https://www.vice.com/en/topic/shotspotter
https://www.techdirt.com/2022/07/08/judge-tosses-defamation-...
https://www.vice.com/en/topic/shotspotter
https://www.techdirt.com/2022/07/08/judge-tosses-defamation-...
Police said ShotSpotter, a surveillance system that uses hidden microphone sensors to detect the sound and location of gunshots, generated an alert for that time and place.
Except that’s not entirely true, according to recent court filings.
That night, 19 ShotSpotter sensors detected a percussive sound at 11:46 p.m. and determined the location to be 5700 South Lake Shore Drive—a mile away from the site where prosecutors say Williams committed the murder, according to a motion filed by Williams’ public defender. The company’s algorithms initially classified the sound as a firework. ...
But after the 11:46 p.m. alert came in, a ShotSpotter analyst manually overrode the algorithms and “reclassified” the sound as a gunshot. Then, months later and after “post-processing,” another ShotSpotter analyst changed the alert’s coordinates to a location on South Stony Island Drive near where Williams’ car was seen on camera.
In 2016, Rochester, New York, police looking for a suspicious vehicle stopped the wrong car and shot the passenger, Silvon Simmons, in the back three times. They charged him with firing first at officers.
The only evidence against Simmons came from ShotSpotter. Initially, the company’s sensors didn’t detect any gunshots, and the algorithms ruled that the sounds came from helicopter rotors. After Rochester police contacted ShotSpotter, an analyst ruled that there had been four gunshots—the number of times police fired at Simmons, missing once.
Paul Greene, ShotSpotter’s expert witness and an employee of the company, testified at Simmons’ trial that “subsequently he was asked by the Rochester Police Department to essentially search and see if there were more shots fired than ShotSpotter picked up,” according to a civil lawsuit Simmons has filed against the city and the company. Greene found a fifth shot, despite there being no physical evidence at the scene that Simmons had fired. Rochester police had also refused his multiple requests for them to test his hands and clothing for gunshot residue.
Curiously, the ShotSpotter audio files that were the only evidence of the phantom fifth shot have disappeared.
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,” according to Simmons’ civil suit
Of course that seems like a small nitpick given the content of the passage I copied from the article.
>In Chicago, a government watchdog says Shotspotter alerts have only led to evidence of gun crime in 9 percent of cases.
>fewer than 2 in 10 investigatory stops following ShotSpotter alerts resulted in the recovery of a gun
9% actually seems like a lot? Considering that most criminals don't stick around after illegally discharging a firearm. And 1 in 5 resulting in the recovery in a gun? Vice is really bending over backwards to pretend that these numbers are bad.
If you're in a particularly crime ridden area, my concern is how many of those 9% are the right evidence against the right person. It's pretty terrible if all it took to nab the wrong person was shoddy evidence from a shady and secretive company that is accused of having manipulated the evidence in the past. It is still quite terrible even if it's often correct, because that makes it much harder for someone who is innocent to do anything about it.
Still, it's possible that the numbers Vice is showing does not demonstrate the problem.
I would not want to live in a community so policed.
Maybe we should focus on why there's so many gunshots in these specific communities.
The gun violence is just the camouflage that provides plausible deniability. If ShotSpotter had been founded in London they'd have called it "StabSpotter."
I also hear kids shooting fireworks, and those modifications people do to their motorcycles and cars to make them sound like they're backfiring (even if they aren't; I don't know how these things work).
And while I like the concept behind ShotSpotter, the company, it's methods and its data governance are... Shoddy. That's probably the most charitable I can put it from what I've read about them.
Another thing I didn't point out in my comment is that ShotSpotter also changes its data if police tell them to. Which seems like either an admission that their sensor is not very good, or that they're willing to compromise good data when told to.
This is no different than other technologies. DNA testing wouldn't be admissible in legal actions either if the tests were essentially black boxes that couldn't be scrutinized.
You have an interesting concept of the rule of law.
The average police response time in Chicago is 5-6 minutes[0]. I'm going to bet that active shootings are on the fast side of the average. Having lived in Chicago for 7 years, I can tell you there are areas where you regularly see police patrolling.
0. https://mediaprogram.maps.arcgis.com/apps/Minimalist/index.h...
In any case, this is all supposition. We aren’t being allowed to review the actual evidence, so for all I know SpotShotter is just telling the police what they’re asking it to.
Eg https://chicago.suntimes.com/crime/2022/7/27/23280415/chicag...
Yes, I do think that.
https://www.npr.org/2022/05/26/1101496374/chicago-police-13-...
