ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood
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Historically, APD's use of pervasive surveillance technology has been a flashpoint in the debate. APD has live access to perhaps 3-4 thousand cameras across the city (they aren't very transparent about this and it depends on how far along the APS integration project is), they have used facial recognition against driver's license photos and other sources since 2014, they have installed ALPR throughout the city and recently expanded retention to one year, etc. This is all fed into the Real-Time Crime Center, which uses a data fusion product from a vendor called Genetec to provide sort of a futuristic point-and-click data system that combines ShotSpotter detections with video feeds with service call records etc. to produce sort of a dossier on any given person or location.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of things going on in city politics, especially with regard to crime and policing, and so the topic of surveillance has mostly fallen out of public attention.
Still, APD's refusal to say in any detail what parts of the city were covered by ShotSpotter has been one of the big ongoing frustrations, particularly among those who favor police reform. I mostly wrote this article to highlight that there is finally information on the matter available. The concerns about how distribution of sensors and, more broadly, use of surveillance technology impacts civil rights and quality of life in the city are mentioned mainly as an aside and I do not attempt to articulate the pros and cons. That would require a rather lengthy piece as the topic is complex, and currently the greater part of the controversy isn't even about the wisdom of deploying ShotSpotter, but rather over whether or not ShotSpotter even works (and, consequently, whether or not it's simply a waste of city money, at a rate of around $5 million).
It seems an important piece of context if you are concerned about surveillance.
The detection of gunshots is based on an algorithm. When triggered, it saves a few seconds before the sound and several seconds afterward.
It is different than police just being able to pull up the recordings for a certain street corner from 2 weeks ago or even a day ago and listen in on people's conversations. The case in question came from a shotspotter recording gunshots, and the short clip also happened to include speech within it since it directly followed the sound of shots.
For convenience, the most relevant text: "If the system misses a gunfire incident, police may contact the company to see if there is any audio or location evidence. In this case, only authorized ShotSpotter personnel with proper credentials can access sensor audio to search. Their search is limited to the 30- hour sensor storage timeframe."
ShotSpotter used to have significantly fewer privacy protections, and retention was indefinite early in the product's life. Fortunately, a combination of legal challenges and statutory privacy policies among their customers have lead to them significantly improving their privacy controls over time.
I'm curious what your source for that information is
Further, the concern is unequal policing biases statistics resulting in more uneven policing. A grid of microphones covering a full city is unbiased, placement based on past data isn't.
Drug crime is known to be fairly evenly distributed across different incomes, arrests are extremely biased.
[1] "New Bedford utilized ShotSpotter, and the following was recorded by the gunfire detection system: “‘Oh my God! You're crazy!’ and then ‘Jason don‘t!’ several times, followed by a number of gunshots. After the gunshots, a female was heard yelling ‘You . . . missed and they shot him!’ ‘You're going to jail!”’. A motion to suppress this evidence was granted in Denison’s case, as the judge ruled that the ShotSpotter recording violated the Massachusetts Wiretap Act" https://readingroom.law.gsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=...
"In the 2015 Massachusetts case, the court refused to allow the introduction of ShotSpotter audio after the defendant argued the audio was captured and obtained in violation of that state’s wiretap laws. Police in that case requested and received an extended audio clip from the company that captured people discussing the shooting, including one calling out the defendant’s name."
In theory any evidence from those audio recordings is tainted and no longer admissible, therefore police should want to avoid listing to any of it. But... by not bringing it up in court police can use parallel construction to get around those issues.
> Drug crime is known to be fairly evenly distributed across different incomes, arrests are extremely biased.
Keep in mind that the reverse is true for gun crime, where low-income minority communities suffer from the lowest clearance rates.
PS: You are quoting my previous post not an edit: "Drug crime is known to be fairly evenly distributed across different incomes, arrests are extremely biased." is from further up the thread.
https://www.policingproject.org/shotspotter
https://www.shotspotter.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/ShotS...
Are shooting crimes known to be fairly evenly distributed across different incomes?
I'm reasonably concerned that once recordings exist getting access to them is much easier, especially as police have already heard many conversations taken from these recordings.
https://twitter.com/loteck/status/1760859493133697237?t=AQTP...
I actually strongly disagree with you — the context doesn’t matter. We have a private quasi-law enforcement entity installing thousands of surveillance devices in American cities without any external oversight or knowledge of where they are installed. These surveillance devices that were pitched as tools to locate gun crimes all of a sudden record audio? And this quasi-law enforcement company with no oversight is storing that data and then furnishing it to the police?
We have no idea what’s recorded, we have no idea where these devices are, we have no idea who is listening to the recordings, we have no idea what access LEOs have to these recordings, we don’t know how they are stored, and we don’t know how long they are stored for. You’re seriously okay with a non-government entity operating like this?
Some sort of software analysis performed by SoundThinking identifies a possible gunshot. The audio recordings are sent to a human analyst, a SoundThinking employee, who reviews the recording and enters an assessment of what it contains (e.g. if it is gunfire, and how many rounds). If the analyst confirms the report, an alert is sent as a text message (I believe in an app they furnish) to staff in APD's dispatch center, called the Emergency Communications Center (ECC). The contract includes an SLA on this process of I think 1 or 2 minutes, but I was told that they routinely performed as well as 30 seconds. Some APD personnel, I think usually area commanders but it may have been all field division sergeants, also receive the alerts on their phones.
The ECC dispatches the call as a priority 2. P2 is high enough that a ShotSpotter report will "bump" most calls for service except for a caller on the line violent crime in progress. When the officers arrive at the reported location, they make a brief assessment and search the area for suspects or victims. If no suspects or victims are found, a Crime Scene Technician is dispatched (often later as they will wait for daylight) to search the area for evidence such as spent shell casings.
My recollection is that I was told they were able to find definitive evidence of actual shots fired in less than five percent of cases, but take that with a grain of salt as I do not believe it was ever put in writing (I don't think they're allowed to by their contract) and I could be remembering wrong. However, it's believable that the accuracy of the system is higher than that suggests, as Albuquerque has a lot of wide open spaces that are difficult to search thoroughly if the ShotSpotter location estimate is at all inaccurate.
I was told that, when the system was tested by firing blanks, it was not completely effective but that they were satisfied with how effective it was. I was never given a number and I think they had been very specifically prohibited from discussing the testing in detail when they coordinated it with SoundThinking.
One of the major criticisms of the ShotSpotter system in Albuquerque is that it results in a relatively large volume of P2 calls that delay police response to most other calls for service. During the worst of the understaffing, I was told that some officers in high-crime areas like the International District spent a large portion of their total shift following up on ShotSpotter activations while there were multiple P3 calls queued. This has probably improved as staffing levels have increased, but in my mind it is the greatest single concern about the system.
SoundThinking's evasiveness, refusal of independent research, and clear motive to sell their product creates an alarming possibility that they are deceiving police leadership and elected officials into overprioritizing ShotSpotter. It may be a waste of money, which is already a problem, but the much greater concern is that police departments are putting off responding to nonviolent crimes in progress to go to ShotSpotter reports instead, because they have been told by SoundThinking that the accuracy rate of the system is very high.
Wow that's even worse than what I had read from reports about the deployment in Chicago (which I read up on when Seattle was considering it). I think the value was like 10%.
Chicago also ditched it recently I think.
Though at the end of the day it doesn't really matter. The brass I mean. Finding brass or not finding brass doesn't exactly help catch or prosecute someone shooting a gun illegally. The whole point was to more quickly catch crimes in progress, and it doesn't seem like that's working.
All that being said, the metrics are horribly flawed because they assume police will actually investigate anything after dispatch and that the investigation will turn anything up. Believing that CPD is going to case a neighborhood looking for GSR and shell casings with a forensics team is a tall order. If there isn't someone bleeding out in the street there probably isn't going to be a police report filed.
And even that said - ShotSpotter is useless because it requires police to do their job to be useful. When Reddit is better at tracking gang violence than cops, no fancy audio forensics tool is going to help.
(1) https://www.npr.org/2024/02/15/1231394334/shotspotter-gunfir...
Kind of. The mayor said he was shutting it down for not being effective. And then he went and renewed the contract until just after the DNC convention: https://chicago.suntimes.com/city-hall/2024/02/22/shotspotte...
My read is that they know it does work but they don’t want to continue to use it because statistically the “wrong” people are committing the crimes it’s tipping off.
https://medium.com/@kim_94237/tdoa-sound-localization-with-t...
and with manual input you can greatly improve the accuracy from what an automatic system could do due to noise and signal degradation. However it’s very time consuming. The service level response would not be met if doing this on many cases I’m sure. Meaning the default accuracy of localization is likely to be a bunch less accurate than what it could be in theory.
