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ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood

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Re: ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood

#431

Post by WalterBright »

jakelazaroff wrote: post #353
WalterBright wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is the murder rate easy to measure? Yes. The medical examiner decides if a death is homicide or not. > result in hundreds of deaths each year Lacks context - the number of homicides in the same year. > How many of those would be considered murder in other states? They're still considered homicide. > Police killed over 1,300 people last year That figure is for all deaths where police were involved. A subset of that…

None of this addresses my point. You can measure dead bodies. Whether or not those get counted in the murder rate depends on social factors — are police honestly investigating themselves? are there laws that exculpate killing humans? etc Arizona has a bill in the works that would make it legal to kill people trespassing anywhere on one’s land, intended to allow farmers with large plots of land to shoot migrants. The…

You'd have a point if you compared the number of edge cases with the total number of homicides, and those edge cases are enough to swing the results.

But I doubt there are enough.

Re: ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood

#432

Post by pontifier »

hcfman wrote: post #250

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 m…

This is fantastic! I have been thinking about building something like this myself. I'm definitely going to deploy this in my area. I hear gunshots almost every weekend. Heard 2 sets of gunfire about an hour ago.

Re: ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood

#433

Post by reducesuffering »

pontifier wrote: post #432
hcfman wrote: post #250

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 m…

This is fantastic! I have been thinking about building something like this myself. I'm definitely going to deploy this in my area. I hear gunshots almost every weekend. Heard 2 sets of gunfire about an hour ago.

Please get out of Pine Bluff and sell your properties for whatever you can recoup. You are putting yourself into way too much danger for a father of 3. There is a very real chance you will die by your constant confrontations with thieves there. It's not worth it. Years later you don't have progress on any business there. It's not the place to be for you.

Re: ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood

#434

Post by ragazzina »

w0z_ wrote: post #399
ragazzina wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>the cops legitimately thought someone was shooting at them But cops always "legitimately" think someone is shooting at them. Have you heard of the acorn incident?

Forty-seven officers were shot and killed in the line of duty in 2023. That's about 1 a week.

Is that a lot? More than one unarmed person per week is killed by the police in the US.

Re: ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood

#435

Post by kstenerud »

RussBrown00 wrote: post #295
kstenerud wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 le…

As per the article, they're also using the microphones to record private conversations.

> Conversations recorded by ShotSpotter sensors have twice been introduced as evidence in criminal trials. In one case the court allowed it, in another the court did not.

Even in cases where they're not used at trial, they're still used to generate suspicion. I don't know if you've ever had cops on your ass, but it's super stressful, and can impact your job (because they start harassing you at work and you get fired). Depending on how much of a dick the cop is, he may just arrest you for shit and giggles, and now you have an arrest record that fucks up all sorts of things in your life (he's got qualified immunity so what does he care).

This basically amounts to pervasive harassment of a community, and the more surveillance there is, the worse it gets, the less the locals will trust or cooperate with police, the more "us vs them" it gets between citizens and police, the more heavy-handed police response becomes, the less likely people are to solve their differences using the police, the more chaotic a community becomes. This is what oppression looks like.

Re: ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood

#436

Post by elendee »

9935c101ab17a66 wrote: post #246
sbierwagen wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

there is an unfortunate reality that in neighborhoods like mine, there is a culture of imitating gun shots. It's tangential to this tragic incident, but it's also an issue that I assume will only explode as it becomes "cool" to trigger shot spotters with your fireworks, cars, motorcycles. It's daily here in Brooklyn as soon as the temperature is above freezing

Re: ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood

#437

Post by dmoy »

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%.

Hah yea that's fair.

Though at the end of the day it doesn't really matter. The brass I mean. Finding brass or not finding brass doesn't exactly help catch or prosecute someone shooting a gun illegally. The whole point was to more quickly catch crimes in progress, and it doesn't seem like that's working.

Re: ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood

#438

Post by Spooky23 »

jstarfish wrote: post #422
Spooky23 wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or... 3. Cops use performative enforcement in poor neighborhoods because it yields metrics important to them with minimal effort. Poor neighborhoods are often demanding and crying out for enforcement of laws. Nobody wants to live next to a crackhouse, and the people forced to lack options to leave. In my city, there's a notorious drug house that has been in operation since I was in college in the 1990s. It has better…

> When the powers that be say "clean up that area", they round up stupid kids for bullshit, maybe hit up a few street dealers, etc. The actual hard work, say arresting street gang leadership or investigating property crimes isn't sexy and takes time. Shotspotter is useless (5% is at best par for the course for every intelligence appliance I've used myself) but your expectations are unrealistic. You're berating them f…

Half my family are police. It’s impossible to do the actual work. Half of them plan to retire at the minimum years of service and transition to private security to a fire department.

Writing tickets for blocking sidewalks is an overtime generating detail, not intelligence. It’s “objective” in the sense that everyone gets harassed, and thus safer than using discretion to do something potentially intelligent.

Re: ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood

#439

Post by mrguyorama »

w0z_ wrote: post #399
ragazzina wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>the cops legitimately thought someone was shooting at them But cops always "legitimately" think someone is shooting at them. Have you heard of the acorn incident?

Forty-seven officers were shot and killed in the line of duty in 2023. That's about 1 a week.

And way more than that die every year of automobile accidents, or fucking heart disease!

Re: ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood

#440

Post by Talanes »

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…

>because the defunded police don't respond to them

Police have been ignoring small property crime as a waste of their time for far longer than anyone has called for defunding them. I couldn't get small town police to do anything about my stolen bike that was tagged and visibly sitting outside the house of the guy who took it. Wasn't worth taking anyone off speed-trap duty.

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