Jackson MS uses shot spotter and is 80% black, and no, they aren't deploying it in predominantly white
"minority" neighborhoods.
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.