What is absolutely needed is to start a validation process. Start legal proceedings to force the disclosure of co-ordinates and exact event time information as recorded by each recorder so the math can be checked. My software will provide that side.
I did wonder about finding mice. I connected an ultra-sonic microphone once and saw lots of squeaks that were probably mice. I suspect the accuracy is sufficient.
Less than five percent seems unlikely, but I wouldn't be surprised to hear "less than half the time".
Not finding evidence is a different problem, it could be as simple as using a revolver rather than a semi-auto that ejects the cartridges.
In any case, it would be great to see independent testing of this problem by the sort of people in this forum and you can use the software I developed last year (https://github.com/hcfman/sbts-aru) to do so. That software sets the time on the Raspberry Pi to have less than 1 microsecond of error, which is more than enough for any validation efforts.
> The reader can probably infer how this coverage pattern relates to race and class in Albuquerque. It's not perfect, but the distance from your house to a ShotSpotter sensor correlates fairly well with your household income. The wealthier you are, the less surveilled you are.
This sets off the bs alarms to me. The author knows this is a gross distortion of the rationale and is playing dumb. So what else are they lying about?
1. Cops use enforcement on poor neighborhoods because they like to make their lives difficult and because they hate poor people
2. Cops use enforcement there because that's where the crimes take place
Explanation 2 is so obviously much more likely that I can't take the person that purports reason #1 without acknowledging the other explanation. They're playing dumb.
1) Why is this conversation happening in this subthread? What does this have to do with nonrandomstring's experience in doing similar work for the military?
2) Nothing in the passage you quoted insinuates anything about the reasoning for surveiling poor neighborhoods more than rich. It simply points out that this is a thing that is happening.
Earlier they said this:
> Many assumed that ShotSpotter coverage was concentrated in disadvantaged parts of the city, an unsurprising outcome but one that could contribute to systemic overpolicing.
It's unsurprising because that is where the crime tends to take place, but there's a valid concern raised that this is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I've read some highly political anti-police rants in the past few years, but this isn't one of them. The author barely makes their opinions known at all, and when they do they're very aware of the complexities.
3. Cops use performative enforcement in poor neighborhoods because it yields metrics important to them with minimal effort.
Poor neighborhoods are often demanding and crying out for enforcement of laws. Nobody wants to live next to a crackhouse, and the people forced to lack options to leave. In my city, there's a notorious drug house that has been in operation since I was in college in the 1990s. It has better staying power than Walmart -- it's still there. What poor people in general resent to the point of riot about is systematic bullshit and abuse on the part of ineffective police.
When the powers that be say "clean up that area", they round up stupid kids for bullshit, maybe hit up a few street dealers, etc. The actual hard work, say arresting street gang leadership or investigating property crimes isn't sexy and takes time. The best documented examples are NYPD, where the worship of Excel sheets resulted in sweeps where the cops would issue appearance tickets for such offenses as "obstructing the public sidewalk" (ironically doing so, btw, when they are literally parking their personal vehicles on sidewalks for these big sweeps), than run through and make arrests for failure to appear a few months later.
Shotspotter in particular is stupid - it's just a way to blow Federal grant money. If as you say, the police "know where the crime is", why would they need microphones to tell them where gunshots go off? Presumable they patrol high risk areas and hear it themselves.
Police departments are paramilitary organizations. That means they need a military like level of accountability and discipline to function well, and the nature of modern governance is such that that is lacking. The Army doesn't tolerate drunken soliders runing amok, but police departments do. IMO the best way to address the issues of policing is to consolidate smaller departments into state or regional entities to both professionalize and reduce the chummy nature of what goes on.
Shotspotter is useless (5% is at best par for the course for every intelligence appliance I've used myself) but your expectations are unrealistic.
You're berating them for shaking down street kids for intelligence, then berating them for not taking down gang leaders? Lmao.
That's an impossible situation you've created. How about you demonstrate how policing should be done?
> why would they need microphones to tell them where gunshots go off?
Not where, when.
Writing tickets for blocking sidewalks is an overtime generating detail, not intelligence. It’s “objective” in the sense that everyone gets harassed, and thus safer than using discretion to do something potentially intelligent.
I assumed someone was raising a technical objection to my claim that acoustic location of transient sounds is "hard" - myself being the "expert" having published on firearm signatures and machine listening.
But this is about the socio-politics in TFA. Okay.
Would it report if you were playing Counterstrike outside with speakers on? What if you were listening to some gangster rap with shots in it? Or just a Raspberry Pi with a speaker on with gunshot? It seems to me something like this can in theory DoS the ECC.
You even talk about how a school where some little kid got shot has a sensor, as if it's some sort of punishment for the lower income people there. Perhaps it's because the police and the city government want to deter or solve murders that happen. The way your article is framed, the main concern is that low income or minority perpetrators of shootings might get caught and put in jail. The fact that minority or low income victims of major violent crime might have their assailants deterred or at least brought to justice does not even factor into your calculus.
“Funding for programs that clean and rehabilitate blighted and abandoned property are associated with both decreases in gun violence of up to 39% over one year and improved community health.” https://publichealth.jhu.edu/center-for-gun-violence-solutio...
To be fair after checking SoundThinking’s website they do have some research showing similar levels of violence reduction, so I don’t think it’s fair to outright claim one is more effective on a per-dollar basis without knowing all the associated costs. However surveillance is a reactive solution (or a deterrent if you’re really on board with a police state), whereas community-based programs are preventative.
I can see there being room for both but any public surveillance on that level has to have serious public accountability.
There’s a bit of a chicken and egg problem here nobody wants to wrestle with: 1. Poor people commit the vast majority of violent crime. 2. People with records of convictions of violent crime cannot get stable employment. 3. There is a measurable intelligence and emotional regulation gap at the average between violent criminals and productive members of society. 4. There is a measurable intelligence gap associated with income in our modern knowledge-based society. 5. Inability to get stable employment and low impulse control both are major contributing factors to recidivism.
It’s a heavily intractable problem, it’s clear retributive justice is not as effective as rehabilitative justice, but creating a feeling of duty of care in the communities harmed by crime is a nearly impossible ask. Gentrification at least provides a way out to improve communities for those residents who can afford to stay.
> In fact, large majorities of residents in low-income “fragile communities” — including in both urban and rural areas — want more police presence, not less. In the more than a dozen low-income urban areas surveyed, 53% of residents want more police presence while 41% want the same — only 6% want less.
Not being shot is pretty low on the hierarchy of needs. And let's be real, it's a tiny percentage of people that are committing violent crime. Increasing the odds of correctly putting one person in jail prob reduces future crime greatly.
The criminal element is real and I'm doubtful that you can give someone who's killing people access to a food bank or job training and they'll just become a productive member of society. Being a violent criminal is almost certainly the least economical thing you can do. You end up killed or in jail in a short time span so to think someone rationally picks this as a career opposed to a minimum wage job is not realistic.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2020/08/26/why-americ...
But ARE you though? I'm in Chicago where we're in the tail end of phasing this system out specifically because it did not address the problems it claimed to. All it did was aggravate and harass locals _after_ the fact that had nothing to do with the initial crime.
The deterrence factor was not insignificant, but it definitely wasn't worth the far greater instances where it was not only creating false positives but also proactively CREATING crime in accordance with other "high tech" solutions like predictive crime algorithms which only really served to reinforce existing biased patrolling practices (which were driven by data generated by shot spotter, in part).
See: https://www.theverge.com/c/22444020/chicago-pd-predictive-po...
People want more, better-trained police, not a third party listening in and directing police resources based on biased data, proprietary algorithms, and human analysts with dubious training and no public accountability.
All you’re telling me is that you lack human empathy and aren't interested in understanding the systemic causes of violence.
I'm pretty sure we should start arresting people who kill other people and remove them from society. Pretty high on priority
Does ShotSpotter prevent shootings? Does it suppress would-be shooters? $5M can go a long way to do good in a community. Effectiveness of systems that taxpayer dollars purchased should be transparent. If there isn't transparency in these systems then they should have to be paid for out of pocket. And that means that since law enforcement doesn't sell services they would have to raise the money publicly and sell citizens on the improvements that the system would bring to those residents.
The fact that you had to post what you did with a throwaway speaks volumes about your self-awareness of your position and how it would resonate. Feels good to be able to choose privacy, right?
Unless you're the police then you just do whatever you feel -- I'm scared! Should we get another tank?
I caught it at the Omaha Film Festival and it has caused me to take a second look at the way our cities are organized in to "good" and "bad" parts.
