Slashdot Mirror
A Smart Doorbell Company Is Working With Cops To Report 'Suspicious' People, Activities (vice.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Smart doorbell company Ring is making it easier for customers to call the cops on "suspicious" people and activities. The startup, which Amazon acquired for reportedly "more than" $1 billion this year, uses security cameras to let people monitor their entryways. Now, it's launching its Neighbors app -- a platform for reporting crime that, so far, police in Fort Lauderdale and Orlando, and the Ventura Sheriff's Department, have access to. "Over the next days and weeks, law enforcement across the U.S. will be joining Neighbors," a Ring spokesperson told me over email.
The app, while presented as a crime-fighting aid, could also be a new place for paranoid people to profile fellow citizens, as similar platforms in the past have turned out to be. According to the company's statement in a press release for Neighbors today: "In addition to receiving push notifications about potential security issues, app users can see recent crime and safety posts uploaded by their neighbors, the Ring team and local law enforcement via an interactive map. If a neighbor notices suspicious activity in their area, they can post their own text, photo or video and alert the community to proactively prevent crime."
The app, while presented as a crime-fighting aid, could also be a new place for paranoid people to profile fellow citizens, as similar platforms in the past have turned out to be. According to the company's statement in a press release for Neighbors today: "In addition to receiving push notifications about potential security issues, app users can see recent crime and safety posts uploaded by their neighbors, the Ring team and local law enforcement via an interactive map. If a neighbor notices suspicious activity in their area, they can post their own text, photo or video and alert the community to proactively prevent crime."
In Florida it was decided that it was OK to shoot someone much larger than yourself who had you down on the ground and was slamming your head into the concrete. That's not the same thing as just shooting anyone who looks suspicious.
My local police force has something similar already. You get SMS when there are "issues" in your neighborhood. A website also allows you to view recent crime in the area. You don't need to be paranoid to be vigilant.
My daughter's neighborhood had several cars broken into. The neighborhood watch has a facebook group that alerted members. They all polled their surveillance cameras and each found the same van casing their houses throughout the area. They emailed all the pictures to the local Sheriff's department and they caught the van in another area the next night. Cameras are everywhere now and if neighbors unite they have an amazing amount of coverage.
It would be difficult for police to set up a network to do this throughout neighborhoods (cost, potential constitutional issues), but it's perfectly legal for a group of private civilians to collect images of the public, tag it almost however they want (as long as it's opinion-based), and upload it wherever they're allowed. They can label as suspicious a minority in an overwhelmingly white neighborhood, a teen in a beater car, or a child without his or her parents as long as they're stating an opinion about it being suspicious, completely ignoring (or oblivious) that the person recently moved in, the teen lives there and just bought their first car with their own money, or the kid is ten and playing just a couple of doors down from home. Having police respond to these wastes resources and contributes to the further deterioration of neighborhood relations.
Crafting laws to cover this without blocking legitimate reports would be difficult, if not impossible. This can only change through social pressure. If a group like this forms in your neighborhood, it could be helpful to join even if you don't want to if only to talk some sense into those who read too much into perfectly innocent activities.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
Paranoid Caucasians living in isolated suburbs. Now im sure this will get downvoted to oblivion, but unless and until you've lived with these people you've no clue just how willing a specific segment of the American population is to buy just one more thing to "keep their family safe."
I moved back into my parents old home in an Ohio suburb temporarily after they died in order to auction off the estate and sell the property. Granted this was in 2010 so the economy was about as stable a foundation as the Los Angles I had lived the bulk of my adult life in, but I was prepared for a long sale anyhow. In the first two weeks I lived there I got 3 neighbors banging on my door announcing themselves and nearly demanding to know who i was, who my wife was, what school my kids went to, and how many cars I owned. I was left politely at some point with a cake from Wal-Mart and a suggested church. At the end of the month I received a phone call from the local police department reporting a burglar had entered the home and had been detained after claiming to be my husband. After confirming he was indeed my husband with police, who seemed stunned to see actual gay people, life settled back down to normal with the exception of the now monthly 'jesus saves' fliers that would arrive unsolicited on my car windshield from neighbourhood kids.
A month passes and we're both playing Borderlands in the living room when we notice a handful of police walking alongside the house to the back yard. The neighbours who were standing proudly in our driveway, had called the police on our utility meter reader, who was black. After enduring a half hour with the neighbours explaining everything from make-believe methamphetamine addicts to the second amendment and gun ownership, they left.
long story short, we finally sold the property and moved back to LA, but the obsession with night prowlers, evil lurking in the shadows, drug addicts, and the paranoid gun culture was pretty shocking. This was a city thats biggest crime was a McDonalds truck that had lost its brakes and slid backwards into an adjacent sandwich shop, yet everyone on the block was geared up like a K-Town shop owner in the LA riots. It made zero sense...however if you're selling a doorbell that profiles people, ive got just the customer.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Are the stereotypical old ladies of the future going to monitor their Neighbors app instead of a police scanner? Joking aside, I wonder if this will do more to create false perceptions of danger than it will to keep people genuinely informed.
