(More precisely: there was drama, but it was all public drama from residents who didn't want the cameras taken down.)

The Feds have full access to search everything, are no doubt exempt from any transparency on the platform, and ICE is already using it to abuse and intimidate political enemies.

It’s a nationwide surveillance system posing as a local police tool.

Also, the Feds are creative in their application of the law. Things like HIDTA designated areas led to Flock-predecessors - scaled infrastructure deployed decades ago. One of the “drug corridors” is the I-95 corridor from Miami to Maine.

The police should show that a crime has likely been committed, and get access to just the data that probably has evidence.

There are many other contexts where we trust properly supervised people who lack an immediate and obvious incentive to abuse the system. Combined with good overall software design, auditing and transparency almost all of the harms could be mitigated. And the tech does have some pretty major benefits.

The cameras apprehend criminals. I can show with evidence that the juice isn't worth the squeeze, and in fact that the cameras had the effect of tasking our police force with doing municipal debt collection for Melrose Park and Maywood, at the cost of 5-7 hours of sworn officer time per "failure to appear warrant" arrest. But supporters of the cameras will point to multiple stolen car interdictions and recovered firearms.

If you go into these kinds of things assuming that the median resident of a municipality is anti-policing, you're already way, way off. And I find when I talk to anti-Flock advocates (that is: people who have "anti-Flock" as part of their personal identity, not just a person chosen at random who would happen to answer "no" to "should we ALPR") that many of them are operating from anti-policing premises, and so these kinds of responses are very surprising to them.

(Totally reasonable for your reaction to this to be "whoah, that was a lot more than I asked for", I just feel like I've been in these kinds of conversations a lot. It's not personal.)

A commissioner can easily mess things up and get sued trying do work on their own. Say they try to “repair a playground” by replacing a missing bolt. Well, were they qualified to do that? Do they have insurance? Was the action approved by a properly filed motion? Etc etc etc

I learned this is why it costs my town egregious sums to do simple maintenance work; the only companies willing to put up with all the red tape of working with the government have to charge a premium.

The part about him being a commissioner smells like a simple publicity stunt.

You don't get to rob a bank and then say "oopsie! my mistake, here's the bag of cash" when the police come knocking.

This article seems to confirm what I stated above - he took the cameras, and was later confronted by law enforcement about it.

And even if your telling is correct, that's still theft. Similarly, I can't just take your car, drive it around, and call you later to tell you where it is.