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ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood

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Re: ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood

#291

Post by 392 »

Fnoord wrote: post #285
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…

Do you know how it communicates with ECC? Can it be MITMed? Would it report if you were playing Counterstrike outside with speakers on? What if you were listening to some gangster rap with shots in it? Or just a Raspberry Pi with a speaker on with gunshot? It seems to me something like this can in theory DoS the ECC.

All of these are much more complicated and expensive than just sending someone off in a stolen car to fire some shots wherever you'd like the cops to be in 20 minutes or so. Convenient leash.

Re: ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood

#292

Post by philwelch »

bliteben wrote: post #195
dmoy wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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%.

And that’s assuming ideal conditions. Criminals don’t always leave their brass lying around if they can avoid it, after all.

Re: ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood

#293

Post by splintercell »

jakelazaroff wrote: post #240
pillusmany wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are the rates of drug dealing the same through?

Let me put it this way. The biggest drug epidemic of this century was the opioid crisis. Half a million Americans died. The primary people responsible are white billionaires, and we know exactly who they are — yet they were never even arrested.

This is whataboutism.

Some sort of system which detects prescription abuse should not be deployed over utility poles in low income neighborhoods. It should be deployed where abuse is happening, for instance in pharmacy computers etc.

Also "white billionaire" part is low key racist against blacks. They are "incidentally" whites billionaire criminals, they can as well be black billionaire criminals, unless there's a fundamental difference in criminal tendencies among races.

Re: ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood

#294

Post by 8organicbits »

sbierwagen wrote: post #261
9935c101ab17a66 wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Cops are Bayesian reasoners. If you set off fireworks inside the White House, right now, would you be surprised to suddenly meet the acquaintance of many armed men? Fireworks don't often go off in the Oval Office. Loud banging noises are therefore assumed to be gunfire, not fireworks. If you set off fireworks on the South Pole on July 4th, would you meet police? No, and for two reasons: July 4th is a well known day f…

s/meet police/get shot and killed by police/g

It's reasonable for cops to investigate loud noises, but killing unarmed children is wrong every day of the year.

Re: ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood

#295

Post by RussBrown00 »

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…

So this might be true for things like increased patrols for drug crimes as an example, but this doesn't apply to shootings. Shootings get reported no matter where they are. When someone shoots a gun in a wealthy part of town, it's not going unreported... Shot spotter simply allows for an instant report instead of having to wait for a phone call. Wealthy areas aren't getting away with more shootings just because of less patrols.

Re: ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood

#296

Post by philwelch »

ryandrake wrote: post #203
Aurornis wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

That’s an oversimplification.

First of all, unless you’re completely overwhelmed and not even bothering to enforce certain laws, you’re going to find out about most of the serious crime that takes place. Law enforcement is made aware of homicides either through missing persons reports or the discovery of dead bodies. Armed robberies and grand theft are usually reported if, for no other reason, than to create a paper trail for insurance claims. People who get shot or stabbed badly enough to end up in a hospital, end up in a hospital so there’s a reporting mechanism there. It’s not normal for most major crimes to happen completely outside of the attention of law enforcement unless things have gone very very wrong (which admittedly they have in many American cities). And much of the time, you can infer where these crimes happened.

The benefit of increasing patrols and surveillance in a specific area is more about gathering evidence to solve crimes, and less about discovering those crimes to begin with. In some cases you might end up discovering more crime (especially when gangs are involved and people are intimidated into not reporting crimes) but if you monitor areas where any serious crime would already get reported in the first place, you won’t actually find more serious crime there.

Re: ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood

#297

Post by splintercell »

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…

Everything you say, is an attempt to make people look elsewhere, but at the obvious place.

Your point is that crime is spread in a manner, unrelated to where society think crime happens, that there is no correlation between crime and poverty of a neighborhood, and that most likely an inverse relationship between race and crime?

Oh, and according to you, one important way to arrive at your conclusion is to change our definition of crime.

Re: ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood

#298

Post by splintercell »

smt88 wrote: post #174
whimsicalism wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It works very well where I live (DC) and I and people I know have seen police respond to actual things with shotspotter Many shootings where nobody calls it in and cops respond with shotspotter

How would you know no one called it in? Also ShotSpotter has false positives. You have no way of knowing if you (or it) even heard a gun or one of many other things.

What's the problem with false positives in this case?

I'm pretty sure, "don't bother with this technology which reports shots to the cops, because it has false positives" is a very weak argument.

Re: ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood

#299

Post by philwelch »

Blahah wrote: post #189
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 'obvious'[0] that the latter warrants more policing. Is it? I don't see it as at all obvious. It seems utterly ridiculous to me to increase policing in sync with socioeconomic deprivation. The blindingly obvious thing is to invest in solving the problems that cause the disparity, not to criminalize people who are living in poverty.

Crime is one of the problems that causes the disparity.

Re: ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood

#300

Post by lo0dot0 »

throwaway9917 wrote: post #248
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 tha…

Is wiretapping public spaces on the scale of a city even constitutional in the USA?
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