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Comment by 4gotunameagain | Hacker News Reader

I don't seem to understand what's the civil liberties union points.

If there are more gunshot incidents in neighbourhoods with predominately black people, they shouldn't be installed as so to not appear "racist" ?

What am I missing ?

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There is also a line of thinking that the system should not be installed at all, under any circumstance, because it is ineffective:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/07/its-time-police-stop-u...

https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/four-problems-w...

Exactly, when I saw the headline I was thinking, great, the DOJ will stop this wasteful spending on fradulent technology. Nope.

The first link doesn't just say "ineffective"; it suggests that the gunshot data being generated is fraudulent.

The issue involves both the placement (in low income black neighborhoods) and accuracy (allegedly low). According to critics, ShotSpotter has thousands of false positives. Naturally when police think shots have been fired, their response is going to be much different than an innocent knock on the door. Imagine riding your bike down the street as a kid and dozens of cops suddenly arrive with their guns drawn.

So assuming the stats on low accuracy are correct, the use of Shotspotter seems to unjustly subject black residents to potentially harmful high-stakes police calls with no apparent benefit.

I get the criticism if the accuracy is allegedly low, I still don't see the connection with race. Is it more acceptable to unjustly subject non black residents to potentially harmful high-stakes police calls ?

Legally police need evidence of some crime (probable cause) to stop and investigate an individual. This is so police can't just randomly confront people or even worse illegally discriminate based on race. Police have historically used minor traffic violations like tail light failure, the smell of marijuana, or "furtive movements" as loopholes to the requirement of probable cause. A technowiz device provides an excuse to just stop and frisk everyone near the alert even if the cause was a car backfiring.

There is no proof (currently) that these systems were (or were not) only deployed in the highest gun high-crime areas. We're assuming police used data (and not racial prejudice) to place cameras, but I didn't see anything in the article to support that. That's something an investigation would reveal!

> We're assuming police used data (and not racial prejudice) to place cameras, but I didn't see anything in the article to support that.

I'm not sure what good assumptions do for anybody. The media tells us one thing, law enforcement tells us another.

Did you know 38% of all serial killers...are black [men]? I didn't. The media and academia don't dare touch that particular narrative, but the data says it in no uncertain terms. See for yourself:

https://www.fbi.gov/file-repository/serialmurder-pathwaysfor...

Of the most prolific 36 offenders (killed 5 or more victims), 22 were white and 11 were black. Settling stereotypes: you're still more likely to be raped/killed by someone you know, not some random black guy. White men killed white victims 37.5% of the time, black victims, 10.8%. Black men were less discriminating, but still mostly hunted their own-- 16% white and 17.9% black victims.

Crazy, right? I assumed the FBI started combining gang violence in the stats for serial murder, since those killings do technically fit (murders punctuated by cooling-off period, etc.)-- but organized crime hits were deliberately omitted from the study!

The majority of all serial murder victims are white (60%) female (75.4%) and killed via strangulation for sex (81.5%). That's no surprise, but we're led to believe it's all middle-aged white guys in aviator glasses that go around butchering prozzies (a stereotype in itself). Wayne Williams was just an anomaly that happened that one time way back in the 80s; black serial killers don't exist, don't be silly. The DC snipers? Is that a superhero movie?

I'm not defending Shotspotter (guns accounted for a single-digit percentage of victims, so it's pointless by every metric) but I can't help but feel we're being collectively misled by media-driven outrage that BLM lent credibility to.

The counterarguments are always the same-- overpolicing, unfair justice system, etc. They fall flat in this particular domain. Vague words like "overpolicing" and "inequality" are not enough to substantiate claims of prejudice against individuals convicted of five or more counts of murder, committed serially over the course of years.

The arguments become all the more absurd when the implication is that the police are racist, the entire justice system is corrupt, the FBI can't fucking count, all the witnesses are lying, the forensics are junk science, and it's innocent people being framed for killing everyone they disagree with. QAnon is more plausible-- there are fewer actors involved. The system has its problems, but it's not believable that there's this much cross-jurisdictional conspiracy going on to indict 10% of the population. They didn't do any of this to Snowden or Assange (the best they came up with was a dubious rape claim, and both were enemies of the state that agencies had an interest in silencing). Even white serial killers don't go out of their way to target black victims. But the narrative is that everyone is racist and out to get them?

The data continues to show black-on-black violence is the biggest threat to black people, but intervention is met with cynicism, belligerence (from milquetoast white people), or else the "you're not allowed to ask questions, you're persecuting them, you x-ist" playbook everyone from the Catholic church to the Branch Davidians, the FLDS, the Jehovah's Witnesses, and the kink-cultists of today trot out to rouse their community against nosy outsiders and distract from the abuses they have an interest in concealing. Remember how long each of these institutions got away with their shenanigans due to lack of transparency? Notice how nothing is changing for the black community-- and only getting worse, as the NYT so frequently opines?

Is it really the police getting worse, or was the problem with violence in this community underreported to begin with? I'm not actually making an argument either way-- I don't have a clue what is going on here, but I'm concerned about the lack of due diligence that anybody is able to conduct when one side offers actual data and the other only brings histrionics and a handful of exceptions to the table. I don't trust either side, but to date we've only really listened to a single one of them-- the news-as-entertainment industry's take on it.

Are you not entertained?

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