This is an unreliable system which police and prosecutors misrepresent as reliable.
It might not be useless in the strictest sense of the word, but it ought to be taken away from them.
It might not be useless in the strictest sense of the word, but it ought to be taken away from them.
The problem is allowing it to be used as evidence in criminal cases. That's the part that should be taken away.
Facial recognition and license plate readers are used to automatically track individual humans wherever they go so that they can be quickly arrested if they're on a to-arrest list. I'm not entirely sure how I feel about that, even if it's all taking place in public, open areas, but it's a totally different category from just knowing when and where a gun may have been fired. It's real-time crime detection vs. alleged criminal detection.
This is also the latest I've heard of, in a long line of the criminal justice system presenting what's often closer to fiction as an indisputable fact of someone's guilt. One of the cases that made me incredibly angry was the junk arson science surrounding the conviction and execution of Cameron Todd Willingham in Texas in 2004:
https://innocenceproject.org/cameron-todd-willingham-wrongfu...
But I also think of how unreliable eyewitness testimony is, and yet people's recollections of events (when we know, and have known for so long, that memory is plastic!), sometimes years later, are treated as fact:
https://www.ncsc.org/trends/monthly-trends-articles/2017/the....
I don't know how to solve this, since the "proven" part of "innocent until proven guilty" seems like it's built on a house of cards, and the only people with a direct incentive to change it are suspects (i.e. the people that the criminal justice system has already decided could've done it, and how can you trust a criminal's motivations? eye roll)
> Rather than defend ShotSpotter’s technology and its employees' actions in a Frye hearing, the prosecutors withdrew all ShotSpotter evidence against Williams.
Ducking the test and withdrawing the evidence means prosecutors can continue to claim that this stuff hasn't been deemed unreliable by experts.
>This is an unreliable system which police and prosecutors misrepresent as reliable.
I would argue in american policing, that broken is the point. People (cops, judges, juries, the public) don't engage with anything criminal justice related as probabilistic. If they showed the probabilities, they wouldn't have a product specifically because it would not be able presented as reliable.
It's product market fit, like the parallel citizen thread, that serves malicious and anti-social goals. But it is profitable.