"Massive database of vehicles" is the best hope we have for reestablishing order and peace in American cities. I am all for cameras and the larger, more visible number plates of Europe. I also think the cops should intercept and seize all vehicles operating without their plates.
If you think authoritarianism will lead to order and peace, you're gonna have a bad time. The presence of a secret police is already causing wide scale violation of our constitutional rights.
It is not "secret police". The reason your car has a highly visible number plate is because for decades society has recognized its compelling interest in knowing the whereabouts of private vehicles.
No, the ability to know the current whereabouts and location history of practically all private vehicles is a new capability afforded by deployment of ALPR mass surveillance.
Previously, we had some balance between privacy and accountability. A bystander or a victim of a collision could remember license plate numbers and give them in a police report. The police could tail you (but only you, because $$$) to discover your movements. But government agents couldn't track the movements of all the people, all the time. Now they can.
The societal balance of power has shifted and is now seriously lopsided in favor of the rulers. And cheerleaders like you don't mind, as long as you can purchase a little temporary safety...
Masked, unidentified individuals abducting people are either kidnappers (if doing it without the law behind them) or secret police (if doing it with the law behind them).
EDIT: Rather then downvote, offer an example of a masked, unidentified person abducting someone who is neither a kidnapper nor secret police.
Then why are they wearing masks?
Probably so unhinged individuals don't show up at their homes and attack their families for performing unpopular law enforcement functions?
Setting aside their lawlessness, it sounds like we agree they are unidentifiable, meaning their identity is a secret. So they are a secret police. And you support that for some reason, maybe because you haven't read a single history book.
Is this supposed to be some kind of "gotcha?" I don't really care about the language being used to describe this law enforcement agency: it isn't going to change my opinion about their mission or somehow change their legal ability to carry it out.
You're right: because I do not want illegal immigrants in my country I haven't "read a single history book."
Nah, it's your support for lawless authoritarianism because you think it will improve your safety- that's the part you missed in history class. That's the con you are falling for. The truth is that once authoritarianism takes hold, nobody is safe. Many Germans who thought the Nazi's would only target "bad people" learned this the hard way.
Interesting that record deportations under the Obama administration didn't spur such reactions to immigration enforcement at the time. Has there been any change in behavior by officials?
Any change in behavior? Is that a joke? Setting aside the masked men terrorizing our communities, immigrants are being literally tortured inside camps across the country. They are being treated worse than criminals- tortured. Abused. What's happening right now is horrific, and the dehumanization propaganda can only be compared to Hitler's vilification of the jews.
Getting ticketed for blowing through a red light isn't "authoritarianism"
This discussion isn't really about red light or speed cameras, although they suck in different ways. They are technically "license plate cameras", but they only capture for a specific purpose. ALPR cameras are about a surveillance dragnet over the whole city, tracking people who are not accused of anything.
Nor is getting reinstated to your home country of origin when you are here illegitimatly.
You're making the assumption that widescale violation of our constitutional rights can't lead to order and peace.
Where has that actually happened?
El Salvador is making a case for it, and other countries are paying attention.
Order and peace sounds great! But that's just road crime, why stop there? We have so many wifi enabled nodes and cameras. Lets put alpr on every Waymo and Tesla. Gait detection and face recognition on every Ring. Triangulate every cell phone down to the meter. Dump it all in a big data watershed. Let anyone with username/password query it (no MFA needed). We could even name our panopticon after some mythical all-seeing artifact, like a palantir. You won't be able to take a breath without officials knowing.
Okay, sounds good?
You genuinely don't think that's ripe for abuse?
When has "ripe for abuse" stopped anything from happening?
Cell phones are ripe for abuse...do you carry one?
Decreasingly so. Particularly if I am going to anything charged (e.g. political rallies). Which is a shame, they are very useful tools and it's a very real chilling effect.
That's not what they asked.
The poster above asked why you personally support total surveillance, despite it being ripe for abuse. How inevitable something may or may not be is completely irrelevant to whether you personally choose to support it. Acknowledging that it can be abused means you have to make that logical connection and say why something being ripe for abuse doesn't preclude you from cheering on for it.
Go live in Mordor; lmk how that goes.
You lost me at "reestablishing order and peace"... what do you believe is happening in our cities? And how is tracking cars nationwide going to fix whatever problem you think exits?
