The EFF found cops writing “idiot,” “WEIRD KID,” “blah,” “leave me alone,” and button mashing in Flock’s ‘reason’ box.
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The EFF was able to do this analysis because of the way that Flock documents police use of the system. Each time a search is performed, a record of it is saved in the Flock system, which can be obtained by the public using government records requests. These audit logs show hundreds of thousands of searches of the system; after 404 Media and other news outlets used these types of logs to show police using the Flock system to look for undocumented immigrants on behalf of ICE, a woman in Texas who had an abortion, and protesters, cops were warned by government surveillance centers to be “as vague as permissible” about the reasons for their searches. Late last year, Flock changed its system; rather than having to type in a reason, Flock now has a drop-down list of prepopulated reasons, which the EFF called “a loss for transparency.”
The EFF contacted departments whose cops performed these “joke” searches, and found that many of them did not do anything about cops who button mashed or put jokes. Cops who wrote “hehe” and “idk” were “counseled,” they were told. A cop who wrote “idiot” got away with it because by the time the department learned about it, it had passed a 90-day time period in which the cop’s union contract allowed for internal investigations. Several other police departments said they would investigate the behavior. The Fishers Police Department in Indiana said that a detective who searched Flock for reasons of “blah” only did so “when he has issues with the technology,” or when “the technology is not moving fast enough for him.” A police department said it investigated a cop who wrote “driving around being weird” in the reason field but found it was for “legitimate public safety purposes.”
Easy solution:
Federal law that requires any sort of abuse of power by police is a felony and prevents them from ever working anything near law enforcement.
Get rid of the “bad apples” and ensure the remaining cops understand the balance of power.
That’s not a solution. We’ve had measures like that implemented for decades. It approaches the problem from an individual and up perspective.
The issue is not “bad apples”. All these measures do is force the obscurity of the issue. Right now we see an obvious abuse of power because of these obviously unserious reasons.
It’s a symptom not the problem. Would the police oppression change if the prompt got filled with an AI generated string of that sounded professional? No.
Individualized solutions that treat the problem as individual are treating symptoms; not the problem.
It’s the same reason ICE and the police aren’t going to be any better with body cameras. The problem was never the witnessing of the crimes. The problem has always been the protection of the institutions by those with economic and political power.
Fire em.
Audit trails mean nothing if nobody is looking at them.
Completely backwards…
If there’s no audit trail, no one can ever look at them.
If there’s an audit trail, then later someone can follow it. Even if no one is right now.
So often the time they’re most valuable, is when the people that need audited don’t think anyone will ever look.
This is a self reported list of cops that should be barred from ever working law enforcement across the country, that’s immensely valuable even five years from now.
For those who are slow like me: “asdfg” is the order of keys on the home row left to right. It doesn’t stand for anything.
This took me way too long to figure out.
Nahh it’s surely alaska state department of fish and game, the cops wouldn’t type in garbage!!!1!
