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 evolving bribery scandal, the level of public trust in APD (and even the city council's confidence in APD) is very low. APD's transparency and accountability, or lack thereof, has been a common locus of the debate. On the other hand, another major issue has been APD's chronic understaffing, and APD contends that ShotSpotter and other elements of their real-time program help to close the gap that results from their limited personnel. With gun crime as one of the foremost issues in the city, whether you view APD positively or negatively, ShotSpotter is a big part of the discussion right now.
Historically, APD's use of pervasive surveillance technology has been a flashpoint in the debate. APD has live access to perhaps 3-4 thousand cameras across the city (they aren't very transparent about this and it depends on how far along the APS integration project is), they have used facial recognition against driver's license photos and other sources since 2014, they have installed ALPR throughout the city and recently expanded retention to one year, etc. This is all fed into the Real-Time Crime Center, which uses a data fusion product from a vendor called Genetec to provide sort of a futuristic point-and-click data system that combines ShotSpotter detections with video feeds with service call records etc. to produce sort of a dossier on any given person or location.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of things going on in city politics, especially with regard to crime and policing, and so the topic of surveillance has mostly fallen out of public attention.
Still, APD's refusal to say in any detail what parts of the city were covered by ShotSpotter has been one of the big ongoing frustrations, particularly among those who favor police reform. I mostly wrote this article to highlight that there is finally information on the matter available. The concerns about how distribution of sensors and, more broadly, use of surveillance technology impacts civil rights and quality of life in the city are mentioned mainly as an aside and I do not attempt to articulate the pros and cons. That would require a rather lengthy piece as the topic is complex, and currently the greater part of the controversy isn't even about the wisdom of deploying ShotSpotter, but rather over whether or not ShotSpotter even works (and, consequently, whether or not it's simply a waste of city money, at a rate of around $5 million).
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 departments may vary in their approach.
Some sort of software analysis performed by SoundThinking identifies a possible gunshot. The audio recordings are sent to a human analyst, a SoundThinking employee, who reviews the recording and enters an assessment of what it contains (e.g. if it is gunfire, and how many rounds). If the analyst confirms the report, an alert is sent as a text message (I believe in an app they furnish) to staff in APD's dispatch center, called the Emergency Communications Center (ECC). The contract includes an SLA on this process of I think 1 or 2 minutes, but I was told that they routinely performed as well as 30 seconds. Some APD personnel, I think usually area commanders but it may have been all field division sergeants, also receive the alerts on their phones.
The ECC dispatches the call as a priority 2. P2 is high enough that a ShotSpotter report will "bump" most calls for service except for a caller on the line violent crime in progress. When the officers arrive at the reported location, they make a brief assessment and search the area for suspects or victims. If no suspects or victims are found, a Crime Scene Technician is dispatched (often later as they will wait for daylight) to search the area for evidence such as spent shell casings.
My recollection is that I was told they were able to find definitive evidence of actual shots fired in less than five percent of cases, but take that with a grain of salt as I do not believe it was ever put in writing (I don't think they're allowed to by their contract) and I could be remembering wrong. However, it's believable that the accuracy of the system is higher than that suggests, as Albuquerque has a lot of wide open spaces that are difficult to search thoroughly if the ShotSpotter location estimate is at all inaccurate.
I was told that, when the system was tested by firing blanks, it was not completely effective but that they were satisfied with how effective it was. I was never given a number and I think they had been very specifically prohibited from discussing the testing in detail when they coordinated it with SoundThinking.
One of the major criticisms of the ShotSpotter system in Albuquerque is that it results in a relatively large volume of P2 calls that delay police response to most other calls for service. During the worst of the understaffing, I was told that some officers in high-crime areas like the International District spent a large portion of their total shift following up on ShotSpotter activations while there were multiple P3 calls queued. This has probably improved as staffing levels have increased, but in my mind it is the greatest single concern about the system.
SoundThinking's evasiveness, refusal of independent research, and clear motive to sell their product creates an alarming possibility that they are deceiving police leadership and elected officials into overprioritizing ShotSpotter. It may be a waste of money, which is already a problem, but the much greater concern is that police departments are putting off responding to nonviolent crimes in progress to go to ShotSpotter reports instead, because they have been told by SoundThinking that the accuracy rate of the system is very high.
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.
This looks awesome. I’ve been wondering if it would be practical/feasible to create something similar but portable, self-contained for quieter, „local” sounds, like for instance locating a termite-like bug(s?) that’s been terrorizing my sanity for years now hiding in wooden beams.
Yeah, for short close distances sound camera of phase difference of arrival localization is interesting.
I did wonder about finding mice. I connected an ultra-sonic microphone once and saw lots of squeaks that were probably mice. I suspect the accuracy is sufficient.
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 firework the more this degrades.
Not finding evidence is a different problem, it could be as simple as using a revolver rather than a semi-auto that ejects the cartridges.
In any case, it would be great to see independent testing of this problem by the sort of people in this forum and you can use the software I developed last year (https://github.com/hcfman/sbts-aru) to do so. That software sets the time on the Raspberry Pi to have less than 1 microsecond of error, which is more than enough for any validation efforts.
Nice work. PM me if you want to chat. Have you considered the
possibilities with oversampling and adding more channels- now there are
much cheaper 192kHz multi-chan ADCs on the market - these can be used
with MEMS arrays. Then you can play with phase information much more
freely.
The frustrating problem with people down voting without any
explanation is that simply ignoring the knowledge of experts and
hiding whatever has emotionally enraged you does not further the
discussion.
I think people don't "trust the experts" when they read the "experts" saying things like 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. The wealthier you are, the less surveilled you are.
This sets off the bs alarms to me. The author knows this is a gross distortion of the rationale and is playing dumb. So what else are they lying about?
1. Cops use enforcement on poor neighborhoods because they like to make their lives difficult and because they hate poor people
2. Cops use enforcement there because that's where the crimes take place
Explanation 2 is so obviously much more likely that I can't take the person that purports reason #1 without acknowledging the other explanation. They're playing dumb.
1) Why is this conversation happening in this subthread? What does this have to do with nonrandomstring's experience in doing similar work for the military?
2) Nothing in the passage you quoted insinuates anything about the reasoning for surveiling poor neighborhoods more than rich. It simply points out that this is a thing that is happening.
Earlier they said this:
> Many assumed that ShotSpotter coverage was concentrated in disadvantaged parts of the city, an unsurprising outcome but one that could contribute to systemic overpolicing.
It's unsurprising because that is where the crime tends to take place, but there's a valid concern raised that this is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I've read some highly political anti-police rants in the past few years, but this isn't one of them. The author barely makes their opinions known at all, and when they do they're very aware of the complexities.
So the bodies of people shot are seen more often in high police presence areas and just not found in other areas? That seem strange that it would be due to higher police presence. The fact that for non violent crimes the stats are skewed sound plausible but that seem less so for violent ones.
Higher enforcement of nonviolent crime leads to more strained relationships with the community leads to less cooperation with law enforcement leads to higher rates of all crime.
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 staying power than Walmart -- it's still there. What poor people in general resent to the point of riot about is systematic bullshit and abuse on the part of ineffective police.
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. The best documented examples are NYPD, where the worship of Excel sheets resulted in sweeps where the cops would issue appearance tickets for such offenses as "obstructing the public sidewalk" (ironically doing so, btw, when they are literally parking their personal vehicles on sidewalks for these big sweeps), than run through and make arrests for failure to appear a few months later.
Shotspotter in particular is stupid - it's just a way to blow Federal grant money. If as you say, the police "know where the crime is", why would they need microphones to tell them where gunshots go off? Presumable they patrol high risk areas and hear it themselves.
Police departments are paramilitary organizations. That means they need a military like level of accountability and discipline to function well, and the nature of modern governance is such that that is lacking. The Army doesn't tolerate drunken soliders runing amok, but police departments do. IMO the best way to address the issues of policing is to consolidate smaller departments into state or regional entities to both professionalize and reduce the chummy nature of what goes on.
> 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 for shaking down street kids for intelligence, then berating them for not taking down gang leaders? Lmao.
That's an impossible situation you've created. How about you demonstrate how policing should be done?
> why would they need microphones to tell them where gunshots go off?
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.
Of course number 2 is the reason. The author knows that too, it's obvious to the point of not needing mentioned. It doesn't change what they say though, the end result is that poorer people are more surveiled.
Ah. Not what I expected. And that's really why it ought to be
necessary to leave a comment in order to make a downvote.
I assumed someone was raising a technical objection to my claim that
acoustic location of transient sounds is "hard" - myself being the
"expert" having published on firearm signatures and machine listening.
But this is about the socio-politics in TFA. Okay.
The quote doesn't insinuate anything like what you claim it's insinuating. I don't believe you're intentionally distorting their intent, but I do think they you're reacting to other pieces you've read before in a similar genre rather than to the article and author at hand.
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%.
Here's a decent article because this happened in recent weeks (1). The numbers they cite there are 89% of alerts lead to no reports of gun crime and 86% lead to no crime reports at all.
All that being said, the metrics are horribly flawed because they assume police will actually investigate anything after dispatch and that the investigation will turn anything up. Believing that CPD is going to case a neighborhood looking for GSR and shell casings with a forensics team is a tall order. If there isn't someone bleeding out in the street there probably isn't going to be a police report filed.
And even that said - ShotSpotter is useless because it requires police to do their job to be useful. When Reddit is better at tracking gang violence than cops, no fancy audio forensics tool is going to help.
"Definitive evidence of shots fired" is a higher bar than shots actually being fired. I agree it's still very low though, especially since it means that at least 95% of the time responding to the call was a complete waste of time (= even if shots were fired, there was no evidence of crime).
My read is that they know it does work but they don’t want to continue to use it because statistically the “wrong” people are committing the crimes it’s tipping off.
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%.
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.
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.
I'm sure there are ways to make a gun shot sound without having an actual gun, too. If police responds every time within a few minutes, it's also very easy to find out which device/firework will do.
Depends on who's doing it. For career criminals, sure the stolen car and gun are probably easy. If it's anybody else, say some bored high school kids, then the speaker is probably a much easier option.
Yep. I guess using a gun didn't cross my mind as possession is illegal here in this part of Europe (unless you are licensed, screened, store it safely, etc etc).
Why didn't you mention that the only "conversation" recorded by ShotSpotter admitted in court was a guy saying "[shooter's name], why did you shoot me!" two seconds after the sound of gunfire?
It seems an important piece of context if you are concerned about surveillance.
There are multiple conversations from shot spotter admitted into court. New Bedford, Connecticut and Oakland had court cases off the top of my head, but a much wider range of conversation ends up being listened to by police and parallel construction is a thing.
