (a retired Navy vet) should mindlessly support the police. They are not interested in the LONG history of those two populations clashing.
Why not the other way around? First make sure the police department is capable of using them legally and reliably investigating abuse, then we can consider allowing them.
There are no "good apples" the article itself shows that other "apples" were helping him illegaly surveil. The "good apples" thought it was a good idea to give every apple access to a problematic system.
There are no good apples if there's a rotten in the bunch, we need public oversight of the only people that are allowed to enact violence on behalf of the state.
I personally blame the lack of accountability that police have in the US and the lack of public oversight into how departments operate.
Malfeasance is the $10 word that's probably more appropriate here for the actions of officers intentionally abusing the systems their authority grants access to.
Abusing surveillance tools has nothing to do with legitimate policing, so "over-policing" is probably the wrong word.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say here, but it sure sounds bad. Poor communities have frequently suffered the most from police forces, since by and large police are designed and funded by the wealthy to protect their interests.
I don't think the people recording regular police interactions and refusing police instructions when stopped ever had any doubt about being over-policed.
> NSF funding from my relatives: "yes, funding has been illegally cut,..."
How is a cut illegal? Does any additional dollar in funding have to persist for all of eternity. For reference:
| FY | NSF appropriation |
| 1952 | $4M |
| 1960 | $153M |
| 1970 | $440M |
| 1980 | $992M |
| 1990 | $2.08B |
| 2000 | $3.91B |
| 2010 | $6.87B |
| 2020 | $8.21B |
| 2024 | $9.06B |
| 2025 | $9.06B |
| 2026 | $8.75B |
If the Office of Management and Budget follows a president's order to cut NSF funds and they violate the Anti-Deficiency Act, it's literally a crime. If the president orders the violation in order to achieve some political outcome, that's also bribery and extortion.
In this mafia regime it's a case of 'throw it on the pile,' but it doesn't change the fact that this stuff is wildly illegal. The president's job is to be the dumb unthinking agent of Congress and to execute the laws they pass on behalf of the people.
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-02574-6
> The request proposes $4 billion for NSF, a 54% cut from the fiscal year 2026 enacted level. The amount echoes last year’s proposal of $3.9 billion, which Congress soundly rejected, funding the agency at $8.75 billion.
https://www.aip.org/fyi/trump-proposes-deep-research-cuts-ne...
Most people are like this. They care about "cuts" but don't know the amount. They don't even consider the amount, just the direction has to be up and to the right. And they'll even try to spin "cuts in projected growth" with "cuts".
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.wied.11...
That's what's meant by a lack of accountability. Cops abusing their authority to pester people they don't like has been happening for nearly as long as there has been cops. But in modern America they have extra protections and one of the most powerful unions in the US which shield them from all real punishments.
Just being caught abusing the system is meaningless.
> Cops abusing their authority to pester people they don't like has been happening for nearly as long as there has been cops.
I think on net cops are good. We grant them power and put in reasonable guards for them to not abuse that power. And when they do there are remedies, like this guy is pursuing.
2. It's lack of public oversight because an attorney filing a complaint about an unlawful arrest noticing a suspicious photograph from a month after the incident and then compelling the police to turn over evidence isn't oversight.
Accountability would have started with the officer, who knew very shortly after arresting the victim that the arrest was unlawful, being placed on leave almost immediately. But since it progressed to this point, accountability would look like literally any administrative action being taken whatsoever once the improper use was discovered.
Public oversight would have looked like that audit trail actually being read internally to determine whether there was a legitimate use for the searches in the first place. An audit trail that never gets looked at unless you're getting subpoenaed isn't "oversight".
> Record a cop doing something blatantly illegal and try finding a willing prosecutor.
The cop wasn't doing anything illegal, from the article: While standing in a private parking lot in Sussex, Wisconsin, on May 4, 2025, Napoleon Jones witnessed a traffic stop made by an out-of-county police officer. "It just didn't sit right with me,"
Yeah dog, "just didn't sit right" doesn't really hold up.
Can you cite the law that requires more than “it doesn’t sit right” to record police officers in public?
For example - I don’t have links to substantiate this yet - but I’d bet the same playbook that’s always used was used here as well. Flock cameras were provided to cash strapped police departments at a very low cost - unsustainably low for any other non vc funded company to compete with - in order to juice growth and build the scale/network effect to make the system valuable.
They are just shameless because making money has been canonized as a greater moral good than being a decent human being. We need to bring back name and shame.
