A Flock of Police Criminals

I am not sorry for that headline. I should be, but I am not.

Flock is probably the country’s largest purveyor of public surveillance cameras — the kind that sit on telephone poles and traffic light wires and record your license plate. Flock has built an entire system that allows people who have access to it — mostly without warrants — to track people across the country. And cops, who have the most access, are, unsurprisingly, using it in ways that range from inappropriate to criminal to downright dangerous. Tracking people without warrants. Stalking exes and wanna-be dates. Causing car accidents in the process of using these to force women to interact with them. And while Flock is a terrible company whose product does not lower the crime rate or solve crimes, the misuse of these cameras show how pathological our policing system has become.

We are at a time of historically low levels of crime. The reasons for this are, like with most social issues, a bit complex and in dispute, but the rates are unambiguously lower than when I was a child in the 1970s (jokes about how I could remember so far back will be met with signing the perpetrator up for the Barry Manilow of the Month Club). However, we still act as if crime is a major problem. Now, of course, crime is bad. I have been the victim more than once, and it is terrible. But when I say major problem I mean a problem, like climate change, that necessitates marshaling significant resources in order to prevent existential harm. Crime is no longer that in America. And yet our police forces haven’t changed.

Police have not gotten better at solving crimes. The clearance numbers — the percentage of cases solved — have not been good in America, and they have mostly gotten worse recently. We have not stopped providing police officers with military-grade equipment. We haven’t decreased police funding. And we have not made the police more responsive and accountable to the communities that they serve. So while crime has gone down, the police appear to be neither a major driver of that trend nor have they adjusted to the new reality. And that makes the abuses of the Flock system almost inevitable.

Cops are largely not accountable to their communities. Clearance rates, as mentioned, are terrible. Other nations do not generally accept clearance rates this low, but Americans do. The power of the police unions has hampered accountability, both at the individual level and at the community level. We have stopped expecting them to solve crime, and when we do try to hold them to account, they often react by trying to withhold their services. We now have a situation where there is less for the police to do, they are held to no reasonable standard of community service or individual decency, and we have given them a largely supervision-free device to act out their worst instincts. It is unsurprising that so many have taken us up on the opportunity.

Flock is a symptom, not the disease. Now, that does not mean that we do not treat the symptom. Flock, and all similar setups, should be banned in as many places as possible. At a minimum, nothing they collect should be exposed to anyone without a warrant. None of that will matter, however, if we allow policing to continue to fester as an ineffective, unaccountable drain on our society.