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ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood

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Re: ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood

#111

Post by aCoreyJ »

Amezarak wrote: post #82
aCoreyJ wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Big cities are pretty safe. For instance you more likely to be a victim of a crime in rural northern Wisconsin, like Barron County, than you are in Milwaukee. Don't let your narrative be shaped by stats that aren't proportional.

People say this but I'm skeptical. I regularly leave valuables in my car. My windows have never been broken. I've never had anything stolen. Nor do I know anyone who has. All the stores have free-to-use, unlocked public bathrooms. All the product is available on the shelf for anyone to grab. When I go on travel to more urban locations, that's not what I see. Unfortunately the urban blight is creeping closer every yea…

Double checking I think I'm wrong. I may have been thinking of some specific crime. But Milwaukee is specifically bad due to historical segregation issues. Anyway drug and addiction issues have hit rural issues really bad

Re: ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood

#112

Post by bombcar »

nkurz wrote: post #101
aCoreyJ wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Big cities are pretty safe. For instance you more likely to be a victim of a crime in rural northern Wisconsin, like Barron County, than you are in Milwaukee. Don't let your narrative be shaped by stats that aren't proportional.

I'm familiar enough with Barron County, WI to doubt this. I grew up in neighboring Rusk County and my mother spends about half her time in Cumberland. While there are some disturbing incidents of violent crime, very few people there would feel that are at high risk of being a crime victim. My quick attempt at searching suggests violent crime is 220/100K for Barron ( https://www.areavibes.com/barron-wi/crime/ ) versus…

Those could all be true and still the statement true.

For example if all crime in Barron county was entirely random as to selection of victim, and in Milwaukee it 100% only happened to poor blacks, then infinite crime in Milwaukee could never affect you unless you were poor and black, whereas Barron county could affect anyone.

But I suspect that there’s a sleight of hand on “crime” - people usually mean crime by force against another, but technically suicide by meth overdose is two or three crimes.

Re: ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood

#113

Post by wl »

mandevil wrote: post #97
wl wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re probably thinking of Boomerang, not ShotSpotter if you’re talking about military use.

Maybe? I thought it was the same system of microphones just mounted on a vehicle, maybe it was different. Anyway, they found it unhelpful. "Wouldn't even notice our own gun shots" and stuff like that.

Yeah, you’re thinking of Boomerang. ShotSpotter did some limited body-worn stuff for the military back in the day, but the vehicle mounted stuff is all Boomerang. Entirely different approaches (distributed microphones vs. a single microphone array at the expected target) done by different companies.

Re: ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood

#114

Post by ALittleLight »

I've also been blogging about ShotSpotter and review the evidence that the system is good or bad.

https://quickthoughts.substack.com/p/shotspotter-good-or-bad

There's a lot of evidence that ShotSpotter detects almost all gunshots and that's been validated by multiple third party groups. ShotSpotter also seems to alert to things that are either false positives (construction sounds, fireworks, etc) or are not useful.

Chicago IG says 9/10 times when officers respond to a ShotSpotter alert they find nothing. 1/10 times it leads to an arrest, but the arrest isn't always strictly related to the ShotSpotter event - e.g. police responding to an event stop a speeding car and discover drug paraphernalia or an unrelated gun.

Some cities, e.g. Atlanta, discontinued ShotSpotter over cost benefit concerns. From their analysis it seemed a better use of money to hire more officers than use ShotSpotter. Still, it's in use in 84 metro areas today.

Ultimately, I think it should be up to the local community. The individual community is the one who will most benefit (if it is beneficial) and suffer from increased police incursions.

Re: ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood

#115

Post by torstenvl »

wonnage wrote: post #63
torstenvl wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don't engage in ideological warfare, it's boring and against site guidelines. No reasonable person could look at any meaningful measure of violent crime rates and come to your conclusions.

[flagged]

You accept the standards you walk past. A community's values must be held by the community. If you only allow a few overworked moderators to maintain those values, then they aren't community values anymore, and the quality of HN will plummet.

Re: ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood

#116

Post by verteu »

jcrawfordor wrote: post #71

Hello all, occasionally I write what I consider "Albuquerque content" and I do not expect it to become broadly popular. This article is something I put together very quickly and it probably assumes a certain degree of familiarity with the political context around policing in Albuquerque (which either side will tell you is very contentious) and, more broadly, policing and civil justice. Even without the currently evol…

Why didn't you mention that the only "conversation" recorded by ShotSpotter admitted in court was a guy saying "[shooter's name], why did you shoot me!" two seconds after the sound of gunfire?

