AI Startup Flock Thinks It Can Eliminate All Crime in America

Flock is driving the following future:

"It’s a paradigm shift where we go from having an expectation of privacy even in public spaces to its inverse. Not only do we not have a right to privacy in public; we don’t even have a right to see ourselves as the government and police might see us — a set of still moments in place and time from which they, not us, can decide what our story is."

https://cardinalnews.org/2025/03/28/i-drove-300-miles-in-rur...

My housemate's car was stolen in Atlanta, and because of Flock the police were able to get it and return it the same day he reported it missing. He was even able to get to work on time.

> In less than 10 years, Flock’s cameras, airborne and fixed, will eradicate almost all crime in the U.S.

It'll fit right in with the fully self driving cars we'll get in "two years" since 2012, and the manned flights to mars we'll get in "five years" since 2015

American version of capitalism and Chinese versions of socialisme seem to slowly converge, the future will be fun!

Even if true, it would only be for one of the narrowest possible definitions of "crime". What can Flock do about mail fraud? About domestic violence? About wage theft? About falsified studies that lead to substances being misclassified as harmless? About price fixing? Does the majority of criminal activity even take place in "public" spaces?

This is not a new startup. It predates the AI era. This is the company that installs cameras in public places and wires them all together with data sharing arrangements that circumvent those pesky jurisdictional separations of power. And guess which neighborhoods have the most cameras?

It’s a pre-crime company and data broker that sells to police forces and corporations (while sharing all the data between them). It’s one of the most regressive and heinous business models someone could spend their time building.

Through conversion to a total surveillance state.

This does not account for any crime committed outside of public spaces: White collar crime and embezzlement Murder in private places Sexual assault in private places Domestic abuse Illegal drug use Insurance fraud Wage theft

Off the top of my head

The weakest link of the proposed technology like this is guaranteed fallibility of the folks using it, ie the judicial system and the asymmetric power dynamic against those it supposedly serves.

This is a very common scenario: a sheriffs deputy holds a biased belief against an individual. Said deputy selects and overfits data from systems like this to obtain a warrant against said individual. Individual is arrested and enters the meat grinder that is the justice system where hundreds of experienced indifferent agents and millions of dollars are put to work to support that deputies biased accusation. That original bad actor can now disengage and go about their life. Meanwhile, our Individual must spend a fortune on legal defense to prove their innocence. Individual loses time, money, peace, and reputation pursuing the best case realistic scenario—having charges dismissed (though indefinitely tainting their record). The more realistic scenario is individual is unjustly punished to some degree through plea agreements or trial (if they can afford it) which could easily ruin the rest of their life.

I’m not on the ACAB extreme, I just personally know many law enforcement officers and work in the industry adjacent to the justice system.

Oh I'm VERY interested in seeing how this will eliminate white collar crimes like wage theft, embezzlement, ponzi schemes and the like. Or do they mean the kind of crimes THOSE OTHER PEOPLE do?

Cities should have a little bit of crime

more crime happens at the WH every minute than in the entire country in a year :)

The 'crypto industry' was supposed to collect and contain the manic megalomaniacs before they could build the torment nexus.

I guess instead we get Machines of Loving Grace's boot stamping on a human face-- forever.

I don't understand how this startup would eliminate embezzlement?

Counterpoint: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pp9MwZkHiMQ

You can eliminate many crimes by decriminalizing them, too. Let people be productive junkies as long as they pose no threat or harm to society, for one.

Paraphrasing from an Oakland police officer reflecting on the spike in crime 3 years ago to today: "Flock has been a game changer. The officers who use it are getting results. Criminals will steal a car, drive through a neighborhood and rob someone. Pretty quickly we can look up 'black BMWs driving around this location'. Maybe 10 come back, you figure out which is the likely one, and then can see where it shows up in the next few hours. Then you have officers on patrol in that area look out for it. The criminals get a police car tailing them & they ditch the vehicle. Instead of doing 5 or 6 robberies with a stolen car, they can do 1 or 2. That makes it much less worth it to do the crimes."

Gotta love these grandiose, attention-grabbing pie-in-the-sky mission statements. "Eliminate all crime!"

Reminds me of when I worked in the same building as Mark Zuckerberg's and his wife's health startup, whose mission statement plastered all over the building is to "eliminate all disease within our lifetimes." All disease? Really? All of them?? Every single one? Why not pick 1 disease and work on that, maybe start from there, and once you eliminate that one move on and try a few more.