Further, the concern is unequal policing biases statistics resulting in more uneven policing. A grid of microphones covering a full city is unbiased, placement based on past data isn't.
Drug crime is known to be fairly evenly distributed across different incomes, arrests are extremely biased.
ShotSpotter is recording conversations inside peoples homes and on the street. You can definitionally hear someone making a drug deal or talking about the joint their smoking etc.
I'm reasonably concerned that once recordings exist getting access to them is much easier, especially as police have already heard many conversations taken from these recordings.
Can you point to an example of a ShotSpotter sensor recording a conversation inside somebody's home? That seems unlikely given that these sensors are installed outdoors.
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 . . . missed and they shot him!’ ‘You're going to jail!”’. A motion to
suppress this evidence was granted in Denison’s case, as the judge ruled that the
ShotSpotter recording violated the Massachusetts Wiretap Act" https://readingroom.law.gsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=...
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 captured people discussing the shooting, including one calling out the defendant’s name."
In theory any evidence from those audio recordings is tainted and no longer admissible, therefore police should want to avoid listing to any of it. But... by not bringing it up in court police can use parallel construction to get around those issues.
Those "extended audio clip[s]" don't seem to be available anymore as a matter of policy after 2019, following an external privacy audit done by the Policing Project at NYU Law. It also seems that police don't have access to audio outside of gunshot incidents.
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.
Audio evidence is being used such as in the Massachusetts case.
PS: You are quoting my previous post not an edit: "Drug crime is known to be fairly evenly distributed across different incomes, arrests are extremely biased." is from further up the thread.
Are these things public microphones that pick up street conversations or are they specialized microphones without stored recordings? The capability of these things is the only important question, since if they can be used for mass surveillance we shouldn’t trust cops with them.
My guess would be that since they need to record a shot without knowing when it happens, and then forward the sound of the shot to an expert to confirm it was gunfire, they must have the capability to locally listen and record continuously, and we can hope that they only keep a few seconds of recording before/after the event.
that doesn't really change the fact that they have microphones that are capable of recording voices, they have storage of the recordings, and are able to retrieve recordings and are willing to provide them to the police.
Yes it is very important. Shotspotter is like a DVR. It's always "recording", but it is running on a very very short recording loop.
The detection of gunshots is based on an algorithm. When triggered, it saves a few seconds before the sound and several seconds afterward.
It is different than police just being able to pull up the recordings for a certain street corner from 2 weeks ago or even a day ago and listen in on people's conversations. The case in question came from a shotspotter recording gunshots, and the short clip also happened to include speech within it since it directly followed the sound of shots.
ShotSpotter's own public statements say that audio is retained for 30 hours, see e.g. https://www.soundthinking.com/faqs/shotspotter-privacy-faqs/. In the past they provided Albuquerque with a document that said 72 hours, but I believe they have been reducing that period over time. It may also depend on their specific contract with the law enforcement agency. Still, we know that they must retain recordings, because they do take requests from customers to reanalyze data that did not result in an alert.
For convenience, the most relevant text: "If the system misses a gunfire incident, police may contact the company to see if there is any audio or location evidence. In this case, only authorized ShotSpotter personnel with proper credentials can access sensor audio to search. Their search is limited to the 30- hour sensor storage timeframe."
ShotSpotter used to have significantly fewer privacy protections, and retention was indefinite early in the product's life. Fortunately, a combination of legal challenges and statutory privacy policies among their customers have lead to them significantly improving their privacy controls over time.
Is that, like provable though, thats my biggest issue. Cities are allowing a private company to mass deploy microphones all over (mostly lower income) areas and just _trusting_ them to not be keeping recordings.
How would we know if this is true? For instance, is the source code subject to independent review, with verifiable builds made from that source so that all deployments have to show matching hashes? Or is more of a pinky-swear kind of a thing? If so, is the pinky swear even documented somewhere?
I mean, yah, it makes sense the one they admitted was pertinent to the case? I don’t see how that context is meaningful.
I actually strongly disagree with you — the context doesn’t matter. We have a private quasi-law enforcement entity installing thousands of surveillance devices in American cities without any external oversight or knowledge of where they are installed. These surveillance devices that were pitched as tools to locate gun crimes all of a sudden record audio? And this quasi-law enforcement company with no oversight is storing that data and then furnishing it to the police?
We have no idea what’s recorded, we have no idea where these devices are, we have no idea who is listening to the recordings, we have no idea what access LEOs have to these recordings, we don’t know how they are stored, and we don’t know how long they are stored for. You’re seriously okay with a non-government entity operating like this?
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 that happen. The way your article is framed, the main concern is that low income or minority perpetrators of shootings might get caught and put in jail. The fact that minority or low income victims of major violent crime might have their assailants deterred or at least brought to justice does not even factor into your calculus.
Did we read the same article? The main concern is that millions are being pumped into a surveillance program of dubious efficacy with zero accountability and clear biases. Budget that could be allocated to social programs that have a dollar for dollar higher impact on reducing violent crime is instead going into the police industrial complex, increasing surveillance on underprivileged communities instead of actually trying to do anything to address the root causes of gun violence. Shouldn’t that make you mad?
If I were in one of these high crime neighborhoods where people are getting shot, I would want more surveillance and police. This position that they're being exploited by surveillance is mostly a rich white cosmopolitan belief rooted in fantasy
> In fact, large majorities of residents in low-income “fragile communities” — including in both urban and rural areas — want more police presence, not less. In the more than a dozen low-income urban areas surveyed, 53% of residents want more police presence while 41% want the same — only 6% want less.
Not being shot is pretty low on the hierarchy of needs. And let's be real, it's a tiny percentage of people that are committing violent crime. Increasing the odds of correctly putting one person in jail prob reduces future crime greatly.
The criminal element is real and I'm doubtful that you can give someone who's killing people access to a food bank or job training and they'll just become a productive member of society. Being a violent criminal is almost certainly the least economical thing you can do. You end up killed or in jail in a short time span so to think someone rationally picks this as a career opposed to a minimum wage job is not realistic.
> If I were in one of these high crime neighborhoods where people are getting shot, I would want more surveillance and police. This position that they're being exploited by surveillance is mostly a rich white cosmopolitan belief rooted in fantasy
But ARE you though? I'm in Chicago where we're in the tail end of phasing this system out specifically because it did not address the problems it claimed to. All it did was aggravate and harass locals _after_ the fact that had nothing to do with the initial crime.
The deterrence factor was not insignificant, but it definitely wasn't worth the far greater instances where it was not only creating false positives but also proactively CREATING crime in accordance with other "high tech" solutions like predictive crime algorithms which only really served to reinforce existing biased patrolling practices (which were driven by data generated by shot spotter, in part).
Wow you did a great job cherry-picking from that article. Notice how the survey mentioned “police”, not covert surveillance.
People want more, better-trained police, not a third party listening in and directing police resources based on biased data, proprietary algorithms, and human analysts with dubious training and no public accountability.
All you’re telling me is that you lack human empathy and aren't interested in understanding the systemic causes of violence.
So people want more police presence but they draw the line of microphones to listen to gunfire to triangulate crime and arrest murderers? Seems like the second one is a lot less egregious but I guess since I don't have "source" you win the argument.
I'm pretty sure we should start arresting people who kill other people and remove them from society. Pretty high on priority
“Funding for programs that clean and rehabilitate blighted and abandoned property are associated with both decreases in gun violence of up to 39% over one year and improved community health.”
https://publichealth.jhu.edu/center-for-gun-violence-solutio...
To be fair after checking SoundThinking’s website they do have some research showing similar levels of violence reduction, so I don’t think it’s fair to outright claim one is more effective on a per-dollar basis without knowing all the associated costs. However surveillance is a reactive solution (or a deterrent if you’re really on board with a police state), whereas community-based programs are preventative.
I can see there being room for both but any public surveillance on that level has to have serious public accountability.
This sounds an awful like it is saying the solution to crime is to gentrify? What happened to the communities in the study? If you suddenly increase property values in a community where almost everyone rents, guess how many can afford to stay?
On a macro level, evidence does strongly support that gentrification is a good thing. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t have downsides, including displacing low income residents in areas being gentrified. The fact this also creates huge reductions in crime is not coincidental though.
There’s a bit of a chicken and egg problem here nobody wants to wrestle with: 1. Poor people commit the vast majority of violent crime. 2. People with records of convictions of violent crime cannot get stable employment. 3. There is a measurable intelligence and emotional regulation gap at the average between violent criminals and productive members of society. 4. There is a measurable intelligence gap associated with income in our modern knowledge-based society. 5. Inability to get stable employment and low impulse control both are major contributing factors to recidivism.
It’s a heavily intractable problem, it’s clear retributive justice is not as effective as rehabilitative justice, but creating a feeling of duty of care in the communities harmed by crime is a nearly impossible ask. Gentrification at least provides a way out to improve communities for those residents who can afford to stay.
If you have a neighborhood with abandoned buildings, some of which are burned out or boarded up or just have all the windows smashed out, and you then clean up the abandoned buildings, then property values will go up. When property values go up, rent goes up. Which part of what I said disagrees with 'the research'?
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?
I don't think you realize how invasive this technology is on it's own, but if you read the article you'll also realize that it's even worse as other layers of technology have been added in (cameras, LPR, facial recognition, etc).
Does ShotSpotter prevent shootings? Does it suppress would-be shooters? $5M can go a long way to do good in a community. Effectiveness of systems that taxpayer dollars purchased should be transparent. If there isn't transparency in these systems then they should have to be paid for out of pocket. And that means that since law enforcement doesn't sell services they would have to raise the money publicly and sell citizens on the improvements that the system would bring to those residents.
The fact that you had to post what you did with a throwaway speaks volumes about your self-awareness of your position and how it would resonate. Feels good to be able to choose privacy, right?
This sounds a little far fetched, but my current hypothesis is that Americans have developed a co-dependent attachment disorder on a societal level around sociopaths that transcends ideology, whether they are certain presidential candidates or violent criminals. It's an enablement/abuse cycle that you typically see with alcoholic or abusive partners. Books on attachment theory have hinted that this type of disorder can occur on a macro level, which I was initially dismissive of, but when you apply it current events it really helps to explain a lot of irrational behaviors.
In the country with 21,000 homicides a year, it's hard to ignore the connection to attachment disorders while watching people wring their hands and make up exotic concerns that would be more fit for a Ray Bradbury novel over anything designed to address the world leading rates of violent gun crime, up to and including the literal concept of laws and the enforcement of those laws.