In the country with 21,000 homicides a year, it's hard to ignore the connection to attachment disorders while watching people wring their hands and make up exotic concerns that would be more fit for a Ray Bradbury novel over anything designed to address the world leading rates of violent gun crime, up to and including the literal concept of laws and the enforcement of those laws.
I don't know what the solution here is, because I don't know how you send an entire country to therapy and/or Al-Anon, but not continuously enabling the people that are hurting us is a great start, and that necessarily requires shifting empathy from the people that don't deserve it (violent criminals) to the people that do (their traumatized victims).
Apologies for the throwaway account but a lot of people get ridiculously emotional over this topic, and that's when I'm not accusing them of being societally co-dependent.
Are these areas also the ones where the majority of crime takes place or not? If there exists such correlation then why bring it up? If the gun crime is the foremost issue then are you arguing that the "disadvantaged parts" should be left on their own to deal with the issue?
To give ABQ police the benefit of the doubt, that pattern could also be compatible with more gun crime equaling more surveillance. It would be nice to have enough gun crime and sensor location data to see how true that is. When the sensors are as dense as they are, it's not clear that knowing the sensor locations is an advantage to offenders, at least in the gunshot spotting role.
If you pull up a map of crime in most cities the inverse correlation with home prices is obvious. If nothing else, high crime rates rapidly crush property values as everyone wants to leave those areas.
If the police department spends the majority of its resources on certain areas, it will respond to the majority of incidents and make the majority of arrests in those areas. You can truthfully say "look, these numbers are higher than anywhere else!" but that doesn't necessarily mean there's more crime happening there — it could also mean the residents are overpoliced relative to other neighborhoods.
With regard to the article, why is it obvious that police are putting surveillance in areas with the highest rates of gun crime?
Because there are nicer neighborhoods and less than nice neighborhoods? In so far as I can tell this is true to various degrees in every place I've ever lived or visited. Colloquially, some neighborhoods have manicured lawns, other neighborhoods have cars on blocks - it's 'obvious'[0] that the latter warrants more policing.
[0]The truth of it is arguable, perhaps, but it is very obvious.
Is it? I don't see it as at all obvious. It seems utterly ridiculous to me to increase policing in sync with socioeconomic deprivation. The blindingly obvious thing is to invest in solving the problems that cause the disparity, not to criminalize people who are living in poverty.
Manicuring a lawn is expensive and serves no useful purpose, so most practitioners have disposable income and/or spare time, and care about keeping up appearances.
Putting a car up on blocks implies it's being used for spare parts, which is generally not something the well-off need to engage in (they buy new and use professionals for repairs as needed), and having one on your front lawn in particular implies that you value spare parts more than appearances.
So both are reasonable proxies of wealth, and wealth correlates inversely with the kind of violent crime you could detect with gunshots.
Edit: you added the correlation bit after I replied, but why do you believe that to be the case? If you have more police in an area, of course they’ll hear more gunshots there. That doesn’t necessarily mean there actually are more gunshots.
What you’re actually saying is “poor people need more policing”, which is A) offensive and B) counterproductive.
Let's imagine a city divided in two halves of equal population. West City is poor and has a high crime rate, East City is rich and has a low crime rate. Should police resources be allocated equally to both? How about public health facilities or welfare payments?
The ultimate reason is that if you are poor, the proceeds of crime (theft, burglary, robbery etc) are comparatively more meaningful than to somebody who is wealthy, while the cost of getting caught is comparatively less. A rich professional does not steal loaves of bread to feed their family, because they don't need to and they risk losing their entire livelihood if they do. If you're poor, unemployed and your kids are hungry, the risk/reward calculus is very different.
There’s not actually a well known link between poverty and crime in the way you imply. We’ve just decided that we only care about some people committing some crime some of the time.
Now I'd agree with you that society should be putting more resources into combating this, but I'm still going to ask you to respond to my earlier question: for the hypothetical city with high-crime and low-crime halves, which should the police focus on?
As to your question: if you are playing SimCity and you have a little number in your omniscient UI that reads “crime rate” and police are your one lever to address that, by all means add more police to the area. But in the real world that’s not how things work.
Your point is that crime is spread in a manner, unrelated to where society think crime happens, that there is no correlation between crime and poverty of a neighborhood, and that most likely an inverse relationship between race and crime?
Oh, and according to you, one important way to arrive at your conclusion is to change our definition of crime.
When people put bars on their windows on the ground floor, it is not the police causing them to be willing to spend the money on that.
Crime can also cause poverty. For example, if the family breadwinner goes to jail, the family slips into poverty.
As best we can tell, “stand your ground” laws in states like Florida result in hundreds of deaths each year. How many of those would be considered murder in other states?
Police killed over 1,300 people last year. How many of those people truly posed an immediate danger to others, and how many were murdered by a trigger-happy cop who was not held accountable by his colleagues?
Crime, even serious crime like murder, is socially constructed. It’s not objective; society decides what’s illegal and who gets to do it anyway.
Yes. The medical examiner decides if a death is homicide or not.
> result in hundreds of deaths each year
Lacks context - the number of homicides in the same year.
> How many of those would be considered murder in other states?
They're still considered homicide.
> Police killed over 1,300 people last year
That figure is for all deaths where police were involved. A subset of that would be the police killing. Furthermore, if someone points a gun at a policeman, and the policeman kills him in response, that is self-defense, not murder. There are officers killed while on duty, too:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_law_enforcement_office...
Less than 10% of homicides result from police action.
> how many were murdered by a trigger-happy cop who was not held accountable by his colleagues?
In Washington state, each death from a police encounter are investigated by law, and charges get filed if the officer broke the law. That would include being trigger-happy.
> It’s not objective
It's objective enough. My larger point is there aren't a lot of (or even any) homicides that go undetected in wealthy communities. Furthermore, your figures lack context as you didn't compare with the total amount of homicides. Your figures are not enough to claim that the higher homicide rates in poor communities are the result of police murders.
Arizona has a bill in the works that would make it legal to kill people trespassing anywhere on one’s land, intended to allow farmers with large plots of land to shoot migrants. The bill will probably get vetoed, but in a world where it passes it’s very likely that the number of killings will increase but the number of murders will drop.
Dead bodies are objective. “Murder” is not.
But I doubt there are enough.
Police have been ignoring small property crime as a waste of their time for far longer than anyone has called for defunding them. I couldn't get small town police to do anything about my stolen bike that was tagged and visibly sitting outside the house of the guy who took it. Wasn't worth taking anyone off speed-trap duty.
So let me get your point straight: your worry is that since wealthy areas have less sensors gun-crime in those areas will go under reported?
Idk about your neck of the woods but where i live if I hear a gunshot I call the police with a high probability. If i see someone brandishing weapons i do the same. And of course i call the police/emergency services if i see someone with a gunshot wound. These all create the statistical evidence independent of the sensor systems.
Enter my teen years. I had cars up on blocks in the driveway. My poor mom!
The causation more likely goes the other way: When an area gets the reputation of being higher crime (because of reality or because of bias from more police saturation), that area becomes cheaper to live in, and poorer people can then afford to live there.
I don't think it's more police presence that causes banks to install the armor. More likely it's the lack of police presence that results in armored banks.
Definitely my Bank of America branch in Ballard doesn’t have bullet proof glass.
Isn’t that called de-gentrification, or maybe ghetto-ization? However, I think it’s the opposite with property crime (richer neighborhoods attract property crime because their is lots of property to steal).
This is in fact the crux of the problem. By significantly increasing monitoring of areas with higher crime rates, you inadvertently create a vicious cycle feedback loop: The more you monitor an area, the more samples you get, biasing the stats (because your sampling is no longer uniform). Then these stats are used to justify more monitoring and policing in the area, further biasing your data.
The farce is the utter failure of the 'survalience state' to actually catch and prosecute people.
So by monitoring an area with high crime rate, you catch more crime, which results in more policing for the area with a confirmed high crime rate?
And that's a bad thing?
First of all, unless you’re completely overwhelmed and not even bothering to enforce certain laws, you’re going to find out about most of the serious crime that takes place. Law enforcement is made aware of homicides either through missing persons reports or the discovery of dead bodies. Armed robberies and grand theft are usually reported if, for no other reason, than to create a paper trail for insurance claims. People who get shot or stabbed badly enough to end up in a hospital, end up in a hospital so there’s a reporting mechanism there. It’s not normal for most major crimes to happen completely outside of the attention of law enforcement unless things have gone very very wrong (which admittedly they have in many American cities). And much of the time, you can infer where these crimes happened.
