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ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood

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Re: ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood

#241

Post by resolutebat »

jakelazaroff wrote: post #217
resolutebat wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? Let's imagine a city divided in two halves of equal population. West City is poor and has a high crime rate, East City is rich and has a low crime rate. Should police resources be allocated equally to both? How about public health facilities or welfare payments?

In the real world, wealth is relatively easily measured and crime rate is not. The question no one seems to be willing to answer is: why do you believe poor people commit more crime?

It's not a matter of belief, there's a well known link between poverty and crime.

The ultimate reason is that if you are poor, the proceeds of crime (theft, burglary, robbery etc) are comparatively more meaningful than to somebody who is wealthy, while the cost of getting caught is comparatively less. A rich professional does not steal loaves of bread to feed their family, because they don't need to and they risk losing their entire livelihood if they do. If you're poor, unemployed and your kids are hungry, the risk/reward calculus is very different.

Re: ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood

#242

Post by sbierwagen »

chasd00 wrote: post #185
grugagag wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are people shooting blanks?

No just random gunfire. People in their cars shooting in the air and then speeding off. They’re definitely not shooting at people otherwise it would be national news every night. I think the local police have resorted to a “just please aim in a safe direction” stance instead of trying to stop them. New years is especially annoying. Something like shotspotter wouldn’t work for this because by the time you get the info…

>otherwise it would be national news every night.

Well, Dallas had 246 murders last year. https://www.dallasnews.com/news/crime/2024/01/11/1-year-246-... That's a killing every other day, and obviously does not include nonfatal shootings.

While it is true that there is lots of death in the news, most murders are not newsworthy. For instance, did you know there were 21 school shootings in 2020? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_th...

Surprising, right? You certainly didn't hear about a shooting every other week that year. (Granted, 2020 was an unusual year, news wise.) But look at the descriptions of the shootings:

"A large group of men jumped a fence to gain access to Atascocita High Schools football field, when an argument escalated and a 19-year-old was killed.[503]". "At Sonora High School in downtown Sonora, a student named Eric Aguiar, 17, was shot and killed in the High School's parking lot.[507]". "A 20-year-old University of Alabama at Birmingham student was shot and killed in a campus parking lot outside the student center. Investigators believed the shooting occurred during an arranged meeting to sell headphones.[513]".

Parking lots, dangerous places!

Dallas could have a thousand murders a year, or five thousand, and you'd never hear about them-- if the murders were boring enough.

Re: ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood

#243

Post by WalterBright »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #228
WalterBright wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Seattle, the bank tellers are behind bulletproof glass. In the surrounding communities, there's no bulletproof glass. I don't think it's more police presence that causes banks to install the armor. More likely it's the lack of police presence that results in armored banks.

Uhm, I’ve only seen one bank in Seattle like that (in pioneer square), maybe there are more south Seattle? Definitely my Bank of America branch in Ballard doesn’t have bullet proof glass.

Capitol Hill.

Re: ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood

#244

Post by 9935c101ab17a66 »

verteu wrote: post #116
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.

I mean, yah, it makes sense the one they admitted was pertinent to the case? I don’t see how that context is meaningful.

I actually strongly disagree with you — the context doesn’t matter. We have a private quasi-law enforcement entity installing thousands of surveillance devices in American cities without any external oversight or knowledge of where they are installed. These surveillance devices that were pitched as tools to locate gun crimes all of a sudden record audio? And this quasi-law enforcement company with no oversight is storing that data and then furnishing it to the police?

We have no idea what’s recorded, we have no idea where these devices are, we have no idea who is listening to the recordings, we have no idea what access LEOs have to these recordings, we don’t know how they are stored, and we don’t know how long they are stored for. You’re seriously okay with a non-government entity operating like this?

Re: ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood

#245

Post by jakelazaroff »

resolutebat wrote: post #241
jakelazaroff wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the real world, wealth is relatively easily measured and crime rate is not. The question no one seems to be willing to answer is: why do you believe poor people commit more crime?

It's not a matter of belief, there's a well known link between poverty and crime. The ultimate reason is that if you are poor, the proceeds of crime (theft, burglary, robbery etc) are comparatively more meaningful than to somebody who is wealthy, while the cost of getting caught is comparatively less. A rich professional does not steal loaves of bread to feed their family, because they don't need to and they risk los…

The most costly form of theft — by far — is not burglary or robbery but wage theft. That is a crime overwhelmingly committed by rich professionals and rarely enforced. So if we really want to get serious about stopping theft, we should allocate much more resources to investigating businesses than putting beat cops on the street.

