Today in dystopia, police have been wrongfully arresting people based on faulty information from AI-assisted Flock surveillance footage instead of actually investigating the evidence of the crime.
In an article titled “She Spent 7 Months in Legal Hell After Cops Used Flock Surveillance To Identify the Wrong Car,” Reason Magazine documents multiple instances of innocent people having their lives upended in legal battles because police slammed them with charges based on incorrect Flock camera data which could have easily been ruled out by some basic verification.
Here’s an excerpt:
“But Isaacs wasn’t involved in the crash, and officers had enough information at the time to exclude her as a suspect. Yet she still spent two weeks in jail and faced the threat of life behind bars for months because police didn’t use basic scrutiny to be sure their cameras implicated the right person.
“Much has been written about Flock cameras making mistakes — including cases in which innocent people were detained at gunpoint because a camera mistook a 2 for a 7, or misread the state on a license plate.
“But it’s worse than just imperfect software: All too often, police pull people over, arrest them, and even jail them based on camera misidentifications that officers could have caught with basic scrutiny. There are also numerous examples of officers with access to Flock’s database using it to stalk and surveil people in their personal lives.”
Reason shared a police body cam video of a cop confidently handing a court summons to a woman for package theft, telling her and her husband that it was “100 percent” certain she was guilty because Flock surveillance had her on camera committing the crime.
“We have cameras everywhere in that town; you can’t get a breath of fresh air in or out without us knowing,” the officer asserts on camera, saying “It is her, it is 100 percent, it is locked in, there is zero doubt; I wouldn’t have come here unless I was 100 percent sure.”
If that wasn’t Orwellian enough for you, Reason reports that the woman was only able to exonerate herself by providing police with “her cellphone tracking data, camera footage from her truck, and video placing her elsewhere at the time of the theft.” In other words, she was only saved from wrongful conviction based on faulty mass surveillance by providing correct information from other forms of mass surveillance.
It is absolutely chilling how the panopticon of surveillance is creating this “guilty until proven innocent by better surveillance” standard that is rapidly becoming the norm throughout our society. The state is being given massive, sweeping powers to monitor every aspect of civilian life to an increasingly intrusive extent, and it is already ruining people’s lives. This benefits nobody but the powerful, who live in constant vigilance and paranoia about the common folk growing fed up with their rulers and forcing the creation of a more equitable status quo.
All these wrongful arrests based on faulty Flock camera evidence is another illustration of the way people are making themselves dumber by outsourcing their thinking to machines. Police let AI tech do their job for them instead of using their own brains to rule out the suspect.
And the obnoxious cop in the video footage is a perfect example of someone who has become addicted to using artificial intelligence instead of real intelligence. His condescending, unearned confidence in his incorrect conclusion is the same kind of pompous attitude I routinely encounter in people showing me screenshots of a chatbot explaining why I’m wrong for saying Israel is guilty of genocide or the US provoked the war in Ukraine.
People are making gods out of their AI toys and acting under the assumption that they are being given infallible information from on high, instead of just using their critical thinking faculties like normal human beings. And, today in dystopia, this trend is turning everybody into drooling idiots with a hyperinflated sense of their own correctness.
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Caitlin Johnstone 