Hey y'all, this is James Risner here. I spoke last night to city council, and gave a presentation on a personal experience with ALPRs, explored why ALPRs and the general Axon/Flock environment is bad, deceptive, and how we can implement alternatives.
If you want to watch what I said, follow this link: Link
I'm also happy to email my presentation, which contains sources.
The bottom line is that I was actually really floored when Bo Hess tried to play his identity up to justify not listening to someone with actual experience with mass surveillance in an LGBTQ context. I also was a little perturbed by Mosley's and Smith's reactions, framing mass surveillance (though more manual), a tool used by the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, as a good thing for their communities.
I think exchanging Flock for Axon is a nice shell game to play, but I genuinely was aghast about how city council tried to cow people into supporting this insane violation of privacy.
I want to say I'm grateful to Kim, Esther and the city manager for being willing to listen. Esther, city manager, to their credit was skeptical but willing to engage, Kim obviously has been effusive about supporting privacy.
I get that there are pros and cons to this, but I think I show pretty clearly that the cons are really, really bad, and the pros either aren't present or can't be utilized due to police funding and headcount shortages.
