alt Hacker News"Cameras don't fix homelessness or addiction or underfunded services. They just make life harder for regular people."
In what way do cameras make life harder for regular people? If anything rampant crime (and progressive legal systems' unwillingness to lock up repeat offenders for a long time or at all) makes life much harder for regular people than a camera just sitting there.
Replies
By mis-identifying them, leading to 5 months of jail time for a person who has done nothing other than be in public. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/30/us/north-dakota-facial-re...
Biased policing means these systems are used to target minorities, activists, and people with "controversial" beliefs: https://www.aclu.org/issues/national-security/discriminatory...
Surveillance tech can alter peoples behavior. I know I'm personally more stressed when I know I'm being filmed, even if I'm doing nothing wrong.
https://academic.oup.com/nc/article/2024/1/niae039/7920510?l...
"Police used AI facial recognition to arrest a Tennessee woman for crimes committed in a state she says she’s never visited": https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/29/us/angela-lipps-ai-facial-rec...
There's zero proof anywhere that these devices do anything about crimes. How could they? A camera can't lock someone up.
1) Surveillance needs to be reviewed. Even if reviewed by AI, eventually that reviewed work needs to be reviewed by a human if we're going to maintain the fiction / friction of "human in the loop". The "hits" will include false positives, unless the system is overtuned so that it rarely kicks an event.
1a) Review will take time / resources which could be spent on human policing, harming the community.
1b) Some jurisdictions may prefer "broken windows as policy", the notion that they can construct a "reasonable suspicion", given enough garbage (some of it outright garbage, the point being there is so much of it nobody cares; don't need to do an accurate drug test until trial, right?).
2) False surveillance hits will make it through human review and result in injury to innocent humans.
3) Police forces already lack the money / manpower to investigate potential crimes.
4) Police forces already "prioritize" other matters than the mentally ill setting their houses on fire or releasing plagues of rabbits into their neighborhoods (actual things that have happened to me!).
feels somewhat dystopian, no? the big brother is watching everywhere you go. no way this can go tits up
A few months ago a woman was harassed over a crime she did not commit, by a police officer using her vehicle driving in a large general area as proof she committed the crime. Officer demanded she admit to a crime she did not commit.
Additionally, the surveillance apparatus enables parallel reconstruction. When law enforcement gathers evidence via illegal means, they can then use the drag net to find cause to detain/search unrelated to the original crime, in order to have cover to gather evidence they illegally gathered prior, aka a loophole for civil rights.