ShotSpotter requests to be held in contempt rather than disclose its methodology • Hacker News Board

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

#121

Post by calvinmorrison » Thu, Jul 28, 2022, 2:32 AM UTC

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.

But ShotSpotter doesn't do stop and searches. If police are using this to justify searches, thats between the courts and police, not shotspotter

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

#122

Post by googlryas » Thu, Jul 28, 2022, 2:32 AM UTC

trs8080 wrote: post #74

googlryas wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but if a city that is predominantly black, whose government is predominantly black, decides to use shot spotter, it would be silly to claim that it is being deployed in minority areas in order to oppress minorities.

You win! The commenter made a grave semantic mistake by not adding "in the US" to "minority" and now their comment is completely meaningless and without merit.

OP's comment implied that it is a tool used by the majority(whites) to deploy in minority(black) areas, in order to oppress them.

I provided an example of basically the blackest city in America deploying it within their own city. Why did they deploy a tool of oppression on themselves?

It seems you were very distracted that I pointed out that whites are a minority within Jackson MS, but that was really just an offhand comment and not the point of the post.

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

#123

Post by googlryas » Thu, Jul 28, 2022, 2:34 AM UTC

flurben wrote: post #78

googlryas wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but if a city that is predominantly black, whose government is predominantly black, decides to use shot spotter, it would be silly to claim that it is being deployed in minority areas in order to oppress minorities.

As someone who has lived in majority-black towns in the south most of my life, those words are simply not used in the way you are using them. Blacks in the south are universally considered a minority, even in those geographies where they are actually the demographic majority.

Sure, and that wasn't the point of my post. My point is that black people who run the government that governs over an almost entirely black population still choose to use shot spotter.

Surely there is some merit there that is not merely keeping minorities down, or maybe all the black people running the government just secretly hate blacks.

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

#124

Post by fastball » Thu, Jul 28, 2022, 2:35 AM UTC

solardev wrote: post #36

pledess wrote: post #24

It's plausible that ShotSpotter's main motivation is that there isn't much benefit (e.g., increased sales) to complying with the defense's request, but the costs could be huge, both for collecting the requested information in the required manner, and for the ramifications if they cannot produce information that the court believed they should have been able to produce. Discovery can be extremely expensive even when th…

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...

How can law enforcement use this technology to create crimes out of thin air?

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

#125

Post by TedShiller » Thu, Jul 28, 2022, 2:35 AM UTC

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…

> selectively deployed in minority areas

I don’t think police is deploying this based on skin color

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

#126

Post by pxmpxm » Thu, Jul 28, 2022, 2:35 AM UTC

randyrand wrote: post #98

> selectively deployed in minority areas God this phrasing gets so annoying. If white neighborhood residents were being murdered in their streets, you really don’t think they’d put these devices there? Residents would be itching for them! It’s about catching murders - putting these devices in places with the most gun violence. Having police catch murderers is something we all want - rich neighborhoods included - and…

No post body was provided.

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

#127

Post by jahewson » Thu, Jul 28, 2022, 2:36 AM UTC

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…

No, these numbers are meaningless without a null hypothesis to compare them to. If you stop random people in the monitored areas, at the right time of day, how many guns do you find?

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

#128

Post by gpm » Thu, Jul 28, 2022, 2:36 AM UTC

llanowarelves wrote: post #84

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…

If true, selective enforcement is bad. But some minority demographics commit disproportionate (edit: violent) crime per capita so you expect some proportional scaling (more crime = more need for crime detection) if they happen to live in cities/areas where that's the case. (Usually big cities)

> Usually big cities

I'm surprised to see this is somewhat true in the US. In Canada rural crime rates are higher than urban ones, but that trend doesn't seem to hold for the US (per sources below)

Of course extrapolating from "average crime rate" to "location of hotspots" might be suspect in both cases...

Stats Canada: https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/85-002-x/2019001/article...

Bloomberg article with some nice graphs, and really good links to sources (at the end of it) - the text focuses on NYC but the second line chart in particular (based off of linked CDC data) does a good job of answering this question: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-06-07/is-new...

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

#129

Post by public_defender » Thu, Jul 28, 2022, 2:37 AM UTC

calvinmorrison wrote: post #121

xbar wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

But ShotSpotter doesn't do stop and searches. If police are using this to justify searches, thats between the courts and police, not shotspotter

The issue is that ShotSpotter may be profiting by giving police an excuse to search people when they would not otherwise have sufficient legal grounds.

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

#130

Post by nickysielicki » Thu, Jul 28, 2022, 2:38 AM UTC

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…

I would have a problem with that, but I don’t think that’s what’s going on here.

My gut feeling is that shotspotter mostly works and is mostly accurate, regardless of what Vice reported. I can imagine how I’d build such a system and I don’t think it would be very complicated. You don’t need any powerful signal processing or AI, this entire idea was feasible 20 years ago.

And secondly, I think that if any technology is rolled out by a city in a way that’s discriminatory, that falls squarely on the city and their police department, not on the technology company that sold it to them.