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ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood

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Re: ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood

#331

Post by InCityDreams »

TaylorAlexander wrote: post #168
xeckr wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are suggesting that police regularly invent false positives for ShotSpotter. Is there any evidence to support this? This would seem like something that would easily show up on an audit.

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…

Chicago: heyjackass.com

Re: ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood

#332

Post by pwillia7 »

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…

You still need oversight and discussion about over policing of communities and how to keep them safe while not violating the constitution, even though obviously those are where the most gun shots are.

Unless you're the police then you just do whatever you feel -- I'm scared! Should we get another tank?

Re: ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood

#333

Post by 392 »

llm_trw wrote: post #130
brikym wrote: post #121

I have some noisy neighbours and I've thought of the same idea for controlling noise in neighbourhoods. You could have a microphone on every lamp post and send people fines for violating the rules.

I've been having a nightmarish time trying to track down intermittent low frequency industrial noise. It's over the EPA regulations, it's neighborhood wide, and it is on for 2 hours between 11pm and 1am on random days. The EPA did monitoring of the house and site but couldn't pinpoint where it was coming from because of how low frequency it was. This isn't surveillance, this is the equivalent of finding who is dumpin…

Buy a whole load of the same model voice recorder, label them with tape for location, spread them out and record till batteries die, pull data to PC, repeat until get a sample? Someone above mentioned microsecond accurate clocks on raspberry pi being used for TDOA.

Re: ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood

#334

Post by micromacrofoot »

Aurornis wrote: post #73
bombcar wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> high crime rates rapidly crush property values as everyone wants to leave those areas

it's a nitpick, but I think it's the reverse... property values don't appreciate as quickly in these areas, in this current market if you told millennials that gun violence lowered house values they'd probably fire off a few shots themselves

Re: ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood

#335

Post by wl »

Communitivity wrote: post #312

Several of us are noting the less than 5% success rate in finding definitive evidence of shots fired, and calling the tech a failure. I disagree, because of the importance of preventing active shooters. With this kind of system you are going to want to lean toward false positives vs false negatives. There is definitely a lot of room for improvement though. Improvement could come through better ML use/training, better…

Several people are misinterpreting a Chicago Inspector General report that examined call disposition records on ShotSpotter alerts and found approximately 10% were coded with dispositions indicating a firearms offense. The misinterpretation is conflating this with a false positive rate of 90%, never mind that the police are disincentivized to thoroughly search for shell casings rather than just moving on to the next call if there are no victims, shooters, witnesses, or any other obvious evidence of a shooting on scene. It implies, at best, a rough lower bound on the false positive rate.

Additionally, the author of this article is claiming the police in Albuquerque have suggested to him that when they send forensics teams to the site of detected shootings, they "find definitive evidence of actual shots fired in less than five percent of cases." This would be at least twice as bad as the rough lower bound suggested by the Chicago Inspector General report and seems way out of line with other experiences I've heard.

Re: ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood

#336

Post by micromacrofoot »

chasd00 wrote: post #79

In Dallas I hear the pop-pop-pop of gunfire virtually every night in my oakcliff neighborhood. Even when the Cowboys score a touchdown you hear gunfire. The police have basically given up.

And this is a right people want to defend to the death? I just don't understand it

Re: ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood

#337

Post by verteu »

Retric wrote: post #329
verteu wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, in New Bedford, the "conversation" was not admitted into court [1]. Oakland is the "one" case I mentioned [2]. Do you have a source for the Connecticut case? [1] "New Bedford utilized ShotSpotter, and the following was recorded by the gunfire detection system: “‘Oh my God! You're crazy!’ and then ‘Jason don‘t!’ several times, followed by a number of gunshots. After the gunshots, a female was heard yelling ‘You .…

That's what I get from faulty memory. However, evidence is still being used even when it's not directly brought up in court. "In the 2015 Massachusetts case, the court refused to allow the introduction of ShotSpotter audio after the defendant argued the audio was captured and obtained in violation of that state’s wiretap laws. Police in that case requested and received an extended audio clip from the company that cap…

edit: Good point, I agree that parallel construction is an important concern, especially since there's so little transparency in police investigations. One possible solution is to force them to limit the duration recorded to only a few seconds. (I previously thought that's how ShotSpotter worked. Turns out they've kept days of audio before, apparently for "debugging purposes.")

> Drug crime is known to be fairly evenly distributed across different incomes, arrests are extremely biased.

Keep in mind that the reverse is true for gun crime, where low-income minority communities suffer from the lowest clearance rates.

Re: ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood

#338

Post by jakelazaroff »

splintercell wrote: post #293
jakelazaroff wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fu…

Read the thread again; the comment I responded to literally asked if there was a difference in rates of drug dealing between white people and Black people.

Re: ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood

#339

Post by jakelazaroff »

boxed wrote: post #289
jakelazaroff wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The difference being that they convinced doctors to hand this stuff out like candy. It was all legal . Which is why it got that bad in the first place.

Right, which is why it’s asinine to talk about “crime rate” as though it weren’t wholly dependent on whom we as a society want to call criminals.

Re: ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood

#340

Post by aaron695 »

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...

You can listen to the ShotSpotter audio from that incident here - https://www.chicagocopa.org/case/2024-0002095/

I see nothing wrong done by ShotSpotter.

It accurately reported the location of a noise that sounded like gunfire.

What is timely about this?

Do you want the police to not investigate gunshots? I don't care about how they approached the scene, their training has nothing to do with ShotSpotter which is the discussion at hand.

Also fireworks are illegal to set off in Chicago so no legitimate activity was interrupted.

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