I have some noisy neighbours and I've thought of the same idea for controlling noise in neighbourhoods. You could have a microphone on every lamp post and send people fines for violating the rules.
ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood
121–130 of 443 posts
Re: ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
That's the point. Believing the things that would have to be true for GGGP's viewpoint to be even plausible, let alone true, requires a complete divorce from reality.
Re: ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood
#123>Many assumed that ShotSpotter coverage was concentrated in disadvantaged parts of the city, an unsurprising outcome but one that could contribute to systemic overpolicing. The author presents this as a negative but it is obviously a good thing. If there was an increase in gunfire in my neighbourhood I would hope that police increases their presence, lest the "disadvantages" begin to accumulate.
Your argument assumes that the devices are only used as marketed. My understanding is that this assumption doesn’t hold, and that police regularly use these systems as an excuse to harass people in poor neighborhoods. The reports I have read suggest that police will enter a neighborhood they want to patrol, and if they see someone they don’t like they can claim they were called in by shotspotter, then shake down the…
You are suggesting that police regularly invent false positives for ShotSpotter. Is there any evidence to support this? This would seem like something that would easily show up on an audit.
Re: ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood
#124> It's not perfect, but the distance from your house to a ShotSpotter sensor correlates fairly well with your household income. The wealthier you are, the less surveilled you are. To give ABQ police the benefit of the doubt, that pattern could also be compatible with more gun crime equaling more surveillance. It would be nice to have enough gun crime and sensor location data to see how true that is. When the sensors…
This is just another example of how American Police budgets have gotten out of hand. A budget that allows for a municipal police force to install 721 "AI powered" recording devices. That are purchased from a publicly traded company, and deployed in areas guaranteed to funnel people into the for profit privatized prison system.
What a wonderful use of tax dollars. Protecting and serving the path to a better society.
Re: ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood
#125Hello 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…
Let me follow up, and maybe I should write this up on CAB but I don't really want to get too much into police reform there, what I know factually about the ShotSpotter system. Most of this comes from discussions with APD leadership and officers in the context of the police oversight role I used to hold, and they are very much limited in what they can say. Some of this is specific to APD SOP and other police departments may vary in their approach.
Some sort of software analysis performed by SoundThinking identifies a possible gunshot. The audio recordings are sent to a human analyst, a SoundThinking employee, who reviews the recording and enters an assessment of what it contains (e.g. if it is gunfire, and how many rounds). If the analyst confirms the report, an alert is sent as a text message (I believe in an app they furnish) to staff in APD's dispatch center, called the Emergency Communications Center (ECC). The contract includes an SLA on this process of I think 1 or 2 minutes, but I was told that they routinely performed as well as 30 seconds. Some APD personnel, I think usually area commanders but it may have been all field division sergeants, also receive the alerts on their phones.
The ECC dispatches the call as a priority 2. P2 is high enough that a ShotSpotter report will "bump" most calls for service except for a caller on the line violent crime in progress. When the officers arrive at the reported location, they make a brief assessment and search the area for suspects or victims. If no suspects or victims are found, a Crime Scene Technician is dispatched (often later as they will wait for daylight) to search the area for evidence such as spent shell casings.
My recollection is that I was told they were able to find definitive evidence of actual shots fired in less than five percent of cases, but take that with a grain of salt as I do not believe it was ever put in writing (I don't think they're allowed to by their contract) and I could be remembering wrong. However, it's believable that the accuracy of the system is higher than that suggests, as Albuquerque has a lot of wide open spaces that are difficult to search thoroughly if the ShotSpotter location estimate is at all inaccurate.
I was told that, when the system was tested by firing blanks, it was not completely effective but that they were satisfied with how effective it was. I was never given a number and I think they had been very specifically prohibited from discussing the testing in detail when they coordinated it with SoundThinking.
One of the major criticisms of the ShotSpotter system in Albuquerque is that it results in a relatively large volume of P2 calls that delay police response to most other calls for service. During the worst of the understaffing, I was told that some officers in high-crime areas like the International District spent a large portion of their total shift following up on ShotSpotter activations while there were multiple P3 calls queued. This has probably improved as staffing levels have increased, but in my mind it is the greatest single concern about the system.
SoundThinking's evasiveness, refusal of independent research, and clear motive to sell their product creates an alarming possibility that they are deceiving police leadership and elected officials into overprioritizing ShotSpotter. It may be a waste of money, which is already a problem, but the much greater concern is that police departments are putting off responding to nonviolent crimes in progress to go to ShotSpotter reports instead, because they have been told by SoundThinking that the accuracy rate of the system is very high.
Re: ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood
#126If anyone wants the raw data, it's available in window._Flourish_data variable on https://flo.uri.sh/visualisation/16818696/embed Which means you can extract it with my https://shot-scraper.datasette.io/ tool like this: shot-scraper javascript \ 'https://flo.uri.sh/visualisation/16818696/embed' _Flourish_data \ > /tmp/data.json That's a 25MB file. I loaded it into SQLite like this: cat /tmp/data.json | jq .events | \…
Thanks! And alternatively you can create an anchor element in the console with `href` set as a JSON stringified representation of `window._Flourish_data`. Then set a download attribute with the filename you'd like, and simulate a click to download it.
To use it in leaflet, you'll need to iterate over the `events` array and change `lon` to `lng` before adding each point to the leaflet map.
Re: ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
Chicago is letting the ShotSpotter contract expire instead renewing this year after the data revealed that it did not have any positive effect on crime reduction. https://www.yahoo.com/news/chicago-not-renew-shotspotter-con...
I think that's because our police force is incompetent though. Shotspotter may very well suck but if the police cant solve shit either way its not shotspotters fault. Murder has a 5% clearance rate here
It's true. They only have an 8% success rate on closing homocide cases. It is the lowest in the country by several points.
Re: ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm curious if the author lives in the wealthier or non wealthy region. I do not own a gun. I currently live in a city and would be happy to learn they were installing shot spotter near me. It's maybe the least intrusive type of surveillance there is. It just says a signal if there is a loud noise in public. edit: previous statement not correct but leaving it up as it's been responded to
From the article: > Conversations recorded by ShotSpotter sensors have twice been introduced as evidence in criminal trials. In one case the court allowed it, in another the court did not. The possibility clearly exists, and depending on interpretation of state law, it may be permissible for ShotSpotter to record conversations on the street for future use as evidence.
Yeah, but the only reason anyone listened to those sections (or was even able to listen to these sections) of tape was because they contained shootings. These systems work on a rolling buffer storage system; they're constantly recording to a buffer that contains the last N minutes of audio and if a triggering event occurs, it gets written out to a file that is reviewed by a person and if it contains a gunshot, that person confirms there was a gunshot (ie that it wasn't a firework or something) and a notification goes out to the relevant police district/precinct/whatever for that area. If there's just people talking but no gunshots, the buffer never writes out and it's overwritten before too long.
Re: ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood
#129Wait what this is real? I thought it was just a plot point invented for Person of Interest
84 metro areas in the US are covered by Shotspotter. It is very real.
Re: ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood
#130I have some noisy neighbours and I've thought of the same idea for controlling noise in neighbourhoods. You could have a microphone on every lamp post and send people fines for violating the rules.
I've been having a nightmarish time trying to track down intermittent low frequency industrial noise.
It's over the EPA regulations, it's neighborhood wide, and it is on for 2 hours between 11pm and 1am on random days. The EPA did monitoring of the house and site but couldn't pinpoint where it was coming from because of how low frequency it was.
This isn't surveillance, this is the equivalent of finding who is dumping raw sewage in your drinking water.