The benefit of increasing patrols and surveillance in a specific area is more about gathering evidence to solve crimes, and less about discovering those crimes to begin with. In some cases you might end up discovering more crime (especially when gangs are involved and people are intimidated into not reporting crimes) but if you monitor areas where any serious crime would already get reported in the first place, you won’t actually find more serious crime there.
Some sort of system which detects prescription abuse should not be deployed over utility poles in low income neighborhoods. It should be deployed where abuse is happening, for instance in pharmacy computers etc.
Also "white billionaire" part is low key racist against blacks. They are "incidentally" whites billionaire criminals, they can as well be black billionaire criminals, unless there's a fundamental difference in criminal tendencies among races.
> Conversations recorded by ShotSpotter sensors have twice been introduced as evidence in criminal trials. In one case the court allowed it, in another the court did not.
Even in cases where they're not used at trial, they're still used to generate suspicion. I don't know if you've ever had cops on your ass, but it's super stressful, and can impact your job (because they start harassing you at work and you get fired). Depending on how much of a dick the cop is, he may just arrest you for shit and giggles, and now you have an arrest record that fucks up all sorts of things in your life (he's got qualified immunity so what does he care).
This basically amounts to pervasive harassment of a community, and the more surveillance there is, the worse it gets, the less the locals will trust or cooperate with police, the more "us vs them" it gets between citizens and police, the more heavy-handed police response becomes, the less likely people are to solve their differences using the police, the more chaotic a community becomes. This is what oppression looks like.
The notion that poverty causes crime rather than crime causes poverty is a great disservice to the poor.
The positions are entirely inconsistent, but that's because anything is being said in an effort to remove enforcement. This was stated pretty explicitly a few years back with "Defund The Police", and now that it's lost popularity it's being pushed covertly.
Ironically, for all the talk about needing to remove police to help the poor, it's the poor who have suffered the most from the massive increase in crime these policies have caused. Here's a community meeting from a poorer area a few months back, where the residents are complaining that people who live in safer areas are running an experiment in their areas that's leading to a massive spike in crime and death[1].
[1] https://wjla.com/news/local/gun-violence-shootings-crime-you...
From the point of view of someone who can roll into a poor area, say they are "overpoliced", and roll out again...yes, it probably does that seem way. That is because they aren't likely to get shot so the police are the problem, not the bullets.
For the person who can get shot, the bullets are the issue (this isn't limited to this area, you are seeing in multiple policy areas that wealthy people enthusiastically advocate for the state to be rolled back like some kind of giga-Milton Friedman...as with libertarians, they aren't the ones that have to deal with the consequences of this).
Crime and poor schools are usually what make "bad neighborhoods" bad. It's why many of the people there will save and downsize to move to nicer neighborhoods. Whenever I've talked to people living in those areas, they always want more enforcement and to have their neighborhoods cleaned up.
A lot of people want to speak for the residents there, without ever actually speaking to the residents there.
Finally, what they did was they decided to split in half the high performing cohort from the best/wealthiest high school into two high schools. This cohort was now much smaller than the maximum capacity for either high school, which allows for a lot of out of boundary seats.
The problem is, even still they don't seem to be able to admit how important a high performing cohort is. If they did, there are plenty of things they could do to attract more of them to public schools and neighborhood high schools. For instance, there's at least one high school in the city that is very low performing, but has a large number of very high performing students in boundary. The parents want the school to guarantee some high level classes for their students, but it won't. They want the school to provide a safe environment, but the school can't commit to that (it's hard to remove students even if they are repeatedly violent). And if they do, they run the risk of national media reporters (who would never send their kids to these types of schools themselves) going after them[2].
[1] https://twitter.com/notcomplex_/status/1762607726817923545 [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/23/podcasts/nice-white-paren...
it's a nitpick, but I think it's the reverse... property values don't appreciate as quickly in these areas, in this current market if you told millennials that gun violence lowered house values they'd probably fire off a few shots themselves
The way this is phrased sounds like “the poorer you are, the more likely you would want to be where the shots are”. Which is obviously false.
Not just could -- without more information, it's the far more likely and economical explanation. The phrasing in the article imo is intentionally inflammatory.
Of course the public surveillance is located in the areas where crime is most likely to occur! But an important side effect is that innocent people in those areas now are more surveilled than other people. So it becomes yet another injustice inflicted on people who already tend to suffer more greatly from injustice than others.
Maybe there are offsetting factors. If the surveillance makes neighborhoods significantly safer, then maybe local residents will be happy to be surveilled in exchange.
The article is stating a fact of correlation, not causality. But the particular outcome of "greater surveillance" clearly happens, regardless of why it occurs, and regardless of other offsetting considerations.
What I think the article is suggesting is that policies like these, particularly when implemented without sufficient transparency or oversight, can cause dystopian-sounding outcomes, such as poor people's conversations being constantly recorded by the government while wealthier people remain un-surveilled.
I do not own a gun. I currently live in a city and would be happy to learn they were installing shot spotter near me.
It's maybe the least intrusive type of surveillance there is. It just says a signal if there is a loud noise in public.
edit: previous statement not correct but leaving it up as it's been responded to
> Conversations recorded by ShotSpotter sensors have twice been introduced as evidence in criminal trials. In one case the court allowed it, in another the court did not. The possibility clearly exists, and depending on interpretation of state law, it may be permissible for ShotSpotter to record conversations on the street for future use as evidence.
I understand the hypothetical case they could be misused but I'm still not aware of any cases they actually were.
>On June 8, 2007, the Shotspotter acoustic gunshot detection and location system recorded two gunshots from the corner of 83rd Avenue and Birch Street in Oakland, California. The first one, at 11:10:22 p.m., was at 8236 Birch Street, and the second one, 24 seconds later at 11:10:46 p.m., was at 1775 83rd Avenue. Those addresses are less than 10 feet apart. The recording of the second shot also captured the voice of Tyrone Lyles, apparently addressing the person who shot him: "Ar, Ar, why are you going to do me like that, Ar."
I am happy shotspotter helped in the prosecution of this person who needlessly killed someone. I realize there could be ways to abuse this for things having nothing to do with gun violence, but you could also say DUI traffic stops or DNA collection could be misued. That doesn't mean they are misused.
“Good guys,” on the other hand, respect the rule of law. It shouldn’t refer to people shielded from legal liability who spouts the “tough on crime” rhetoric to excuse themselves from their own criminal behavior.
100% this, IMO any of these law enforcement vendors like ShotSpotter, Harris (stingray), Taser/Axon, etc. which insist on keeping any and all details secret deserve zero trust. Anything they say without actual data analyzed by an independent third party is worth less than what I scooped out of my cats' box this morning.
The public conversation relies on public data, so if your company doesn't want the public to have the data then your company and its clients should not be given any benefit of the doubt by the public.
Rigorous audits in technically savvy jurisdictions: * San Francisco has a technical population that has passed numerous ordinances focused on protecting privacy of San Franciscans in balance with protecting safety. As such, the San Francisco city government has a Committee on Information Technology, which has a Privacy and Surveillance Advisory Board that evaluates and audits privacy-impacting technology used by the city. Here are their evaluations that cleared ShotSpotter for use in San Francisco. [0] [1]
Logic: * Why would city government officials pay the very high cost for ShotSpotter (it's $73k per square mile here in my city, Chicago) if they couldn't audit the system or impost contractual, legally enforceable privacy protections? * ShotSpotter has been a company for a long time, but the only evidence this article presents of ShotSpotter collecting verbal communications is from two courts cases where the verbal communication was incident to a shooting. At some point, absence of evidence becomes pretty plausible evidence of absence.
Economics: * They have to pay for staff to review every loud noise to meet negotiated SLAs for alert response times (typically under 120s), so they have an incentive to not send audio samples off of sensor-devices unless there's a gunshot-like noise. * They have no way to monitize loose bits of audio of unidentified people just walking around near sensors, but it would cost money to store this data and would cost a lot of money to organize it for search-ability.
Physics: * These sensors are mounted high up on poles and buildings, and they are not directional. If sensors have high enough sensitivity to pick up street level voices, then there's a ton of other ambient noise that they'd pick up and the signal would be trash most of the time. It is just the distinct loudness of gunshots that trigger the audio to be written out + transmitted, and the loudness of people while they are in the excited emotional state [needed to shoot someone, or created by being shot or being near a shooting] that enable these recordings to capture audible vocals.
> The people behind these invasive systems who push back hard on the slightest attempt at basic accountability?
I get that that feels true to you, but it's not true. ShotSpotter is a company selling a product to city governments, who have constrained budgets and adequate legal departments and can cut ShotSpotter if they aren't happy with ShotSpotter (my city is dropping ShotSpotter service in September [2]). There are a ton of forces enforcing accountability.