It seems an important piece of context if you are concerned about surveillance.

Re: ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood

#117

Post by jacurtis »

loteck wrote: post #102
Aurornis wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This system detects door slams and popped volleyballs just as well as it detects gun fire (which is to say, imperfectly on all counts). Sound classification moved far beyond what you’re claiming years ago. If you set the threshold at “imperfectly” then no system will ever meet your bar, because perfect is an unreasonable threshold. However, the claim that we’re unable to differentiate between gunshots and car doors…

Shotspotter falsely classifies popped volleyball as gunshot: https://www.wtol.com/article/news/local/false-shotspotter-al... Slamming doors: https://www.axios.com/2022/04/07/campaign-zero-against-shots... This list can go on. Jackhammer, nail gun, normal hammers. https://voiceofsandiego.org/2020/09/22/shotspotter-sensors-s...

Yes there are false positives. This is an alert system and doesn't have to be perfect. This is the difference between a sensor in a self-driving car and a sensor for something like Shotspotter.

If a self-driving car sensor has a 1% fail rate, then it is useless and would cause crashes and death. It couldn't be used.

But if shotspotter is 1% inaccurate, then it just sends police to a street corner where there is actually just road construction or a volleyball popped. The consequences are pretty low to nil.

Many people might not know this all calls have priorities in a policing system, they are not treated equal. So Shotspotter alerts are very low priority to officers. The same is true for home alarm systems. Home alarm systems trigger false alarms constantly. Police treat them as very low priority as a result. So if a 911 call comes in or an eyewitness reported shooting, or even a wreckless driver or suspected DUI, the police will treat that first. In fact if they are on the way to a shotspotter alert and encounter something else, they will stop for it.

This is to say, that the false positives aren't as important as everyone makes them out to be. If a false positive happens, it means that a cop that's sitting on a random street corner gets moved to a street corner where the false alarm from Shotspotter fired. There's not really any harm being done here.

Re: ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood

#118

Post by prophesi »

bombcar wrote: post #105
dmurray wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The police disproportionately focus on poor areas for drug possession / traffic offences / white collar crime" is an important criticism, and the kind of thing awareness of which leads to reform and fairness in policing. "There's just as much gun crime in rich areas as poor ones, but the police focus on the poor areas because of historical racism" is an extraordinary claim that should require extraordinary evidence,…

I guess you could believe that when rich people are murdered it is not reported and quietly hushed up, but when poor people are the full force of the state swings into action.

Hasn't that historically been the opposite? If a rich/white person is murdered, it's a headline-grabbing tragedy. Even serial killers are more likely to evade detection if their targets are minorities, though the reasons for that are more complicated than just systemic prejudice.

Re: ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood

#119

Post by reaperman »

sixothree wrote: post #60
incanus77 wrote: post #54

Timely, as a boy was shot at last week in Chicago while setting off fireworks that triggered a ShotSpotter alert: https://chicago.suntimes.com/crime/2024/02/27/chicago-police...

This is entirely grotesque. But the systematic deception is especially appalling.

ShotSpotter has (used to?) manually changed the location of detected gunfire to placate police who needed the evidence to point to their primary suspect.

Then they could go to court and say “this system showed the gunshots came from the suspect’s location”. But “the system” didn't show that, until ShotSpotter employees manually changed the data.

They spent a lot of effort hiding that as well.

Re: ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood

#120

Post by nkurz »

bombcar wrote: post #112
nkurz wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm familiar enough with Barron County, WI to doubt this. I grew up in neighboring Rusk County and my mother spends about half her time in Cumberland. While there are some disturbing incidents of violent crime, very few people there would feel that are at high risk of being a crime victim. My quick attempt at searching suggests violent crime is 220/100K for Barron ( https://www.areavibes.com/barron-wi/crime/ ) versus…

Those could all be true and still the statement true. For example if all crime in Barron county was entirely random as to selection of victim, and in Milwaukee it 100% only happened to poor blacks, then infinite crime in Milwaukee could never affect you unless you were poor and black, whereas Barron county could affect anyone. But I suspect that there’s a sleight of hand on “crime” - people usually mean crime by forc…

I agree it's possible with some definition of crime, and I'd be interested to see what that definition is. I also think there's an interesting effect where it's possible for there to be less of some kinds of crimes in "high crime areas" because people take greater precautions. I also agree with OP's comment that drug related problems in Northern Wisconsin have gotten much worse since I last lived there. Still, I'd like to see the stats rather than just the assertion.
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