I don't know what the solution here is, because I don't know how you send an entire country to therapy and/or Al-Anon, but not continuously enabling the people that are hurting us is a great start, and that necessarily requires shifting empathy from the people that don't deserve it (violent criminals) to the people that do (their traumatized victims).
Apologies for the throwaway account but a lot of people get ridiculously emotional over this topic, and that's when I'm not accusing them of being societally co-dependent.
Here in Minneapolis we seem to have an officer or someone associated with the MPD that posts screen recordings of their Shotspotter/Soundthinking app on twitter: https://twitter.com/mplsspots
> Many assumed that ShotSpotter coverage was concentrated in disadvantaged parts of the city, an unsurprising outcome but one that could contribute to systemic overpolicing.
Are these areas also the ones where the majority of crime takes place or not? If there exists such correlation then why bring it up? If the gun crime is the foremost issue then are you arguing that the "disadvantaged parts" should be left on their own to deal with the issue?
> It's not perfect, but the distance from your house to a ShotSpotter sensor correlates fairly well with your household income. The wealthier you are, the less surveilled you are.
To give ABQ police the benefit of the doubt, that pattern could also be compatible with more gun crime equaling more surveillance. It would be nice to have enough gun crime and sensor location data to see how true that is. When the sensors are as dense as they are, it's not clear that knowing the sensor locations is an advantage to offenders, at least in the gunshot spotting role.
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. If nothing else, high crime rates rapidly crush property values as everyone wants to leave those areas.
I've noticed a lot of people start with the desire to not enforce laws, and work from there. So when there's more law enforcement activity in poorer areas, we get claims that the poor are being targeted and overpoliced. But when the wealthier people say they want more law enforcement in their area, the response is always "Why are safe areas like yours trying to take these law enforcement resources away from the poor areas who need it?"
The positions are entirely inconsistent, but that's because anything is being said in an effort to remove enforcement. This was stated pretty explicitly a few years back with "Defund The Police", and now that it's lost popularity it's being pushed covertly.
Ironically, for all the talk about needing to remove police to help the poor, it's the poor who have suffered the most from the massive increase in crime these policies have caused. Here's a community meeting from a poorer area a few months back, where the residents are complaining that people who live in safer areas are running an experiment in their areas that's leading to a massive spike in crime and death[1].
The funniest part is having a (presumably) wealthy person knowledgeably inform poor people, who are the victims of these crimes, that they are "overpoliced".
From the point of view of someone who can roll into a poor area, say they are "overpoliced", and roll out again...yes, it probably does that seem way. That is because they aren't likely to get shot so the police are the problem, not the bullets.
For the person who can get shot, the bullets are the issue (this isn't limited to this area, you are seeing in multiple policy areas that wealthy people enthusiastically advocate for the state to be rolled back like some kind of giga-Milton Friedman...as with libertarians, they aren't the ones that have to deal with the consequences of this).
Yeah, I always get the impression that the people talking about this really haven't spoken to the people in these neighborhoods. I've walked in neighborhoods here where the longtime residents came up to me and told me I should leave because it was dangerous (and I've spoken to others who have had a similar experience). It's always the people who grew up in suburbs and moved to the city as an adult who are dismissive of crime.
Crime and poor schools are usually what make "bad neighborhoods" bad. It's why many of the people there will save and downsize to move to nicer neighborhoods. Whenever I've talked to people living in those areas, they always want more enforcement and to have their neighborhoods cleaned up.
A lot of people want to speak for the residents there, without ever actually speaking to the residents there.
In my area teachers are assigned somewhat randomly to schools. The goodness or badness of a school is 100% correlated with the kids, not the teachers. A single disruptive child can stop a class. When most of the class is disruptive, good luck teaching anything to anyone
Yeah, our government here spent years pouring money into low performing high schools to revitalize them, to little avail. Here's an interesting article on a very expensive (they spend $63,000 a year per student) boarding school they sent some kids to for free, that didn't have much of an impact[1].
Finally, what they did was they decided to split in half the high performing cohort from the best/wealthiest high school into two high schools. This cohort was now much smaller than the maximum capacity for either high school, which allows for a lot of out of boundary seats.
The problem is, even still they don't seem to be able to admit how important a high performing cohort is. If they did, there are plenty of things they could do to attract more of them to public schools and neighborhood high schools. For instance, there's at least one high school in the city that is very low performing, but has a large number of very high performing students in boundary. The parents want the school to guarantee some high level classes for their students, but it won't. They want the school to provide a safe environment, but the school can't commit to that (it's hard to remove students even if they are repeatedly violent). And if they do, they run the risk of national media reporters (who would never send their kids to these types of schools themselves) going after them[2].
> 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 are used to justify more monitoring and policing in the area, further biasing your data.
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.
The devices monitor specifically for gunshots. I find it hard to believe that gunshots in wealthy area's often go undetected, with or without those devices.
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.
It's biasing the sample. For example, drug usage among teens are roughly the same between white, hispanic and african americans but african americans are more likely to be arrested and charged for drug possession or usage. Here the difference is probably because african americans are stopped and searched more even though their usage is about the same as whites.
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.
"Asinine" is a bit much. There can be huge problems that aren't illegal, but that doesn't mean the crime rate is totally useless. You just have to treat it carefully, like any measurement.
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.
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.
It’s probably a cultural factor. Most criminal enterprises want to be discreet in order to avoid detection by law enforcement and rival enterprises. Whereas the black criminal community has made an entire industry of advertising their criminality through music and fashion.
Yes, in a country filled with badly trained police that open deadly fire upon hearing a firework[0] or an acorn dropping on a car hood, more police presence is a bad thing.
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.
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.
Putting aside how easy it is to compensate for this (e.g. report gunshots per area under surveillance), I'm curious how much crime estimates based on ShotSpotter or general policing differ from the frequency with which dead bodies are produced by an area. This latter measure mostly immune to overpolicing bias.
The point is supposed to be that the monitoring and increased policing makes at least certain crimes impossible therefore improving the area for the rest of us.
The farce is the utter failure of the 'survalience state' to actually catch and prosecute people.
Including the businesses that don’t want to be robbed, looted or have to pay into a protection racket. So those who are forced to stay have no way of making an honest living.
The notion that poverty causes crime rather than crime causes poverty is a great disservice to the poor.
> 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
> If you pull up a map of crime in most cities the inverse correlation with home prices is obvious.
If the police department spends the majority of its resources on certain areas, it will respond to the majority of incidents and make the majority of arrests in those areas. You can truthfully say "look, these numbers are higher than anywhere else!" but that doesn't necessarily mean there's more crime happening there — it could also mean the residents are overpoliced relative to other neighborhoods.
With regard to the article, why is it obvious that police are putting surveillance in areas with the highest rates of gun crime?
>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 the latter warrants more policing.
[0]The truth of it is arguable, perhaps, but it is very obvious.
> 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.
"Incredibly unclear"? Really? Not the OP, but let's spell it out:
Manicuring a lawn is expensive and serves no useful purpose, so most practitioners have disposable income and/or spare time, and care about keeping up appearances.
Putting a car up on blocks implies it's being used for spare parts, which is generally not something the well-off need to engage in (they buy new and use professionals for repairs as needed), and having one on your front lawn in particular implies that you value spare parts more than appearances.
So both are reasonable proxies of wealth, and wealth correlates inversely with the kind of violent crime you could detect with gunshots.
The reason it’s unclear is that nothing either of you have said has anything to do with policing.
Edit: you added the correlation bit after I replied, but why do you believe that to be the case? If you have more police in an area, of course they’ll hear more gunshots there. That doesn’t necessarily mean there actually are more gunshots.
What you’re actually saying is “poor people need more policing”, which is A) offensive and B) counterproductive.
> If you have more police in an area, of course they’ll hear more gunshots there. That doesn’t necessarily mean there actually are more gunshots.
So let me get your point straight: your worry is that since wealthy areas have less sensors gun-crime in those areas will go under reported?
Idk about your neck of the woods but where i live if I hear a gunshot I call the police with a high probability. If i see someone brandishing weapons i do the same. And of course i call the police/emergency services if i see someone with a gunshot wound. These all create the statistical evidence independent of the sensor systems.
Let's imagine a city divided in two halves of equal population. West City is poor and has a high crime rate, East City is rich and has a low crime rate. Should police resources be allocated equally to both? How about public health facilities or welfare payments?
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 poverty.
As best we can tell, “stand your ground” laws in states like Florida result in hundreds of deaths each year. How many of those would be considered murder in other states?
Police killed over 1,300 people last year. How many of those people truly posed an immediate danger to others, and how many were murdered by a trigger-happy cop who was not held accountable by his colleagues?
Crime, even serious crime like murder, is socially constructed. It’s not objective; society decides what’s illegal and who gets to do it anyway.
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 would be the police killing. Furthermore, if someone points a gun at a policeman, and the policeman kills him in response, that is self-defense, not murder. There are officers killed while on duty, too:
Less than 10% of homicides result from police action.
> how many were murdered by a trigger-happy cop who was not held accountable by his colleagues?
In Washington state, each death from a police encounter are investigated by law, and charges get filed if the officer broke the law. That would include being trigger-happy.
> It’s not objective
It's objective enough. My larger point is there aren't a lot of (or even any) homicides that go undetected in wealthy communities. Furthermore, your figures lack context as you didn't compare with the total amount of homicides. Your figures are not enough to claim that the higher homicide rates in poor communities are the result of police murders.
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 bill will probably get vetoed, but in a world where it passes it’s very likely that the number of killings will increase but the number of murders will drop.
>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.
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 losing their entire livelihood if they do. If you're poor, unemployed and your kids are hungry, the risk/reward calculus is very different.
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’ve just decided that we only care about some people committing some crime some of the time.
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?
I’m not really steering the conversation anywhere. Wage theft is a felony in many states. Which is the point I’m making: crime is socially constructed, and two big reasons that some areas are “low crime” and some are “high crime” is that we’ve decided to A) selectively criminalize things and B) selectively enforce those laws.
As to your question: if you are playing SimCity and you have a little number in your omniscient UI that reads “crime rate” and police are your one lever to address that, by all means add more police to the area. But in the real world that’s not how things work.
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.
What seems more obvious to me is that the more surveillance you do in any area (regardless of whether the lawns are manicured), the more crime you're going to find there. If you put 5 cops patrolling the wealthiest, nicest areas of your city, and 1 cop patrolling a less wealthy less nice area, the 5 cops will find more crime than the 1 cop. Even if you don't assume crime is uniformly distributed (which it probably isn't), it's logical that more surveillance -> more crime found.
I'm not sure there are lot of murders, carjackings, breakins, etc., in wealthier neighborhoods going undetected. Why would wealthier victims be less likely to report crime?
