Is it complaining to ask for a workaround and point out HN guidelines?
> It's ok to ask how to read an article or to help other users by sharing a workaround. But please do this without going on about paywalls. Focus on the content.
I am earnestly curious to read a recounting of what was said by the Trump official.
2017: the ACLU defends Milo Yiannopoulos' right to advertise his new book. They file an amicus brief in the Supreme Court supporting a Tea Party supporter challenging a ban on wearing political insignia at polling places.
2018: the ACLU supports the NRA's First Amendment challenge to Governor Cuomo's attempt to convince NY financial institutions not to do business with the NRA.
2019: they defended a conservative student magazine which was denied funding by UCSD.
2020: they filed a brief supporting antisemitic protestors picketing a synagogue on the Sabbath. They also supported a Catholic school's religious right to make religious-based choices in hiring and firing teachers.
I'm just quoting the fruits of five minutes of research here, so I won't go on (but there's more). Is it possible that you're reacting to the radical conservative stereotyping of the ACLU rather than the actual actions of the organization?
It's very possible that I'm misinformed, but if so it was mostly from reading 'radical conservatives' like the NYT and other related reporting, along with ex-ACLU lawyers. [0]
> Starting on March 19, 2024, Flock Safety began installing ALPR cameras in various strategic locations across San Francisco. This rollout is expected to take place over the next 90 days. Per 19B ALPR policy, the administration of the Flock ALPR system is the responsibility of the Investigations Bureau.
How did the Flock cameras cause two crime drops before their installation?
The article's note about 2018 is talking about extending backwards, not forwards. It's entirely accurate, and a direct quote from your link.
The chart is trending down by January 2020, changes directions (upwards) right around the March 2020 spot, and again around (down) the July 2023 spot.
The fact that they only have data going back to 2018 means it's hard to say if the pre-COVID stuff was the norm or unusual.
To be super-clear, here's the chart annotated to show that 90 day window (black rectangle) in which the cameras were installed. https://imgur.com/a/i00Gna0
"that drop is obviously in early 2020", to reemphasize, is several years before the cameras got installed.
I read this as 2020 was Covid related drop, it then returned to normal for 2 years, then began dropping again in late 2023. The covid blip is explained by what was going on at the time, nothing since 2023 has any explanation and could be flock
It looks like that rapid increase was a return to pre-covid normal. It never spikes above pre-covid. Given the world was returning to normal, this is precisely what you'd expect most trends to look like, something like in-restaurant dining probably looks similar.
That’s why I said “how I read this chart is ….” I don’t know what pre2018 looked like either. But on this chart, it was the precovid portion.
Nowhere on here am I seeing how covid caused a spike up, that’s what you said though and signifying our differences in reading the chart that was shown.
The data is open, and so we don't have to do the visual reasoning off an imperfect graph. SF Chronicle has done a pretty rare (but I think good journalistic practice) of specifying the source of the data: https://data.sfgov.org/Public-Safety/Police-Department-Incid...
First to match the graph you make sure you pick 'Larceny - From Vehicle' only (there are some others one might argue matter) and ensure you're only counting incidents once (many rows reference the same incident). That lets us recreate the original graph.
When looking at many things I like to look at seasonal effects just to see, and it doesn't look like they are significant here (but you can see the Mar 2020 drop to the next year quite easily which I like): https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/images/2/2e/SFPD_Vehicle_Bre...
I also tried overlaying various line charts but that's useless for visually identifying the break.
I like PELT because it appeals to my sensibilities (you don't say ahead of time how many changepoints you want to find - you set an energy/cost param and let it roll) and it finds that one changepoint. You can have some fun with the other algos and changing the amount of breakpoints or changing the PELT cost function. And then you can have even more fun by excluding 2020 or excluding Mar 2020 onwards or replacing it by estimates from the previous years (quite suspect considering what we're trying to do but hey we're having fun - a bunch of algos all flag Nov 2023 as some moment of truth)
Anyway, anyone curious should download the data. It's pretty straightforward to use and if I goofed up with off-by-one or whatever, you can go see for yourself.
Your analysis also supports a covid trough, not a covid peak and certainly no covid effect. I agree with other commentators suggesting that flock cameras are not the full or even most of the story, but absolutely disagree with the GP that car break-ins are some identifiable covid phenom or that the decrease is merely a post-covid return to normalcy.
Hopefully there was nothing wrong with posting a news article with a graph instead of doing the data analysis myself.
I was avoiding getting into the specifics because rather than tea-leaf-reading a picture one can simply look at the numbers themselves and they cannot support anything but that the one year period immediately following the lockdowns was much lower than the surrounding years.
