I feel the ship has sailed here.
Once the police started to record every interaction with the public, along with their existing habit of placing traffic cameras left and right, they acquired enough data to track people.
Trying to restrict the analysis of existing data is never going to work. The police can always point to some death that wouldn't have happened, if they had ran Flock's software on their surveillance footage.
And even if by some miracle you manage to forbid plate recognition, cross referencing, etc, every ambitious (or lazy) detective would start doing it on the down low with OSS software.
As an ex-Flock employee:
I was sold during the recruiting process on high ethics and morals and an idealistic vision.
The reality was a surveillance state, questionable policies on data sharing between agencies and private installations (HOA, etc.), and a CEO with a very literal belief that Flock should "eliminate all crime" - not "visionary" but far more literal. It was way too Minority Report for my liking.
They have a public "disclosure" site that supposedly shows the agencies using Flock that is absolutely inaccurate (there are three agencies in my County alone using it that are not listed there).
Any conversations about ethics and the other "should we even do this?" questions got consistently shorter and superficial during my time there.
> The police can always point to some death that wouldn't have happened
Why must it be this way?
Because we're a bunch of bitch-ass pansies unwilling to tell our fellow countrymen (and women) to shove it when they permit the use of such logic.
I don't care "how many children need to die" or whatever, the sum total of the affronts upon our freedom a is not worth it. What even is the point of caring about the children if we're giving them a totalitarian dump to inherit?
> Once the police started to record every interaction with the public
I don't think this is true? As far as I can tell any time the recording is mentioned in a complaint at the police behaviour the camera was off due to [battery life|maintenance|other].
I get the feeling that judges & juries are less and less likely to give the benefit of the doubt if charges/lawsuits are ever actually filed against the officer, year by year.
You also get just rank intimidation. My friend got out of jail and the next day tried to file a complaint about an officer stealing his pocket money during an arrest. He was placed in a room with the arresting officer, who explained that any complaint which was filed would incur retribution from the DA with regards to the thing that got him arrested. This is happening in a large urbanized precinct, in a blue state.
To ever regain control of the police force, the various civilian & political oversight bodies would need to prosecute thousands of felony exortion, kidnapping, and assault cases a year.
Actually now that they have all pervasive surveillance, there is real evidence to be used against them in incompetence and allowing crimes to occur. This is not going to go the way they hoped
What difference does it make if they allow crimes to occur? They have no duty to protect.