I think there's a lot of quiet classism going on in this thread, and it's easier for these guys to just drive by and hit the downvote button than to actually speak their mind and tell us why they think poor people -> criminals.
The causation more likely goes the other way: When an area gets the reputation of being higher crime (because of reality or because of bias from more police saturation), that area becomes cheaper to live in, and poorer people can then afford to live there.
In Seattle, the bank tellers are behind bulletproof glass. In the surrounding communities, there's no bulletproof glass.
I don't think it's more police presence that causes banks to install the armor. More likely it's the lack of police presence that results in armored banks.
> The causation more likely goes the other way: When an area gets the reputation of being higher crime (because of reality or because of bias from more police saturation), that area becomes cheaper to live in, and poorer people can then afford to live there.
Isn’t that called de-gentrification, or maybe ghetto-ization? However, I think it’s the opposite with property crime (richer neighborhoods attract property crime because their is lots of property to steal).
If the false positive rate is 5%, it’s probably not much of a problem in terms of the overall balance of effectiveness.
If the false positive rate is 95%, it’s pretty obviously going to be a diversion of police resources from whatever else they could be doing if not responding to zero-value alerts.
This claims the false positive rate is under 3%. It's based on Shotspotter's statistics and "independent audit" statistics.
Not sure how trustworthy either is, but without better stats from anywhere else I have no reason to doubt the claim the false positive is pretty low.
Seems like even if false positive rate was at 50% it wouldn't be that big of a deal. Cities have police on patrol at all times anyway - it would just mean sending someone to drive 5 minutes away to see if there is visible a disturbance instead of them driving around the area they were currently randomly patrolling.
Yeah, you’re thinking of Boomerang. ShotSpotter did some limited body-worn stuff for the military back in the day, but the vehicle mounted stuff is all Boomerang. Entirely different approaches (distributed microphones vs. a single microphone array at the expected target) done by different companies.
> It just says a signal if there is a loud noise in public.
This is probably false. There have been two convictions as a result of recordings of conversations that happened through the devices.
I, for one, do not want microphones capable of recording my conversations placed near me by the government. Not because I'm paranoid the government is conspiring against me, but rather because I have zero confidence they're storing those recordings securely, being handled by only authorized persons, and being deleted within a timely manner.
It sounds like you are paranoid. Why would the government be listening to a conversation you might be having near a device used for tracking gunshots? Is there some little man somewhere just waiting to pounce on you or anyone just for that purpose?
I don't know how effective these devices are but any tool that helps the police go after criminals is a good thing and no one should be fighting against good things.
Over a two year period in the US, there were over 600 cases where police officers and civilians with access to law enforcement databases violated internal policies and safeguards to access private data about "romantic partners, business associates, neighbors, journalists and others for reasons that have nothing to do with daily police work". This is certainly an undercount, as this is just who got caught and the department didn't cover it up. These are the cases they admitted to doing it and were charged, so the records are public.
"Among those punished: an Ohio officer who pleaded guilty to stalking an ex-girlfriend and who looked up information on her; a Michigan officer who looked up home addresses of women he found attractive; and two Miami-Dade officers who ran checks on a journalist after he aired unflattering stories about the department."
The same thing may have occurred with an office just sitting in his squad car on a street corner. Will we now pull them off the streets for that reason? Will we require them to keep their windows rolled up or wear noise cancelling ear muffs?
The cases you cite are of people who did things wrong. The cases you cite have nothing to do with the advantages this gives to the police in protecting citizens and solving crimes.
Why do people keep fighting against the police who are trying to defend us against crimes? In general, these tools help and don't hurt anyone. Lest anyone forgets, the police are on our side.
You clearly didn't read my comment. We know the recordings exist, that's indisputable. How securely are they stored? How do I know the government isn't selling those recordings to third parties to make a quick buck? How would you know that a conversation you had with nobody around isn't going to leak online and be scrutinized by god knows who? I don't care one way or the other what the government thinks of what I say, but I don't trust them to secure their systems and protect my privacy more broadly, and you shouldn't either. The system could just as easily do exactly what it says (detect gunshots) and NOT save recordings, but that's not the case.
> It just says a signal if there is a loud noise in public.
as a community we really ought to be suspicious of claims like this. There's another word for "acoustic sensor" and it's "microphone". When a corporation says "trust us, we only use the data for good", we should collectively raise our eyebrows, knowing that when data is collected for one stated purpose and stored, that the data at rest will always be used for additional purposes. Once data is collected, the number of things it may be used for is always unbounded; any claims to the contrary should not be taken at face value.
Is there any evidence of shotspotter using the data that it collects for something other than good? Even if shotspotter collected audio that didn't contain gunshot-like sounds (which they don't; without a triggering event, the sensors never write the audio out to a file or send it over the network for review), how could they monitize it or do anything malicious with it? How could they tie loose audio of people walking around to the identities of those people (besides the method in the two court cases cited by the article, where homicide detectives listened to the audio of the shootings and heard verbal exchanges incident to the shootings where the victim verbally identified the shooters)?
It it's so amusing to me that people who carry around a phone 24/7 spend time imagining these intricate Rube Goldberg surveillance systems to be afraid of.
When I joined Google I started thinking to myself "geez, we care so much. why does HN hate us?"
It clicked for me when someone pointed out that even if you trust group of employees X with a mountain of data, nothing prevents group of Y from eventually selling it. And after what I saw my last couple years, I'm utterly convinced some McKinsey-ite will be telling 2050's CEO that's a great idea and in fact the moral option. Maximize shareholder value => stonk go up => Americans have safe retirements.
Why am I talking about Google?
People talk past eachother on this stuff. The problem isn't that "have they ever done anything bad?", it's that the incentive structure is set up such that something that crosses the line will eventually happen. They have an incentive to keep the customer happy.
And as the article, and comments below from 1.5 hours before you posted point out, there's no room for argument on that: this already happened. A court threw out info because it was illegally obtained.
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 (Mass. Super. Ct. Oct. 7, 2015)
"ShotSpotter is a listening and recording system that runs 24/7, attuned to the sound of gunfire. When the system hears gunfire, or what it recognizes as gunfire, it locates it, reports it, preserves the recording, and send the recording to the customer within seconds.” The defendant, charged with first degree murder, moved to suppress a recording made by ShotSpotter of an verbal exchange among numerous individuals before and after the fatal gunshots. The court rejected that the argument that the defendant had a reasonable expectation of privacy under the Massachusetts Declaration of Rights because the exchange was “audible by anyone passing and was in fact heard by a crowd of neighbors and other witnesses.” However, the court found that the exchange was an “oral communication” and that the recording was a prohibited “interception” under the Massachusetts Wiretap Act because the defendant had no knowledge that the exchange was being recorded. The court also found that the interception was “willful” because the police had “purposefully directed the placement of the sensors.” The court granted the motion to suppress: “the continuous secret audio surveillance of selective urban neighborhoods ** is the type of surreptitious eavesdropping as an investigative tool that the Legislature sought to prohibit."
""" [0]
The verbal exchange was recorded because it was incident to the shooting that triggered the recording. In addition to recording the shooter(s) shoot the victim(s), it also recorded the shooter(s) and victim(s) speak before the shooting. This was in public so there wasn't an expectation of privacy, and I can't imagine this is the kind of recording that the Massachusetts's legislature "sought to prohibit".
> 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 one case due to violating wiretap laws) in court cases?
Edit and even if we trust ShotSpotter to do the right thing, how do we know their systems are secure enough to keep those recordings away from less-honorable actors?
The website says the audio buffer on the sensor holds the last 30 hours before overwriting. So police have less than 30 hours to flag a missed shooting so shotspotter staff can check sensors for audio around the shooting time.
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.
It seems plainly to be a wiretap under the laws of my state (MA): anything “capable of transmitting, receiving, amplifying or recording a wire or oral communication.”
With some additional carve outs, none of which appear to apply to ShotSpotter.
I’m not arguing that properly scoped and protected ShotSpotter couldn’t be allowed by MA legislators, but it sure doesn’t fall apart under scrutiny by my reading of the law.
The court seems to agree in the text you copied in your upthread quote:
> However, the court found that the exchange was an “oral communication” and that the recording was a prohibited “interception” under the Massachusetts Wiretap Act because the defendant had no knowledge that the exchange was being recorded.
Which I think is the proper interpretation of the written law.
I’d also like to enjoy being free from audio recording while near loud noises. And the argument that it is a wiretap has apparently not fallen apart in at least one court of law.
And regarding your last question, the first of the two court cases where verbal communications were captured (because they were at the same time as the shooting), was in 2007. So shotspotter has been around for a while.
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?
Being skeptical of face value claims makes sense if they have never been used before. But, they've been in place in some cities since before 2000 and after searching I'm still not aware of any incident audio from it was used that didn't have to do with a gunshot.
Looking into it more all the cases of audio being used in court, that was not audio of gunshots, was audio immediately after a gunshot. Spotshotter is open about recording that and it seems completely reasonable to me this audio should be used.
What's most boggling to me about the criticism is Albuquerque apparently has 10,000 cameras law enforcement has access to. I know we likely disagree on the usefulness of those, but if you are privacy concerned why would shotspotter even be on the same level of concern as cameras that don't need a gunshot to start filming?
> I know we likely disagree on the usefulness of those, but if you are privacy concerned why would shotspotter even be on the same level of concern as cameras that don't need a gunshot to start filming?
I think that is also bad. Two things can be bad! That's just not the topic of the post.
> 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. The possibility clearly exists, and depending on interpretation of state law, it may be permissible for ShotSpotter to record conversations on the street for future use as evidence.
Fair enough. My previous statement was incorrect. Edited above.
I understand the hypothetical case they could be misused but I'm still not aware of any cases they actually were.
>On June 8, 2007, the Shotspotter acoustic gunshot detection and location system recorded two gunshots from the corner of 83rd Avenue and Birch Street in Oakland, California. The first one, at 11:10:22 p.m., was at 8236 Birch Street, and the second one, 24 seconds later at 11:10:46 p.m., was at 1775 83rd Avenue. Those addresses are less than 10 feet apart. The recording of the second shot also captured the voice of Tyrone Lyles, apparently addressing the person who shot him: "Ar, Ar, why are you going to do me like that, Ar."
I am happy shotspotter helped in the prosecution of this person who needlessly killed someone. I realize there could be ways to abuse this for things having nothing to do with gun violence, but you could also say DUI traffic stops or DNA collection could be misued. That doesn't mean they are misused.
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?
