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ShotSpotter requests to be held in contempt rather than disclose its methodology

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Re: ShotSpotter requests to be held in contempt rather than disclose its methodology

#101

Post by xbar »

daenz wrote: post #68
solardev wrote: post #5

(Not the OP) For background, this is the company that supposedly locates gunshot sounds in cities (and sometimes battlefields) by microphone triangulation. It doesn't work all that well and is selectively deployed in minority areas and is used by police to selectively enforce crimes, sometimes also altering the evidence. Vice did a few articles on them and the company tried to sue but had it tossed out. Shady all aro…

Top article on that vice link: >In Chicago, a government watchdog says Shotspotter alerts have only led to evidence of gun crime in 9 percent of cases. >fewer than 2 in 10 investigatory stops following ShotSpotter alerts resulted in the recovery of a gun 9% actually seems like a lot? Considering that most criminals don't stick around after illegally discharging a firearm. And 1 in 5 resulting in the recovery in a gun…

80% of all stops and searches are unfounded.

I would not want to live in a community so policed.

Re: ShotSpotter requests to be held in contempt rather than disclose its methodology

#102

Post by gitfan86 »

alasdair_ wrote: post #69
nickysielicki wrote: post #33

I don’t understand the argument here. Suppose shotspotter is deeply flawed and often confuses fireworks and car backfires for gunshots, how could that have any impact on this case or the legality of it? I don’t see it as any different than if a police officer is out patrolling, hears a car backfire, and confuses it for a gunshot. If he then detains someone as a part of his investigation and discovers some other crime…

Imagine I made a magic "crime detection" box that called the police each time a crime was "detected". Now imagine all it did was randomly pick a number from 1 to 100 each day and if it were a 1 or a 2, it "detected" a crime, giving probable cause to police to search people near the box. Now imagine I almost exclusively put the boxes in areas where black people without a lot of money lived. You could see this would be…

Imagine if there were 100 gun murders in a city in one year and you had a magic box that was 100% accurate at detection of location of gun shots within 1 mile and the city could only afford to buy 10 magic boxes.

Would you put those magic boxes near where previous gun crimes have been committed or would you put those boxes in places based on the race and sexual orientation and disability status and gender of the people living in the city?

Re: ShotSpotter requests to be held in contempt rather than disclose its methodology

#103

Post by trs8080 »

nickysielicki wrote: post #55
solardev wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dunno if this company deserves that benefit of the doubt. Honestly, given their history, they probably just don't want to reveal that their entire business is snake oil, basically existing solely to make money by enabling law enforcement to create crimes out of thin air. If their science was sound they wouldn't have to resort to such tactics...

Why are you so skeptical of their technology? Look how accurate raspberry pi powered ADSB plane tracking networks are — and that’s a much harder problem: they have no funding, they’re doing triangulation at the speed of light, and they’re doing it without GPS clock sources. You could also point to the lightning tracker networks that work in roughly the same way. Given a few million dollars to outfit their nodes with…

"[Office of Inspector General] Finds That ShotSpotter Alerts Rarely Lead to Evidence of a Gun-Related Crime and That Presence of the Technology Changes Police Behavior"

- https://igchicago.org/2021/08/24/oig-finds-that-shotspotter-...

"Police watchdogs in Chicago have issued a report about the city’s use of ShotSpotter’s acoustic gunshot detection system, finding that only 9 percent of ShotSpotter alerts led to evidence of gun crime."

- https://www.vice.com/en/article/5db8vk/police-are-using-guns...

"Court documents recently reviewed by VICE have revealed that ShotSpotter, a company that makes and sells audio gunshot detection to cities and police departments, may not be as accurate or reliable as the company claims. In fact, the documents reveal that employees at ShotSpotter may be altering alerts generated by the technology in order to justify arrests and buttress prosecutors’ cases."

"And according to the testimony of a ShotSpotter employee and expert witness in court documents reviewed by VICE, claims about the accuracy of the classification come from the marketing department of the company—not from engineers."

- https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/07/its-time-police-stop-u...

Re: ShotSpotter requests to be held in contempt rather than disclose its methodology

#104

Post by tracerbulletx »

beckingz wrote: post #65
matt_heimer wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So can't you just do that? Install the system and then drive a calibration car that emits sounds and logs gps coordinates?

Map every city in the US and world? Now that's a lot of work.

Could just do it for the areas that sign up for the system if it worked.

Re: ShotSpotter requests to be held in contempt rather than disclose its methodology

#105

Post by kmeisthax »

jschveibinz wrote: post #80

I would like to post a slightly different angle to the discussion. Assumption: the majority of commenters are working in technology fields, and perhaps even technology startups. Let’s say that you have developed some software product that works pretty well for certain applications, but is certainly not perfect. But it works well enough that your customers are paying you to use your product. Now, your customers decide…

If the law hinges upon how your secret algorithm works then it should not be a secret. I'd rather have my secret sauce cloned by China[0] than live under Maoism[1].

