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ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood

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Re: ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood

#191

Post by ryukoposting »

crtified wrote: post #22

I can't help but think how easily such a system - which is hardly sophisticated, in technical principle - could be used to pinpoint things that are 'problematic' in my neighbourhood. Loutish vehicle behaviour of various kinds. The loud Harley Davidson and dirt-bike signatures associated with the comings-and-goings of local gang members. Squealing tyres of deliberate burn-outs on the road. The occasional fool loudly b…

Some of the illegal things you listed aren't things that benefit much from a hastily dispatched response. If you want to catch people on cars or dirt bikes driving down the street, you kinda have to already be there. Also, a couple of the things you listed are nuisances, but not illegal activity in their own right.

ShotSpotters don't repel crime, let alone prevent it. They're intentionally covert, as shown in the OP, which gives credence to the notion that they aren't intended to deter criminal activity from the surrounding area. If anything, repelling/deterring crime would defeat the purpose of the technology.

At best, ShotSpotter merely detects crime, and its effectiveness in that capacity is kept a secret. The world of police tech is a knee-deep in snake oil. A bit of transparency would go a long way for ShotSpotter.

Re: ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood

#193

Post by xeckr »

TaylorAlexander wrote: post #168
xeckr wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sourcing this for you, I see that there has indeed been a great deal of rigorous investigation, reporting, and lawsuits regarding the ways ShotSpotter leads to overpolicing, though I had misremembered one thing - the false detections come from the system itself, though this does also lead police to perceive areas as more dangerous and then patrol them more often, leading to measured increases in stop and frisk pat do…

The summary here seems to be that no, police do not regularly invent false positives for ShotSpotter.

Regarding:

1) How do you know you are dealing with a false alarm? Given the seriousness of gun violence, isn't it perfectly reasonable to send someone to investigate the situation rather than to ignore it?

2 and 3) Isn't it also the case that black neighbourhoods in Chicago have the highest gun violence and murder rate? What else would you expect from ShotSpotter other than for it to confirm that those neighbourhoods are indeed the ones with the most shots fired?

Re: ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood

#194

Post by fasthands9 »

zemo wrote: post #81
fasthands9 wrote: post #25

Earlier 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

> It just says a signal if there is a loud noise in public. as a community we really ought to be suspicious of claims like this. There's another word for "acoustic sensor" and it's "microphone". When a corporation says "trust us, we only use the data for good", we should collectively raise our eyebrows, knowing that when data is collected for one stated purpose and stored, that the data at rest will always be used fo…

Being skeptical of face value claims makes sense if they have never been used before. But, they've been in place in some cities since before 2000 and after searching I'm still not aware of any incident audio from it was used that didn't have to do with a gunshot.

Looking into it more all the cases of audio being used in court, that was not audio of gunshots, was audio immediately after a gunshot. Spotshotter is open about recording that and it seems completely reasonable to me this audio should be used.

What's most boggling to me about the criticism is Albuquerque apparently has 10,000 cameras law enforcement has access to. I know we likely disagree on the usefulness of those, but if you are privacy concerned why would shotspotter even be on the same level of concern as cameras that don't need a gunshot to start filming?

https://apnews.com/article/albuquerque-crime-cameras-technol...

Re: ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood

#195

Post by bliteben »

dmoy wrote: post #171
jcrawfordor wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I mean brass can be crazy hard to find, I'd bet if you did a geocaching experiment with brass picking a random spot within shotspotter's accuracy tolerances, you'd find the casing less than 50% of the time. Add in an hourly employee that is in no way motivated to find the casing and you'd prob drop to 10%.

Re: ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood

#196

Post by resolutebat »

dmoy wrote: post #171
jcrawfordor wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"Definitive evidence of shots fired" is a higher bar than shots actually being fired. I agree it's still very low though, especially since it means that at least 95% of the time responding to the call was a complete waste of time (= even if shots were fired, there was no evidence of crime).

Re: ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood

#197

Post by Aurornis »

kstenerud wrote: post #148
Aurornis wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Putting surveillance for gun crime in areas with the highest rates of gun crime is obviously what’s happening. I think the author and some commenters are nervous about claims that gun crime is inversely correlated with neighborhood wealth, which creates some of these strange accusations that some other bias is at play. If you pull up a map of crime in most cities the inverse correlation with home prices is obvious. I…

> Putting surveillance for gun crime in areas with the highest rates of gun crime is obviously what’s happening. This is in fact the crux of the problem. By significantly increasing monitoring of areas with higher crime rates, you inadvertently create a vicious cycle feedback loop: The more you monitor an area, the more samples you get, biasing the stats (because your sampling is no longer uniform). Then these stats…

> The more you monitor an area, the more samples you get, biasing the stats

So by monitoring an area with high crime rate, you catch more crime, which results in more policing for the area with a confirmed high crime rate?

And that's a bad thing?

Re: ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood

#198

Post by hamburglar »

modriano wrote: post #170
refulgentis wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't intricate or Rube Goldberg. When I joined Google I started thinking to myself "geez, we care so much. why does HN hate us?" It clicked for me when someone pointed out that even if you trust group of employees X with a mountain of data, nothing prevents group of Y from eventually selling it. And after what I saw my last couple years, I'm utterly convinced some McKinsey-ite will be telling 2050's CEO that's…

These devices don't send audio over the network unless a shooting-like noise is detected. I get it, if the state can listen to all of our communications that are immediately coincident with shootings, what privacy will any of us have? But in all seriousness, you should actually read the section for that court case. Here's all of the text for that case from the link: """ Commonwealth v. Denison, No. BRCR2012-0029 (Mas…

> These devices don't send audio over the network unless a shooting-like noise is detected.

How does this jibe with the fact that the police can apparently request a ShotSpotter operator review of audio recordings for up to 30 days if a known shooting is missed by the system? How does this jibe with the fact that the system has apparently at least twice recorded voice conversations that were used (and thrown out in one case due to violating wiretap laws) in court cases?

Edit and even if we trust ShotSpotter to do the right thing, how do we know their systems are secure enough to keep those recordings away from less-honorable actors?

Re: ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood

#199

Post by jakelazaroff »

thereisnospork wrote: post #167
jakelazaroff wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you pull up a map of crime in most cities the inverse correlation with home prices is obvious. If the police department spends the majority of its resources on certain areas, it will respond to the majority of incidents and make the majority of arrests in those areas. You can truthfully say "look, these numbers are higher than anywhere else!" but that doesn't necessarily mean there's more crime happening there —…

>With regard to the article, why is it obvious that police are putting surveillance in areas with the highest rates of gun crime? Because there are nicer neighborhoods and less than nice neighborhoods? In so far as I can tell this is true to various degrees in every place I've ever lived or visited. Colloquially, some neighborhoods have manicured lawns, other neighborhoods have cars on blocks - it's 'obvious'[0] that…

It’s actually incredibly unclear why houses with cars on blocks would warrant more policing than houses with manicured lawns. Why don’t you elaborate?

Re: ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood

#200

Post by w0z_ »

xeckr wrote: post #80
cratermoon wrote: post #69

It's used the way police use any technology: to over-police the poor and non-white communities. https://www.cnn.com/2024/02/24/us/shotspotter-cities-choose-...

How is it "overpolicing" if those communities truly experience more gun violence than others?

You can't fight a radical with logic.
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