100% this, IMO any of these law enforcement vendors like ShotSpotter, Harris (stingray), Taser/Axon, etc. which insist on keeping any and all details secret deserve zero trust. Anything they say without actual data analyzed by an independent third party is worth less than what I scooped out of my cats' box this morning.
The public conversation relies on public data, so if your company doesn't want the public to have the data then your company and its clients should not be given any benefit of the doubt by the public.
The word you’re looking for is “tyrant.” In other words, people with unrestricted authority to beat, kill, rob, spy, or do whatever they want with us. And tyrants don’t keep us safe.
“Good guys,” on the other hand, respect the rule of law. It shouldn’t refer to people shielded from legal liability who spouts the “tough on crime” rhetoric to excuse themselves from their own criminal behavior.
Rigorous audits in technically savvy jurisdictions:
* San Francisco has a technical population that has passed numerous ordinances focused on protecting privacy of San Franciscans in balance with protecting safety. As such, the San Francisco city government has a Committee on Information Technology, which has a Privacy and Surveillance Advisory Board that evaluates and audits privacy-impacting technology used by the city. Here are their evaluations that cleared ShotSpotter for use in San Francisco. [0] [1]
Logic:
* Why would city government officials pay the very high cost for ShotSpotter (it's $73k per square mile here in my city, Chicago) if they couldn't audit the system or impost contractual, legally enforceable privacy protections?
* ShotSpotter has been a company for a long time, but the only evidence this article presents of ShotSpotter collecting verbal communications is from two courts cases where the verbal communication was incident to a shooting. At some point, absence of evidence becomes pretty plausible evidence of absence.
Economics:
* They have to pay for staff to review every loud noise to meet negotiated SLAs for alert response times (typically under 120s), so they have an incentive to not send audio samples off of sensor-devices unless there's a gunshot-like noise.
* They have no way to monitize loose bits of audio of unidentified people just walking around near sensors, but it would cost money to store this data and would cost a lot of money to organize it for search-ability.
Physics:
* These sensors are mounted high up on poles and buildings, and they are not directional. If sensors have high enough sensitivity to pick up street level voices, then there's a ton of other ambient noise that they'd pick up and the signal would be trash most of the time. It is just the distinct loudness of gunshots that trigger the audio to be written out + transmitted, and the loudness of people while they are in the excited emotional state [needed to shoot someone, or created by being shot or being near a shooting] that enable these recordings to capture audible vocals.
> The people behind these invasive systems who push back hard on the slightest attempt at basic accountability?
I get that that feels true to you, but it's not true. ShotSpotter is a company selling a product to city governments, who have constrained budgets and adequate legal departments and can cut ShotSpotter if they aren't happy with ShotSpotter (my city is dropping ShotSpotter service in September [2]). There are a ton of forces enforcing accountability.
Yeah, but the only reason anyone listened to those sections (or was even able to listen to these sections) of tape was because they contained shootings. These systems work on a rolling buffer storage system; they're constantly recording to a buffer that contains the last N minutes of audio and if a triggering event occurs, it gets written out to a file that is reviewed by a person and if it contains a gunshot, that person confirms there was a gunshot (ie that it wasn't a firework or something) and a notification goes out to the relevant police district/precinct/whatever for that area. If there's just people talking but no gunshots, the buffer never writes out and it's overwritten before too long.
The author’s neighborhood is mentioned in the article.
“The "pocket of poverty" south of Downtown where I live, the historically Spanish Barelas and historically Black South Broadway, are predictably well covered.”
Also, that there is a veil of secrecy of the system's installation and exact capabilities suggest that incorrect or excessive reports could provide pretense for more invasive policing.
> To give ABQ police the benefit of the doubt, that pattern could also be compatible with more gun crime equaling more surveillance. It would be nice to have enough gun crime and sensor location data to see how true that is.
The very point of the article is that, absent leaks like this one, there could be no way for anybody to independently study or verify the fairness of the sensor distribution, or even the real efficacy of the reports the system produces—which is a troubling situation to be in when the state has an outsized amount of power to prosecute people based on potential junk science that will be hard for defendants to challenge in court.
The answer isn't to give police departments the benefit of the doubt (which they so rarely earn), but to demand better transparency and citizen oversight of the technology poised to be used against us.
> It would be nice to have enough gun crime and sensor location data to see how true that is.
The main thread of the article is that ShotSpotter operate without scrutiny. The problematic aspects of their deployment are the false positives...
> APD received about 14,000 ShotSpotter reports last year. The accuracy of these reports, in terms of their correctly identifying gunfire, is contested. SoundThinking claims impressive statistics, but has actively resisted independent evaluation. A Chicago report found that only 11.3% of ShotSpotter reports could be confirmed as gunfire.
.. and false charges
> This ought to give us pause, as should the fact that ShotSpotter has been compellingly demonstrated to manipulate their "interpretation" of evidence to fit a prosecutor's narrative---even when ShotSpotter's original analysis contradicted it.
I don't think the article is suggesting there is a conspiracy wherein the police decided to target lower income areas because they are poor. It is certainly because incidences of those crimes are higher in those areas.
What I think the article is suggesting is that policies like these, particularly when implemented without sufficient transparency or oversight, can cause dystopian-sounding outcomes, such as poor people's conversations being constantly recorded by the government while wealthier people remain un-surveilled.
But if you're not listening for the guns then you're not going to find the crime that does happen, will you? It's either saying "we don't care about it because it's less frequent" (which is stupid—you still build a fire station in places where buildings burn down less frequently) or "it's easier to keep ourselves busy when we fish in a barrel".
If you were to design a system to spot a certain kind of crime in real time, would you place it in zones historically more plagued by that kind of crime or in zones that experienced it scarcely? It's hard to buy into the rhetoric of "it's only fair if you monitor the crime equally" if you have already independently sampled it for decades and by now know the zones where it's much likely to happen.
Would you patrol a desert in the same way you patrol a busy road intersection if you're trying to prevent car accidents?
The problem is Bayesian priors look an awful lot like racism to the unaided eye, enough so that it's really hard to justify them. Or maybe it's racism masquerading as a Bayesian prior. I don't see how to know for sure either way.
Also if such devices (and law enforcement) worked well to reduce crime, the crime would move to less-surveilled areas. We don't see that happening anywhere.
You are still claiming that crime is conserved. It's not possible, even likely, that a reduced cost-benefit for committing crime shifts preferences toward some non-criminal activity with a more attractive risk-reward profile?
Conservation of crime isn't a claim I made and it isn't relevant to my comment.
If ShotSpotter were successful, crime would move to a different area and/or go down. Arrests would be made, so it's impossible to assume crime rates wouldn't change in that scenario.
Neither happening in correlation with ShotSpotter installation, which is one way we know these tactics don't actually work.
There are far too many confounds to draw a conclusion like "these tactics don't actually work." Speeding up police response to gunfire isn't going to have a measurable impact if the police aren't actually allowed to do anything when they get there, except maybe call the paramedics.
We know at least one of the tactics that does work, because Mayor Bloomberg and the NYPD provided demonstrative proof (and saved thousands of lives by drastically reducing murders). However, that also relies on Bayesian priors (or is it racism?) and thus has become unfashionable amongst the current ruling urban elite. It is highly plausible that a technology like ShotSpotter would be highly effective making such preemptive interventions more data driven and effective.
Unfortunately, the ideological blinders many people choose to wear around criminology really makes it difficult to constructively discuss or address. After all this study is trying to present, in a weaselly way, the claim that ShotSpotter actually increases shootings. I'd love to hear the proposed mechanism for that. I'm sure it's something that makes superstition look sensible.
> would you place it in zones historically more plagued by that kind of crime or in zones that experienced it scarcely?
Both. I don't skip out on adding monitoring to my applications that don't crash as often. The crashes might be less frequent but that doesn't mean I don't need monitoring.
you can definitely tell gun crime has happened without listening to the sounds of it. people die, get hurt, police reports are made etc. we don't typically determine if gun crime has happened by... listening do we?
There is a ShotSpotter on the lightpole outside my door. My household income is about $2400/yr. My hood is a warzone though (South Side Chicago), so not unexpected lol
This is just another example of how American Police budgets have gotten out of hand. A budget that allows for a municipal police force to install 721 "AI powered" recording devices. That are purchased from a publicly traded company, and deployed in areas guaranteed to funnel people into the for profit privatized prison system.
What a wonderful use of tax dollars. Protecting and serving the path to a better society.
> Many assumed that ShotSpotter coverage was concentrated in disadvantaged parts of the city, an unsurprising outcome but one that could contribute to systemic overpolicing.
Also
> Conversations recorded by ShotSpotter sensors have twice been introduced as evidence in criminal trials.
Exactly, instituting pervasive audio surveillance is bad even if it's rarely used in court, because it can and will still be used for parallel construction.
> that could also be compatible with more gun crime equaling more surveillance
Not just could -- without more information, it's the far more likely and economical explanation. The phrasing in the article imo is intentionally inflammatory.
Of course the public surveillance is located in the areas where crime is most likely to occur! But an important side effect is that innocent people in those areas now are more surveilled than other people. So it becomes yet another injustice inflicted on people who already tend to suffer more greatly from injustice than others.
Maybe there are offsetting factors. If the surveillance makes neighborhoods significantly safer, then maybe local residents will be happy to be surveilled in exchange.
The article is stating a fact of correlation, not causality. But the particular outcome of "greater surveillance" clearly happens, regardless of why it occurs, and regardless of other offsetting considerations.
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 by freeways and toxic waste dumps, and the removal of many adult males to the prison system as a result of all the "observed crime" leading to an excess of young males with few prospects.
* Based on that data the modern survellience goes to where all the crime has been created^H observed.
Meanwhile entire areas of US cities get on by considerably less police present and oversight and a great deal less observed crime.
"The police disproportionately focus on poor areas for drug possession / traffic offences / white collar crime" is an important criticism, and the kind of thing awareness of which leads to reform and fairness in policing.
"There's just as much gun crime in rich areas as poor ones, but the police focus on the poor areas because of historical racism" is an extraordinary claim that should require extraordinary evidence, and the kind of thing that holds back improvements in police work.
I guess you could believe that when rich people are murdered it is not reported and quietly hushed up, but when poor people are the full force of the state swings into action.
Hasn't that historically been the opposite? If a rich/white person is murdered, it's a headline-grabbing tragedy. Even serial killers are more likely to evade detection if their targets are minorities, though the reasons for that are more complicated than just systemic prejudice.
That's the point. Believing the things that would have to be true for GGGP's viewpoint to be even plausible, let alone true, requires a complete divorce from reality.
> historically there's been a lot of "black crime" in the US due to the US police watching black neighbourhoods
You can control for this by just looking at homicides. Dead bodies are pretty objective. And the homicides also follow the same trend as the general crime rate.
