Canadian YouTuber Visited By Cops After Building Mock Flock To Track Cop Cars

If most cops had a sense of irony, they wouldn’t be cops. By that I mean that there’s little in the job that attracts people with tons of self-awareness or a finely developed sense of humor. Both of those traits generally contain a sense of irony. And since most cops don’t have that, this is the sort of thing that happens.

Canadian YouTuber Anthony Sistilli cobbled together a very rudimentary approximation of Flock’s ALPR tech, using off-the-shelf hardware and his personal laptop. A pinch of AI was added to the mix to “train” the camera to focus on probable cop cars, rather than every car that passed by.

He uploaded a couple of shorts to YouTube briefly explaining what he was using and what he was attempting to do. (Here and here.) The recordings honestly explained the limitations of the tech Sistilli was using, while still demonstrating that it did work, albeit in an extremely limited fashion.

To the surprise of absolutely no one, the local PD (the Peel Regional Police of Ontario, Canada) decided this simply could not pass without comment. And that would be the sort of “comment” that involved officers arriving at Sistilli’s house in the apparent hopes of intimidating him into abandoning this project.

After Sistilli produced two short-form videos about his project for his 140,000 subscribers, officers from the Peel Regional Police in Ontario showed up at his home on Sept. 20. Sistilli said the visit lasted roughly 30 minutes, with officers focusing on his intentions and whether he planned to build a map tracking police movements.

“Their concern was that mapping police movements could put officers at risk and help people committing crimes,” Sistilli said. “They also made the case that their own cameras and ALPR technology weren’t as concerning as I was suggesting. My impression was that they weren’t familiar with many of the controversies or examples of misuse in the United States.”

This interaction was also posted to Sistilli’s channel. The entire conversation — which should really be considered a professional embarrassment for Peel Regional Police — can be viewed below (albeit interspersed with commentary and interviews):

While it’s true that Canada as a whole hasn’t experienced the perpetual abuse of ALPR cameras by law enforcement officers that we have in the US, that doesn’t excuse the officers’ inability (or refusal) to recognize the irony attendant in claiming persistent surveillance “puts officers at risk” while obtusely refusing to recognize that it creates the same risks for citizens. In fact, the risk posed to citizens is inherently more dangerous than the risk posed to officers due to the imbalance of power.

When a cop misuses cameras, they do so from behind a web of opacity with almost zero accountability. When a single person aims cameras at cop cars — one that can’t handle 24/7 surveillance and operates (very clunkily) only when physically manipulated by the camera operator — there’s nothing approaching the round-the-clock from all over the city surveillance cops insist keep us safer, but somehow would be harmful if the ALPRs decided to focus on cop cars instead.

Sistilli’s experiment (and unwanted interaction with police officers) makes a good point. And because it’s a good point, it was almost entirely lost on the officers who decided this somehow posed a risk to them.

“I never intended to create a giant network mapping every police officer, and I still don’t,” Sistilli told Straight Arrow. “I wanted to see whether it was feasible and use the irony to illustrate a point. Sometimes it’s easier to show people what this kind of surveillance means by turning it around than by simply explaining what companies like Flock are doing.”

Even if the cops are unable (or simply unwilling) to comprehend this point, the hundreds of thousands of people who’ve watched these videos certainly do. Cops need to learn they can’t simply “because we said so” their way through interactions like these — ones they initiate but immediately make clear they’re not actually interested in an honest conversation.