While Flock is a tool that can be audited, there is nothing to stop a corrupt officer simply following a car when they don’t like the look of its driver, or writing down plates of vehicles spotted outside an ex-girlfriend’s house – they would just be harder to catch.

Ned Donovan, a journalist turned police reporter, wrote an excellent defense of flock Security cameras: https://worksinprogress.co/issue/a-cops-case-for-flock/. It combined some ironclad statistics about camera abuse and efficacy, and some anecdotes to explain what those numbers looked like in practice.

The backlash to this article on Twitter was predictably ugly. So who was this piece for?

It certainly can’t have been for the cynics. At first, I thought it was- after all, Donovan responded to plenty of those sorts on Twitter! But if cynics were his target audience, he sure did a poor job convincing them. In his writing, Donovan implicitly refers to them as entirely detached from reality! That kind of prose certainly isn’t going to convince anyone, particularly the skittish and stubborn general American public. Experts in public communication focus on distractions and other unfortunate, underhanded tactics. It’s really the only way to get the job done when you don’t respect the other party. This certainly isn’t that!

But is it for Flock advocates? Trying to make them feel emboldened to go out and vote, or attend town hall meetings? I doubt that, too. The article is full of basic facts that anybody who uses or makes the decision to install these cameras is aware of.

I wrote a similar post on waymo, but didn’t stop to think about it as hard. After all, Waymo’s marketing is for the cynic, so it wasn’t as perplexing. But even they clearly struggle hard to change peoples’ minds. I mean, I don’t have any A/B data to measure how effective their communication has been, but it can’t be nothing- they convinced me!

I can guess who Donovan’s target audience is, though, through the publication. Works in Progress is full of non-partisan political writing. I was very surprised to find out, in fact, that the fabled housing theory of everything was one of their publications! That’s all to say, the publication appears geared towards highly educated Americans with horses in politics who intrinsically have to be open to changing their mind on things. The publication is full of left wing and right wing policies, so I imagine it would hurt the brain of anyone suffering a severe case of groupthink would be absolutely incapable of reading it. I think that’s a fair and valid group of people to write for, even if it’s a sliver of the overall population. Thanks to the housing theory of everything find, I have a pretty strong guess that it’s picked up by pundits, at least. So this flock article will probably do some real work (and we’ll see if it ends up referenced in the podcasts next news cycle).

I bought a 1 year subscription to https://worksinprogress.co/. Maybe it’s a longshot, but if we’re to have any hope at all as a civilization, publications like this are essential.