Comment by Sniffnoy

> The entire tone is "bad things happen, what can ya do?"

Well, no, it isn't -- for abuse, its response is "we can catch it after the fact and charge or fire the officers" (which then also provides a deterrent effect). I guess the particular sort of case you're describing doesn't fall under abuse (I guess you'd call it negligence?) and so this might not apply in this case. So maybe you could say it takes a hand-wavy approach to negligence. ("Negligence" doesn't seem like quite the right term here -- I assumed you were talking about negligence or abuse on the part of the police, rather than on the part of Flock.) But it explicitly addresses abuse, which is contrary to your original claim that it doesn't address either!

> Sure, like in the case of a rear/front plate switch on a stolen car, Flock has every bit of information to identify that this is the case before deploying an officer to perform a pit maneuver on an innocent citizen.

OK, and how do you know that they do not in fact flag this case so such incidents can be avoided? I agree with you that if they don't than they should, but you haven't provided any indication that they don't, just asserted it.

> But they have no incentive to build that

Why not? Seems to me like the police would find it helpful. Of course maybe there's some nonobvious reason I'm missing why there's no incentive, but you should say what that reason is rather than just asserting it exists!

> and the author makes no allowances for this kind of self-imposed accountability.

I'm not even entirely sure what you mean by this. Like, flagging things in advance to prevent a needless deployment isn't "accountability", it's just getting things right in the first place. I mean yeah you're right that the article doesn't seem to really discuss "what if Flock just gets things wrong?" But I thought we were talking about abuse -- or I guess also negligence? But I was also assuming there you were talking about negligence on the part of the police, not of Flock. It's confusing if you mash these two together!

So sure -- the article ignores questions of "what if Flock just gets things wrong?" If that's what you meant by "negligence", you could have said that a lot more clearly, but I agree it doesn't discuss that. But it definitely addresses abuse.

Also, sorry, but I gotta say, you're making your argument in a very compressed form that makes it hard to determine exactly what you're arguing (and what is referring to exactly what, etc). I had a hard time here determining exactly what you meant in order to respond to it. Presumably someone who already agrees with you would be able to fill in the details in their head -- but those aren't the people you need to be making your argument to! For the sake of those of us who don't already agree with you, it would be helpful to expand a bit.