Just one data point, but I've been to many policing conferences since 2020 and I think one of the main drivers of the Flock problem is a disconnect between what the public understands 'crime prevention' to mean, and what is sold to police under the same verbiage. Something I believe strongly is that healthy public safety requires both responsive action and crime prevention. When I talk about this, I will show quadrants with axes for Give/Take and Planned/Responsive, and try to get people to classify their public safety activities to see where they fall. To me it should be somewhat balanced. Everything concentrated in Take/Responsive is an incomplete strategic plan.

However, most tools available to police are designed to be responsive; they help catch a criminal that has already done something bad. This is not crime prevention. Nothing was prevented. Anyone living in an American city knows these cameras don't prevent much.

It is also (unfortunately) a very vendor driven industry. IACP is a big deal each year, and Flock / Axon / Motorola go all out on spending to influence decision makers.

Talking to communities, in my experience, they ask for crime prevention. People want the actual incident to never have occurred in the first place. When vendors go around saying they are solving crime once and for all, but all they deliver is surveillance, it builds distrust. It feels like lying, while the companies themselves get rich on public money.

Then they go on huge PR campaigns to tell the public actually what they're feelings is wrong and they should accept the surveillance. It's silly.

In the policing communications world, people often say trust is built in drops, and lost in buckets.