And I think it was great you shared the news article! For many others, analyses one does oneself are less believable. I prefer doing it myself to convince myself but I wouldn’t expect it to convince others. Here I did it because I wanted to know what the fact is and I always have trouble with picking change points on a bar graph without all the ticks marked.
I put it at this level because it feels supplemental to your link not because it’s a debunking of your comment or whatever though perhaps https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47690707 is the best place to do it.
It is very clearly advertising on their part. They have been paid to put that thing there and added the sign to announce the presence. It's like when you get your roof replaced by a business and they ask if they can put a sign in your yard. They're not doing it to make everybody know that you're getting your roof replaced, they're advertising.
I'm very in favor of speed & redlight cameras and don't have a particular problem with license plate trackers. I think we partisan-ize far too many things nowadays, unfortunately.
Both of these camera systems also usually come with a kangaroo civil court of sorts. Last time I looked at red light camera distribution in Texas it was also fairly obvious that they were only installing them in poorer areas.
These systems were largely disliked bipartisanly because of those factors.
If they only installed them based on collision/injury data, and that data identified mostly poor areas, you would be ok with it? Because this is what the data finds over and over. The people most harmed by red light running are the poor people who live in these neighborhoods.
I might question the benefits of making the poor area even poorer via fines they likely can't afford. I might wonder if there are confounding factors like poorly maintained roads and vehicles at play. I might wonder if the yellow lights have the same timing as in the suburbs.
Are the small fines for red light violations costlier, or the impact on health and life from the collisions red light running inevitably causes? I think letting poor areas be high traffic injury areas through deliberate neglect is even costlier to the poor who live there than red light fines.
I might question why you are so opposed to interventions that save the lives of people in poorer neighborhoods (disproportionately not owners of cars).
In my experience it's the rich areas chock full o' Karens that get the latest and greatest in jackbootery because they have all the money for the new hotness, no real problems to divert their attention and almost nobody who's ever been on the business end of government enforcement so they don't see any real problem with dispensing it at the drop of a hat.
Any dataset involving police actions will show high concentrations in poor areas because that's where police patrol the most and where they're most likely to crack down on behaviors that might be allowed to slide elsewhere (in part due to the racial demographics of those areas).
Usually allocation decisions are related to actual car/pedestrian fatality/injury counts + trial placements and measurements. Either way, wouldn't you be in favor of measures that remove police from overpoliced poor neighborhoods in favor of a technology focusing on traffic safety enforcement?
This is a bizarre comment. What level of absence of evidence would you accept to prove "not corrupt enough?" The "corruption snack" language strongly suggests you aren't really interested in changing your mind even if such evidence could be provided.
They are potentially now, but when I lived there (~a decade ago) they were not and this was the battle we were fighting as neighborhoods and communities. At the height of it they couldn't take your drivers license but the company could file an injunction preventing you from renewing your drivers license over civil penalties.
The value of red light cameras is debatable. I've copied the conclusion from a DoT study below (1):
This statistically defendable study found crash effects that were consistent in direction with those found in many previous studies, although the positive effects were somewhat lower that those reported in many sources. The conflicting direction effects for rear end and right-angle crashes justified the conduct of the economic effects analysis to assess the extent to which the increase in rear end crashes negates the benefits for right-angle crashes. This analysis, which was based on an aggregation of rear end and right-angle crash costs for various severity levels, showed that RLC systems do indeed provide a modest aggregate crash-cost benefit.
The opposing effects for the two crash types also implied that RLC systems would be most beneficial at intersections where there are relatively few rear end crashes and many right-angle ones. This was verified in a disaggregate analysis of the economic effect to try to isolate the factors that would favor (or discourage) the installation of RLC systems. That analysis revealed that RLC systems should be considered for intersections with a high ratio of right-angle crashes to rear end crashes, higher proportion of entering AADT on the major road, shorter cycle lengths and intergreen periods, one or more left turn protected phases, and higher entering AADTs. It also revealed the presence of warning signs at both RLC intersections and city limits and the application of high publicity levels will enhance the benefits of RLC systems.
The indications of a spillover effect point to a need for a more definitive study of this issue. That more confidence could not be placed in this aspect of the analysis reflects that this is an observational retrospective study in which RLC installations took place over many years and where other programs and treatments may have affected crash frequencies at the spillover study sites. A prospective study with an explicit purpose of addressing this issue seems to be required.
tl;dr - it's complicated. There are places RLCs make sense and places they don't. Expecting local government to know the difference... good luck with that.
People like you expressing sentiments like that are exactly how we got here. You want them to go hard on some particular issue. Save the children, get rid of the drugs, arrest the terrorists, save the planet, there's always some justification that's hard to argue against in abstract but think a few steps ahead "what would happen if everyone did it". At the limit tolerating this sort of thing for even a fraction of people's pet issues adds up to dystopian 1984 crap.
