That's falsification of evidence. Will there be any consequences? Who watches the watchmen?
If shotspotter wants to be relied on for evidence, allowing technicians to go back and modify data seems like a recipe to quickly eliminate its use in cities and destroy its market share. Adding notes about manual review after the fact would be the only acceptable thing, but the originals should never be modified/deleted.
And not a chance I could do that based on microphone playback between firework and gunshot with some random mic in a city. 1/2 the “trick” is knowing the location, at my range I know the echo of a 12ga vs a 45ACP, the crack difference in a 223 or a 6.5prc, if I went to some random place and you shot one random shot, it would be ridiculously less accurate.
Shotspotter seems like a ton of bullshit to me after reading this article including…
> Both the company and the Rochester Police Department “lost, deleted and/or destroyed the spool and/or other information containing sounds pertaining to the officer-involved shooting,”
I’m happy to agree with you on that point, since I don’t have the experience there.
My larger point is that I could reasonably say allow for shotspotter to review the sound, but the location I’m assuming is pretty darn accurate.
And yes, the article completely destroys their credibility as a reliable source of evidence.
Clearly those adjustments should not be admitted as evidence in a court case. ShotSpotter just needs to take the 'L' and they will have to prosecute without (or admit whatever was originally recorded as corroborating evidence).
I remember reading about a similar technology used by soldiers in Afghanistan to find snipers, but Afghanistan is largely an open area. I don't see how it would be accurate when the acoustics of multiple buildings are in effect.
You have way too much faith in the legal system. So many pseudo-scientific classes of evidence exist:
- Field sobriety tests
- Ballistic forensics
- Blood spatter analysis, as you mentioned
- Bite pattern analysis
- Burn / arson forensics
- Polygraph
- Biometrics under less-than-perfect conditions (your fingerprint reader on your phone works well because it's near perfect conditions. Crime scene partial finger prints are usually insufficient. Same for facial recognition -- works with your iPhone FaceID sensor, doesn't work with the gas station 480x320 camera)
- Most DNA and hair analysis
Pretty much all hocus pocus. Courts don't care. Anything for the conviction. Anyone hoping for fair scientific analysis in a court of law today is in for a rude awakening.
Sounds like that should be required before the results of automated processes can be used as evidence.
* Not using ridiculous hyperbole
* Providing a well-reasoned solution instead of just stating what the problem is
I did:
>modern policing must be abolished and something entirely different needs to take its place
That's not a well-reasoned solution. That's not a solution at all. All you're doing is complaining.
Put your money where your mouth is, and come up with what the "something" should be.
https://www.npr.org/2021/03/08/974941422/6-month-experiment-...
https://www.npr.org/2021/07/23/1019704823/police-mental-heal...
But that doesn't jive with your proposal to completely eliminate police and replace them with something else.
I'm not going to engage you any further since it's become clear you're either trolling or not really trying.
Police resisting reforms, limited consequences to police misbehaviour, and limited progress in attempts to reform, are I think baseline facts by now. The notion that they need to be rebuilt from ground up with different culture/prerogatives/internal processes/priorities again is nowhere near "troll like".
>>Providing a well-reasoned solution instead of just stating what the problem is
That's a high bar and an unreasonable threshold to speaking out. A lot of times, recognizing / defining a problem is an important first step. It should not be suppressed solely for lack of immediate solution provided.
Really? And how do you figure that? They literally opened with "There won't be any consequences, because the police never face any consequences." The entire planet can name at least one instance of a cop facing consequences for their behavior.
"There's no way to reform modern policing" is a strong assertion without very much to support it.
> That's a high bar and an unreasonable threshold to speaking out.
No, it isn't. _All_ systems are subject to abuse by bad actors. _No_ system is perfect. There are only trade-offs.
If you have no alternative solution it means you haven't considered the trade-offs, and if you haven't considered the trade-offs, you haven't actually spent time thinking about the problem.
It's easy to point fingers at what sucks. Everybody can do it, and everybody is doing it. If you're here on Hacker News, which is supposed to be a place for interesting conversation, I expect that you're going to do better than that.