The number of people killed and maimed while just walking around has never been higher.
Substantiate your claims or GTFO. Comments like this are just bait, you have been here long enough to know that.
I don't disagree with you, but this is obviously a misleading stat on its face because the number of people has simply never been higher.
Crime per capita could be completely static and this statement would always be true simply because there are more people.
Wrong.
https://counciloncj.org/homicide-trends-report/
My dude, we are not talking about homicides.
Oh, are we talking about natural disasters and animal attacks? Or is it some secret third thing so you can feel even more clever as vaguepost?
>The number of people killed and maimed while just walking around has never been higher.
Yes, we are. You brought it up.
Citation for that?
Overall crime rates are up from pre-COVID, but nowhere near all-time highs.
Or, if you mean specifically traffic-related deaths and injuries, again, trending the wrong way, but also nowhere near all-time highs.
In either case, you still haven't indicated how pervasive surveillance will help...
Just curious to understand how you think vehicles are such a critical point for decreasing crime in the US?
I do agree that we have heavy crime (though HN will say it's all anecdotal and the stats show we're in a period of remarkable peace).
I just don't know that greater enforcement around vehicle use will have the outsized effect that you're claiming.
I live in a usually safe and crime free area in Florida, we had someone going car by car stealing from any car left open. My neighbor opened his door and told him he had him on camera, guy ran away. I had him on camera too but sadly no spotlight to catch a better look. I cant help but imagine that Flock deters people doing this sort of thing. I hate surveillance nanny states but criminals are getting bolder everyday it feels like.
I wish there was a way to implement this sort of “surveilance” in such a way that it only impacts criminals or would be criminals and only them.
> we had someone going car by car stealing from any car left open.
We have that too here, the issue seems to be more that it's a catch and release crime. The police not only knew who was doing it on our street, they had caught them multiple times and released them immediately. I'm guessing if they're not caught with stolen guns on them here it's not enough of a charge to bother with. I really doubt Flock would matter.
Hell, at least you have the "catch" part. Here, "officers of the law" just DGAF.
Thanks for the response and I generally agree. Though I HATE HATE HATE the march towards the surveillance state, we need to stop crime.
I was specifically asking about the GP's focus on vehicles (larger plates, unregistered vehicle enforcement) and how they thought that would reduce crime so much.
All but literally every crime in my city (in the categories of, say, burglary, robbery, assault, etc) are committed by people who drive into town in stolen cars with no plates. It's totally ridiculous. If the only tactic the police knew was to pull over every Infiniti with tinted windows and no plates, the crime rate would drop to zero.
> If the only tactic the police knew was to pull over every Infiniti with tinted windows and no plates, the crime rate would drop to zero.
Then the question is, why don't they do that? Why do we need a surveillance state to enable police to do what residents might consider the bare minimum?
A large part of the deal is that ALPRs flag on hotlists and cannot be accused of racism. There's no way to argue a vehicle stop is the result of profiling when it's a machine recognizing a plate on a list and issuing an alert. The stats don't go in the same bucket.
At the end of the day, avoiding accusations of racism is behind much of modern policing's foibles (like the near-total relaxation of traffic law enforcement in some cities).
I think the broad thrust of your argument is right on the money. Officers' perception of heightened (or unfair) accountability has turned every police interaction into a risk for the officers and department, too. However, I think the problem actually goes even deeper. The incentives are all aligned to launder responsibility through automated systems, and we'll end up sleepwalking into AI tyranny if we're not careful.
Where I am, police officers get paid healthy 6-figure salaries plus crazy OT to boot. $300k total comp is absolutely not unheard of. I think the police have basically figured out that the best way to stay on the gravy train is to do as little as possible. Certainly stop enforcing traffic laws entirely, as those are the highest risk interactions. Just rest n' vest, baby. So you get to hear about "underfunded" and "overworked" police departments while observing overpaid police officers who are structurally disincentivized from doing their jobs.
The bottom line is: People want policing, but adding more police officers won't deliver results and anyway is too expensive. What to do?
Enter mass surveillance and automated policing. If we can't rely on police to do the policing, we'll have to do it some other way. Oh, look at how cheap it is to put cameras up everywhere. And hey, we can get a statistical inferential model (excuse me, Artificial Intelligence!) to flag "suspicious" cars and people. Yeah yeah, privacy risks blah blah blah turnkey totalitarianism whomp whomp whomp. But think of all the criminals we can catch! All without needing police to actually do anything!
