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ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood

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Re: ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood

#251

Post by soraminazuki »

modriano wrote: post #159
kortilla wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that’s not how shotspotter is supposed to work. It’s supposed to detect gunshots, not be used for evidence of voice recordings. If that was the point they could just put microphones recording everyone and play them back whenever there was a crime.

The voice recordings were only picked up because they were incident to shootings. Without the shooting, the audio wouldn't have been written out to file or ever be heard by anyone.

Says who? The people behind these invasive systems who push back hard on the slightest attempt at basic accountability?

Re: ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood

#252

Post by eBombzor »

Jcowell wrote: post #223
eBombzor wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cops made a big mistake but why is there some juvenile sitting in the dark, middle of the night, lighting up fireworks the moment the police start getting close. That's what I don't understand. There is some weird stuff going on in this story and the article jumping to conclusions isn't helping.

What lethal force is necessary when responding to a phenomenon that regular in mass occurs at least once a year in this country? Lightning up fire works is something I would expect a juvenile to do.

I like how all 3 replies ignored the part where I put in context "the moment police were getting close", as if to assume I was asking why fireworks were ignited at night in general. I saw the body cam footage, and the cops legitimately thought someone was shooting at them, because when they got close, they heard, what literally sounded like gunshots. Should they have just blind fired? Absolutely not, terrible training by those officers, but it's not hard to see why there would be some confusion.

Re: ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood

#253

Post by simonw »

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.

Or use the copy() function to copy it straight to your clipboard.

Re: ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood

#254

Post by [deleted] »

bilbo0s wrote: post #227
eBombzor wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cops made a big mistake but why is there some juvenile sitting in the dark, middle of the night, lighting up fireworks the moment the police start getting close. That's what I don't understand. There is some weird stuff going on in this story and the article jumping to conclusions isn't helping.

why is there some juvenile sitting in the dark, middle of the night, lighting up fireworks Huh? Genuinely confused by that question? When does anyone light fireworks? I've never seen them any time but at night.

[deleted]

Re: ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood

#255

Post by resolutebat »

jakelazaroff wrote: post #245
resolutebat wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Ah, so this is what you were so keen to steer the conversation to. Alas, despite the name, wage theft is not considered a criminal act (misdemeanor/felony) in most US states, so enforcement is left to the Department of Labor and the IRS, not police.

Now I'd agree with you that society should be putting more resources into combating this, but I'm still going to ask you to respond to my earlier question: for the hypothetical city with high-crime and low-crime halves, which should the police focus on?

Re: ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood

#256

Post by crtified »

ryukoposting wrote: post #191
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,…

> 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.

Yes and no. Intelligence (in the data sense of the word) can accrue usage patterns. You might not catch them that time, but you know where they'll be next time. What routes they travel. Where to focus.

If it's a live event, the police officer is not having to stand there fruitlessly questioning a witness about which direction the offender hooned off in 5 minutes ago - the system is already telling them, by tracking the relevant data.

It's a form of telemetry.

And it's also quite a disturbing (to use an overused phrase!, but which I hope is justified here) slippery slope.

Re: ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood

#257

Post by twoWhlsGud »

whatwhaaaaat wrote: post #44
defrost wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's an interesting control system feedback complaint with a lot to it; * historically there's been a lot of "black crime" in the US due to the US police watching black neighbourhoods excessively and being absent elsewhere .. take this all the way back in time to Tulsa and before. * Subsequently there's been a lot of "black crime" as neighbourhoods have been destroyed by occasional mobs (Tulsa), frequent division…

[flagged]

I lived in Menlo Park for a number of years in the late 80s and early 90s - in group house a few blocks away from the border with East Palo Alto. At the time, East PA was poor and had a massively underfunded police department. This resulted in drug dealers realizing the city was a great place to deal from - as the probability they'd get caught was really low. In 1992, East PA had the US's highest per capita murder rate. (We'd hear small arms fire many nights and I remember listening to the radio and hearing a BBC reporter calling in a report from less than a mile away from my house (talking from a phone booth in the since demolished Whiskey Gulch neighborhood) - talking about a war zone like atmosphere with dealers openly carrying Uzi's.) Anyway, in spite of all this nothing ever happened on our street. We walked around without any fear of crime at all. Correlation isn't causation, but it's hard to shake an impression that having an actual police department had something to do with that. Incentives matter and culture tends to follow if they change hard enough.

Re: ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood

#258

Post by Tabular-Iceberg »

I don’t understand the pearl clutching over what parts of town these sensors get concentrated in. Wouldn’t it just be wasteful to put them in areas where people don’t have the habit of shooting each other? Is it really overpolicing when those who do are made to face the consequences?

Re: ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood

#259

Post by hcfman »

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…

I developed a TDOA based sound localization system for the Raspberry Pi

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

and with manual input you can greatly improve the accuracy from what an automatic system could do due to noise and signal degradation. However it’s very time consuming. The service level response would not be met if doing this on many cases I’m sure. Meaning the default accuracy of localization is likely to be a bunch less accurate than what it could be in theory.

What is absolutely needed is to start a validation process. Start legal proceedings to force the disclosure of co-ordinates and exact event time information as recorded by each recorder so the math can be checked. My software will provide that side.

Re: ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood

#260

Post by whatshisface »

BriggyDwiggs42 wrote: post #155
fargle wrote: post #145

i broadly agree with the sentiment in this article, especially the "no public oversight" part. but this: > The reader can probably infer how this coverage pattern relates to race and class in Albuquerque. It's not perfect, but the distance from your house to a ShotSpotter sensor correlates fairly well with your household income. is facetious and is almost certainly argued in bad faith. well, duh . the distance to the…

Actually this is a direct example of how systemic racism works. The goal isn’t to surveil minorities more, it’s just that the system watches places where crimes occur. Consider that, when an area has more surveillance, more people who commit crimes are caught. All of a sudden, you’re disproportionately catching minority criminals. Better put in more surveillance to cover the higher crime rates in those minority commu…

>Consider that, when an area has more surveillance, more people who commit crimes are caught. All of a sudden, you’re disproportionately catching minority criminals.

Turn the coin over to the other side - you're catching criminals victimizing minorities. Nothing is simple, is it.

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