Have you ever read the police log of a small town? People are afraid of their own shadows. Your average person is not qualified to assess what is a threat and what isn't.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
Depends on the state laws, etc....
A few years back, here in LA, there was a case where a guy came out on the balcony of his 2nd story apartment, and saw just below in the parking lot, 2 thieves in his car rummaging around stealing stuff.
He pulled out his gun and opened fire, killing one and wounding the other I believe, that ran off.
They actually tried to try him, but no jury would convict him.
I was actually surprised it went to trial at all, as that here in LA, the car is considered and extension of your home.
In TX, I believe you can freely open fire if you find someone on your property stealing stuff.
Frankly, I have no problem with that....if they'd not been committing the crime on property they didn't now own, they'd be happily alive and processing oxygen.
If I'm home and someone breaks in to my house, I assume 100%, that the person means bodily harm to myself, family/friends within and I won't even be checking the body till I'm loading my 3rd magazine generally.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
trayvon made the first contact not the other way around, per trayvons girlfriend under oath. last i checked, walking behind someone isnt a crime
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
You're conflating "Stand Your Ground" with "Castle Doctrine".
Stand Your Ground applies anywhere - not just your home. In states without Stand Your Ground even if you feel your life is in danger, you have whats referred to as a "Duty to retreat". IE, run away if you can. Stand Your Ground states that you have no duty to retreat and if your life is in danger then you can respond with deadly force.
Castle Doctrine applies in your home, and it not only means that you have no duty to retreat, but also that the mere presence of an intruder in your home is by default considered a threat to your life, and so you can use deadly force immediately. IE, if you come downstairs and there's a stranger standing in your living room you're clear to shoot - even if they have said or done nothing else. Their mere presence is considered a threat.
Castle Doctrine does have it's limits though. It's not applicable cases where home owners have "baited" criminals into the home, or where the criminal has already surrendered then the threat is considered ended (ie, you can't tie up an intruder and then shoot them, nor can you leave your door open with a stack of cash visible while you wait in the corner with a gun).
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
I've lived in large single family home residential neighborhood in a city (looks suburban, but is in the city) for 19 years and over the past 5+ years, the amount of nuisance theft has skyrocketed. Just on my *block* it's not unusual to hear about a car being rifled, strange "door to door" sales people with no materials/identification/logos. We had a rash of car entries using keyless entry repeaters and a couple of sneak burglaries (snatching purses from kitchen tables). Over a week last November, the entire larger neighborhood was hit by package thieves, including my house. 3 different people had footage of the car involved.
I had a long conversation with my council member about what can be done and was told that we should just report it and then do insurance or whatever. I asked why we couldn't get more police patrols and was told our area was "too low crime" (the numbers say we're the lowest crime area in the city) and there wasn't sufficient resources.
So what the fuck? Just put up with it? That's the answer? Or just change my thinking, it *must* be my racial bias?
Or this is somehow really ad-hoc redistributive economic justice, and I'm just too racist to notice?
I love the scare quotes around "suspicious", like that's just some crazy impossible concept.
A losing effort.
The city has had at least two controversial shootings in recent years and activists are wholly opposed to anything involving "more police". One shooting involved an African American male who fought white officers and tried to take their gun and was shot and killed. The OTHER shooting happened about 1.5 miles from where I lived and involved an African American (first Somali immigrant police officer) officer who shot an unarmed white woman who had actually initiated the police call.
So it's a total political clusterfuck with the cops in this town. In last year's mayoral election, a major candidate actually suggested disarming the cops. Another major candidate rose to prominence in the precinct occupation/protest which went on for a month or two (in addition to disrupting things like the Park Board meetings, screaming racism and preventing the meeting from taking place). We use ranked choice voting and both candidates polled top 4, so there's that kind of crazy here.
The latter shooting (white woman shot by Somali cop) has everyone spinning in circles. The African American activists and white liberals don't know whether to be outraged or not because while they're trained to be outraged at police shootings, the racial role reversal here has them flummoxed. The pro-police "conservatives" who usually give the cops the benefit of the doubt are annoyed, but are equally flummoxed because a black cop shot a white woman.
The 100% democratic city government just wants it all to go away. The DA had to turn to the Grand Jury (after saying he would no longer use it after the previous shooting) to forcibly extract testimony as all the officers even tangentially involved in the Officer's career and training went blue wall of silence, making it take 8 months to get an indictment. The so-called legal experts are calling the odds of conviction 3-2 against due to the incredible lack of evidence (body cameras -- turned off, no witnesses, etc).
So yeah, run for city council on a "we need more police patrols" platform? Uh, no.
I'm not a fan of police state tactics by any means, but shit, what else can we turn to?