While police are expensive and practically useless at doing things people want, this technology can actually deliver results. That makes it irresistible. The problem is that it's turning our society into a panopticon and putting us all in great danger of an inescapable totalitarian state dominated by a despot and his AI army.
But those are abstract risks, further out and probabilistic in nature. Humans are terrible at making these kinds of decisions; as a population we almost always choose short-term benefit over abstract long-term risks and harms. Just look at climate change and fossil fuel consumption.
> If the only tactic the police knew was to pull over every Infiniti with tinted windows and no plates, the crime rate would drop to zero.
Your efficiency gain in the size and complexity of the policies and procedures handbook would be unparalleled.
But why might the crime rate shoot up on day two of your short tenure as police chief?
Hint: a metric is distinct from a target.
Very funny, thanks for the response.
I am concerned about the lack of follow through after police intervention. Lack of prosecution and convictions, light sentences, repeat offenders being released, etc.
If judges would simply keep someone with 3+ felonies in jail, crime would drop 80%.
That got labeled "mass incarceration" and even Joe Biden (a 'law and order Democrat' to the core) had to walk back support of what he viewed as one of his greatest achievements, championing the 1994 Crime Bill.
> "If the only tactic the police knew was to pull over every Infiniti with tinted windows and no plates, [...]
...they'd get called racist. Let's be real. The tint thing in particular gets filed as "bullshit excuse for racial profiling", never mind that illegal tint can be empirically measured.
We are moving from God sees all and the afterlife will judge you to The Govt de Jour sees all and will judge you in this life.
> but criminals are getting bolder everyday it feels like.
Might feel that way, but objectively, violent and property crime are on the decline in the USA.
I've also heard many stories where a person gets high def footage of someone committing a crime (usually burglary, smash and grab, or porch snatching) and the cops are basically like "eh we'll get to it when we get to it"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States
edit: can someone explain what is objectionable about this comment?
Two weeks ago, my parked car, along with two other parked cars, was rear-ended at 3:15am by a drunk driver (the car interior smelled like alcohol), in an unregistered car that was not his. He then fled the scene.
All of this was caught on high definition video.
However, he also left his phone and State ID (he was also unlicensed) in the car.
Did the cops drive the 2 blocks to the address listed on his ID to arrest him for leaving the scene of the accident, or to give him any kind of blood alcohol test? No, no they did not.
Did the cops follow up in any way whatsoever? No, no they did not. How do I know this? Because a few days later, I walked the two blocks to the house to inquire whether the car was insured. It was not.
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What is objectionable about your comment is the same thing that eventually plagues every social media that has downvoting/flagging: you violated someone's strongly-held priors.
I don’t think it’s so much as critical but has potential to help close the loop on crime. Big box stores love this service. The can easily identify the car type and license and out out a bolo with the police. Police put this into flock and track movement. You don’t have to pursue chases as aggressively. You can just track the car next time it pops up. I think flock is a net positive in this sense.
I'm curious as to why you think we have heavy crime when you know the stats say otherwise.
Not the person you asked.
In those statistical roundups homicide is treated as a proxy for crime in general, so the best we can rigorously say is that homicide rates have decreased - which is, obviously, great. Researchers treat homicide as a proxy because they know not all crimes are reported.
Anecdotally, living in [big city] between 2014 and 2021 my street-parked car was broken into ~10 times, and stolen once (though I got it back). I never reported the break-ins, because [city PD] doesn't care. In [current suburb] a drive by shooting at the other end of our block received no police response at all, and won't be in the crime stats.
Are those types of crimes increasing? I don't know! I'd had my car broken into before 2014, and I witnessed (fortunately only aurally - I was just around the corner) a drive-by in the nineties. But... That's the point: no one knows! These incidents aren't captured in the statistics.
Personally, I think the proxies are broadly accurate, and crime in general is lower, and I shouldn't trust my anecdotal experiences. However, I think the general lack of trust in the quality of American police-work (much of it for good reason, sadly) biases most people towards trusting anecdotal experience and media-driven narratives.
Great response, you said it better than me.