You accept the standards you walk past. A community's values must be held by the community. If you only allow a few overworked moderators to maintain those values, then they aren't community values anymore, and the quality of HN will plummet.
his point was that he thinks low income areas are being targeted with a higher police presence. That is so wrong it’s hard to believe oc has ever been to a city in the us. I actually doubt he has for any serious amount of time. High tax areas are covered with police in US cities at a rate far above poor inner city areas.
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.
> Wealthy areas absolutely have a higher police per capita presence than even the most well funded low income neighborhood.
As a test, you can call the police from an address in a wealthy area, report a crime in progress, and do the same from an address in a poor area, and time how long it takes before they show up.
Big cities are pretty safe. For instance you more likely to be a victim of a crime in rural northern Wisconsin, like Barron County, than you are in Milwaukee.
Don't let your narrative be shaped by stats that aren't proportional.
I'm familiar enough with Barron County, WI to doubt this. I grew up in neighboring Rusk County and my mother spends about half her time in Cumberland. While there are some disturbing incidents of violent crime, very few people there would feel that are at high risk of being a crime victim.
These stats aren't quite perfect, since this is for Barron the town versus Barron the county, but it really doesn't seem to support your view. The other small towns in Barron County that I checked were rated even better than Barron itself and rated as "A+".
I'm willing to believe that there is some axis on which your statement is correct but I doubtful it's the one that most people would use. Can you offer any more support for your position than just your say so?
Edit: As a quick gauge for others, I'll mention that most cars are still kept unlocked. The joke was that they were only locked in the fall, to prevent people from "gifting" you their excess zucchini. My father always left the keys in his cars as well, in case someone needed to borrow it. Our house was locked only if we left for long vacations. The key was lost sometime after I left home, and no attempt was made to replace it. I'm not nearly as familiar with Milwaukee, but I'd be surprised if this is the norm there.
Those could all be true and still the statement true.
For example if all crime in Barron county was entirely random as to selection of victim, and in Milwaukee it 100% only happened to poor blacks, then infinite crime in Milwaukee could never affect you unless you were poor and black, whereas Barron county could affect anyone.
But I suspect that there’s a sleight of hand on “crime” - people usually mean crime by force against another, but technically suicide by meth overdose is two or three crimes.
I agree it's possible with some definition of crime, and I'd be interested to see what that definition is. I also think there's an interesting effect where it's possible for there to be less of some kinds of crimes in "high crime areas" because people take greater precautions. I also agree with OP's comment that drug related problems in Northern Wisconsin have gotten much worse since I last lived there. Still, I'd like to see the stats rather than just the assertion.
People say this but I'm skeptical. I regularly leave valuables in my car. My windows have never been broken. I've never had anything stolen. Nor do I know anyone who has.
All the stores have free-to-use, unlocked public bathrooms. All the product is available on the shelf for anyone to grab.
When I go on travel to more urban locations, that's not what I see. Unfortunately the urban blight is creeping closer every year, and judging by the crime reports, in a few years or decades I too will be experiencing these joys.
I have heard in especially bad-off areas desperate meth addicts are a theft issue. Usually they target people they know, so small comfort as it may be to their friends and relatives, it's usually not a random crime.
Double checking I think I'm wrong. I may have been thinking of some specific crime. But Milwaukee is specifically bad due to historical segregation issues. Anyway drug and addiction issues have hit rural issues really bad
City centers have far, far more theft crime objectively from a dollar value perspective. The vast majority of this crime comes from two sources: employers and police. This is widely documented fact.
I am extremely pro-labor and would have much stricter enforcement and severer penalties for wage theft, but home burglary, carjackings, and muggings are qualitatively different than wage theft and it does not make sense to compare the two.
It’s directly comparable to say shoplifting which is one of the social ills complained about in this discussion
Police theft is directly comparable to burglary (which police and employers each on their own manage to vastly outnumber) or even carjacking (police civil forfeiture accounts for many jacked cars and the encounters can involve violence and coercion under threat of immediate violence or execution)
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.
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?
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 for setting off fireworks, and the South Pole is far away from basically everything.
If you set off fireworks shortly before midnight, on a random Thursday in January, in a city that's famous for having large numbers of murders, should policemen assume it's fireworks, or gunshots?
On the American internet I often find the Freedom Indeterminacy Principle, where "it's a free country, you should be able to light a firework on a random Thursday in January if you want" and "if you light a firework outside of public holidays you should expect to be killed" coexist in harmony.
These cops acted without justification, then committed a crime to cover up their unjustified actions by attesting to multiple demonstrable falsehoods.
The HN User you are responding to is stretching to make the situation seem reasonable in the US. It is not reasonable in the US and we will continue to demonstrate its unreasonableness to officers who can't seem to understand. We will do so through everything from disciplinary actions to docked pay to dismissals to prison terms if we must.
I'm tired of people seeing these things and saying we aren't free here. It's more accurate to say we have a few nugget headed police officers who can't seem to understand that we are free. And then you get the impression that their nugget headed behavior is normalized because they have a few nugget headed supporters who go out to defend the indefensible. I can assure you, inside police forces nowadays these sorts of loose cannons are very much looked on as liabilities.
Every nation will have some level of corruption, and we obviously have ours as this incident clearly demonstrates. But there is a reason these worms are burrowing under rocks to try to hide. It's because they know they are engaged in explicitly criminal activity. They are the crisis of confidence in the US. Now real police officers will have an even more difficult time operating in the community.
Guy, the job is law enforcement. Not Bayesian Reasoning enforcement.
It's just the words on the page. Was a law broken or not.
Let me explain it to you in a fashion you might better understand. Let's suppose a man is late on his child support because the child he was ordered to pay child support for is not his. If you are a Bayesian Reasoner and conclude there is no reason to arrest this man, then you have no place on the police force. Full stop. You see judgement is the job of the courts. It's not my place to decide whether or not someone is being done an injustice or justice by being arrested. The only concern of an LEO has to be the words on the page. He didn't pay child support that I personally believe was unjustly ordered, but I'm still taking him down.
That's the job. You don't believe that kid should be setting off fireworks, that's your business. But you better have a legal reason if you are going to take action against a person in our system. Because it's based on rule of law. It's more critical now than at almost any time in the past that LEOs understand that fact. Those who don't are gonna do nothing but make life hard for a whole lot of decent LEOs out there.
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
We're a nation of laws, not of your awareness. It's just the words on the page. Was there a law being broken or not. In this case the answer was no. The police then proceeded to write up multiple claims of illegal activity that were all demonstrable falsehoods, and your defense of the illegal activity on the part of the police is that you aren't aware of a holiday?
This is just the sort of thing we need to stamp out before these thugs kill either some other innocent kid, or cause a real police officer to be hurt or killed while trying to control the inevitable community reaction to their bird brained behavior.
These cops need to be off the force yesterday. Yes they are liabilities waiting to happen. Yes they are dishonest. But the real reason we need to get rid of them is because they are unpredictable. We have no idea what anyone who will shoot at innocent kids and lie about it today will do tomorrow.
Honest cops are predictable. Dishonest cops are just loose cannons and we need to cut them out at every opportunity.
ShotSpotter has (used to?) manually changed the location of detected gunfire to placate police who needed the evidence to point to their primary suspect.
Then they could go to court and say “this system showed the gunshots came from the suspect’s location”. But “the system” didn't show that, until ShotSpotter employees manually changed the data.
They don’t change the data. They change their interpretation of it. The police say the classifier got something wrong, so the classification gets updated, both for the record and to improve the classifier. The police say that the location is wrong. The company looks at the data, maybe finds that the system automatically located on an echo at one or more sensor and then recomputes the location using the primary pulse.
What gets presented in court is a "Detailed Forensic Report" that includes the timestamped audio waveforms, sensor locations, and screenshots of the multilateration computations. These reports, when used as evidence, are required to be available to the defense for rebuttal and crossexamination. One could, if one was so inclined, calculate shot locations by hand from these reports. The time stamped audio files are discoverable.
The underlying algorithms have been made available to defense teams in countless Daubert and Frye hearings. I have no idea what you're referring to by "a rules change like, last week."
How are you privy to the underlying algorithms/source-code being made available to defense teams? I thought the source code (algorithm) doesn't have to be made available to defense teams.
Daubert requires that expert testimony be based on "reliable principles and methods" and Frye requires "the thing from which the deduction is made must be sufficiently established to have gained general acceptance," both essentially requiring the disclosure of underlying algorithms if not the actual source code.
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.
As detailed in the article, the placement of ShotSpotter sensors in the Albequerque area roughly correlates to wealth and class. And it details the ShotSpotter culture of secrecy around sensor placement, so that even police departments don't necessarily know where the sensors are.
Combine that with the racially-charged patterns of policing in this country[1][2], where certain populations are disproportionately profiled and experience use-of-force incidents.
It's extremely timely in the sense that at present, we have systemic problems with where police force is being directed, and ShotSpotter is likely helping tip those scales — but not in the right direction.
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.
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.
What are the potential downsides to police oversight?
> But, if asked, they provide a form letter written by ShotSpotter. Their contract prohibits the disclosure of any actual data.
A potentially dystopian surveillance apparatus is installed citywide, and the police can't discuss about it's efficiency because the company that sold it to them won't let them?
The police know what’s good for them. They have extraordinary powers and the more they can keep the public in the dark about what they do, the more freedom they have to act with impunity.
Some bumbling police chief might say something stupid that would draw media attention to ShotSpotter and their massive data collection operation. You definitely wouldn't want that to happen.
I would request that a crowd as technically sophisticated as HN move past marketing claims when discussing this system. "Gunshot detection" is pure marketing.
The devices are hot mics — public audio surveillance. The software layer triggers alerts on loud noises, which are sent off to a facility that is little more than a call center, for characterization by a human worker there. This system detects door slams and popped volleyballs just as well as it detects gun fire (which is to say, imperfectly on all counts).
> This system detects door slams and popped volleyballs just as well as it detects gun fire (which is to say, imperfectly on all counts).
Sound classification moved far beyond what you’re claiming years ago.
If you set the threshold at “imperfectly” then no system will ever meet your bar, because perfect is an unreasonable threshold. However, the claim that we’re unable to differentiate between gunshots and car doors is extremely incorrect.
Yes there are false positives. This is an alert system and doesn't have to be perfect. This is the difference between a sensor in a self-driving car and a sensor for something like Shotspotter.
If a self-driving car sensor has a 1% fail rate, then it is useless and would cause crashes and death. It couldn't be used.
