5,000 Police Departments Use This Controversial Tech

Ultimize. Flock Safety has become one of the most controversial police technology companies in America. Its automated license plate readers photograph cars on public roads, identify their plates, and put that information into searchable databases. Flock says its network is now used by more than 5,000 law enforcement agencies and processes billions of plate reads every single month. Critics on both the left and right call this mass surveillance. They worry police can reconstruct where innocent people travel, that officers can abuse the databases, that outside agencies can gain access, and that eventual billions of individual observations become a detailed record of people's lives. Those concerns aren't imaginary. There have been documented cases of police misusing license plate reader systems Because they thought some woman was hot, and critics have raised concerns about ice access. So that's the argument against flock. This is one case where there is consensus from left to right across America that flock is bad, bad, bad, bad. It's got to go, and I stand firmly in the camp of that's crazy. I don't think the problem is having flock everywhere. I think the problem is we're not using its Now, bear with me. Let's, let's look at the facts here. Yes, there can be abuse. There can be situations where ICE can use this to harass poor innocent people. There are creepy police officers who see someone they think is a hot woman, and let's face it, it's, it's the men police officers tracking women, following her every move so they can just conveniently bump into her at the 7-Eleven. That's creepy and weird, but there are ways of checking that. There are ways of preventing abuse. I think the benefits of the technology of Flock far outweigh any negatives. The problem is we're just not using it at full force. Right now, it's just taking pictures. It's not attached to radar. It's not tracking whether people speed. It's not tracking whether people go through red lights. It's not tracking whether whether people tailgate, but it could. Why would that be a good thing? Now, let me put my cards on the table because some of you are going to think, well, TJ must have stock in this company. I own no stock in Flock. I don't know anybody who works there. I have no vested interest. I'm not paid by them. They're not a sponsor of this show. I'm giving it to you like I see it. And you can feel free to give your comments as you like it, as you see it below as well. But this whole idea of, okay, you see someone come to your house, mug a family member, attack a family member, perhaps violently attack a family member. You see them drive off and you see their license plate. What's happened for the last 100 years or so is you would call the police. Tell them the license plate, and maybe it would kind of filter out. Meanwhile, the person could just drive away, be 2 blocks away, pass a police officer. No one would know. They wouldn't get caught. Now, boom, their location can be ascertained almost instantly. It's so much harder to commit crime and drive away in a car where you have the license plate shown in any community that has this. So the argument is basically it's too good. Let's do the old-fashioned way. It's almost like saying, okay, I don't like paying taxes, therefore let's not use— let's not let anyone at the IRS use a calculator. Let's just hire 1,000 more IRS officials so they can manually count, go through and add, you know, get a little paper and pen and add up. Because then they wouldn't ensnare us for tax violation. Now, I realize some people might say, hey, you're on to something, but that would expand the number of IRS officials needed dramatically. So, here's the part that I think everyone always forgets because it's so normal that we don't notice it. 1.2 million people a year die in car crashes around the world. Technically, 1.19. I want to give you the facts. 39,000 die on average in the United States. If, for example, we could connect these flock cameras to radar and automatically give a ticket to people speeding or tailgating, even the most conservative estimates Says that should reduce deaths by a couple of thousand people. So imagine yourself, you're at a city council meeting and you're saying, "I want the right to speed." We don't. We shouldn't have a flock camera attached to radar in our community. And you know what? If we have to have the equivalent of 9/11 every year in terms of death toll, I'm willing to murder. 2,000 American citizens every year, so I have the right to run a red light and speed. That's essentially the argument you're making. Now, I haven't seen anyone willing to say that for fear they would look like complete absolute jerks, which they would be. But let's make no mistake about it, that is essentially the argument. Again, if someone were saying, okay, Here is a certain president's enemy list. So the government's now going to go put a flock camera in their home and a recording device on their cell phone just because they voted against the president. Believe me, I'm all in on banning that, but that's not what's happening. We're talking about public roads. Now, this is done in other countries. I've been to Qatar and I've seen it where it says you're now being monitored and you're going to get a ticket automatically if you speed. Guess what happened? A lot fewer people went speeding. This happens in Singapore. And where it has happened, they're seeing quite often a 25% reduction in traffic accidents that result in death. Call me old-fashioned, but the idea that the government could pass a regulation and prevent thousands of people from dying I think that's a good thing, especially if it's not requiring some onerous, onerous burden on the rest of citizens. And I'm sorry, but following the speed limit isn't an onerous ask. It's just not a big ask. Between the opposition to this, these flock cameras and red light cameras, we have a real problem in America. We have people saying, Laws are good for other people, but not for me. I shouldn't have to follow the law. And hey, I get it. Have I ever gone speeding? Yes. Have I ever had a speeding ticket? Yeah. One ticket 35 years ago. And it's not because I'm perfect. But if I knew every single time my car is monitored and I would automatically be emailed a ticket and it would automatically be deducted from my bank account, Believe you me, I'd stop speeding. I'd somehow figure out a way to go the speed limit, and so would you. The result— I'm not saying there would be zero traffic deaths in America, but no serious person thinks that we would still have 39,000 deaths a year. Whether it goes to 37,000 or 30,000 or 20,000, isn't that a good thing? I want you to think for a moment. Surely. If not in your own immediate family, a friend of a friend at least has someone in their family who's died in an automobile wreck. And I want you to ask yourself seriously, if you had gotten a ticket for speeding automatically just because of one of these cameras, but that person could live, would you be willing to— Maybe slow down a little, maybe pay a $50 ticket if it could save the life of a family member or friend. I think when you personalize it like that, it's all of a sudden not so crazy to think this technology should be warranted. Would you like to be the sort of successful person who is dominating news, at least in your industry? Well, if