I am more skeptical of homicide rate stats than you are, given the garbage data I see for crime in general, but even I am willing to admit they're much more robust than the rest.
You have to be careful with stats. There's an incentive to manipulate crime stats. https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2025/12/12/dc-police...
I could buy that for some crimes, but e.g. murder is pretty hard to manipulate.
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If that actually happened often enough to skew the stats, it would get a huge amount of attention.
I work with stats. I think even very honest people with high incentive to tell an accurate story and good data have trouble with stats. Now add politicians and police and bad data into that mix with winner-takes-all politics at stake and the stats get gamed.
Also I believe my eyes and when I see crimes happening in my neighborhood I don't rush to "the stats" to ask them what I saw.
But "what you saw" isn't necessarily representative of the state of things, either. Arlington, VA is (was?) one of the nicer places in VA; generally expensive, etc. When I drove through there, the van in front of me at a light was car-jacked, and the person in it chased down. I'm uncomfortable driving through Arlington because of that; even though it's not representative of the area. Admittedly, this was years ago... but the point stands. My experience is not representative of the actual facts.
Stats are also "not necessarily representative of the state of things". At the very best they are a single factoid about a very complex human existence.
Stats only get worse from there: at neutral they contain no information, at worst they are dis-info.
So we have stats, that's the closest we have to objective, but I guess we can't trust those. You say your anecdote contradicts "the stats", and I genuinely believe you. Sincerely, what's the alternative? Vibes? We gotta steer this ship (society) based on something.
How else do you condense down myriad and often conflicting datapoints of this complex human existence in order to get trends you can make decisions on?
Short answer: idk.
Longer answer: this is a fundamental problem across many domains. I don't think anyone has solved it.
I think of a story of Bezos being told by his Amazon execs that customer support wait times were meeting X service levels. In the meeting room with his execs, Bezos dials up customer service, gets some wait time of >>>X and makes the point that service levels are not up to his expectations.
I don't think that story is a great analogy for running society but is interesting nonetheless.
Car crashes are a leading cause of death. We can save a lot of lives by getting drivers to follow the law.
> "Massive database of vehicles" is the best hope we have for reestablishing order and peace in American cities
Have you tried electing moderate prosecutors who don't drop charges just because the habitual offender has a heartbleed sob story?
A massive database of people's travel records is the best hope we have for reestablishing morality and church attendance. Cops could proactively round up mon-attendees or those who went to a synagogue. </christofascism>
Famously, excellent Dutch record keeping was bad for jewish people in the Netherlands in May 1940.
Also, an unlicensed-plated car and your dream enforcement, my first thought was of "illegal" cases I have done include moving a vehicle to a neighboring property a couple blocks away. How strict would you like it? Should I be forced to use an expensive tow service to move an unregistered car across the street on some slow residential street?
Police ignore crime that's happening on the roads right now.
Drive around Kansas City sometime, particularly on the Missouri side. Tons of temporary paper license plates that are a year past expiration. Any member of law enforcement could pull the person over and enforce a penalty for it.
They just... don't. I don't know exactly why that is. Are they afraid that doing so opens them up to the chance of being shot or engaging in a high-speed pursuit? The former definitely happened in North Kansas City a few years ago (not to be confused with KC North) but having a massive network of cameras tracking license plates and how they move across town doesn't help. At the end of the day, you have to send someone a fine, and if they don't pay it and don't show up for court, you are again faced with having a police officer try to interact with them one-on-one, this time to enforce a bench warrant for their arrest.
In the meantime, you now have an absolutely massive data set of citizen movements being collected without a warrant by an increasingly authoritarian American government.
I can confirm that they are not shy about pulling over people with regular plates that have just expired, however. They’re on top of that. N = 3, 100% enforcement within a month.
But long-expired temps are everywhere. So confusing. How?
People with barely expired plates are normies who made a mistake. Safe. People with temps expired a year ago aren't making a mistake, they're willfully and openly displaying defiance of the law. That makes them scarier.
I'd also add that there's a socioeconomic component. In Missouri, at least up until 2025, you'd get your temp tags when you buy the car, and your actual metal plates once you paid sales and property tax and registered the vehicle with the DMV. This recently changed to make the sales and property tax apply at the time of the purchase so that you'd get your plates much more quickly after.