[0] https://sfcoit.org/sites/default/files/2020-11/SFPD_ShotSpot...
[1] https://sfcoit.org/sites/default/files/2020-11/SFPD_ShotSpot...
[2] https://www.npr.org/2024/02/15/1231394334/shotspotter-gunfir...
This is probably false. There have been two convictions as a result of recordings of conversations that happened through the devices.
I, for one, do not want microphones capable of recording my conversations placed near me by the government. Not because I'm paranoid the government is conspiring against me, but rather because I have zero confidence they're storing those recordings securely, being handled by only authorized persons, and being deleted within a timely manner.
It’s also not paranoia if the government does actively conspire to imprison as many people as possible on flimsy evidence.
Both possible usages are incorrect here.
I don't know how effective these devices are but any tool that helps the police go after criminals is a good thing and no one should be fighting against good things.
"Among those punished: an Ohio officer who pleaded guilty to stalking an ex-girlfriend and who looked up information on her; a Michigan officer who looked up home addresses of women he found attractive; and two Miami-Dade officers who ran checks on a journalist after he aired unflattering stories about the department."
https://apnews.com/general-news-699236946e3140659fff8a2362e1...
The cases you cite are of people who did things wrong. The cases you cite have nothing to do with the advantages this gives to the police in protecting citizens and solving crimes.
Why do people keep fighting against the police who are trying to defend us against crimes? In general, these tools help and don't hurt anyone. Lest anyone forgets, the police are on our side.
This wouldn't be quite so laughable if civil forfeiture didn't exist.
as a community we really ought to be suspicious of claims like this. There's another word for "acoustic sensor" and it's "microphone". When a corporation says "trust us, we only use the data for good", we should collectively raise our eyebrows, knowing that when data is collected for one stated purpose and stored, that the data at rest will always be used for additional purposes. Once data is collected, the number of things it may be used for is always unbounded; any claims to the contrary should not be taken at face value.
It it's so amusing to me that people who carry around a phone 24/7 spend time imagining these intricate Rube Goldberg surveillance systems to be afraid of.
When I joined Google I started thinking to myself "geez, we care so much. why does HN hate us?"
It clicked for me when someone pointed out that even if you trust group of employees X with a mountain of data, nothing prevents group of Y from eventually selling it. And after what I saw my last couple years, I'm utterly convinced some McKinsey-ite will be telling 2050's CEO that's a great idea and in fact the moral option. Maximize shareholder value => stonk go up => Americans have safe retirements.
Why am I talking about Google?
People talk past eachother on this stuff. The problem isn't that "have they ever done anything bad?", it's that the incentive structure is set up such that something that crosses the line will eventually happen. They have an incentive to keep the customer happy.
And as the article, and comments below from 1.5 hours before you posted point out, there's no room for argument on that: this already happened. A court threw out info because it was illegally obtained.
But in all seriousness, you should actually read the section for that court case. Here's all of the text for that case from the link:
""" Commonwealth v. Denison, No. BRCR2012-0029 (Mass. Super. Ct. Oct. 7, 2015) "ShotSpotter is a listening and recording system that runs 24/7, attuned to the sound of gunfire. When the system hears gunfire, or what it recognizes as gunfire, it locates it, reports it, preserves the recording, and send the recording to the customer within seconds.” The defendant, charged with first degree murder, moved to suppress a recording made by ShotSpotter of an verbal exchange among numerous individuals before and after the fatal gunshots. The court rejected that the argument that the defendant had a reasonable expectation of privacy under the Massachusetts Declaration of Rights because the exchange was “audible by anyone passing and was in fact heard by a crowd of neighbors and other witnesses.” However, the court found that the exchange was an “oral communication” and that the recording was a prohibited “interception” under the Massachusetts Wiretap Act because the defendant had no knowledge that the exchange was being recorded. The court also found that the interception was “willful” because the police had “purposefully directed the placement of the sensors.” The court granted the motion to suppress: “the continuous secret audio surveillance of selective urban neighborhoods ** is the type of surreptitious eavesdropping as an investigative tool that the Legislature sought to prohibit." """ [0]
The verbal exchange was recorded because it was incident to the shooting that triggered the recording. In addition to recording the shooter(s) shoot the victim(s), it also recorded the shooter(s) and victim(s) speak before the shooting. This was in public so there wasn't an expectation of privacy, and I can't imagine this is the kind of recording that the Massachusetts's legislature "sought to prohibit".
[0] https://www.mass.gov/files/documents/2018/01/08/CRIMINAL%20E...
How does this jibe with the fact that the police can apparently request a ShotSpotter operator review of audio recordings for up to 30 days if a known shooting is missed by the system? How does this jibe with the fact that the system has apparently at least twice recorded voice conversations that were used (and thrown out in one case due to violating wiretap laws) in court cases?
Edit and even if we trust ShotSpotter to do the right thing, how do we know their systems are secure enough to keep those recordings away from less-honorable actors?
Regarding the court cases, I literally included the entire linked info for one of those Court cases in the post you're responding to. For both of the cases, the verbal exchange was at the same time as the shooting. In the other case, the victim verbally identifies the person about to murder them just before they were murdered. The argument that shotspotter is a wiretap falls apart under the slightest bit of scrutiny and there's no way the legislature meant to protect the right of people to be free from audio recording while shooting someone in public.
With some additional carve outs, none of which appear to apply to ShotSpotter.
I’m not arguing that properly scoped and protected ShotSpotter couldn’t be allowed by MA legislators, but it sure doesn’t fall apart under scrutiny by my reading of the law.
The court seems to agree in the text you copied in your upthread quote:
> However, the court found that the exchange was an “oral communication” and that the recording was a prohibited “interception” under the Massachusetts Wiretap Act because the defendant had no knowledge that the exchange was being recorded.
Which I think is the proper interpretation of the written law.
Have there been any breaches where less-honorable actors have managed to hack into sensors and exfiltrate data? Have there been any breaches of the actual recordings of shootings?
Looking into it more all the cases of audio being used in court, that was not audio of gunshots, was audio immediately after a gunshot. Spotshotter is open about recording that and it seems completely reasonable to me this audio should be used.
What's most boggling to me about the criticism is Albuquerque apparently has 10,000 cameras law enforcement has access to. I know we likely disagree on the usefulness of those, but if you are privacy concerned why would shotspotter even be on the same level of concern as cameras that don't need a gunshot to start filming?
https://apnews.com/article/albuquerque-crime-cameras-technol...
I think that is also bad. Two things can be bad! That's just not the topic of the post.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/chicago-watchdog-harshly...
https://twitter.com/greg_doucette/status/1512138327205589004 (criminal defense attorney)
https://boingboing.net/2022/04/12/shotspotter-wastes-million...
I supported units with them while I was a contractor to the US Army, and the soldiers I talked to didn't think much of it either.
Anyway, they found it unhelpful. "Wouldn't even notice our own gun shots" and stuff like that.
Many shootings where nobody calls it in and cops respond with shotspotter
Also ShotSpotter has false positives. You have no way of knowing if you (or it) even heard a gun or one of many other things.
I'm pretty sure, "don't bother with this technology which reports shots to the cops, because it has false positives" is a very weak argument.
If the false positive rate is 95%, it’s pretty obviously going to be a diversion of police resources from whatever else they could be doing if not responding to zero-value alerts.
This claims the false positive rate is under 3%. It's based on Shotspotter's statistics and "independent audit" statistics.
Not sure how trustworthy either is, but without better stats from anywhere else I have no reason to doubt the claim the false positive is pretty low.
Seems like even if false positive rate was at 50% it wouldn't be that big of a deal. Cities have police on patrol at all times anyway - it would just mean sending someone to drive 5 minutes away to see if there is visible a disturbance instead of them driving around the area they were currently randomly patrolling.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Seth_Rich
We talked to the cops (not in this instance but in another homicide)
“The "pocket of poverty" south of Downtown where I live, the historically Spanish Barelas and historically Black South Broadway, are predictably well covered.”
Also
> Conversations recorded by ShotSpotter sensors have twice been introduced as evidence in criminal trials.
More importantly, how many times were collected conversations used and acted upon in an investigation and not been introduced as evidence?
But if you're not listening for the guns then you're not going to find the crime that does happen, will you? It's either saying "we don't care about it because it's less frequent" (which is stupid—you still build a fire station in places where buildings burn down less frequently) or "it's easier to keep ourselves busy when we fish in a barrel".
Would you patrol a desert in the same way you patrol a busy road intersection if you're trying to prevent car accidents?
You mean these zones? https://whitecollarcrime.zone/
If someone made a system for detecting fraud, embezzlement, or insider trading, you bet your ass it would be deployed there.
