Now imagine all it did was randomly pick a number from 1 to 100 each day and if it were a 1 or a 2, it "detected" a crime, giving probable cause to police to search people near the box.
Now imagine I almost exclusively put the boxes in areas where black people without a lot of money lived.
You could see this would be something of a problem, right?
My gut feeling is that shotspotter mostly works and is mostly accurate, regardless of what Vice reported. I can imagine how I’d build such a system and I don’t think it would be very complicated. You don’t need any powerful signal processing or AI, this entire idea was feasible 20 years ago.
And secondly, I think that if any technology is rolled out by a city in a way that’s discriminatory, that falls squarely on the city and their police department, not on the technology company that sold it to them.
The problem is that this specific company seems to be strong on marketing claims and light on engineering legwork. There have also been some implications that point to (in my opinion) post-indictment editing of records to gin up post-hoc probable cause in some cases. No smoking gun (ugh) to prove it but concerning.
What is known is that ShotSpotter reports seem to rarely create useful leads for police. It would hardly be the first (or second, third, fourth, et al) time someone promised to revolutionize policing only to hand over snake oil. Then when the money faucet begins to dry up some companies just can't help fabricating proof of their technology or even falsifying evidence to make sure police "see the value" in continuing to pay for it. Most police departments are being taken for a ride. Some fully understand the wink-wink-nod-nod going on and appreciate the company's "flexibility".
I don't want to base our legal system on your gut feelings. If ShotSpotter is mostly accurate, then they should have no problem releasing the requested material and proving that's the case.
Otherwise I will have to assume it's just the magic crime detection box as described above.
Now part of that might be because of the defacto police strike in response to "defund the police", but the noise went on long enough and was heard in nearby wealthy cities enough that actually motivated police forces were pushing to fix the problem and yet shotspotter proved useless.
This leads to the allegation that shotspotter doesn't actually work at all and is just there so when a hothead young cop does something wrong without thinking the police department can, after the fact, get shotspotter to gin up some probable cause.
Would you put those magic boxes near where previous gun crimes have been committed or would you put those boxes in places based on the race and sexual orientation and disability status and gender of the people living in the city?
First consideration would be applicable legal standard, which practically always errs on the side of the State, second is the reasonableness of statistical methodology presenting the locations based on crime statistics.
I would not personally argue for its constitutionality, but given the precedents stemming from pretextual patrolling cases, it isn’t as clear cut as one might hope.
Logically I would say spending the money on gun control would be better, but politically that seems like a no no. Make carrying in the street illegal with jail time, and use the money in a gun amnesty.
If you think it's wrong for police to investigate a shotspotter alert because it might be a false positive then the logical conclusion of that line of thinking is that it should be illegal for the cops to show up to investigate when someone calls in to report gunshots, since those are mostly false positives too.
He is saying they could be selling pure snake oil, and worse using it for discrimination (but not sure what the basis was for that, if any).
Either hearing a gunshot is not probable cause to pull someone over (in which case Shotspotter's accuracy and methodology is irrelevant), or hearing a noise that sounds sufficiently like a gunshot is indeed probable cause, in which case you can just listen to the audio yourself and make a determination about whether or not there was a true gunshot-like noise or the company invented a fake alert out of thin air. I don't see any scenario in which the methodology or accuracy of Shotspotter's devices is at all relevant to this case. The relevant fact here is whether this particular bit of audio can be reasonably classified as a gunshot, not the broader accuracy of the system over the whole data set.
>>Attorneys from the Cook County Public Defender Office, contending the police pulled the man over solely based on a ShotSpotter alert, subpoenaed the company as a third party to find out whether that was the case.
but that seems unlikely -- it would be really expensive and low-yield to pull over everyone in the vicinity of a gunshot. It would be about the same as with regular human ears hearing a bang: go to the source, then pull over cars with evidence further differentiating them as a possible locus of crime.
So probably shotspotter got the cop to that location, where he saw other, more crime-specific evidence. But without more info about this case I couldn't say for sure.
Expensive and low-yield for whom? For the officer who's been directed their by the robot, they're incentivized to do so; it makes them look like they're doing their jobs instead of doing nothing. What's built into the system to penalize them for inconveniencing / endangering a bunch of people with nothing to show for it?
And if you’re economizing on time, I can assure that a better use of it would be to answer the challenge you kept dodging (or “misinterpreting” as a opportunity to show off irrelevant knowledge):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32259971
At this point I’m just going to assume you have no idea if 7% is a good threshold or not, but still see so problem with shouting it because it sounds good.
[1] In case you forgot, the only reason you were outraged was because the search did catch a criminal that it shouldn’t have. So obviously someone cares about catching a criminal!
It's expensive for the community, to be sure, but the cop's not incentivized immediately to care about that.
It wasn't in that comment, it was in the premise of all your previous posts that it is outrag^W^W^W^W^W suboptimal for someone to be pulled over and eventually arrested for DUI when the original instigating cause was a false positive for gunfire.
IOW, the entire reason you're talking about this case, is because they did not pull over everyone in the vicinity but prioritized those that were more likely to be committing crime, based on other signals. That's how we got to this case to begin with! And yet, I'm having to remind you that you're arguing with yourself.
Do you consider it too much to ask that you remember the context of what you're talking about? And for others not have to remind you?
Also, thanks for the confirmation that you don't have a substantive answer to the substantive question, "what probability threshold is appropriate for police to enter in preparation for an active shooter" -- I had always assumed your comment was bad-faith to begin with. Especially when you deny that comments such as these are expressing something similar to outrage: