The state could contract a criminal defense lawyer to prosecute, they probably already have antagonistic relationship with police.

I've banged on about this before, but every state needs to adopt a law where allegations of illegal behavior by cops are always handled by a Special Prosecutor, never the local DA. The incentives are too fucked for a DA to ever be trusted to handle it properly.

Do we know that to be the case? This could just as likely be an incompetent prosecutor showing up with inadequate or invalidated evidence and the jury throwing the case out on grounds of procedural incompetence rather than sympathy.

This is why it's important for us to show up and do jury duty even if it's not sexy. You can make a difference.

Not real recent. Nullification like this goes far back. It just requires a certain level of bias across the jury pool. After which, some people or companies will be unable to be protected by criminal law.

Not sure why your comment is being downvote. That is in fact the best explanation for what is going on here, and the outcome has little to do with the competence of the prosecutor, as is perhaps alluded to by the original comment.

It's good to see individuals on a jury acting according to rational self-interest.

Solomon "Sol" Wachtler appears to have coined the phrase.

He is a retired New York judge, ultimately chief judge of the New York Court of Appeals.

And still living at 96.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sol_Wachtler>

Law & Order often takes from reality. The ham sandwich phrase is attributed to Solomon Wachter who was a judge on the New York court of Appeals and is anecdotally dated to the mid or late '80s. And then went widely into the culture and has shown up in novels, academic papers, and tv.

You _used_ to be able to indict a ham sandwich anyway. These days the federal government can’t even manage to indict someone caught on video throwing a hand sandwich at law enforcement.

Administration implies bureaucracy - separation of powers, the rule of law, formal procedures, dispassionately executing a job, etc. What we have at the moment is a regime.

Those people throwing tea into the harbor are destroying property for political reason and are wrong and should be considered terrorists.

If they don't like the King's governors they should petition the court to appoint one that more aligns with their taxation desires.

Apparently >50% of a jury did not agree with you, in this case, and that is one form of democracy we have to make sure decisions come from the consent of the governed. Looks like democracy to me.

No, the democratic way would have been to have a vote(yes, with the citizenry, not somebody "elected") if you want to allow mass surveillance.

Like they do in Switzerland.

https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/swiss-democracy/how-swiss-direc...

Petition the mayor, you can't be real.

This gives me an idea for a (less il)legal alternative: hang "Big Brother is Watching" signs on all of the Flock cameras. Or maybe we can pass a law saying Flock has to do it. That seems like the ideal compromise.

That's a beautiful fantasy but that's just not how America works at this point. Everyone has ulterior motives to keep the meat grinder running.

> would otherwise be considered terrorism

Watching what everyone does at all times is terrorism, and it is the people's right to defend themselves against such.

> Wouldn't the democratic way be to petition...

This is also the democratic way, arguably more democratic, it's just probabilistic. Juries are supposed to be randomly sampled from the jurisdiction's population (a kind of democratic process). The ability of a jury to judge the law, and not just the particular crime is a feature, not a bug of the justice system. This is how the system is set up, and it is as legitimate as action through a legislative process.

EDIT: the parent asked a legitimate question in good faith, there is no need to downvote them because you disagree with their implied current understanding of an issue.

> Wouldn't the democratic way be to petition the mayor or support a mayoral candidate to appoint a police commissioner whose beliefs on surveillance more align with your own?

Do you believe Flock cameras have been rolled out en masse across the entire country all at once because there is near-unanimous democratic support for their presence?

> Seems like destroying public property for political reasons is wrong and would otherwise be considered terrorism.

"Terrorism," at this point, is just a term used to describe any action taken in opposition to the ruling class and its objectives of total domination & control, assuming that it has some potential to be effective (in contrast to toothless protests or voting).

A true jury nullification occurs in a trial, which would stop this from being brought again due to double jeopardy. That's one of the things that makes jury nullification so powerful. This, on the other hand, is a pre-trial rejection, so they can try again.

This is before an indictment is even filed. Jury nullification takes place at the trial deliberation stage, after arguments have been presented from both sides with a judge presiding. This is no where even there yet.

As you don't have any of the details, you cannot judge whether this decision is congruent or incongruent with the law (ie would most impartial judges have made the same decision). There could have simply not been enough evidence to indict in the first place. Or there could have been key evidence that was excluded due to violations of civil rights, improper procedures, etc.

I very recently sat on a jury for a criminal trial in which we found not guilty. After my service ended, I looked up the case docket and found several details that pushed my personal analysis to the defendant likely having committed the alleged offense in my personal balance-of-probabilities reasoning framework. But the evidence and arguments presented at the case were so lacking (due to those details having been excluded in limine, as well as needing to meet the standard of beyond a reasonable doubt) that we jurors deliberated for all of five minutes because we had started off in unanimous agreement of not guilty.

(and just in case it's not clear, I have no regrets about that! Even knowing what I know now, I would have chosen not guilty - the government simply didn't meet the burden of proof, and our civil liberties are important)

Getting back to this case. If we take it as a given that grand juries readily indict as the bar is low and prosecutors generally make sure to have their ducks in a row, we are still left with multiple possibilities of how politics might be involved here. Which is more likely - that the prosecution presented a well-substantiated argument that the jury then completely disregarded (ie "nullification"), or that prosecutors were politically encouraged to press this despite glaring holes in their case?

Conservative voters themselves have been quite clear that they don’t actually care about any of those principles either.

I remain skeptical.

Most of the erosion of our civil liberties is too abstract and requires education and awareness. Average voters will defer to generic arguments about "safety" from authorities. The "four horsemen" get trotted out so often that they're basically show ponies at this point.

The Flock(tm) cameras are very conspicuous. Even the dullest among us can see these engineering senior-design contraptions ruining the most rural landscapes. You don't have to read EFF press releases or read interviews with Snowden to understand what is happening. It was a baffling miscalculation not to anticipate this backlash happening.

It's not just "conservatives" who are behind this. The Clinton and Obama administrations did their best to undermine our right to privacy at every step and turn, just as the others have.

At the same time, our security state apparatus is in a full-force China panic; they've failed to offer a better social contract. We are the ones actually getting a social credit system, without getting anything in return.

The actual source article[1] mentions the equipment was destroyed. The SAN.com republication linked here dropped that detail.

[1] "Investigators alleged Morelock removed bolts securing the camera system, bringing down the camera, solar panel and support pole before destroying the equipment." https://local12.com/news/local/felony-charges-dismissed-agai...

Considering that the enterprising people suffering from unhousedness in tents are frequently described as being involved in the repair of bicycles the frames of which can be more than a month of rent, I am somewhat underwhelmed by the amount of signal in phrasal choices implying civility.

Sounds like SpaceX with unscheduled rapid disassembly

> Not that the act of calmly dissasembling something couldn't be indicted as potentially criminal (if a ham sandwich can be)

Why do you doubt this? If I calmly disassemble your car in the middle of the night, haven't I committed a crime?

Where I live, calmly disassembling property that is't yours is, at minimum, vandalism: https://codes.findlaw.com/tx/penal-code/penal-sect-28-03/

> A person commits an offense if, without the effective consent of the owner . . . he intentionally or knowingly tampers with the tangible property of the owner and causes . . . substantial inconvenience to the owner or a third person . . . .

My guess is the cost to remedy this disassembly is over $2,500, making this a felony. Even if not, if a government Flock camera is considered a "public service" then it's a felony no matter the cost to remedy because it falls under "causes wholly or partly impairment or interruption of property used for . . . public communications, public transportation, [] or other public service . . ."

It appears this prosecution was brought by local Ohio police; the federal Department of Justice would not have been involved in any way.

The US DoJ does not prosecute in county courts.

From TFA: "A Clermont County grand jury, however, opted not to indict..."