There’s not actually a well known link between poverty and crime in the way you imply. We’ve just decided that we only care about some people committing some crime some of the time.

Re: ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood

#246

Post by 9935c101ab17a66 »

sbierwagen wrote: post #224
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...

He was setting off fireworks on January 25? Is there a holiday on that day I'm not aware of?

Can I ask why you’re concerned about the legitimacy of the kids reasoning for setting off fireworks? Like, if he was shot and killed on a holiday, it’s not his fault, but it’s perfectly reasonable to be shot and killed by a police officer when a opaque surveillance system reports gunshots on non-holidays?

Re: ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood

#247

Post by WalterBright »

jakelazaroff wrote: post #217
resolutebat wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? Let's imagine a city divided in two halves of equal population. West City is poor and has a high crime rate, East City is rich and has a low crime rate. Should police resources be allocated equally to both? How about public health facilities or welfare payments?

In the real world, wealth is relatively easily measured and crime rate is not. The question no one seems to be willing to answer is: why do you believe poor people commit more crime?

Some crimes, like shoplifting, are hard to measure because it often goes unreported because the defunded police don't respond to them. But the murder rate is easy to measure.

When people put bars on their windows on the ground floor, it is not the police causing them to be willing to spend the money on that.

Crime can also cause poverty. For example, if the family breadwinner goes to jail, the family slips into poverty.

Re: ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood

#248

Post by throwaway9917 »

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…

The tone of your article makes me honestly, really angry. You know damn well that the reason the sensors are in those neighborhoods are because that's where people are getting shot.

You even talk about how a school where some little kid got shot has a sensor, as if it's some sort of punishment for the lower income people there. Perhaps it's because the police and the city government want to deter or solve murders that happen. The way your article is framed, the main concern is that low income or minority perpetrators of shootings might get caught and put in jail. The fact that minority or low income victims of major violent crime might have their assailants deterred or at least brought to justice does not even factor into your calculus.

Re: ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood

#249

Post by jakelazaroff »

WalterBright wrote: post #247
jakelazaroff wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the real world, wealth is relatively easily measured and crime rate is not. The question no one seems to be willing to answer is: why do you believe poor people commit more crime?

Some crimes, like shoplifting, are hard to measure because it often goes unreported because the defunded police don't respond to them. But the murder rate is easy to measure. When people put bars on their windows on the ground floor, it is not the police causing them to be willing to spend the money on that. Crime can also cause poverty. For example, if the family breadwinner goes to jail, the family slips into pover…

Is the murder rate easy to measure?

As best we can tell, “stand your ground” laws in states like Florida result in hundreds of deaths each year. How many of those would be considered murder in other states?

Police killed over 1,300 people last year. How many of those people truly posed an immediate danger to others, and how many were murdered by a trigger-happy cop who was not held accountable by his colleagues?

Crime, even serious crime like murder, is socially constructed. It’s not objective; society decides what’s illegal and who gets to do it anyway.

Re: ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood

#250

Post by hcfman »

I have a project for the Raspberry Pi that provides for sound localization via time difference of arrival (TDOA). In a similar manner I suppose as shotspotter.

There was a case recently in America where a grandfather was jailed for a significant part of a year based on a shotspotter localization and no other physical evidence such as gunshot residue.

If citizens in such areas run their own systems they would have a means to provide counter evidence to that provided by shotspotter. Currently they have no means to do that. Even the times of the shots they have to take shot spotters word for it.

Recordings by citizens themselves is an inherently safer approach because their sphere of influence is considerably smaller. Recordings are written to a separate partition on an SD card, it’s pretty simple to encrypt this partition as well if you like, I’ve done that.

For those who are interested each node can be made very cheaply. It will run on a Raspberry Pi zero with a 7 euro GPS. It can also run portably on batteries.

Here are relevant links:

https://github.com/hcfman/sbts-aru

https://hackaday.com/2023/12/30/localizing-fireworks-launche...

https://medium.com/@kim_94237/tdoa-sound-localization-with-t...

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