four cop cars came flying out of nowhere and boxed us in. The officers jumped out and started shouting.
So, 4 cars, who knows how many cops.
Really, this is a story about how absurd cops are in the USA.
At no point in this tale was there ever a car reported stolen. It was only a set of license plates that went missing. So, at no point was there a car thief, you can’t have a car thief if there’s no stolen car. Obviously, if there’s no car thief, there can’t be any reason to assume that the person in the “stolen car” will be violent. Yet, somehow the police charged up aggressively, boxing him in using 4 cars, jumping out and shouting, hands on their guns.
The cops even claimed that their reaction was “lucky” for the guy:
“You’re lucky we’re in Plymouth. If you were in Minneapolis, they definitely would’ve come at you with guns drawn.”
And the guy considers himself lucky too:
And the more I’ve sat with the aftermath, the more I’m thinking about how, with a different set of officers in a different city, or a different unsuspecting driver with 34 ## DTM New Jersey plates who was a little less collected, this could’ve ended so, so much worse. Thank God our kids weren’t with us. I’m not sure if I would’ve been able to react as calmly.
If he hadn’t been as calm, he might have been killed by the cops because he might not have reacted as calmly.
The fact that this is being framed as a “Flock” issue is absurd. It’s like a story about a sensor in front of the orphan crushing machine which sometimes misidentifies normal people as orphans and throws them onto the conveyor belt. Sure, that’s an issue, but let’s focus on this orphan crushing machine first.
The ergonomics aren’t great compared to a dedicated camera. The camera sensor not being in the middle is annoying unless your subject is far away. Having to hold the phone so that you don’t accidentally touch the screen, accidentally block the camera, etc. is not ideal. The shutter is never in a great position, even if you do something like use the volume button as a shutter.
Even flip phone cameras were more convenient than that. With those the camera was roughly in the middle, and you could hold the phone in a way that felt less awkward.
OTOH, the thing that killed cameras for me was the ergonomics of getting the pictures off the camera and backed up online. You either needed to remove the memory card from the camera, make sure you had a USB to memory card adapter, plug it into a computer, drag the files somewhere, etc. then wait for that to complete, and remember to put the memory card back into the camera.
For a short while, the cameras claimed to have WiFi, but it wasn’t like you could just connect them to your home router and let the camera connect to the Internet and upload the photos. No, the camera created its own WiFi hotspot and you had to connect your laptop or something to that hotspot and transfer the files that way.
To me, the killer feature of phone cameras (aside from always being in my pocket) was that to back up the pictures I’d taken I had to… do nothing. I’d get home, use my phone as normal, and within half an hour, the photos were already online and backed up.