And the real root problem isn't you or what you believe. The problem is that you don't feel responsible for the side effects that would happen if you got your way any more than a lone piece of litter feels responsible for ruining the park. Nor does society hold you responsible, "it's nobody's fault". So you and everyone else are free to peddle bad solutions to small problems without consequence.
Edit: Perhaps this is just part of a longer arc of societal progress. We used to categorize bad people worthy of being ignored based on group membership they mostly couldn't control, religions, races, stuff like that. As society got better at measurement we realized this was wrong and somewhat stopped doing it. Now we struggle holding groups accountable. All sorts of evil can be done without consequence as long as the responsibility is diluted enough. Maybe something in the future will solve this.
Cameras like Flock which fingerprint the driver and non-registration vehicle information (e.g. light brightness, damage, driving style, etc.) to generate a best-guess as to the driver of the car absolutely does.
No but license plate requirements pretty clearly violate the 4th and/or 1st amendment, IMO. And without being required to have your license plate searched (registration 'papers' forced to be displayed) at all times without even an officer presenting RAS or PC of a crime, these cameras become a lot less useful.
I don't see how removing the cameras is compatible with the first amendment, but if you have the right of "speech" to record me in public chasing every place I go in a manner that is the envy of any stalker, I ought to have the right of "speech" not to "say anything" (compelled speech of showing my plate).
> The government's warrantless acquisition of Carpenter's cell-site records violated his Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable searches and seizures. Chief Justice John Roberts authored the opinion for the 5-4 majority. The majority first acknowledged that the Fourth Amendment protects not only property interests, but also reasonable expectations of privacy. Expectations of privacy in this age of digital data do not fit neatly into existing precedents, but tracking person's movements and location through extensive cell-site records is far more intrusive than the precedents might have anticipated.
> Although the case was ultimately decided on trespass principles, five Justices agreed that “longer term GPS monitoring . . . impinges on expectations of privacy.” See id. at 430 (Alito, J., concurring); id. at 415 (Sotomayor, J., concurring). Based on “[t]raditional surveillance” capacity “[i]n the precomputer age,” the Justices reasoned that “society’s expectation” was that police would not “secretly monitor and catalogue every single movement of an individual’s car for a very long period.”
It seems clear these cameras can hit some kind of threshold where they're common enough and interlinked enough to amount to unconstitutional surveilance. We don't know exactly where that threshold is yet.
The courts made polygraphs submittable legal evidence used to convict people, and still use them on people under supervision (because lesser standards apply).
Precedent is often crap and wrong until someone can find a good case paired with good lawyers to rectify.
Edit: Throttled so editing to reply
Precedent is randomly set by whoever gets there first often with a random case and a defendant with zero funds desperate to minimize their situation (for example without the funds to challenge the legality of polygraph/flock versus polygraph/flocks paid 'experts'). Although now political people are trying to game the system and shop very thought out cases to specific friendly courts to help put their finger on establishing precedent. After building enough such cases in lower courts, moneyed interests then shop it to the next level. Then with enough at the next level, to the Supremes.
It's a pretty awful, unintentional by design and fairly random 'legal system' with a huge bias towards those with more money and or the huge disparity in power of the Federal government, it's prosecutors, trial tax and the ridiculousness of 'if you exercise your constitutional rights you risk an additional 20-50 years in prison' versus someone broke, whose life has already been ruined by time in jail (and their fight beaten out of them), just wanting to go home as soon as possible.
And when those disempowered have the courage to risk the trial tax and do happen to stumble upon a win you get the strategic use of either pleas bargains or dropping the case by prosecutors to prevent precedent, or the abuse by judges of 'as applied' rulings in order to again prevent precedent from being set even when the case was won.
One side has all the power. One side has huge threats (in the form of trial tax). One side literally holds in you prison and has 100% control over every aspect of your life as you try to fight them and uses things like diesel therapy or the many other ways the have to apply to break you down for 'being difficult'. One side has the power to just drop cases it if risks precedent they don't like. And one side has the power to label a case 'as applied' to prevent precedent they don't like. It's a pretty crap system if you want fair unmanipulated precedents to come out of it. It's a great system if you want money/federal prosecutors/judges to be able to put their finger on the scale and set the outcome.
I agree with you generally but taken to the extreme this argument very easily goes to "precedents I agree with should be venerated because they're precedents and precedents I disagree with are wrong" silliness.
"Precedent is often crap" isn't really the basis for any cohesive judicial philosophy or legal thought process.
I'm not aware of any precedent anywhere that approaches "ALPRs violate 4A" territory, it's when other stuff happens that's beyond simply "$lp_id was seen by $camera on $datetime" that I've seen courts start to talk about reasonableness and privacy.