(Note, and entirely FWIW, I still think message could've been presented clearer / in a more friendly & productive fashion - it's usually better to coach and show than to yell & chastise).
I do think it's unreasonable to expect a detailed description of this solution off-the-cuff. A simple search would have provided you with that, though: https://defundthepolice.org/alternatives-to-police-services/
Saying that police are never held accountable is, in fact, hyperbolic.
> Their description of the solution is well-reasoned
There's no reasoning beyond first order "this thing sucks, progress isn't fast enough, it has to go". No consideration is given to the second or third order effects of such a massive change. So no, it isn't "well-reasoned."
> I do think it's unreasonable to expect a detailed description of this solution off-the-cuff.
Hacker News is _supposed_ to be a place for curious and insightful discussion. Not just issuing complaints about the social issues of the day.
I made an attempt to engage in order to try and produce something substantive, but that fell flat pretty quickly because no effort was made to produce something well-reasoned.
> A simple search would have provided you with that, though: https://defundthepolice.org/alternatives-to-police-services/
A simple search yielding a page that ignorantly proclaims "But we have to remember that police do not prevent violence." Who responds to mass-shootings in progress? Did a cop not prevent someone from being stabbed in the Makhia Bryant case? Does solving cases and locking up the right people who are violet not prevent them from committing further crimes?
Your own link is agenda pushing, not a serious analysis of how & why policing has reached its current state, how this new system will avoid the same fate, and largely avoids talking about the potential problems of this new system.
A reddit-style per-statement rebuttal would seem to be antithetical to that. You don't seem curious, you seem like you have an agenda.
EDIT: I'm going to further defend the link. It is exactly what you asked for: a detailed description of the ways in which policing is lacking as a public service and the initiatives that would replace it. That you singled out a single quote which you have ideological (and flawed) disagreements with does not change that face.
Splitting policing into multiple institutions with specific focuses (per the link: mental health, traffic, violent crime and gender-based crime, investigative services, and minor crime) would allow governments to optimize recruitment and training and to create new institution-specific cultures free from the baggage of modern policing. The link specifically points out the detrimental effect modern policing has on black citizens and communities of color and how they (along with the rest of the population) would benefit from the changes suggested. I have a hard time believing that you would be against this end, and assuming that you're not, I would love to hear your alternative solutions for countering the widespread abuse, corruption, and hostility police visit upon communities of color.
That's not really the problem. Even where the police have embraced incremental reforms they've driven funding and responsibility into the police, pushing them into more domains for which they are inappropriate, and haven't dealt with the underlying problems because those aren't peripheral policy problems but fundamental structural problems of having a general purpose paramilitary force as a top level local government organization unto which almost all law enforcement and some peripheral tasks are layered fostering an insular warrior culture without any other strong focus. (Note that when the US was founded—before standing paramilitary domestic security forces were common enough to be a particular general concern—avoiding a very similar problem with military forces which inevitably would get leaned on for domestic security was a major reason for skepticism of standing armies in favor of relying on militia + cadre, and thus for the second amendment.)
Which also suggests what the “something else” to replace the police could be—given that abandoning professional permanent law enforcement for reliance on citizen militia/posses is probably not viable for modern society, one way to address that problem is to have specialized law enforcement entities in domain-specific agencies whose individual foci are narrower, enabling each to have a cultural focus (and substantive competence requirements) that are domain specific.
And if you look at US law enforcement beyond the local level, that's what a lot of it looks like already. The highly centralized paramilitary law enforcement structure where the top uniformed commander is a the head of a top level agency of the unit of government (and possibly independently elected and effectively unaccountable to the civilian government officials) is unique to city/county government.
I get how suspicious this looks, especially the changed geo-tag that occurred months after, perhaps at the behest of or influenced by the CPD’s investigation, but we should try to be as objective as possible before accusing people of committing felonies.
and we don't because they withdrew evidence, rather than allowing outside review of said processes.