Criminals react to successful surveillance and law enforcement. It's idiotic to suggest that they wouldn't.
If ShotSpotter were successful, crime would move to a different area and/or go down. Arrests would be made, so it's impossible to assume crime rates wouldn't change in that scenario.
Neither happening in correlation with ShotSpotter installation, which is one way we know these tactics don't actually work.
We know at least one of the tactics that does work, because Mayor Bloomberg and the NYPD provided demonstrative proof (and saved thousands of lives by drastically reducing murders). However, that also relies on Bayesian priors (or is it racism?) and thus has become unfashionable amongst the current ruling urban elite. It is highly plausible that a technology like ShotSpotter would be highly effective making such preemptive interventions more data driven and effective.
Unfortunately, the ideological blinders many people choose to wear around criminology really makes it difficult to constructively discuss or address. After all this study is trying to present, in a weaselly way, the claim that ShotSpotter actually increases shootings. I'd love to hear the proposed mechanism for that. I'm sure it's something that makes superstition look sensible.
Both. I don't skip out on adding monitoring to my applications that don't crash as often. The crashes might be less frequent but that doesn't mean I don't need monitoring.
* historically there's been a lot of "black crime" in the US due to the US police watching black neighbourhoods excessively and being absent elsewhere .. take this all the way back in time to Tulsa and before.
* Subsequently there's been a lot of "black crime" as neighbourhoods have been destroyed by occasional mobs (Tulsa), frequent division by freeways and toxic waste dumps, and the removal of many adult males to the prison system as a result of all the "observed crime" leading to an excess of young males with few prospects.
* Based on that data the modern survellience goes to where all the crime has been created^H observed.
Meanwhile entire areas of US cities get on by considerably less police present and oversight and a great deal less observed crime.
You can control for this by just looking at homicides. Dead bodies are pretty objective. And the homicides also follow the same trend as the general crime rate.
No reasonable person could look at any meaningful measure of violent crime rates and come to your conclusions.
"There's just as much gun crime in rich areas as poor ones, but the police focus on the poor areas because of historical racism" is an extraordinary claim that should require extraordinary evidence, and the kind of thing that holds back improvements in police work.
But gun crimes are different (unless they’re saying something like “possession” but in most states that’s some variation of legal unless a felon).
The main thread of the article is that ShotSpotter operate without scrutiny. The problematic aspects of their deployment are the false positives...
> APD received about 14,000 ShotSpotter reports last year. The accuracy of these reports, in terms of their correctly identifying gunfire, is contested. SoundThinking claims impressive statistics, but has actively resisted independent evaluation. A Chicago report found that only 11.3% of ShotSpotter reports could be confirmed as gunfire.
.. and false charges
> This ought to give us pause, as should the fact that ShotSpotter has been compellingly demonstrated to manipulate their "interpretation" of evidence to fit a prosecutor's narrative---even when ShotSpotter's original analysis contradicted it.
Linked article: https://www.vice.com/en/article/qj8xbq/police-are-telling-sh...
.. and as highlighted in another comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39577403), cops shooting kids playing with fireworks
https://chicago.suntimes.com/crime/2024/02/27/chicago-police...
What a wonderful use of tax dollars. Protecting and serving the path to a better society.
The very point of the article is that, absent leaks like this one, there could be no way for anybody to independently study or verify the fairness of the sensor distribution, or even the real efficacy of the reports the system produces—which is a troubling situation to be in when the state has an outsized amount of power to prosecute people based on potential junk science that will be hard for defendants to challenge in court.
The answer isn't to give police departments the benefit of the doubt (which they so rarely earn), but to demand better transparency and citizen oversight of the technology poised to be used against us.
Which means you can extract it with my https://shot-scraper.datasette.io/ tool like this:
shot-scraper javascript \
'https://flo.uri.sh/visualisation/16818696/embed' _Flourish_data \
> /tmp/data.json
I loaded it into SQLite like this:
cat /tmp/data.json | jq .events | \
sqlite-utils insert /tmp/shots.db locations -
To use it in leaflet, you'll need to iterate over the `events` array and change `lon` to `lng` before adding each point to the leaflet map.
https://chicago.suntimes.com/crime/2024/02/27/chicago-police...
Then they could go to court and say “this system showed the gunshots came from the suspect’s location”. But “the system” didn't show that, until ShotSpotter employees manually changed the data.
They spent a lot of effort hiding that as well.
The underlying algorithm wasnt subject to examination by defense teams until a rules change like, last week.
The underlying algorithms have been made available to defense teams in countless Daubert and Frye hearings. I have no idea what you're referring to by "a rules change like, last week."
We're a nation of laws, not of your awareness. It's just the words on the page. Was there a law being broken or not. In this case the answer was no. The police then proceeded to write up multiple claims of illegal activity that were all demonstrable falsehoods, and your defense of the illegal activity on the part of the police is that you aren't aware of a holiday?
This is just the sort of thing we need to stamp out before these thugs kill either some other innocent kid, or cause a real police officer to be hurt or killed while trying to control the inevitable community reaction to their bird brained behavior.
These cops need to be off the force yesterday. Yes they are liabilities waiting to happen. Yes they are dishonest. But the real reason we need to get rid of them is because they are unpredictable. We have no idea what anyone who will shoot at innocent kids and lie about it today will do tomorrow.
Honest cops are predictable. Dishonest cops are just loose cannons and we need to cut them out at every opportunity.
If you set off fireworks inside the White House, right now, would you be surprised to suddenly meet the acquaintance of many armed men? Fireworks don't often go off in the Oval Office. Loud banging noises are therefore assumed to be gunfire, not fireworks.
If you set off fireworks on the South Pole on July 4th, would you meet police? No, and for two reasons: July 4th is a well known day for setting off fireworks, and the South Pole is far away from basically everything.
If you set off fireworks shortly before midnight, on a random Thursday in January, in a city that's famous for having large numbers of murders, should policemen assume it's fireworks, or gunshots?
It's reasonable for cops to investigate loud noises, but killing unarmed children is wrong every day of the year.
We are free here.
These cops acted without justification, then committed a crime to cover up their unjustified actions by attesting to multiple demonstrable falsehoods.
The HN User you are responding to is stretching to make the situation seem reasonable in the US. It is not reasonable in the US and we will continue to demonstrate its unreasonableness to officers who can't seem to understand. We will do so through everything from disciplinary actions to docked pay to dismissals to prison terms if we must.
I'm tired of people seeing these things and saying we aren't free here. It's more accurate to say we have a few nugget headed police officers who can't seem to understand that we are free. And then you get the impression that their nugget headed behavior is normalized because they have a few nugget headed supporters who go out to defend the indefensible. I can assure you, inside police forces nowadays these sorts of loose cannons are very much looked on as liabilities.
Every nation will have some level of corruption, and we obviously have ours as this incident clearly demonstrates. But there is a reason these worms are burrowing under rocks to try to hide. It's because they know they are engaged in explicitly criminal activity. They are the crisis of confidence in the US. Now real police officers will have an even more difficult time operating in the community.
It's just the words on the page. Was a law broken or not.
Let me explain it to you in a fashion you might better understand. Let's suppose a man is late on his child support because the child he was ordered to pay child support for is not his. If you are a Bayesian Reasoner and conclude there is no reason to arrest this man, then you have no place on the police force. Full stop. You see judgement is the job of the courts. It's not my place to decide whether or not someone is being done an injustice or justice by being arrested. The only concern of an LEO has to be the words on the page. He didn't pay child support that I personally believe was unjustly ordered, but I'm still taking him down.
That's the job. You don't believe that kid should be setting off fireworks, that's your business. But you better have a legal reason if you are going to take action against a person in our system. Because it's based on rule of law. It's more critical now than at almost any time in the past that LEOs understand that fact. Those who don't are gonna do nothing but make life hard for a whole lot of decent LEOs out there.
I see nothing wrong done by ShotSpotter.
It accurately reported the location of a noise that sounded like gunfire.
What is timely about this?
Do you want the police to not investigate gunshots? I don't care about how they approached the scene, their training has nothing to do with ShotSpotter which is the discussion at hand.
Also fireworks are illegal to set off in Chicago so no legitimate activity was interrupted.
Combine that with the racially-charged patterns of policing in this country[1][2], where certain populations are disproportionately profiled and experience use-of-force incidents.
It's extremely timely in the sense that at present, we have systemic problems with where police force is being directed, and ShotSpotter is likely helping tip those scales — but not in the right direction.
[1] https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/racial-profiling-texas-r...
[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/opinions/system...
