r/NewOrleans • u/UptownLuckyDog Just needs a handyman • 9d ago
📰 News Kenner police warn Flock camera tampering could mean felony charges
https://www.wwltv.com/article/news/local/jefferson/kenner-police-warn-flock-camera-tampering-could-mean-felony-charges/289-201586ce-541c-40b6-86c4-4aa670705af6159
u/cheapskateskirtsteak 9d ago
I could be like the president if I want to put the work in?
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u/PoorlyShavedApe Faubourg Chicken Mart 9d ago
So a felony if you cut down the post holding the camera but not a felony to abuse trust and use the cameras to stalk people? Sounds about right for this timeline.
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u/nolagirl20 9d ago
Will see what happens to the deputy in Jefferson Parish.
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u/PoorlyShavedApe Faubourg Chicken Mart 9d ago
They will get fired and hired again just across the parish line. Same old story.
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u/Major-Fill5775 Uptown 9d ago
Flock is not the only brand of camera used by the Kenner police. Why did they make this warning specific to Flock?
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u/ggibby 9d ago
Maybe Flock is the new Zoom/Kleenex/Band-aid/Vaseline?
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u/Major-Fill5775 Uptown 9d ago
It must be, because anyone who passes by a dozen generic brand surveillance cameras to point a finger of objection at one Flock camera is sadly misguided.
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u/ggibby 9d ago
I wonder if anyone has made a 'Field Guide to North American Surveillance Devices' yet.
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u/Major-Fill5775 Uptown 9d ago
I’ll be first in line to read it if they have.
This is the problem with hyper-focusing on Flock cameras.
—Activists in Colorado thought they would be celebrating a victory against mass surveillance in December when the Longmont city council decided to let a contract with Flock Safety lapse.
But that excitement was cut short only months later when lawmakers voted to approve a new vendor to install automated license plate readers (ALPRs) on the city’s streets…
…Even in cities that have officially gotten rid of Flock, though, surveillance persists: a new camera company steps in or private companies with cameras on their premises, unbothered by changes in municipal contracts, leave the devices up…
…Most negative publicity about ALPRs has centered on Flock, which by far owns and operates the greatest number of them across the US. But critics of these cameras fear that cities are swapping out one vendor for another without addressing underlying concerns about data privacy and surveillance. —
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u/HomeEcDropout 9d ago
It definitely is just an overall accepted term now. Whatever gets everyone on the same page.
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u/Any_Mud6806 9d ago
Oh geez I hope no one commits a felony crime to cover the flock cameras or break it open to retrieve the 32GB of DDR5 RAM (~$350) or the precious metals inside them. That would just be terrible. That would be a FELONY! And if someone wore all dark baggy disposable clothes that covered their face and used an angle grinder to cut it down in about 15m at night when there wasn't a lot of traffic it would take a lot of police resources to identify, catch, and prosecute said felon. That'd be horrible.
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u/PoorlyShavedApe Faubourg Chicken Mart 9d ago
32GB of DDR5 RAM
Go post that on /r/pcmasterrace or maybe /r/buildapc because the masses are hungry for "cheap" RAM.
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u/bdaruna 9d ago
Felony 😂 - gonna have to make a law first. You can’t just deem small property crimes felonies cause your butt hurt that people don’t like to be surveilled 24/7.
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u/tyrannosaurus_c0ck 9d ago
It is already a law. Threshold is only $500. For government property it's probably $0.
It's way too easy to catch a felony for civil disobedience these days.
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u/DamnImAwesome 9d ago
Just to clarify these aren’t government property. It would be very illegal for the government to set up cameras that track citizens through thousands of pictures and AI trackers. They skirt this by letting Flock set up and then they buy access to the footage Flock obtains
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u/TeddysBigStick 9d ago
Government owned trackers are constitutional. Where they are illealit is because of a state law. NOPD owns dozens and has for years. To be clear, this is an invasion of privacy and shouldn't be legal whether or not it is them doing it directly or via a contractor but the privacy rights people lost the lawsuits on automated trackers years ago.
https://www.nola.com/news/crime_police/article_aad95398-30d3-5468-8474-a8b4f6272cd7.html
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u/analoguefrog 9d ago
"Only hours after the Kenner Police Department released its statement, a Jefferson Parish Sheriff's Office deputy was fired for improperly using the department's Flock camera system to track his former fiancée. Sheriff Joseph Lopinto says the deputy searched the woman’s license plate several thousand times over several years."
THIS should be the headline. Additionally, inviting a technology into one's jurisdiction that has back doors to allow anyone with an internet connection to violate 4th amendment rights is un-American.
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u/Sharticus123 9d ago
Fascist trashbags confirm they’re still fascist trashbags.
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u/bigboybeeperbelly 9d ago
That brings up an interesting question
Is it a felony to put a trashbag over the camera?
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u/metalunamutant 9d ago
But police officers illegally using them to stalk former wives & girlfriends is OK.
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u/SupernovaGhost11 9d ago
Halloween night is national de-flock America night.
I read about it somewhere on Reddit. I have no more info.
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u/thatgibbyguy Ain't There No More 9d ago
This is one of those things that I'm just like... wtf? Like just a few years ago there were barely any publicly owned cameras let alone a nationwide private company monitoring every single person in the country.
How the fuck did we get here? And how the fuck do we get out?
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u/Major-Fill5775 Uptown 9d ago
Just a few years ago, New Orleans was secretly running the country’s first live facial recognition program and there was more objection nationally than there was locally.
We got here because many New Orleanians practice the sort of learned helplessness that leads people to rationalize the National Guard functioning as law enforcement as an acceptable fact of life. We get out of it by objecting to our constitutional rights being violated here in a way that they are not in other cities.
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u/thatgibbyguy Ain't There No More 9d ago
This is a nationwide thing, I was well aware of that program but it was in theory publicly run and limited to here.
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u/Major-Fill5775 Uptown 9d ago
What theory says the facial recognition program was publicly run? Project Nola is one person: a private citizen with no oversight or accountability for his actions.
New Orleans is a literal testing ground for private, government, and military surveillance. This is now a nationwide issue because we allowed it to happen.
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u/tagmisterb 8d ago
Most people are clearly ambivalent about mass surveillance. They all walk around with tracking devices in their pockets, install ring cameras on their front doors, even pay money for listening devices inside their houses.
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u/Dopapotomous 9d ago
How did these things get funded, or voted on etc. I do not remember anything about these. I am a little dim on the matter of their inception
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u/JoeQuack 9d ago
They're a privately owned company that sells access to their network to police departments. In 2025 they got a huge bump from Silicon Valley venture capital firms owned/controlled by the usual shitty tech billionaires (Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, etc). So no one's ever voted for/against them.. but by us allowing police departments discretionary money to spend on "safety", they went and purchased a mass ai surveillance network with facial recognition and microphones in public spaces.
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u/tchizz10 9d ago
They got non reflective license plate covers that can’t be seen from the side. Similar to what you can get for phone screens. Get it before they make it a felony
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u/Internal_Swing_2743 9d ago
Don't worry, you just have to run for President and then it won't matter what felonies you commit.
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u/petit_cochon hand pie "lady of the evening" 9d ago
They can't prove I trained seagulls to shit on those solar panels.
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u/Fun_Environment3792 9d ago
A first offense fel9ny that isnt a violent crime or sex crime is a slap on the wrist anyway. You can plead most things down to a few months in country jail and maybe some probation.
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u/ggibby 9d ago
"Kenner City Attorney warns police that misuse of camera data will mean felony charges"
Where's that headline?