This sounds unfair to you, but sometimes the fair solution creates more injustice than it solves. This is the same reason why we have the EPA Superfund program. Love Canal might not have been the polluter's fault[2] but the "fair" alternative was to let everyone sit in court while they and their kids die from toxic waste.

[0] tbh the biggest problem with Chinese IP theft is that they don't share their plunder

[1] At least I'm assuming "keeping the law secret" is something Mao did, I might just be being an ignorant American

[2] If I remember correctly New York State or the county government actually threatened to use eminent domain to force the polluter to sell the toxic waste dump to them.

Re: ShotSpotter requests to be held in contempt rather than disclose its methodology

#106

Post by Vecr »

anewpersonality wrote: post #11

The US should mandate every gunshot be accompanied by a loud ultrasonic tone that can easily identify the occurrence to any recording device. The tone could eventually be modulated with the guns serial number.

How would that work anyway? It's not something someone would notice you disabling when you go to the range, unlike full auto/DIAS conversions and short barrels where someone might notice, you literally can't notice unless you have an ultrasonic detector. Are there going to be ATF agents hanging out at ranges trying to see loose wires hanging out of people's guns or guns that don't produce ultrasonic noises when fired? I assume that's not going to happen. Anyway, it's not legal to ban guns without the ultrasonic speakers anyway, because there's no way the military is going to have ones that can't be turned of on their guns. No historical precedent for anything like that either, and ~all of current guns don't have ultrasonic speakers on them, so the Heller "common use" thing is there as well.

Re: ShotSpotter requests to be held in contempt rather than disclose its methodology

#107

Post by jjeaff »

dmix wrote: post #83
PuppyTailWags wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, I genuinely think most people don't intend ill. The most nasty, abusive people I know simply believe that they are in the moral right. In fact, believing that being morally right justifies their behavior is the biggest sign to me of a dangerous person, not a person who knowingly thinks evil things.

The only question then is whether the police biased these installations in minority neighborhoods without connecting it to high amounts of shootings, which could easily be proven with data. That's the sort of thing that would be useful in court if it's true. Are local police required to publish where they are deploying ShotSpotters? Shootings and racial demographic data is certainly already public. I've read the enti…

You seem to imply that intent is all that matters. But the law and history regarding discrimination in the US is more nuanced.

For example, perhaps literacy tests in order to vote in the Jim Crow south were purely based out of concern that only informed voters should be able to vote. Assuming they were applied evenly to both whites and minorities (they weren't), one could draw the conclusion that even though most of the people prohibited from voting were minorities, the intent wasn't racist.

But that's not how most racism works.

Re: ShotSpotter requests to be held in contempt rather than disclose its methodology

#108

Post by lamontcg »

pseudo0 wrote: post #8
public_defender wrote: post #2

This is an audio surveillance company which sells itself to cities as a gunshot detection system. Based on how they appear to be acting in court, it would be reasonable to assume that either: (1) Their methodology is about to be debunked, or; (2) It's about to be revealed that they were working with police to allow them to manufacture reasons to arrest people.

Would results of discovery be public record? If so, I could also see: 3) They don't want their "secret sauce" made publicly available. That would both open them up to commercial competition, and make their product less reliable in court, as anti-Shotspotter experts would start figuring out how to effectively argue against the product's methodology. In general I think technology like this should have to be fully trans…

> and make their product less reliable in court, as anti-Shotspotter experts would start figuring out how to effectively argue against the product's methodology.

If their methodology has weaknesses which allow those arguments, then its kind of a travesty of justice not to allow them.

Re: ShotSpotter requests to be held in contempt rather than disclose its methodology

#109

Post by daenz »

xbar wrote: post #101
daenz wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Top article on that vice link: >In Chicago, a government watchdog says Shotspotter alerts have only led to evidence of gun crime in 9 percent of cases. >fewer than 2 in 10 investigatory stops following ShotSpotter alerts resulted in the recovery of a gun 9% actually seems like a lot? Considering that most criminals don't stick around after illegally discharging a firearm. And 1 in 5 resulting in the recovery in a gun…

80% of all stops and searches are unfounded. I would not want to live in a community so policed.

I wouldn't want to live in a community with 50,176 gunshot alerts either.

Re: ShotSpotter requests to be held in contempt rather than disclose its methodology

#110

Post by jjeaff »

Animats wrote: post #77

Strange. Probably the embarrassing parts relate to the after the fact reclassification of reports after the fact by Shotspotter employees. The first system was in Redwood City, CA. I once went to a talk by the designer. They had leased analog audio lines to each microphone. At the microphone end, they had something like a logarithmic amplifier, which traded dynamic range for frequency response. The idea is that you d…

My guess is that they don't want to reveal their methods because they are still crude and obvious.
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