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Comment by kstenerud | Hacker News Reader

> Putting surveillance for gun crime in areas with the highest rates of gun crime is obviously what’s happening.

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.

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> The more you monitor an area, the more samples you get, biasing the stats

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?

By monitoring any area more, you find more crime, which results in that area being considered as "high crime" and in turn increasing monitoring--that's the cycle OP is talking about.

That’s an oversimplification.

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.

The devices monitor specifically for gunshots. I find it hard to believe that gunshots in wealthy area's often go undetected, with or without those devices.

It's biasing the sample. For example, drug usage among teens are roughly the same between white, hispanic and african americans but african americans are more likely to be arrested and charged for drug possession or usage. Here the difference is probably because african americans are stopped and searched more even though their usage is about the same as whites.

Are the rates of drug dealing the same through?

Let me put it this way. The biggest drug epidemic of this century was the opioid crisis. Half a million Americans died. The primary people responsible are white billionaires, and we know exactly who they are — yet they were never even arrested.

The difference being that they convinced doctors to hand this stuff out like candy. It was all legal. Which is why it got that bad in the first place.

Right, which is why it’s asinine to talk about “crime rate” as though it weren’t wholly dependent on whom we as a society want to call criminals.

"Asinine" is a bit much. There can be huge problems that aren't illegal, but that doesn't mean the crime rate is totally useless. You just have to treat it carefully, like any measurement.

This is whataboutism.

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.

Or a fundamental difference in billionaire tendencies, don't forget that possibility.

Read the thread again; the comment I responded to literally asked if there was a difference in rates of drug dealing between white people and Black people.

And the rates of drug-related violence and property crimes.

It’s probably a cultural factor. Most criminal enterprises want to be discreet in order to avoid detection by law enforcement and rival enterprises. Whereas the black criminal community has made an entire industry of advertising their criminality through music and fashion.

Yes, in a country filled with badly trained police that open deadly fire upon hearing a firework[0] or an acorn dropping on a car hood, more police presence is a bad thing.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39577403

So this might be true for things like increased patrols for drug crimes as an example, but this doesn't apply to shootings. Shootings get reported no matter where they are. When someone shoots a gun in a wealthy part of town, it's not going unreported... Shot spotter simply allows for an instant report instead of having to wait for a phone call. Wealthy areas aren't getting away with more shootings just because of less patrols.

As per the article, they're also using the microphones to record private conversations.

> 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.

Putting aside how easy it is to compensate for this (e.g. report gunshots per area under surveillance), I'm curious how much crime estimates based on ShotSpotter or general policing differ from the frequency with which dead bodies are produced by an area. This latter measure mostly immune to overpolicing bias.

The point is supposed to be that the monitoring and increased policing makes at least certain crimes impossible therefore improving the area for the rest of us.

The farce is the utter failure of the 'survalience state' to actually catch and prosecute people.

Perhaps in the US. Some surveillance states like Singapore and China are quite effective at catching criminals (thoughtcrime and otherwise).

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