> But, if asked, they provide a form letter written by ShotSpotter. Their contract prohibits the disclosure of any actual data.
A potentially dystopian surveillance apparatus is installed citywide, and the police can't discuss about it's efficiency because the company that sold it to them won't let them?
The devices are hot mics — public audio surveillance. The software layer triggers alerts on loud noises, which are sent off to a facility that is little more than a call center, for characterization by a human worker there. This system detects door slams and popped volleyballs just as well as it detects gun fire (which is to say, imperfectly on all counts).
Sound classification moved far beyond what you’re claiming years ago.
If you set the threshold at “imperfectly” then no system will ever meet your bar, because perfect is an unreasonable threshold. However, the claim that we’re unable to differentiate between gunshots and car doors is extremely incorrect.
https://www.wtol.com/article/news/local/false-shotspotter-al...
Slamming doors:
https://www.axios.com/2022/04/07/campaign-zero-against-shots...
This list can go on. Jackhammer, nail gun, normal hammers.
https://voiceofsandiego.org/2020/09/22/shotspotter-sensors-s...
If a self-driving car sensor has a 1% fail rate, then it is useless and would cause crashes and death. It couldn't be used.
But if shotspotter is 1% inaccurate, then it just sends police to a street corner where there is actually just road construction or a volleyball popped. The consequences are pretty low to nil.
Many people might not know this all calls have priorities in a policing system, they are not treated equal. So Shotspotter alerts are very low priority to officers. The same is true for home alarm systems. Home alarm systems trigger false alarms constantly. Police treat them as very low priority as a result. So if a 911 call comes in or an eyewitness reported shooting, or even a wreckless driver or suspected DUI, the police will treat that first. In fact if they are on the way to a shotspotter alert and encounter something else, they will stop for it.
This is to say, that the false positives aren't as important as everyone makes them out to be. If a false positive happens, it means that a cop that's sitting on a random street corner gets moved to a street corner where the false alarm from Shotspotter fired. There's not really any harm being done here.
Having American cops rush to your door thinking violence is happening is not inconsequential. Just a few days ago they shot at a kid who was playing with fireworks, due to a false positive. Also, see swatting and its fatal consequences.
(INACCURATE, SEE EDIT) It does. The "conversations recorded by ShotSpotter sensors" were a few seconds before/after the shooting, and consisted of people saying things like "[shooter's name] Why are you going to [shoot] me like that, [shooter's name]"? [1]
[1] 'The recording of the second shot also captured the voice of Tyrone Lyles, apparently addressing the person who shot him: "Ar, Ar, why are you going to do me like that, Ar."' https://casetext.com/case/people-v-johnson-5116
edit: I was wrong. Apparently "the detectors keep hours or days of continuous audio": https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/shotspotter-ceo...
but this:
> The reader can probably infer how this coverage pattern relates to race and class in Albuquerque. It's not perfect, but the distance from your house to a ShotSpotter sensor correlates fairly well with your household income.
is facetious and is almost certainly argued in bad faith. well, duh. the distance to the nearest "shot spotter" box also correlates with the incidence of crime and gunfire in the area. to bring up racism or classism is unhelpful. that correlation is unfortunate, likely true, and also not the problem at hand.
BINGO!
Turn the coin over to the other side - you're catching criminals victimizing minorities. Nothing is simple, is it.
* results in many high-priority calls tying up the patrols in that area so residents who have serious issues, but not "active shooting" serious, get poorer service than people in predominantly white/wealthy neighborhoods. I think you'd be pretty annoyed if something of yours was stolen and police never show because a huge backlog of calls develops while they chase down shotspotter reports, but someone in a wealthier neighborhood reports a suspicious vehicle and police show up in minutes
* results in a lot of aggressive police action with police swarming an area looking for a "shooter." Given how discriminatory and hostile police are toward the poor and minorities, this has serious consequences....ranging from residents feeling like they're constantly being harassed, to death - a boy was shot and killed by police after setting off a firecracker that the shotspotter system reported.
https://quickthoughts.substack.com/p/shotspotter-good-or-bad
There's a lot of evidence that ShotSpotter detects almost all gunshots and that's been validated by multiple third party groups. ShotSpotter also seems to alert to things that are either false positives (construction sounds, fireworks, etc) or are not useful.
Chicago IG says 9/10 times when officers respond to a ShotSpotter alert they find nothing. 1/10 times it leads to an arrest, but the arrest isn't always strictly related to the ShotSpotter event - e.g. police responding to an event stop a speeding car and discover drug paraphernalia or an unrelated gun.
Some cities, e.g. Atlanta, discontinued ShotSpotter over cost benefit concerns. From their analysis it seemed a better use of money to hire more officers than use ShotSpotter. Still, it's in use in 84 metro areas today.
Ultimately, I think it should be up to the local community. The individual community is the one who will most benefit (if it is beneficial) and suffer from increased police incursions.
https://opendata.dc.gov/datasets/DCGIS::shot-spotter-gun-sho...
Something like shotspotter wouldn’t work for this because by the time you get the info and call it in the people doing the shooting are miles away and there isn’t a crime scene per se to investigate.
Well, Dallas had 246 murders last year. https://www.dallasnews.com/news/crime/2024/01/11/1-year-246-... That's a killing every other day, and obviously does not include nonfatal shootings.
While it is true that there is lots of death in the news, most murders are not newsworthy. For instance, did you know there were 21 school shootings in 2020? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_th...
Surprising, right? You certainly didn't hear about a shooting every other week that year. (Granted, 2020 was an unusual year, news wise.) But look at the descriptions of the shootings:
"A large group of men jumped a fence to gain access to Atascocita High Schools football field, when an argument escalated and a 19-year-old was killed.[503]". "At Sonora High School in downtown Sonora, a student named Eric Aguiar, 17, was shot and killed in the High School's parking lot.[507]". "A 20-year-old University of Alabama at Birmingham student was shot and killed in a campus parking lot outside the student center. Investigators believed the shooting occurred during an arranged meeting to sell headphones.[513]".
Parking lots, dangerous places!
Dallas could have a thousand murders a year, or five thousand, and you'd never hear about them-- if the murders were boring enough.
But those thoughts go hand in hand with a vague but distinct discomfort.
ShotSpotters don't repel crime, let alone prevent it. They're intentionally covert, as shown in the OP, which gives credence to the notion that they aren't intended to deter criminal activity from the surrounding area. If anything, repelling/deterring crime would defeat the purpose of the technology.
At best, ShotSpotter merely detects crime, and its effectiveness in that capacity is kept a secret. The world of police tech is a knee-deep in snake oil. A bit of transparency would go a long way for ShotSpotter.
Yes and no. Intelligence (in the data sense of the word) can accrue usage patterns. You might not catch them that time, but you know where they'll be next time. What routes they travel. Where to focus.
If it's a live event, the police officer is not having to stand there fruitlessly questioning a witness about which direction the offender hooned off in 5 minutes ago - the system is already telling them, by tracking the relevant data.
It's a form of telemetry.
And it's also quite a disturbing (to use an overused phrase!, but which I hope is justified here) slippery slope.
The author presents this as a negative but it is obviously a good thing. If there was an increase in gunfire in my neighbourhood I would hope that police increases their presence, lest the "disadvantages" begin to accumulate.
The ACLU has a thorough article breaking down reporting from the City of Chicago Inspector General, Northwestern School of Law’s MacArthur Justice Center, Vice news and the Associated Press.
ACLU article with links to the other reports here:
https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/four-problems-w...
Key takeaways from the reporting linking ShotSpotter to over policing listed here:
1) ShotSpotter false alarms send police on numerous trips (in Chicago, more than 60 times a day) into communities for no reason and on high alert expecting to potentially confront a dangerous situation. Given the already tragic number of shootings of Black people by police, that is a recipe for trouble.
2) Indeed, the Chicago IG’s analysis of Chicago police data found that the “perceived aggregate frequency of ShotSpotter alerts” in some neighborhoods leads officers to engage in more stops and pat downs.
3) The placement of sensors in some neighborhoods but not others means that the police will detect more incidents (real or false) in places where the sensors are located. That can distort gunfire statistics and create a circular statistical justification for over-policing in communities of color.
Regarding:
1) How do you know you are dealing with a false alarm? Given the seriousness of gun violence, isn't it perfectly reasonable to send someone to investigate the situation rather than to ignore it?
2 and 3) Isn't it also the case that black neighbourhoods in Chicago have the highest gun violence and murder rate? What else would you expect from ShotSpotter other than for it to confirm that those neighbourhoods are indeed the ones with the most shots fired?