A car is a necessity in most of Missouri. Kansas City has more highway miles per capita than any other major city in the country (and maybe in the world); IIRC St. Louis is fourth-most highway miles per capita. Public transit has major gaps. Inability to drive is such an encumbrance that those convicted of DUI are allowed to petition courts for a hardship license allowing them to drive to work and other essential places because not allowing for this could fail under the Eighth Amendment.
All of this is to say that if you are able to pay for a car, but not the sales tax for the car, and you get pulled over for not registering after your temp tags expire, you are essentially under house arrest until you can put together the money to both pay the fine and to pay the tax on the car, which is now exponentially harder since you can't drive anywhere. Since that'd put disadvantaged people at an even greater disadvantage, it might be a "community relations" move by the PD to look the other way on these cases, at least until another blatant violation occurs.
This is basically a description of police in a nutshell. They are just ordinary civil servants, plus a gun, plus maybe a little less accountability if they mess up. People who get scared like you and me. People who are lazy like you and me. Imagine the clerk at the motor vehicle office or the secretary at the welfare office but asked to do something different today.
Do you, reader, want to have to confront a bunch of scary people for a $? Oh, you think having a gun makes it a bit less scary?
Almost no one wants to confront dangerous people day in and day out. Once in a while to flex the hero complex, maybe. But a few times of that will cure you of any particular desire to seek it out.
The people that want to do that are one in a thousand types. Basically criminals themselves, just on the right side of the law who use the 'criminal' mentality for good. Most police are not that.
They want to do a job, collect a paycheck, and do it in an easy way. Like how I like to drive to work rather than do a handstand and walk 5 miles on my hands and wrists. They get little to nothing for making their job harder.
The people with the most motivation to stop the criminal is the victim themselves. You are pretty much on your own. The state won't be coming to save you.
I think you have hit the nail on the head why more police funding, more surveillance tech, more dystopian BS that looks more like PreCrime every single day, is only going to get us so far.
I'm sure there are exceptions, but I think most folks (including criminals) believe crime is, generally speaking, bad. Folks commit crimes to survive, to enrich themselves, out of retribution, out of lapse of judgment, or lack of self control. Almost all some flavor of unmet needs. You put money into tackling those challenges, address why people are stealing, why turf wars break out, why addiction ruins lives and puts people in terrible positions, why poor nutrition and family support and mental health care lead to so many folks slipping through the cracks.
School quality’s largely in the same place. You’re not going to make much of a dent without fixing social support, the social safety net, healthcare, mental healthcare, and generally greatly improving stability for the economically bottom third or so of families.
In other words, the main problems with schools have little to do with schools. But they’re complicated and expensive problems with distant payoff, so we keep monkeying around with schools instead.
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In some places where I’ve lived, local LE mounts ALPR systems atop most of their fleet. Those read “formal” plates as vehicles pass near the cruiser, and they proactively alert against a watchlist. Which presumably somebody’s hooked up to periodically ingest lists of recent lapses alongside the usual stolen/wanted/pile-of-unpaid-tickets sorts of stuff.
My sense is that such systems are rather less consistent at reading temp tags, and that temp tag issuance tends to be decentralized/dealer-based, rather more ad hoc, and thus rather less legible for semi-automated enforcement purposes.
Absolutely. Turns out policing actually requires real police work.
These cameras only punish law-abiding citizens. Fake plates and out-of-date temp tags effectively render these people invisible to the ALPRs.
Yeah, this is a major problem, and it obviously is not just Kansas City. In San Francisco the useless SFPD completely stopped writing traffic tickets, gradually over the last 20 years. They were writing > 14000 per month as recently as 2014 and this was below 500 per month for years until recent reforms brought it up slightly. The problem is that the police are self-selecting members of the tinted-dodge-charger club and do not perceive traffic laws as real laws. This ties in more generally to the fact that every single individual member of law enforcement throughout the United States needs to be closely scrutinized by psychologists.
Uh, no. They stopped because they were being punished for pulling over ethnically disproportionate numbers of drivers. This is likely due to several factors but the end result was making traffic stops a politically sensitive area, so they just pulled back.
reestablishing order and peace in American cities
False premise
Your comment suggests that you do not spend much time in American cities. They are safer than they have been any time during my life.
You have fallen for political talking points.