But if shotspotter is 1% inaccurate, then it just sends police to a street corner where there is actually just road construction or a volleyball popped. The consequences are pretty low to nil.
Many people might not know this all calls have priorities in a policing system, they are not treated equal. So Shotspotter alerts are very low priority to officers. The same is true for home alarm systems. Home alarm systems trigger false alarms constantly. Police treat them as very low priority as a result. So if a 911 call comes in or an eyewitness reported shooting, or even a wreckless driver or suspected DUI, the police will treat that first. In fact if they are on the way to a shotspotter alert and encounter something else, they will stop for it.
This is to say, that the false positives aren't as important as everyone makes them out to be. If a false positive happens, it means that a cop that's sitting on a random street corner gets moved to a street corner where the false alarm from Shotspotter fired. There's not really any harm being done here.
Having American cops rush to your door thinking violence is happening is not inconsequential. Just a few days ago they shot at a kid who was playing with fireworks, due to a false positive. Also, see swatting and its fatal consequences.
As much as I hate to participate in political discussions, I have to agree here. No US cop would ever respond to gunshots in a casual manner. Think about Swatting.
Sound classification under fairly well-controlled conditions could be very different from a real world streetcorner situation, where sound can bounce off surfaces and generate different signals depending on direction and distance of origin relative to the collecting microphone. High-quality omni-directional microphones can be expensive and I imagine there would be theft concerns if they used really good ones.
I recommend primo EM272 microphone capsules for use with https://github.com/hcfman/sbts-aru. They are high quality, very sensitive with high signal to noise ratio, lauded for nature recording use cases. They can be bought assembled for around 65 euros in the Netherlands. However these capsules are often found in much more expensive equipment.
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
> assumed the nature of analyzing for a sound signature would be throwing much of the data away immediately
(INACCURATE, SEE EDIT) It does. The "conversations recorded by ShotSpotter sensors" were a few seconds before/after the shooting, and consisted of people saying things like "[shooter's name] Why are you going to [shoot] me like that, [shooter's name]"? [1]
[1] 'The recording of the second shot also captured the voice of Tyrone Lyles, apparently addressing the person who shot him: "Ar, Ar, why are you going to do me like that, Ar."' https://casetext.com/case/people-v-johnson-5116
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 nearest "shot spotter" box also correlates with the incidence of crime and gunfire in the area. to bring up racism or classism is unhelpful. that correlation is unfortunate, likely true, and also not the problem at hand.
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 communities.
I get they can’t necessarily do anything about this, since they’re gonna put microphones where it’s most efficient, but maybe it’s yet another argument against mass surveillance.
>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.
Uh sure, but that doesn’t effect the placement of new surveillance systems, which is the reason I mentioned it.
Also, I think you’re sort of saying that because you think catching them is a huge success, and that that offsets the harm, but it’s not gonna do a ton of good when nothing has been fixed about the underlying causes. At best the victims get catharsis, where if that money imprisoning the criminal were spent on something like providing economic opportunities or funding schools they’d likely benefit more and be more secure against future crime (not that its either or).
The vast number of reports are false, which if you read the rest of the article as serious consequences. It:
* results in many high-priority calls tying up the patrols in that area so residents who have serious issues, but not "active shooting" serious, get poorer service than people in predominantly white/wealthy neighborhoods. I think you'd be pretty annoyed if something of yours was stolen and police never show because a huge backlog of calls develops while they chase down shotspotter reports, but someone in a wealthier neighborhood reports a suspicious vehicle and police show up in minutes
* results in a lot of aggressive police action with police swarming an area looking for a "shooter." Given how discriminatory and hostile police are toward the poor and minorities, this has serious consequences....ranging from residents feeling like they're constantly being harassed, to death - a boy was shot and killed by police after setting off a firecracker that the shotspotter system reported.
There's a lot of evidence that ShotSpotter detects almost all gunshots and that's been validated by multiple third party groups. ShotSpotter also seems to alert to things that are either false positives (construction sounds, fireworks, etc) or are not useful.
Chicago IG says 9/10 times when officers respond to a ShotSpotter alert they find nothing. 1/10 times it leads to an arrest, but the arrest isn't always strictly related to the ShotSpotter event - e.g. police responding to an event stop a speeding car and discover drug paraphernalia or an unrelated gun.
Some cities, e.g. Atlanta, discontinued ShotSpotter over cost benefit concerns. From their analysis it seemed a better use of money to hire more officers than use ShotSpotter. Still, it's in use in 84 metro areas today.
Ultimately, I think it should be up to the local community. The individual community is the one who will most benefit (if it is beneficial) and suffer from increased police incursions.
In some cities there is - kind of. DC, for example, publishes all ShotSpotter events publicly and you can download all records of their events. You can notice by plotting their events that there is a lot of extra "shots fired" on January first (probably from fireworks). If you knew of gunshots at a specific geographic coordinate you could confirm or deny with the DC data. I suppose you could also go to some specific spot in DC and fire a gun to see if they could detect it - but I don't recommend that.
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.
I've never actually seen "blanks" at any sporting goods or gun store in the 15 years I was really into guns. Reloaders typically reload rifle bullets, so I find it highly unlikely anyone is shooting blanks. Especially during drunken sportsing celebrations.
No just random gunfire. People in their cars shooting in the air and then speeding off. They’re definitely not shooting at people otherwise it would be national news every night. I think the local police have resorted to a “just please aim in a safe direction” stance instead of trying to stop them. New years is especially annoying.
Something like shotspotter wouldn’t work for this because by the time you get the info and call it in the people doing the shooting are miles away and there isn’t a crime scene per se to investigate.
Surprising, right? You certainly didn't hear about a shooting every other week that year. (Granted, 2020 was an unusual year, news wise.) But look at the descriptions of the shootings:
"A large group of men jumped a fence to gain access to Atascocita High Schools football field, when an argument escalated and a 19-year-old was killed.[503]". "At Sonora High School in downtown Sonora, a student named Eric Aguiar, 17, was shot and killed in the High School's parking lot.[507]". "A 20-year-old University of Alabama at Birmingham student was shot and killed in a campus parking lot outside the student center. Investigators believed the shooting occurred during an arranged meeting to sell headphones.[513]".
Parking lots, dangerous places!
Dallas could have a thousand murders a year, or five thousand, and you'd never hear about them-- if the murders were boring enough.
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 blasting down the road at twice the speed limit. Things which the current system of "wait until someone gets annoyed enough or gets the courage to call the police to complain, and one might arrive 15 minutes later, by which time the coop has been long flown" allow to run mostly unchecked.
But those thoughts go hand in hand with a vague but distinct discomfort.
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, which gives credence to the notion that they aren't intended to deter criminal activity from the surrounding area. If anything, repelling/deterring crime would defeat the purpose of the technology.
At best, ShotSpotter merely detects crime, and its effectiveness in that capacity is kept a secret. The world of police tech is a knee-deep in snake oil. A bit of transparency would go a long way for ShotSpotter.
> 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.
Indeed, from a playing around perspective it can be a lot of fun. You do need to be able to identify the start time of a particular sound event though on 3 or more microphones (Technically 4x mics, there are two solutions to a 3 mic localization).
>Many assumed that ShotSpotter coverage was concentrated in disadvantaged parts of the city, an unsurprising outcome but one that could contribute to systemic overpolicing.
The author presents this as a negative but it is obviously a good thing. If there was an increase in gunfire in my neighbourhood I would hope that police increases their presence, lest the "disadvantages" begin to accumulate.
Your argument assumes that the devices are only used as marketed. My understanding is that this assumption doesn’t hold, and that police regularly use these systems as an excuse to harass people in poor neighborhoods. The reports I have read suggest that police will enter a neighborhood they want to patrol, and if they see someone they don’t like they can claim they were called in by shotspotter, then shake down the person and if they find something, arrest them for that. This is textbook over-policing, which I assure you would not want to have done to you, and that is the precise concern mentioned in the quote.
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 downs.
The ACLU has a thorough article breaking down reporting from the City of Chicago Inspector General, Northwestern School of Law’s MacArthur Justice Center, Vice news and the Associated Press.
ACLU article with links to the other reports here:
Key takeaways from the reporting linking ShotSpotter to over policing listed here:
1) ShotSpotter false alarms send police on numerous trips (in Chicago, more than 60 times a day) into communities for no reason and on high alert expecting to potentially confront a dangerous situation. Given the already tragic number of shootings of Black people by police, that is a recipe for trouble.
2) Indeed, the Chicago IG’s analysis of Chicago police data found that the “perceived aggregate frequency of ShotSpotter alerts” in some neighborhoods leads officers to engage in more stops and pat downs.
3) The placement of sensors in some neighborhoods but not others means that the police will detect more incidents (real or false) in places where the sensors are located. That can distort gunfire statistics and create a circular statistical justification for over-policing in communities of color.
The summary here seems to be that no, police do not regularly invent false positives for ShotSpotter.
Regarding:
1) How do you know you are dealing with a false alarm? Given the seriousness of gun violence, isn't it perfectly reasonable to send someone to investigate the situation rather than to ignore it?
2 and 3) Isn't it also the case that black neighbourhoods in Chicago have the highest gun violence and murder rate? What else would you expect from ShotSpotter other than for it to confirm that those neighbourhoods are indeed the ones with the most shots fired?
> The summary here seems to be that no, police do not regularly invent false positives for ShotSpotter.
Right. That was the part I referred to as misremembering in my above comment. The false alarms come from the system itself, not necessarily police lying about it. However the reports from multiple sources do say that false alarms occur at an alarming rate, and this leads to over policing.
I wanted to provide a citation for the article's claims of over policing, and I believe I have done so (the ACLU article has multiple high quality sources clearly linked in the first few paragraphs).
Your comment mentioned that shotspotter leading to a high police presence is "obviously a good thing" and that if you lived there, you would want this too. But if the residents were happy with what was happening, there would be no controversy. The problem with over policing is that it leads to unfair treatment of marginalized communities, and this is what people are unhappy about.
It seems like you are trying to reason away these concerns, or get me to answer your follow on questions, but I am not an expert here, just someone who remembered seeing articles about issues with the system. I would encourage you to review those sources and check their methodology regarding false positive detection rates, and seek additional information about over policing.
It just makes sense to put the sensors near the phenomena being sensed, and if people know where they are they could be manipulated. If guns are going off and people are getting caught, that seems like effective policing, not over or under policing.
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 sensors, and better human in the loop analysts.
I am firmly with Benjamin Franklin, in that "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.". But Franklin himself was in favor of collective security, and Franklin said this in support of the state's authority to provide collective security ( https://www.npr.org/2015/03/02/390245038/ben-franklins-famou... ). Also, these sensors monitor public spaces, where no expectation of privacy exists.