Right. That was the part I referred to as misremembering in my above comment. The false alarms come from the system itself, not necessarily police lying about it. However the reports from multiple sources do say that false alarms occur at an alarming rate, and this leads to over policing.
I wanted to provide a citation for the article's claims of over policing, and I believe I have done so (the ACLU article has multiple high quality sources clearly linked in the first few paragraphs).
Your comment mentioned that shotspotter leading to a high police presence is "obviously a good thing" and that if you lived there, you would want this too. But if the residents were happy with what was happening, there would be no controversy. The problem with over policing is that it leads to unfair treatment of marginalized communities, and this is what people are unhappy about.
It seems like you are trying to reason away these concerns, or get me to answer your follow on questions, but I am not an expert here, just someone who remembered seeing articles about issues with the system. I would encourage you to review those sources and check their methodology regarding false positive detection rates, and seek additional information about over policing.
I disagree, because of the importance of preventing active shooters. With this kind of system you are going to want to lean toward false positives vs false negatives.
There is definitely a lot of room for improvement though. Improvement could come through better ML use/training, better sensors, and better human in the loop analysts.
I am firmly with Benjamin Franklin, in that "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.". But Franklin himself was in favor of collective security, and Franklin said this in support of the state's authority to provide collective security ( https://www.npr.org/2015/03/02/390245038/ben-franklins-famou... ). Also, these sensors monitor public spaces, where no expectation of privacy exists.
So I am for more sensors, video cameras on the sensors, more ML on the sensor data, and better training for analysts, but I am also for complete transparency on where sensors are and how they are used, with a publicly released report from annual external party review of police conduct in the use or abuse of sensor data.
Additionally, the author of this article is claiming the police in Albuquerque have suggested to him that when they send forensics teams to the site of detected shootings, they "find definitive evidence of actual shots fired in less than five percent of cases." This would be at least twice as bad as the rough lower bound suggested by the Chicago Inspector General report and seems way out of line with other experiences I've heard.
It would be interesting to know if there might be some reasonable bounds that could be used to enable ShotSpotter to be used without being considered intrusive surveillance. Having information about gunshots or possible gunshots can be extremely useful for responders who need to understand where events are happening. This does not necessarily mean that the system has to be open to other uses, especially recording and replay of audio.
There was a case recently in America where a grandfather was jailed for a significant part of a year based on a shotspotter localization and no other physical evidence such as gunshot residue.
If citizens in such areas run their own systems they would have a means to provide counter evidence to that provided by shotspotter. Currently they have no means to do that. Even the times of the shots they have to take shot spotters word for it.
Recordings by citizens themselves is an inherently safer approach because their sphere of influence is considerably smaller. Recordings are written to a separate partition on an SD card, it’s pretty simple to encrypt this partition as well if you like, I’ve done that.
For those who are interested each node can be made very cheaply. It will run on a Raspberry Pi zero with a 7 euro GPS. It can also run portably on batteries.
Here are relevant links:
https://github.com/hcfman/sbts-aru
https://hackaday.com/2023/12/30/localizing-fireworks-launche...
https://medium.com/@kim_94237/tdoa-sound-localization-with-t...
This is one block east of my new warehouse.
I am making progress though. It may not be visible to users yet, but I'm actually starting to get the infrastructure set up to begin processing media at the new location, and am running for mayor with some ideas that should eliminate all crime here... If successful, I think it could bode well for the elimination of crime everywhere.
I looked to nature for solutions to predators. Predators and criminals need constant sources of food/targets, but Cicadas emerge periodically and overwhelm the predator population. During lean times, the predator population shrinks.
By periodically clamping down HARD, criminals will be forced to target riskier and riskier targets. Then the key is our ability to hunt. There is nothing humans are better at than hunting. We can hunt things to extinction, and criminal activity is no different.
Criminals that can't crime, will have to find other sources of income. If we set up easy sources of lawful income, they will move in that direction.
The choice for a criminal becomes starve, or change.
I truly believe that technology and fast responses can make the difference.
Without this tech, some would be left to a slow death in an alley where no one would find them until morning.
In reality, ambulance dispatchers would look at the high rate of Shotspotter dispatching a car and finding absolutely nothing and immediately recognize this proposal would harm people by sending emergency services on wild goose chases while real emergencies suffer longer wait times.
If you’re passionate about this subject and have lots of time go and volunteer at high crime communities (if you dare), for example in high schools.
I did the latter for three years, volunteering to help the Ace Tech High School (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACE_Amandla_Charter_High_Sch...) more than 10 years ago, as part of their Robotics Team. The problems I saw were myriad but it was common to see lockers decorated with flowers, for kids who died recently.
I totally understand and agree with the educated person’s poverty, bias, etc. arguments. But when a problem gets this bad first you need to stop it, and then work on long term goals.
Just answer this question: if your child had 10% chance of getting shot and killed walking to/from from school, what would your position be on any technology that can reduce that by even 1%.
Just to put some actual perspective on the numbers: about 40 kids are killed in all of New Mexico each year and about 20 of those are suicides (still tragic but not the walking-home-from-school kind). That's still too many, but is nowhere near 10%. You're inflating the numbers to trigger emotions.
Making wide scale policy decisions based on your emotions surrounding anecdotal incidents is not a good policy. I feel for the families that lose their children, but I don't believe that acting for the sake of acting is safe.
Acting in the heat of a crisis is how we got the TSA and the NSA, which we still haven't managed to get rid of. The risk of creating an enormous and impossible to get rid of surveillance state to save 1% of 20 kids per year (2 kids every 10 years) frankly isn't worth it.
It’s not the “heat of the crisis”, this has been going on for years now here. See this WaPo article from 2013, from when Michelle Obama attended the funeral of a 15 year-old girl: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/michelle-obama-heads...
I'm not advocating doing nothing, but I am advocating against arguments in favor of surveillance that lean heavily into emotions surrounding anecdotes and ignore questions of actual incidence rates, causality, and efficacy of the proposed solutions.
It's over the EPA regulations, it's neighborhood wide, and it is on for 2 hours between 11pm and 1am on random days. The EPA did monitoring of the house and site but couldn't pinpoint where it was coming from because of how low frequency it was.
This isn't surveillance, this is the equivalent of finding who is dumping raw sewage in your drinking water.
For 20Hz noise, are there too many reflections to use an oscilloscope with 3 mics on a 25ft baseline to triangulate it (you'd have to elevate the mics)?
I can hear which birds have been in my backyard.
I can... hear what a customer says about my product in-store and offer them coupons at checkout or later or get feedback about my product...
Automatic localization. The techniques of training the model would likely be the same or similar for other similar sounds.
I've considered filing a FOIA request about them but can't figure out quite what I'd be asking for. Data retention? Frequency of queries? Efficacy?
Seems like societally we would want audio to be recorded after shootings?
Is there faster response? higher arrest rate? decrease in crime?
It isn't supposed to govern the city, it's only supposed to spot the gun shots.
Calling 911 for anything else there is a long delay unfortunately. Last time I called for a car jacking right outside my home I was on hold for ten mins. Cops didn't arrive for another 20.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/chicago-not-renew-shotspotter-con...
Not sure if we have shotspotter, but at least I know the police responded!
(I say apparently because, while I heard the gunshots, and I later saw a heavy police presence and animal control hauling away what appeared to be a dead small animal, I don't ACTUALLY know what happened because I wasn't present at the time. All I know is what a resident of the house told me).
> Conversations recorded by ShotSpotter sensors have twice been introduced as evidence in criminal trials. In one case the court allowed it, in another the court did not.
> ShotSpotter sensor correlates fairly well with your household income. The wealthier you are, the less surveilled you are.
It’s amazing lime 500 years later, there’s still a developed country on earth that hasn’t figured the externalities of gunpowder
The US shares a 3,145 kilometer long border with Mexico, unfortunately there are at best 1,044 km of border 'barriers' in place. People, guns, money and drugs are smuggled across the border daily.
In the context of banning guns, any movement north is too much.
I have nothing in principle against a society that completely bans guns, but are you prepared to strike enough terror into the population that breaking the law and getting guns anyway becomes unthinkable?
The state - which like most organizations is concerned mostly with preserving itself - has an interest in the surveillance of the population and in shifting blame from it's failures to deal with poverty and crime to skapegoats: the police, racism, property taxes, etc.
The west is run by priests (professors, advisors, journalists, students, diplomats) with the support of the merchants. Priests always pretend it is flipped, but it's not. One "tell" is that the priests are never the villains in Hollywood movies. The other groups (warriors, merchants, and peasants) all do even villain duty.
Bias shot-spotter placement is a classic case of priests blaming merchants. There might even be something to the substance, but the priests run the show - not SoundThinking Inc.