You could argue that YC has more of a conscience than other investors like A16Z. But I'm not sure how much I believe that seeing Gary Tan's moral indifference towards startups that are the incarnate equivalent of the Torment Nexus.
This is a vastly smaller set of situations compared to what a health society would consider acceptable.
There is a huge gulf between what the law allows, and what being a decent person requires, and that gulf is called "being a scumbag."
We should not alter the law to prohibit everything in that gulf, because it would create an authoritarian society ripe for abuse, relying on controls like mass surveillance and the erasure of civil liberties.
However, we can and should name, shame, and socially/commercially outcast people who gleefully engage in the art of being a scumbag.
> trying to make money
It is indeed possible to make money without funding evil things.
But that would be OK as long as a warrant was required to access it, right?
* - All people unable to pay the government to disable the device.
See also: https://dave.autonoma.ca/blog/2019/06/06/web-of-knowledge/
I always think of that scene in Minority Report where 3 judges are conferenced in live when a “vision” arrived.
Because if used properly and lawfully these cameras can be useful to keep people safe. Including from the cops.
He’s kept in jail for 5 hrs before being released for it not being a legal stop just like the vet said. Then that officer tracked him thru flock over 100 times for some personal vendetta.
That's not quite accurate according to the article. It was actually worse: There were over 100 searches and some of them were done by officer in question, but some were done by other officers. This was due to lieutenant's order in connection with Jones' citizen complaint. So it wasn't just one officer abusing the system.
But the far worse problem IMO is that this cop is dirty, corrupt, untrustworthy, and should be punished for stalking this man, and yet he surely will not be. Worst case, he might catch some administrative sanction or maybe be fired - he won't go to jail like he should for this misbehavior.
If you have 1 dirty cop and 100 who ignore his bad behavior, you actually have 101 dirty cops. We need a way to deal with this in our society without resorting to the absolutes of "defund the police" or "back the blue".
there needs to be more separation from prosecutors and cops. I know a lot of places now have prosecutors who are actively against cops, that is not what I mean.
the prosecutors are supposed to be unbiased and make decisions on evidence. we know they don't regardless of their political leaning. but that is the standard we (citizens) should hold them accountable. unfortunately there are too may bootlicking voters who just want to feel "safe" and have zero courage of their own even in the voting booth.
we need to stop giving agencies money based on stats. that is one cause to a lot of these problems. then the cops and agencies get all twisted and in a tissy when a tool that made stat pumping easier like right now the flock cameras.
I think you just need to stop giving agencies money based on bad stats. Goodhart's Law is an extremely well-established effect. At the very least, crime rate should be monitored by a separate department.
what systems could be changed or created to prevent abuse of power?
Police wearing body cameras has nothing to do with universal mass surveillance devices.
Flock is just an iteration, and getting rid of that brand won't fix it. And camera tracking of normal citizens is just an iteration -- not the underlying systemic issue that isn't being addressed.
The EU has GDPR. At this point, I want something stronger than that.
321 down, Dallas: https://thehill.com/policy/technology/6065838-dallas-police-...
150 down, El Paso: https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/public-safe...
ALL on state roadways, Florida: https://www.tallahassee.com/story/news/state/2026/09/01/whic...
A dozen agencies cancelling Flock in Wisconsin https://www.fox6now.com/news/flock-camera-pushback-fond-du-l...
Generally those who support the police in general (especially those with the thin blue line American flag displayed somewhere) espouse support for veterans. The clash of a veteran operating legally with police operating illegally helps foster cognitive dissonance and disentangle these two institutions in their mind.
In other words these types of articles are helpful for causing those individuals to confront the issues in their belief structure.
I use them this way all the time with my parents, as they continue to insist that I (a retired Navy vet) should mindlessly support the police. They are not interested in the LONG history of those two populations clashing.
Four different places, four different children rescued by use of Flock cameras.
https://kfdm.com/news/local/flock-camera-teamwork-credited-w...
https://www.foxcarolina.com/2026/07/31/kidnapped-mother-son-...
https://www.whsv.com/2026/08/01/deputy-uses-flock-cameras-fi...
https://abc3340.com/news/local/moody-police-say-flock-camera...
Want to track latest on what flock cameras did? https://flockstopscrime.com
Literally the opposite of the popular saying. Yummy yummy boot.
The unedited comment shows he used it correctly using “and” to mean “so that”.
There are no "good apples" the article itself shows that other "apples" were helping him illegaly surveil. The "good apples" thought it was a good idea to give every apple access to a problematic system.
There are no good apples if there's a rotten in the bunch, we need public oversight of the only people that are allowed to enact violence on behalf of the state.