It seems to me that to think otherwise is a "the omelet requires breaking eggs" argument.
That said, I don't think anyone is opposed to technology that can locate gunshots and deliver law enforcement to the right places. The gripe is that this company in particular has a history of being opaque and trying to cover up their failings, leading to questions about the effectiveness of their underlying technology and data integrity. The public can't tell whether this is a legitimate social good based on an effective tool or if the company is just ripping off tax payers and sometimes outright working with crooked cops to fabricate probable cause.
Not every cop is crooked, and not every acoustic triangulation technology is fake. But this company isn't being transparent or well intentioned enough for the public, or even a limited group of outside experts, to make that determination. And they have a history of being willing to corrupt their data, altering evidence to facilitate false records from crooked cops.
The right tools in the wrong hands can still be a problem. We don't know if this is the right tool, but the company has shown itself to be the wrong hands.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32259925
But yes, "tighten up" those Fermi estimates for a question no one asked and which has no bearing on the discussion.
No, I wouldn't, because your facts are wrong. Yes, London police are generally unarmed, but they still get called to respond to situations where there is a likely armed suspect, and in those cases, they send in special units that are armed.
The question here -- that you avoided -- is, what is the appropriate probability before sending in such an officer, and is it higher than the 7% in the situation you cited? You were asking others to be outraged that there was "only" a 7% chance of an actual armed shooter. In an attempt to move the discussion forward, I asked what the appropriate value is, so as to appropriately judge whether such intervention was unwarranted.
To which your entire response was to shoehorn in an irrelevant factoid about London and falsely imply I'm not aware of it. (And, of course, work in a Fermi reference, because, why not?)
If I may make a suggestion: next time someone asks a substantive question, and you don't have a substantive answer, just don't reply. That's a much better approach for the forum than what you just did.
In that context, ShotSpotter's mechanism bordering on ascientific prognostication should be considered dangerous to the community because it is increasing the chances of fatal encounters for no benefit. It's basically SWATting with a fancy corporate branding.
What part of my comment is that (or anything else you've said) responding to? I asked a simple question: what is the appropriate "probability of a shooter" that justifies going in with a protocol that expects one? Now you're just guessing things that have little to do with what I said.
Are you under the impression that the only evidence of a firearm being discharged is carried away by the person firing the gun? I was under the impression that evidence of a gunshot is kind of famously objective because of the presence of bullets, bullet holes, casings, victims, property destruction etc.
By your reasoning, it’s a feasible proposition that criminals regularly patch up bullet holes and what, fireman carry their victims away from the scene?
Find the bullet hole, and you've found the property destruction, and the bullet is either embedded in the property destruction or fragmented all of over the place, as bullets often do. So you could have just said "property damage."
But tell you what, I'll go downtown and shoot a black paintball in a random direction, and tell you roughly where I was when I shot it, within 100m. It will be your job to find where that paintball hit. Good luck finding your evidence.
>casings
Casings are easier to find, but still very difficult if you don't have the precise location of where the shooting took place.
>victims
Firearm discharges don't always result in victims, or even victims willing to come forward.
What are you honestly expecting cops to do when there's a gunshot report? Spend hours combing the city for some rogue bullet holes? It's not realistic. The best evidence you're going to get is rushing to the area where shots were reported and finding someone fleeing.
That’s a fascinating position! Based on how difficult it is to find any evidence whatsoever, would you conclude that gunshots are essentially inconsequential 91% of the time? If I believed that, I would advocate for the legalization of recreational firearm discharge in populated areas, since obviously they rarely actually cause any noticeable issue.
Edit:
A tech company going “Beep boop loud noise! Give us more public funds for our technology that we refuse to explain!” is not the same thing as an actual report of gunfire to me. As for what I expect the police to do? Nothing. Literally nothing at all, anywhere at any time. They’re not obligated to, and in my experience, that’s what they usually do. Nothing.
I forgot to add “witnesses and complainants” as something that could be considered evidence of gunfire, but I’m assuming they can also be carried away
It's the same problem that Stop and Frisk[1] in NYC had: you can make the contraband recovery numbers look fantastic, if you're willing to sweep peoples' civil rights under the rug.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop-and-frisk_in_New_York_Cit...
But some minority demographics commit disproportionate (edit: violent) crime per capita so you expect some proportional scaling (more crime = more need for crime detection) if they happen to live in cities/areas where that's the case. (Usually big cities)
I'm surprised to see this is somewhat true in the US. In Canada rural crime rates are higher than urban ones, but that trend doesn't seem to hold for the US (per sources below)
Of course extrapolating from "average crime rate" to "location of hotspots" might be suspect in both cases...