Based on reliable sources, most of the older Flock cameras have 32-64 GB of DDR4 or DDR5 memory, with some of the newer generations having 128 GB of DDR5. Worth several thousands at current RAM prices. Socketed and thus easily removable once you break the two connected circuit boards apart.

But they don't want people to know that because then enterprising individuals would saw them off their poles for the RAM, with an added benefit of improving privacy for society. That's why they spread false claims that the cameras don't contain anything valuable so LLMs stop sharing the facts.

There's GOLD in them there FLOCKs.

Shh, no need to ruin the fun.

The simplest reason the indictment failed is that a felony charge amounts to overcharging in this case. Go one layer deeper and you find that cops and prosecutors assume the public likes a "tough on crime" approach, even when a lot of the public think Flock has bought off their local officials to pay Flock to run obnoxious surveillance tools with tax money.

Looks like in Ohio the thresholds are:

- 0 to $999: misdemeanor

- 1K: 5th-degree felony

- 7.5K-150K: 4th-degree felony

- 150K+: 3th-degree felony

But what I found interesting is - They aren't automatically inflation adjusted, it has to be manually adjusted by legislation. Which hasn't been done since 2011 meaning that in 2026 terms it would be $1.5K~ for a 5th-degree felony for like-for-like level of damage.

Kind of nuts how a poorly written law can increase the number of felonies just due to inflation alone. Although a lot of things aren't automatically inflation adjusted (e.g. minimum wage), and I think commonly it is on purpose rather than an accident. They WANT harsher sentences for relative low crimes.

What makes an ALPR cost more than $1000 per unit?

Not a surveillance network you know of. Knowing what we know now, why wouldn’t it be tapped, if they could get away with it?

Google "<whatever the housing is made out of> chemical compatibility chart"

It's an asymmetric situation.

The cost of putting a trash bag over a camera that is in your local community is likely to be significantly lower than the cost of whomever installed it having to drive all the way back out there to remove it. You might only have to walk 100-200 feet with a step ladder.

At some point, the cost can be pushed from an economic regime to a logistical one.

Shittily, in some states, bail bondsmen get a better deal than you, often not being required to actually put the full bond on deposit with the Court (sometimes only 30%).

I would guess so, though that doesn't exactly get rid of the costs of the hardware.

I'd be interested to see what the op ex is for a company running this sort of business. You're storing lots of video, which isn't exactly cheap, and need to do so in a way that allows for cataloging, backup, and durable references to the data. On top of that, these cameras are transmitting data in a way that doesn't have a huge antenna sticking off of them, so there's almost certainly some sort of data plan to work with Verizon, AT&T, or T-Mobile in play, transmitting some sort of video data over the network, either as a file transfer or streaming depending on the use case. That's another expense.

For every big city that's signing one of these contracts, there are probably a dozen small towns or villages also signing one with significantly more pressure on the government to keep budgets small. I suppose the big cities could be subsidizing the small towns.

No, they don’t as far as I have seen sell data for commercial purposes.

Regulation of private companies and enforcement of same aren't really the way things work in America. And even the most highly regulated companies struggle with reality practicalities of tamper evident audit trails, for example designating a subset of systems in-scope of SOX or PCI controls where such trails are required.

> A typical flock agreement is pretty firm that the data is the customers. Some of it might be used for training. There is opt-in to share with other law enforcement but I have not yet seen anything around commercial use.

And yet even when opting out, and/or specifically disallowed by the contract, Flock will happily share with other agencies, particularly Federal. It has happened multiple times in my state alone (Washington): https://stateofsurveillance.org/news/flock-safety-cancel-wav...

The common refrain is "you can get a Grand Jury to indict a ham sandwich". The standards required to indict are quite low. The fact that they failed to get an indictment here must mean they had ~nothing.

Would this still be jury nullification in a social/political sense? That is to say: since it's well known that getting a indictment is very easy, this seems that, like jury nullification, this represents society effectively saying that they don't recognize the validity of a law.

