No, this is not directly US politics, indirectly it is (sorry), but I thought that this warning was warranted since nearly all of you US guys have been talking about going to one or both of those stores regularly and maybe you know people that might be targeted by ICE.
Stay safe you guys!
I’ll try to stay away from the politics of it because that’s a V1 convention.
The HD near me has one of those video surveillance in a trailer things in the parking lot. It annoys me and is one of several reasons I have gone there less and less frequently. It also rearranged the checkouts to have only a pool of self checkouts and on the other side of the store a double pro desk set of staff attended checkouts. Difficult to have any human help. Also the orange jackets are less and less helpful. Very annoying.
In a bit of humor and as close as I’ll get to the politics: I have a surname that classifies me as a target group even though I have ancestry that was here centuries to millennia before any Europeans showed up. On one side of my family tree I can show at least 7 and likely at least 9 generations living in what today is Colorado. All legit citizens by birth, with extensive service including family members who have received service awards up to Purple Heart.
On a lark, I asked both my dad and my brother what they would do if I called them from Juarez (picturing a scene from the worse than B movie “born in east LA”).
Dad joked “never heard of ya” . Brother said “can I join you?”
Both sisters and my daughter got sad and said they’d try to come get me, but asked some version of “ you think they’d come get you for that maker stuff?” Hmm. Plenty to think about.
Wow. Dang A.I. they have proven A.I. is making BIG mistakes but yet still use it more and more and more! i have been traveling more for work with my new position! Want a wild read, looks up hertz A.I. scanners!!! Before you could get away with certain size scratches, etc. A.I. charged a guy $450 for a 1/16 scratch on a wheel. And the big thing is they are doing NO CONTEST on a.i. if it was a bad read, you cannot challenge it!
When I worked for Lowe’s we had one of those police trailers. Was there because customer cars kept getting broken into. There was a big homeless camp in the woods beside the store.
When i was at Depot they didn’t own or control the trailer cameras i was told they were in some high theft stores and accessed by the police when called to investigate but i was Not high on the totempole
Flock is a company that sells these automatic license plate readers and a lot of Colorado municipalities have stuck them up all over the major areas where you can switch highways. There has been one near our house for years. A Software Engineer in Boulder made a map where you can self report them:
It isn’t anything you couldn’t do if you employed a police officer on every corner. But these cameras make it a lot easier. I appreciate when they are used in Amber Alerts (kidnapping cases). But not free for all.
The cameras in parking lots seem less intrusive to me. Unless they are intentionally aiding ICE. My guess is they are mostly a detterent to theft.