so, it's time to up your skills. At ultimize.com, I've created online courses to help you do that. Now, here's the thing. No obligation. You can get a free course on communication skills, a free course on how to build better habits. All you have to do is go to ultimize.com. That's ultimize.com. No obligation. Go there now. You know what gets me is so many people love to bash government waste. Oh, isn't government wasteful? And yet they demand that government be wasteful. We somehow think it's great to have more and more police officers sitting in a car with a radar gun, drinking coffee, and frankly having a boring job pointing that gun so that they can one at a time do speed checks on 0.0001% of the people in that town. That, that's somehow okay. Very few people say that that really shouldn't be allowed. But oh my gosh, putting up an automatic radar gun, um, call back the British, uh, that's tyranny, let's have another tea party. It's hysterical. It's just technology. If you believe in the radar gun of a police holding it, why wouldn't you have the thing automated to use technology? more effectively. It's like toll booth operators. Why do we automate toll booths? Because it was wasteful and stupid to have people on the payroll doing something that a machine can actually do better and 1,000 times cheaper. And that's the case with these flock cameras. Yeah, believe me, if someone kidnaps your kid— not that that many kids are actually kidnapped by anyone other than family members, but bear with me. Someone kidnapped a family member of yours, and Flock technology could instantly tell the police, okay, the kidnapper is 12 blocks away. We have 3 police cars in the vicinity, and we can go ahead and capture that person, bring them in, and arrest them in about 2 minutes. Are you okay with that, or should we turn off the Flock cameras and just— put out their pictures in the post office? Is that what you want? I don't think you'd want that. I don't want that. Think of it this way. I mean, we use the best technology to solve problems in every other aspect of life, private sector and public sector. But I guess in theory, some cheap airline could say, oh, if the federal government gets rid of requirements for planes to have radar, we'll save a few bucks and we'll just start selling tickets to our airline on a plane without radar. And if every so often we crash into another skyscraper and everyone dies, oh well, at least we have government freedom. At least we don't have a surveillance society. We're not surveilling every building or every plant is. I mean, if you take this to the logical extreme, Someone could say, "Well, I don't want radars having, or I don't want airplanes having radar because what if I want to put my own drone above my airspace of my house? I don't want Eastern Airlines or their defunct or United Airlines to have their radar see my drone." Obviously, a ridiculous, absurd argument, but really. No different than the argument against Flock. And believe me, I'm sensitive to the idea that Flock can be used to harass people. It can be used by ICE, all sorts of nefarious things. There are other systems that can be put into place for that. Guns can be abused. Do we really want to go back to a time when no police officer can use a gun? I mean, I guess it works in Great Britain where they have Clubs, but average people don't have guns over there either. Guns are a powerful technology. They are sometimes abused. But I would still like police in America to have access to guns. I want them to have access to all sorts of tools and technology that will save my life, my family's life, my friend's life, community's life, and your life. And that's why this idea that, you know, flock is somehow the end of the world and the biggest evil— no, it's not. One of the things that many people who are advocates of cameras point out to, and I'll be right up front with you, it's cause— it's correlation, it's not causation. But what they have noted is the last 20 years, other than a blip up during the pandemic, Crime has gone dramatically down, really the last 30 years, especially in big cities. Crime has gone dramatically lower and lower and lower. One of the theories is there are cameras everywhere. If you know any crime that you could commit is going to be on camera and you're going to get caught and you're going to get convicted and you're going to serve time, it is a real disincentive. Ideally, we live in a world where people just morally don't want to commit crime. But you know what? I'll take the next best thing. If someone wants to commit But they're afraid to do it for fear of being caught because they're captured on a flock camera or surveillance camera or a red light camera. Then I'm all in favor of that deterring them. I recently had a friend who served on a grand jury in New York City, and she said it was kind of the easiest thing in the world. The prosecutor came forward and said, "We think this person assaulted this person." Oh, and by the way, here's eight different video cameras showing every angle and the person's face of the person punching or raping the person in question. They had no choice other to— other than to indict every single time. And guess what? You conservatives out there won't believe it, but New York City has the lowest crime rate it's had since the early 1960s. Oh, well, TJ, what about that? I saw someone get pushed off the subway. Yeah, you saw it because of a camera. So any one crime gets more attention But you as an individual and any policymaker needs to look at the entire society. Crime is lower in New York City than it's been in 60 years. Violent crime is lower in New York City than it is in most Republican congressional districts in America, certainly more so— or certainly lower than Speaker of the House Mike Johnson's Louisiana district. But that's not a politically correct fact that offends too many people, so we won't talk about that anyway. Flock, my biggest beef with you is you got to figure out a way or get various political entities— cities, towns, states— to combine your technology with radar, and let's just automatically send people tickets when they're speeding. Let's automatically send people tickets when they're tailgating. And yes, if you're at a red light, red— sorry to tell you folks— doesn't mean slow down. Red means stop. And forgive me for, for seeming pedantic here, but stop means there's no more forward motion. I've gotten into countless arguments with friends and family. Oh, I just stopped. Well, No, you didn't stop. This car never stopped going forward. You'll feel a car actually kind of lunge backwards for an eighth of a second if you stop. Oh, teacher, I'm in a hurry. There's no one around. I don't care. If we're going to have laws, then it can't be everyone gets to choose. Oh, there's no one on the road. I decided to drive on the left-hand side because. I fantasize about being in the countryside in Great Britain. Nobody cares about my fantasy of driving as if I'm in the countryside of Britain. You catch me driving on the left side of the road, I deserve a ticket. You run a red light at a stoplight, you deserve a ticket. And that's my thoughts on flock. I realize this isn't going to make me very popular. But I'm not here to be popular. I'm here to tell you the truth as I see it. What do you think? Go ahead and post your comments. I'm TJ Walker. This is Filtered. Ultimize.