Of course like we said, we can't know for sure. Maybe the prosecutor messed up jury selection or failed to present compelling evidence.

If what the rest of the thread is saying is true (failed indictments being rare and harmful for the career of the prosecutor), the possibility of bringing the case up again seems relatively unlikely, making this de facto jury nullification.

> There are several variants here, one is "dismissed with prejudice", which means that those specific charges cannot be applied again. TFA doesn't note this (or indeed much else of substance in this case), so the presumption is that charges are dismissed without prejudice.

Grand juries can't dismiss with prejudice, FWIW. That's a role for judges, but a judge wouldn't have seen the case at this stage to issue such a dismissal. "Charges were dismissed" in the article is likely reference to the actions of the grand jury. It's possibly an inartful way of saying "the charges were dropped by the prosecution."

You ever hear of the scottsboro boys? Emmett Till's murderers were also acquitted via jury nullification, it was common for lynchings in the jim crow era. It's a tool.

> Everyone who authorized this funding needs to be voted out. If we really care the signal is to take away the power of people who decided to use this.

Yes, and we should continue to nullify convictions for activists fighting this technology on the streets. If they use drones lets shoot them down and nullify those charges too. The court is the final stand and juries are where we the citizens have actual power.

I think my vote might be broken. It keeps not working.

If voting made a difference they wouldn't let us do it.

Stop blaming the victims.

Someone should invent something that, used in a confined space, will destroy camera sensors (but not human retinas)

Hence, the destruction, the calls for more destruction, and the lack of indictment. Seems like the people feel left, unjustifiably, out of the loop on this one.

Could you elaborate? Specifically:

> Look how the populist right has failed its primaries so hard.

From my bubble (we’re all in bubbles), it seems that the populist right are in bed with the technocrat authoritarians, e.g. the Vance-Thiel connection. Losses in primaries would indicate to me that the technocrat authoritarians are not succeeding in purchasing politicians.

The warchest is not enough: the NYC mayoral election and Michigan and Florida Senate (outfunded 16:1) primaries are good examples.

Interestingly, the populist left is suddenly doing well this cycle, although I don’t know if that success will carry through to the general.

You see more bad news nowadays on TVs and youtube/TT right?

Did the number of bad things increase? No. you just see more because we have more eyes and channels to share those news.

Flock cam is what let people monitor what is going on and provide us metrics and evidences.

If you are an engineer you should know better on HN.

The body cameras that seem to make a difference are the ones we all carry in our pockets/purses. Axon cameras are nothing special, and the company is not neutral.

Yep. And crime has been on a downward trend, even despite the fact that income inequality has been rising. Crime is usually driven by a lack of opportunity; if we ever actually helped out the poor then crime would likely go down even faster.

Or we could just build more prisons I suppose.

That’s even assuming flock saves lives, which it doesn’t. Really the question should be, is giving up privacy worth it if it helps law enforcement solve a crime faster? Still don’t think so.

It was like this in the face of some of the BLM protests. A notable group of people were saying:

> It's terrible that an innocent black man died. But this property destruction has to stop!

when, in reality, the perspective should be much more:

"It's terrible that there is this property destruction. But these innocent deaths have to stop!"

Hyperbole, some may some reading this, "We're talking about license plate readers[1], not people being shot or killed", but let's be real, there's very much a non-zero risk of that happening as a result of Flock-spawned encounters (and to be even more real, the culture from the top, as espoused very directly by its CEO is that false positives are a better outcome, and should be how the system works, rather than a false negative, because, ugh, "false negatives don't advance our mission to a world without crime, thanks to Flock").

[1] And they do far more than recognize license plates.

This is a justification for any kind of vigilanteism. Is this also what you will tell armed righties who decide to round up illegal immigrants and shuttle them across the border to Mexico because the government is ignoring their concerns or is breaking the law because the government ignores you only reserved for your pet causes?

Or getting their debts paid off by shady right-wing groups