I’d be interested in understanding this better - what kind of sensors do you have in mind that are junk?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28264686 has previous discussion on this from a number of viewpoints.
If you designed a polar bear detector to help prevent people from being eaten by polar bears, would you also deploy them in Florida for the sake of fairness, even though there are no polar bear attacks there?
I mean, if I make a magic box that has a 1% chance per day of calling the police and telling them a crime happened nearby and then only stick that box in areas where poor people live, you could see how that would lead to a whole lot of calls for police in those areas. You can also see how, by having a vastly higher police presence in those areas, more crimes will be detected in those areas, even if the base crime rate is the same as in a different area.
In the past, ShotSpotter employees have gone into the system and changed things after the fact to claim that their system detected shots in a specific area that it never detected. They did this while working with the police to come up with probable cause for an arrest after the arrest happened.
This kind of thing makes it easy for the cops to arrest people they want to arrest without any actual evidence of a crime. This is generally considered a bad thing in the USA.
It could be possible that police and police chiefs are in fact, putting this equipment in poorer neighborhoods because that is where the most gunfire already is.
Concerns about the relationship between employees and prosecutors are real, but "reinforcing biases" is the least of our worries in regards to marginalized communities when they are murdered at 5 to 20x the rate of the nonmarginalized communities.
Black communities are majority-support of the same or more police per Gallup https://news.gallup.com/poll/316571/black-americans-police-r...
Removing police from poorer areas hurts poor people more than edge case concerns about individual prosecutors playing fast and loose.
I conclude that it is a matter of public safety to avoid reinforcing biases.
Since the article this thread is about shows that some portion of police are willing to believe any damn thing, I think my concerns are reasonable.
Could it be "bias" to look at crime statistics? Maybe it's less safe than you think it is.
Do you plan to also change fire regulations to call for an even distribution of sprinklers? Presumably you don't want to die from fire-bias either...
A low crime statistic can either mean crime didn't happen, or the statistic didn't count the crimes that did
Besides the original comment, you can also read the multiple comments elsewhere in this thread making similar points. I am not too hopeful it will help, since your reading comprehension is obviously lacking.
Clearly, the all-too-common combination of stupidity and arrogance is alive and present in you. It is embarrassing how someone who have lost the plot then turns around and says that it is the other party that has lost the argument. Too stupid to understand and arrogant enough to inflict your ignorance on others. Thankfully, many of the users here easily recognized your hubris. No, it is you who are done. How humiliating.
So you're not even a real HN'er. Why don't you tell everyone who it is who's so free with the insults? Or are you scared to take responsibility for them?
But you can't leave it alone now, can you? Maybe now you'll have to write fifty paragraphs. Stay up all night doing it, too.
This is already reinforcing bias, because your question presumes that the places law enforcement deploys this tech are where it needs to be. To use your analogy, cops like deploying polar bear detectors based on how much snow falls in a place, because "everyone" knows that polar bears live in snowy places.
No, we don't. We know where law enforcement, which we already know is biased, reports shootings happening.Those are two completely different things.
For a really contrived example, in a police department of one for the whole world, put the only officer in Antarctica. You'll find there's only officially shootings in Antarctica
If you are claiming that there is significant bias here, you must present evidence that there are unreported shootings in an amount to make up a significant percent of all shootings in the US, or that there is an organized conspiracy by law enforcement to mislead the public about the location of shootings.
To be clear... the goal of the police _force_ is to enforce the law. The goal of (some) individual police officers is public safety, but certainly not all of them (and some days, it seems like not many of them... but you generally only hear about the bad stuff in the news, so take that with a grain of salt).
Often enforcing the law helps secure budgets (especially when it comes to enforcing drug laws with lucrative civil forfeiture seizures), but more recently many police departments have tried a different tactic when budgets have been threatened: actively refusing to enforce the law, in order to increase crime and prompt political change.
And those analysts are part of a law enforcement community that is rife with biases about crime and guns, which means most of the places where the system finds gunshots are where the biased people (who by default placed the detectors according to a bias) expect to hear gunshots.
ShotSpotter works in isolation because in isolation a certain noise profile is almost certainly a gun shot. Like most ML aiming to change the world it's powered by p-hacking.