Stats Canada: https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/85-002-x/2019001/article...
Bloomberg article with some nice graphs, and really good links to sources (at the end of it) - the text focuses on NYC but the second line chart in particular (based off of linked CDC data) does a good job of answering this question: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-06-07/is-new...
For example, it's well documented wage theft is a much bigger crime in terms of monetary value than all forms of robberies combined. But those criminals don't get nearly the same level of enforcement as robbers do.
Other Spotters for things such as wage theft, fraud, etc would be great.
You could (and I would) argue some whole industries are heavily criminal (fraud) and bait people into moral hazard.
If it was up in the atmosphere with long consistent pockets of air, maybe. On the ground, no way.
Even your ears can somewhat locate sound sources in 3D space, just not with perfect accuracy, especially in complex soundscapes like cities.
I don’t think police is deploying this based on skin color
I provided an example of basically the blackest city in America deploying it within their own city. Why did they deploy a tool of oppression on themselves?
It seems you were very distracted that I pointed out that whites are a minority within Jackson MS, but that was really just an offhand comment and not the point of the post.
The OP said nothing like this. You're projecting a lot of personal biases onto their comment. But you know that, and are trying to hone in a single example in order to strawman/red-herring valid concerns about the technology and its effects.
> It seems you were very distracted that I pointed out that whites are a minority within Jackson MS, but that was really just an offhand comment and not the point of the post.
That was the whole point of your post. You literally said nothing else.
Yes, I will admit I am projecting, or rather assuming, bad-faith on their part, or at least sneaky rhetorical tactics. I used to assume good faith, but the past 5 years or so have made me realize that very few people operate this way. If I see someone making a point, and an underspecified part of their post or a part where they use vague language may give a certain impression, and it just so happens that that certain impression furthers the point they were trying to make(rather than diminish it, or be orthogonal to the point), then I assume there was intent to do such a thing.
OP said:
> It doesn't work all that well and is selectively deployed in minority areas and is used by police to selectively enforce crimes, sometimes also altering the evidence.
Yes, I suppose it sometimes may be selectively deployed in minority areas in order to oppress them, but without any kind of mention of the rate that that happens, this appears to be OP trying to convince you that it may be worse than it is. If you didn't know anything about cars, and I said that cars are used to intentionally murder people, you would probably have a worse perception of cars than if you had a more thorough understanding of their usage.
Therefore, my point was to show that shot spotter is not just used to oppress minorities, I provided an example of a predominantly black city choosing to use the technology, which almost certainly means there are uses of the tech that aren't about oppressing minorities.
> That was the whole point of your post. You had nothing else substantive to say.
I'm sorry, but I understand my point better than you do. I apologize for not being more explicit earlier. Hope my post helped.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/88nd3z/gunshot-detecting-tec...
https://www.vice.com/en/topic/shotspotter
https://www.vice.com/en/article/qj8xbq/police-are-telling-sh...
https://igchicago.org/2021/08/24/oig-finds-that-shotspotter-...
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/07/its-time-police-stop-u...
https://www.techdirt.com/2022/07/08/judge-tosses-defamation-...
No, it would be silly to claim it's being deployed only in those areas.
Surely there is some merit there that is not merely keeping minorities down, or maybe all the black people running the government just secretly hate blacks.
Even if the response that used it differently was meant to make a valid point (I believe it was, as they expanded on it later), the way they used minority did nothing to help that point and instead caused unnecessary contention.
It would have been far more effective for their point to say "Jackson MS has a population and police department that are both majority black, and they still choose to deploy shotspotter in black neighborhoods.". Then we could jump right to exploring reasons why that might be, including valid uses of shotspotter because of effectivenessas well as other incentives regardless of it's effectiveness.
1) Jackson MS is 80+% black.
2) The (mayor + city council) of Jackson MS is 75% black
3) The command staff of Jackson MS police department is 100% black.
4) The city and police department decided to deploy shot spotter in Jackson
5) (don't get distracted by this please) The city has not deployed shot spotter in areas that are predominantly white
Given those 5 points, where is Jackson deploying their shot spotter tech? Is it in predominantly black/minority neighborhoods? Yes.
Why are they doing that? Does the predominantly black government intend to keep black people down?
This may be non obvious but for example black cops tend to use disproportionate force against black suspects in areas where such behavior is culturally and systemically tolerated. Cops and suspects are in an adversarial situation and being part of team cop or team suspect is more important than sharing a skin color.
An infallible argument; the oppressee can just as well be opressor, because otherwise we'd have to reconsider our preferred conjecture.
The alternative is like a mirror of the argument that a fellow isn't racist because he has a black friend. It's parody masquerading as analysis.
Also it's my experience that if an all black community decides to enact public policy that goes against the narrative, it's almost exclusively young white progressives that come up with these sorts of agency-removing arguments to protect their preferred worldview
The topic of discussion is a company that produces a product that due to echos and analysis doesn't actually know where or if guns are fired being deployed in shitty crime ridden neighborhoods where disproportionately minorities being poorer are obliged to live. In the context of the gun shot imaginer system they have been literally caught doctoring data to match what the police wanted to be true in order to obtain a conviction.
Multiple things can be true. The shot spotter can be deployed in areas where gun fire actually and truly is more common, it can be misused to shake down or frame people in that area, such behavior can primarily be misused against people in that area, because more poor black people are obliged to live their they can in turn fall victim to such bad behavior more frequently even if not specifically targeted by law enforcement. Further faced with multi decade scare tactics and shitty public defenders poor people and by extension disproportionately minorities flinch and cop pleas.
This is how you fill your prisons up with black people.
This is literally what systemic racism means. Its a racist outcome of a fucked up system even when said system isn't consciously malicious and lets be a little honest with each other. We both know that there is plenty of honest bigotry. There are plenty of folks in government and plenty of folks in uniform that wouldn't mind donning a sheet and burning a cross in their neighbors lawn.
America was born in racism and as much as we hope to generation by generation make it more equal some of us remain more equal than others and a lot of us like it that way.
Also, the devices don't "enforce crimes", they only alert approximate areas where a gunshot/firework may have gone off at.
That's the sort of thing that would be useful in court if it's true.
Are local police required to publish where they are deploying ShotSpotters? Shootings and racial demographic data is certainly already public.
I've read the entire Vice court report and don't remember seeing that data. Haven't read the Chicago one.
Edit: reading the original Motherboard source all of the examples were described as small 'pilot programs' so they were usually only a single part of each city, in Cleveland for example :
> the Cleveland Police Foundation—has been deployed in a small section of Southeast Cleveland that city officials have described as a high-crime area.
> Those neighborhoods also happen to be among the least white in the city and those hit hardest by economic recession and the pandemic, according to local community organizers.
> The area the division chose for Shotspotter accounted for 37 percent of all shots fired calls, 37 percent of felonious assaults, and 45% of all homicides within district four, Sergeant Jennifer Ciaccia wrote to Motherboard in an email.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/88nd3z/gunshot-detecting-tec...
(Motherboard didn't provide crime stats in the other 3 example cities cited, only the demographic profile which was consistently non-white)
For example, perhaps literacy tests in order to vote in the Jim Crow south were purely based out of concern that only informed voters should be able to vote. Assuming they were applied evenly to both whites and minorities (they weren't), one could draw the conclusion that even though most of the people prohibited from voting were minorities, the intent wasn't racist.
But that's not how most racism works.
Which, in the sum of everything, ultimately out-ranks the value of attempting to address the homicides and gun violence that plagues their communities through law enforcement. Therefore it's a net negative for society?
(Apologies if I'm being overly literal here, my brain tends to seek the most rational explanations for everything).
Edit: Also to be clear I agree that the vast majority of people aren't these actors. The problem is it is very easy for someone with ill intent to get things moving in the direction they want. Very few systems stand up to real world abuse by a sufficiently motivated bad actor.
The reason violent crime enforcement disproportionately affects black people in the United States is because black people disproportionately commit violent crime. Black people, for example, commit most of the murders in the United States despite not being most of the population.
It is not racist to notice and react to crime. On the contrary, it is racist to insist that law abiding black people, the vast majority, endure high rates of crime. Reducing and hobbling law enforcement necessitates that citizens who might be protected are not.
That's without getting into the socio-economic factors that lead people to pursue sports as a career rather than playing in school and then going on to be an architect or whatever it is.
The rest of your comments have been dissected and examined to such an extreme over the last like... 80 years... that I don't have anything new to add to the discussion.
The issue is that black people are overrepresented in the NBA. This is a "racist outcome" per the language of an ancestor comment. Is it because the league is prejudiced against white people and keeping them out? Prejudiced against black people and expressing the prejudice, for some reason, by admitting more black players to the league? Or, could it possibly be that black people are just more likely to be good at basketball? Black people are ~15% of the US population and ~75% of the NBA. Must be an awful lot of racism there...