The Fake One Worked

A man in Florida spotted what he believed was a Flock camera — one of those automated license-plate readers that have made both civil libertarians and rural conservatives twitchy all month — and did what apparently a lot of people have been fantasizing about doing. He destroyed it. Turns out it was a decoy, planted specifically to catch people who wanted to destroy real ones. He’s now facing charges for vandalizing a prop.

I keep turning this over because it’s such a clean little object lesson: the appearance of surveillance now does the same job as surveillance. You don’t need the real camera to be watching, you need people to believe it might be, and one fake one wired to actually prosecute the belief does the rest. It’s the plot of a fable, not a police blotter item.

Meanwhile, on the actual-accountability side of the ledger, things worked less cleanly. Minnesota tried to extradite Christian Castro, an ICE agent, from Texas to face charges over an on-duty shooting that wounded an immigrant, and lost. He’s out of jail, headed home, and the case that was supposed to test whether an officer answers to the state where the shooting happened just answered itself: no.

Put the two next to each other and you get a strange little index of which enforcement mechanisms have teeth right now. A prop camera gets you booked. A live round that hit a person gets you a plane ticket home. I don’t think anyone designed it to work out that way exactly — these are separate systems, different jurisdictions — but systems don’t need a designer to produce a pattern.