The courts have been wrong about many things, sometimes for centuries before they've fixed it. Some things they think they've interpreted correctly now that they'll turn around and interpret some other way later.
Trying to interpret viewing and recording the plate as speech but not displaying it as speech is trying to have your cake and eat it too. If the camera can stalk my car everywhere and record it under auspices of 'speech', it's only logical I can hide it as 'speech.'
Driving a motor vehicle on public roads is a privilege that many of the morons I share the road with seem to take for granted. If they are allowed
to drive then I want their plate identifiable on video from my dash cam.
Automated mass surveillance of license plates should also be illegal.
What's the justification for why your (and everyone else's) dashcam doesn't count as automated mass surveillance that should be illegal? Lots of people post timestamped dashcam video with the license plates of other cars clearly visible on the public internet, sometimes explicitly to point out that a particular car was driving unsafely or badly. The police can use this footage as evidence to charge people with crimes.
Ah yes, the muh public roads false representation.
Guess what, all the roads around me are private easements, all privately owned, and they are that way 90% to town. A good portion of my trips never touch a publicly owned road yet I'm still required to display my plate on them. We don't even have public, tax maintained roads where I live (I literally have to bring out a tractor and fix them myself when they wear down). Yet the compelled 'speech' of displaying the license plate is required even then while driving your car on your privately owned non-gated road.
You should check on that. AFAIK you don’t have to display a plate unless the property owner (or HOA) requires it or it’s a state chartered private road like some turnpikes. Police may still hassle you over it but they shouldn’t.
Many farmers have plateless farm trucks, people who live in the woods have plateless UTVs that they drive on private dirt and gravel roads, etc.
I looked this up in my state. They are exempt on private roadways that are only open to select persons via implied or explicit permission[]. They do not appear to be exempt on private roadways that have public access, which is what all the roads around me are. I cannot even selectively limit access on my own roadway because it has an easement for the public to pass. But I still fully own it and am responsible for all of the maintenance.
Therefore it does appear the plates are required even though they are fully privately owned roads and privately maintained. Because our roads don't meet the definition of 'private' road in my state even though they're completely private.
Is the law obligated to be logical like that? As you note it already doesn't have to be consistent over time, there's no particular reason it must be consistent in who it applies to.
You shouldn't pin your ideals on anything as flawed as the Constitution of the US. It was barely a workable system to begin with, and who knows how long it can last now.
Nixon wasn't in office yet, but he did have his campaign manager got to Vietnam and promise the VietCong a better deal if they walked away from negotiations, which lead to FIVE more years of war and countless lives lost for nothing other than a point to talk about on his soap box
The difference seems to be that Nixon may have been crooked, but he was largely competent. He operated on experience, expertise, and causal reality. Our current political situation is largely free of facts, knowledge, or causality. Much of the corruption that happens today is in plain sight and basically ignored. The goal is governance through depoliticization and post-truth infotainment.
Note that Nixon was actually impeached by his own party and would have been removed for what would now be a single day of news cycle, only on a few networks/papers, and completely ignored by a major political party.
Nixon was on track to be impeached, convicted, and thrown in jail. The people were demanding it. His resignation was basically a "you can't fire me, I quit!" moment. Ford's pardon of Nixon was and remains controversial.
I think the tech world is fundamentally difference, though I'm not old enough to experience it in '69. I don't believe we had tech moguls who built enormous wealth and realized they could by the influence they couldn't muster with social influence, and that has made the world net-worse.
What’s the point of focusing on one aspect of the world?
Taken as a whole, the 60’s were far more intense and violent. The Vietnam War. The draft. The Cuban Missile Crisis. Racial inequality and protests. Several major assassinations. Nixon in the White House. And that’s just the US.
The world is net-better even if certain areas still need improvement. But there’s really no point to hyperfocusing on just the things that are worse.
> I don't believe we had tech moguls who built enormous wealth and realized they could by the influence
Didn't this just describe the robber barons of the Gilded Age? Moguls and oligarchs of the day, yes. Amassed their fortunes on the emerging frontier technology of the time, I'd say so. Wielded enormous power over political discourse and essentially owned the law makers of the day. Rhymes, for sure.
It doesn't really matter whether you live in a democracy if the the very issues that are even allowed to be voted on are decided by an elite, wealthy and politically connected group.
I don't think is a fair question because the expectations are wildly different. The 80s and 90s transition gave us expectations of policy, peace and progress that were very different than the 60s.
69 had two things going on for it, the war was not news and on its first signs of being scalled back, Nixon had announced a retraction of force for September (but ended up extending the whole thing to 75) and this would be the first moon landing, there was nothing like it.
From 1969 to today, we're waaaaay better. But from 6 months ago there is clearly an elephant in the room taking a lot of attention.
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