alt Hacker NewsCan we cut to the bone a little bit? The recent crime panics are not about a partner assaulting their live-in partner or a random home burglary. There is no real "ROI" to be had.
It's purely about the unease of living in chaotic cities, the random stabbings, the shoplifting, the visible homelessness etc. Flock is the stopgap here.
Partly the "feeling" of chaos is just that, a feeling, driven significantly by algorithmic feeds feeding us every random crime from around the country 24/7. Husband murders wife in a murderous rage? No one hear's about it. Mentally ill man murders a woman on the train in a Tier 2 city, immediate nationwide breaking news.
The other part though is a real dissolution in how we take care of our mentally ill. Complex topic [1].
I think complaining about Flock is complaining about the symptom. Today we dogpile on Flock to get it cancelled, tomorrow the public will reach for something else. We have to fix the underlying disease, which is a combination of the two factors above.
[1]: https://time.com/6265241/america-care-of-mentally-ill-people...
Replies
Some of this stuff does feed into the perception though. Flock provides more footage for media to clip, for example. Or you can look at Ring cameras and people getting worked up about joggers or neighborhood kids because now they get alerts and have neighborhood chat groups, etc.
> Mentally ill man murders a woman on the train in a Tier 2 city, immediate nationwide breaking news.
Unless this happened a second time, it wasn't really reported on much until after it blew up on social media.
> Flock is the stopgap here.
What exactly have they stopped?
> Today we dogpile on Flock to get it cancelled, tomorrow the public will reach for something else.
Who's the "we" in this sentence? The people who want to keep cities crime-ridden? And why does your opinion matter more than that of the public? I thought these "we" were pro-democracy?
Let us also acknowledged that we're living in the safest time in history and modern American cities are extremely safe, despite the unhinged propaganda from the right.
In the UK there is a yearly survey regarding crime and I've not read it for a few years (I've emigrated) but a regular theme used to be that people interviewed personally felt safe and weren't likely to be victims of crime but thought everyone else in the country was less safe and everywhere they didn't live had higher crime than it did.
The public perception of crime is persistently incorrect for many if not most people and this incorrect, emotional rather than evidence-based view of the world is unfortunately what drives political pressure.