271–280 of 443 posts
I had no idea ShotSpotter was recording conversations, always assumed the nature of analyzing for a sound signature would be throwing much of the data away immediately
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…
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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 l…
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It sounds like shotspotters are likely to be near where shots are; and that the wealthier you are the more likely you’d NOT want to be where the shots are.
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…
The notion that poverty causes crime rather than crime causes poverty is a great disservice to the poor.
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?
I have nothing in principle against a society that completely bans guns, but are you prepared to strike enough terror into the population that breaking the law and getting guns anyway becomes unthinkable?
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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 o…
Regarding the court cases, I literally included the entire linked info for one of those Court cases in the post you're responding to. For both of the cases, the verbal exchange was at the same time as the shooting. In the other case, the victim verbally identifies the person about to murder them just before they were murdered. The argument that shotspotter is a wiretap falls apart under the slightest bit of scrutiny and there's no way the legislature meant to protect the right of people to be free from audio recording while shooting someone in public.
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Previously done a lot of research into firearm and explosive acoustics (and the DSP to locate and categorise) and can say this is a _hard_ problem. Military versions for use in wide open spaces have a much better chance than in urban areas. Less than five percent seems unlikely, but I wouldn't be surprised to hear "less than half the time".
Categorisation will certainly be error prone as there is so much similarity because fireworks and gunshots. The main difference I expect is the speed of the shockwave resulting in steeper spectrograms for gunshots. However, a steep spectrogram is essentially showing a large amount of high as well as low frequencies. The higher frequencies degrade very quickly over distance reducing the difference of a gunshot from a…
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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 o…
Have there been any breaches where less-honorable actors have managed to hack into sensors and exfiltrate data? Have there been any breaches of the actual recordings of shootings?
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 tha…
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…
Previously done a lot of research into firearm and explosive acoustics (and the DSP to locate and categorise) and can say this is a _hard_ problem. Military versions for use in wide open spaces have a much better chance than in urban areas. Less than five percent seems unlikely, but I wouldn't be surprised to hear "less than half the time".