So I am for more sensors, video cameras on the sensors, more ML on the sensor data, and better training for analysts, but I am also for complete transparency on where sensors are and how they are used, with a publicly released report from annual external party review of police conduct in the use or abuse of sensor data.
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.
Interesting how takes on ShotSpotter vary depending on the context and situation. In San Jose it was used to help enforce rules against firing guns in the air. In these cases there would usually be reports to police, but finding the shooter was extremely difficult. With ShotSpotter it became possible to identify locations on individual lots. Using this information enforcement became much more effective and there was a huge reduction in celebratory gunfire. In a large number of these cases no charges needed to be filed as gun owners were often uninformed, apologetic, and compliant. From the start of this program it was explicitly stated that ShotSpotter information would only be used by constables on patrol and would not be admitted as evidence in court. System coverage was based on where crimes were being reported. That such criteria overlap with race and class makes sense without necessarily being connected.
It would be interesting to know if there might be some reasonable bounds that could be used to enable ShotSpotter to be used without being considered intrusive surveillance. Having information about gunshots or possible gunshots can be extremely useful for responders who need to understand where events are happening. This does not necessarily mean that the system has to be open to other uses, especially recording and replay of audio.
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 means to provide counter evidence to that provided by shotspotter. Currently they have no means to do that. Even the times of the shots they have to take shot spotters word for it.
Recordings by citizens themselves is an inherently safer approach because their sphere of influence is considerably smaller. Recordings are written to a separate partition on an SD card, it’s pretty simple to encrypt this partition as well if you like, I’ve done that.
For those who are interested each node can be made very cheaply. It will run on a Raspberry Pi zero with a 7 euro GPS. It can also run portably on batteries.
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.
I am making progress though. It may not be visible to users yet, but I'm actually starting to get the infrastructure set up to begin processing media at the new location, and am running for mayor with some ideas that should eliminate all crime here... If successful, I think it could bode well for the elimination of crime everywhere.
I looked to nature for solutions to predators. Predators and criminals need constant sources of food/targets, but Cicadas emerge periodically and overwhelm the predator population. During lean times, the predator population shrinks.
By periodically clamping down HARD, criminals will be forced to target riskier and riskier targets. Then the key is our ability to hunt. There is nothing humans are better at than hunting. We can hunt things to extinction, and criminal activity is no different.
Criminals that can't crime, will have to find other sources of income. If we set up easy sources of lawful income, they will move in that direction.
The choice for a criminal becomes starve, or change.
I truly believe that technology and fast responses can make the difference.
Hard to imagine this can discern between things like engine backfires, fireworks and garbage trucks effectively enough to be anything more than a really expensive checkmark on some captains yearly performance review.
One thing missed in this writing is that shotspotter also saves lives. In my city, people shot in the alley and left for dead are found shortly after they are shot because of the detection.
Without this tech, some would be left to a slow death in an alley where no one would find them until morning.
It may incidentally do that? But if it reliably saved lives you would be selling it to ambulance dispatchers.
In reality, ambulance dispatchers would look at the high rate of Shotspotter dispatching a car and finding absolutely nothing and immediately recognize this proposal would harm people by sending emergency services on wild goose chases while real emergencies suffer longer wait times.
If you’re passionate about this subject and have lots of time go and volunteer at high crime communities (if you dare), for example in high schools.
I did the latter for three years, volunteering to help the Ace Tech High School (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACE_Amandla_Charter_High_Sch...) more than 10 years ago, as part of their Robotics Team. The problems I saw were myriad but it was common to see lockers decorated with flowers, for kids who died recently.
I totally understand and agree with the educated person’s poverty, bias, etc. arguments. But when a problem gets this bad first you need to stop it, and then work on long term goals.
Just answer this question: if your child had 10% chance of getting shot and killed walking to/from from school, what would your position be on any technology that can reduce that by even 1%.
> Just answer this question: your child had 10% chance of getting shot and killed walking to/fro from school, what would your position be on any technology that can reduce that by even 1%.
Just to put some actual perspective on the numbers: about 40 kids are killed in all of New Mexico each year and about 20 of those are suicides (still tragic but not the walking-home-from-school kind). That's still too many, but is nowhere near 10%. You're inflating the numbers to trigger emotions.
Making wide scale policy decisions based on your emotions surrounding anecdotal incidents is not a good policy. I feel for the families that lose their children, but I don't believe that acting for the sake of acting is safe.
Acting in the heat of a crisis is how we got the TSA and the NSA, which we still haven't managed to get rid of. The risk of creating an enormous and impossible to get rid of surveillance state to save 1% of 20 kids per year (2 kids every 10 years) frankly isn't worth it.
You're advocating creating policy based on emotion, not numbers. That is what I mean by creating policy in the heat of the crisis—the argument goes that it's better to do something than nothing, so we just throw surveillance at the wall and hope it reduces the number of tragedies.
I'm not advocating doing nothing, but I am advocating against arguments in favor of surveillance that lean heavily into emotions surrounding anecdotes and ignore questions of actual incidence rates, causality, and efficacy of the proposed solutions.
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 dumping raw sewage in your drinking water.
For 20Hz noise, are there too many reflections to use an oscilloscope with 3 mics on a 25ft baseline to triangulate it (you'd have to elevate the mics)?
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.
If there are any uniquely identify able patterns such that you found find that point on all microphones then deployment my sbts-aru project in four places surrounding it might very well localize it for you
This is a strange conversation, because surely people realise that
all CCTV cameras made in the past 10 years have microphones and
record audio? Audio street surveillance is ubiquitous.
I think it's lame to limit the detection to just gun shots. Like the web has analytics, I think real life could have audiolytics. One example: I can collect all the data I want from my backyard and give a report to my neighbor about exactly how long and how loudly their dog has been barking.
I can hear which birds have been in my backyard.
I can... hear what a customer says about my product in-store and offer them coupons at checkout or later or get feedback about my product...
I would actually really love to live in a world where I can have a reasonable expectation of privacy when going about my day. A personal bird recorder is fine, but I absolutely would not want a networked system of sensitive microphones available for unlimited data gathering spread across my town. The prevalence of Ring cameras already makes some neighborhoods havens of surveillance, I’d rather we not expand things like that.
They are probably solar powered running on something with low power so they don't have to restrict the locations of hiding these devices to areas directly connected to the electrical grid.
Something along these same lines — I feel like I’m seeing those “Flock” cameras everywhere now. So between Shotspotter and Flock, you’re pretty much always under surveillance.
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?
I've experienced living in a neighborhood covered by shot spotter and hearing gun shots outside, and I think shot spotter is great. I want the cops to actually show up and arrest whoever is terrorizing everybody. Thank you very much
Chicago is letting the ShotSpotter contract expire instead renewing this year after the data revealed that it did not have any positive effect on crime reduction.
I think that's because our police force is incompetent though. Shotspotter may very well suck but if the police cant solve shit either way its not shotspotters fault. Murder has a 5% clearance rate here
In Chicago they will respond to them aggressively
. Gang members have figured this out and will have “decoy” shots fired before a hit takes place to tie up police.
Just yesterday the cops apparently showed up at a house 5 doors down from me and shot someone's dog right in front of their family.
Not sure if we have shotspotter, but at least I know the police responded!
(I say apparently because, while I heard the gunshots, and I later saw a heavy police presence and animal control hauling away what appeared to be a dead small animal, I don't ACTUALLY know what happened because I wasn't present at the time. All I know is what a resident of the house told me).
Even in Baltimore where police response times can be total garbage..they will show up for shot spotter. At least from my experience.
Calling 911 for anything else there is a long delay unfortunately. Last time I called for a car jacking right outside my home I was on hold for ten mins. Cops didn't arrive for another 20.
> 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.
> ShotSpotter sensor correlates fairly well with your household income. The wealthier you are, the less surveilled you are.
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?
The criminal element largely responsible for gun crime would criminally ignore the ban. They're already shooting people.
The US shares a 3,145 kilometer long border with Mexico, unfortunately there are at best 1,044 km of border 'barriers' in place. People, guns, money and drugs are smuggled across the border daily.
Guns aren't smuggled in from the Southern border. If anything guns are smuggled out of the USA into mexico, how do you think the cartels get their guns?
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?
This phrase "systemic overpolicing" and ShotSpotter both come from the same mind - the mind of the state.
The state - which like most organizations is concerned mostly with preserving itself - has an interest in the surveillance of the population and in shifting blame from it's failures to deal with poverty and crime to skapegoats: the police, racism, property taxes, etc.
The west is run by priests (professors, advisors, journalists, students, diplomats) with the support of the merchants. Priests always pretend it is flipped, but it's not. One "tell" is that the priests are never the villains in Hollywood movies. The other groups (warriors, merchants, and peasants) all do even villain duty.
Bias shot-spotter placement is a classic case of priests blaming merchants. There might even be something to the substance, but the priests run the show - not SoundThinking Inc.
Hmm - preservers, creators, and destroyers doing their jobs. Is this not what a healthy, functional society looks like, at least in any philosophy grounded in (albeit painful) reality? Or would you rather the preservers stop doing their job and let the others discover the consequences of their self-destructive fantasy? We might learn how pathetically dependent everyone is on each other for the N+1th time in recorded history.
Historically, APD's use of pervasive surveillance technology has been a flashpoint in the debate. APD has live access to perhaps 3-4 thousand cameras across the city (they aren't very transparent about this and it depends on how far along the APS integration project is), they have used facial recognition against driver's license photos and other sources since 2014, they have installed ALPR throughout the city and recently expanded retention to one year, etc. This is all fed into the Real-Time Crime Center, which uses a data fusion product from a vendor called Genetec to provide sort of a futuristic point-and-click data system that combines ShotSpotter detections with video feeds with service call records etc. to produce sort of a dossier on any given person or location.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of things going on in city politics, especially with regard to crime and policing, and so the topic of surveillance has mostly fallen out of public attention.
Still, APD's refusal to say in any detail what parts of the city were covered by ShotSpotter has been one of the big ongoing frustrations, particularly among those who favor police reform. I mostly wrote this article to highlight that there is finally information on the matter available. The concerns about how distribution of sensors and, more broadly, use of surveillance technology impacts civil rights and quality of life in the city are mentioned mainly as an aside and I do not attempt to articulate the pros and cons. That would require a rather lengthy piece as the topic is complex, and currently the greater part of the controversy isn't even about the wisdom of deploying ShotSpotter, but rather over whether or not ShotSpotter even works (and, consequently, whether or not it's simply a waste of city money, at a rate of around $5 million).