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ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood

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Re: ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood

#171

Post by dmoy »

jcrawfordor wrote: post #125
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…

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 departmen…

> less than five percent of cases

Wow that's even worse than what I had read from reports about the deployment in Chicago (which I read up on when Seattle was considering it). I think the value was like 10%.

Chicago also ditched it recently I think.

Re: ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood

#172

Post by IceHegel »

This phrase "systemic overpolicing" and ShotSpotter both come from the same mind - the mind of the state.

The state - which like most organizations is concerned mostly with preserving itself - has an interest in the surveillance of the population and in shifting blame from it's failures to deal with poverty and crime to skapegoats: the police, racism, property taxes, etc.

The west is run by priests (professors, advisors, journalists, students, diplomats) with the support of the merchants. Priests always pretend it is flipped, but it's not. One "tell" is that the priests are never the villains in Hollywood movies. The other groups (warriors, merchants, and peasants) all do even villain duty.

Bias shot-spotter placement is a classic case of priests blaming merchants. There might even be something to the substance, but the priests run the show - not SoundThinking Inc.

Re: ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood

#174

Post by smt88 »

whimsicalism wrote: post #142
mandevil wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shotspotter is trash. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/chicago-watchdog-harshly... https://twitter.com/greg_doucette/status/1512138327205589004 (criminal defense attorney) https://boingboing.net/2022/04/12/shotspotter-wastes-million... I supported units with them while I was a contractor to the US Army, and the soldiers I talked to didn't think much of it either.

It works very well where I live (DC) and I and people I know have seen police respond to actual things with shotspotter Many shootings where nobody calls it in and cops respond with shotspotter

How would you know no one called it in?

Also ShotSpotter has false positives. You have no way of knowing if you (or it) even heard a gun or one of many other things.

Re: ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood

#175

Post by bombcar »

prophesi wrote: post #140
torstenvl wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Gotcha! The comment parent of mine makes a lot more sense now.

Exactly. If it had been drug crime, I’d be totally prepared to believe everyone in a rich area is coked beyond reason and gets away with it.

But gun crimes are different (unless they’re saying something like “possession” but in most states that’s some variation of legal unless a felon).

Re: ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood

#176

Post by AvocadoPanic »

leumon wrote: post #134

Things like ShotSpotter are only fighting the symptoms. As an european I find it ridiculus to hear that such thing even exists. Why would we not simply ban the guns themselves?

The criminal element largely responsible for gun crime would criminally ignore the ban. They're already shooting people.

The US shares a 3,145 kilometer long border with Mexico, unfortunately there are at best 1,044 km of border 'barriers' in place. People, guns, money and drugs are smuggled across the border daily.

Re: ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood

#177

Post by smt88 »

User23 wrote: post #74
curtisblaine wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you were to design a system to spot a certain kind of crime in real time, would you place it in zones historically more plagued by that kind of crime or in zones that experienced it scarcely? It's hard to buy into the rhetoric of "it's only fair if you monitor the crime equally" if you have already independently sampled it for decades and by now know the zones where it's much likely to happen. Would you patrol a d…

The problem is Bayesian priors look an awful lot like racism to the unaided eye, enough so that it's really hard to justify them. Or maybe it's racism masquerading as a Bayesian prior. I don't see how to know for sure either way.

Also if such devices (and law enforcement) worked well to reduce crime, the crime would move to less-surveilled areas. We don't see that happening anywhere.

Re: ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood

#178

Post by [deleted] »

torstenvl wrote: post #115
wonnage wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[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.

[deleted]

Re: ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood

#179

Post by verteu »

Retric wrote: post #165
verteu wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There are multiple conversations from shot spotter admitted into court. New Bedford, Connecticut and Oakland had court cases off the top of my head, but a much wider range of conversation ends up being listened to by police and parallel construction is a thing. Further, the concern is unequal policing biases statistics resulting in more uneven policing. A grid of microphones covering a full city is unbiased, placemen…

No, in New Bedford, the "conversation" was not admitted into court [1]. Oakland is the "one" case I mentioned [2]. Do you have a source for the Connecticut case?

[1] "New Bedford utilized ShotSpotter, and the following was recorded by the gunfire detection system: “‘Oh my God! You're crazy!’ and then ‘Jason don‘t!’ several times, followed by a number of gunshots. After the gunshots, a female was heard yelling ‘You . . . missed and they shot him!’ ‘You're going to jail!”’. A motion to suppress this evidence was granted in Denison’s case, as the judge ruled that the ShotSpotter recording violated the Massachusetts Wiretap Act" https://readingroom.law.gsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=...

[2] https://casetext.com/case/people-v-johnson-5116

Re: ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood

#180

Post by aspenmayer »

lucubratory wrote: post #153
aspenmayer wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Person of Interest is a criminally underrated show.

Feels pretty incredibly prescient in the current era, hey.

Considering the scale, depth, and breadth of Palantir usage in Ukraine these days, I would be inclined to agree.

https://time.com/6691662/ai-ukraine-war-palantir/

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