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ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood

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Re: ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood

#201

Post by TaylorAlexander »

xeckr wrote: post #193
TaylorAlexander wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ra…

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

Right. That was the part I referred to as misremembering in my above comment. The false alarms come from the system itself, not necessarily police lying about it. However the reports from multiple sources do say that false alarms occur at an alarming rate, and this leads to over policing.

I wanted to provide a citation for the article's claims of over policing, and I believe I have done so (the ACLU article has multiple high quality sources clearly linked in the first few paragraphs).

Your comment mentioned that shotspotter leading to a high police presence is "obviously a good thing" and that if you lived there, you would want this too. But if the residents were happy with what was happening, there would be no controversy. The problem with over policing is that it leads to unfair treatment of marginalized communities, and this is what people are unhappy about.

It seems like you are trying to reason away these concerns, or get me to answer your follow on questions, but I am not an expert here, just someone who remembered seeing articles about issues with the system. I would encourage you to review those sources and check their methodology regarding false positive detection rates, and seek additional information about over policing.

Re: ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood

#202

Post by User23 »

smt88 wrote: post #177
User23 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I didn't realize that there's a conservation law for crime. Is this some kind of ingenious application of Noether's theorem that I haven't heard of?

Re: ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood

#203

Post by ryandrake »

Aurornis wrote: post #197
kstenerud wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

By monitoring any area more, you find more crime, which results in that area being considered as "high crime" and in turn increasing monitoring--that's the cycle OP is talking about.

Re: ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood

#204

Post by resolutebat »

thereisnospork wrote: post #166
kstenerud wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 point is supposed to be that the monitoring and increased policing makes at least certain crimes impossible therefore improving the area for the rest of us. The farce is the utter failure of the 'survalience state' to actually catch and prosecute people.

Perhaps in the US. Some surveillance states like Singapore and China are quite effective at catching criminals (thoughtcrime and otherwise).

Re: ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood

#205

Post by resolutebat »

jakelazaroff wrote: post #199
thereisnospork wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 un clear why houses with cars on blocks would warrant more policing than houses with manicured lawns. Why don’t you elaborate?

"Incredibly unclear"? Really? Not the OP, but let's spell it out:

Manicuring a lawn is expensive and serves no useful purpose, so most practitioners have disposable income and/or spare time, and care about keeping up appearances.

Putting a car up on blocks implies it's being used for spare parts, which is generally not something the well-off need to engage in (they buy new and use professionals for repairs as needed), and having one on your front lawn in particular implies that you value spare parts more than appearances.

So both are reasonable proxies of wealth, and wealth correlates inversely with the kind of violent crime you could detect with gunshots.

Re: ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood

#206

Post by ryandrake »

jakelazaroff wrote: post #199
thereisnospork wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 un clear why houses with cars on blocks would warrant more policing than houses with manicured lawns. Why don’t you elaborate?

What seems more obvious to me is that the more surveillance you do in any area (regardless of whether the lawns are manicured), the more crime you're going to find there. If you put 5 cops patrolling the wealthiest, nicest areas of your city, and 1 cop patrolling a less wealthy less nice area, the 5 cops will find more crime than the 1 cop. Even if you don't assume crime is uniformly distributed (which it probably isn't), it's logical that more surveillance -> more crime found.

Re: ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood

#207

Post by jakelazaroff »

resolutebat wrote: post #205
jakelazaroff wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

"Incredibly unclear"? Really? Not the OP, but let's spell it out: Manicuring a lawn is expensive and serves no useful purpose, so most practitioners have disposable income and/or spare time, and care about keeping up appearances. Putting a car up on blocks implies it's being used for spare parts, which is generally not something the well-off need to engage in (they buy new and use professionals for repairs as needed)…

The reason it’s unclear is that nothing either of you have said has anything to do with policing.

Edit: you added the correlation bit after I replied, but why do you believe that to be the case? If you have more police in an area, of course they’ll hear more gunshots there. That doesn’t necessarily mean there actually are more gunshots.

What you’re actually saying is “poor people need more policing”, which is A) offensive and B) counterproductive.

Re: ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood

#208

Post by jakelazaroff »

ryandrake wrote: post #206
jakelazaroff wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What seems more obvious to me is that the more surveillance you do in any area (regardless of whether the lawns are manicured), the more crime you're going to find there. If you put 5 cops patrolling the wealthiest, nicest areas of your city, and 1 cop patrolling a less wealthy less nice area, the 5 cops will find more crime than the 1 cop. Even if you don't assume crime is uniformly distributed (which it probably is…

Yeah, that’s the original point I made which is currently being downvoted.

Re: ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood

#209

Post by pizzafeelsright »

dudus wrote: post #136
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?

Americans love guns more than freedom.

Guns maintain freedom.

Re: ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood

#210

Post by prophesi »

blatherard wrote: post #164
prophesi wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

An even simpler option to get the data, at least in firefox, is to open the console, enter `window._Flourish_data` then right-click the result and select "Copy Object" which will put the json in your paste buffer and you can then paste it into a file.

This is when HN is at its peak. Duly noted!
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