Hacker News Reader

Comment by graypegg | Hacker News Reader

> The surveillance system spots multiple threats per day, the district said.

… multiple threats a day?! At 1 high school?! Citation needed on that. I know that US high schools have a reputation of being unsafe, but I highly doubt there’s near-HOURLY thwarting of “threats”. Are we talking about rule breaking (vaping in the bathroom, skipping class) or bullying? I would assume so.

The fact it’s then immediately followed up with stats about gun violence does sort of imply we’re talking about serious threats…

Sure, maybe you go full-prison mode if there’s an hourly murder, but that’s so outside the realm of reality that I’m not willing to even entertain that as being a possibility. You would’ve run out of students by now.

View on HN

> The fact it’s then immediately followed up with stats about gun violence does sort of imply we’re talking about serious threats…

Yes, the juxtaposition does strongly suggest that that is the narrative that the piece is trying to push, even before it explicitly states that by following the stats with “Given those appalling metrics, allocating a portion of your budget to state of the art AI-powered safety and surveillance tools is a relatively easy decision.” (And that emotionally-loaded language isn't paraphrasing any figures named in the story, its the "news” stories own voice!)

But with on the order of 50 fatalities nationally per year, and a single high schools system detecting "multiple threats a day", if we are talking about the same kind of threats, then the false positive rate is virtually indistinguishable from 100%. And, if we aren’t, then the juxtaposition is irrelevant as well as emotionally manipulative.

I guess there's two ways to read a ratio like that. Either A) the false positive rate rounds to 100.00000%, or B) the correct positive rate rounds to 100.00000% and the few that slip through are great tragedies due to "just not investing enough", thus making the false positives worth it.

I'm glad B) at least wasn't made /explicit/ in the article, but damn... they do point at it by implication. You're totally right about the juxtaposition being manipulative.

> The company isn’t aware of any school shootings where its tech was deployed.

A thing that happens 50 times a year, across the entire US has not occurred at any of the small number of pilot schools... where apparently "threats" occur multiple times a day?

EDIT: confirming I agree, emphasis on /explicit/.

> I guess there's two ways to read a ratio like that. Either A) the false positive rate rounds to 100.00000%, or B) the correct positive rate rounds to 100.00000% and the few that slip through are great tragedies due to "just not investing enough", thus making the false positives worth it.

I think for (B) to be a justifiable reading, the national stats would have had to have been much higher before the roll out, with a significant share of those national stats being from the particular schools that happened to be the leading implementors.

But, yeah, I agree that that is a possible implication of the presentation on the surface.

> The fact it’s then immediately followed up with stats about gun violence does sort of imply we’re talking about serious threats…

Do we trust surveillance peddlers enough that we should believe what they don't even say directly, but only "sort of imply" it? In this case, we have an easy test: has the number of attempted homicides at this school decreased by multiple per day since the surveillance was implemented?

If it has, I'm sure the surveillance vendors would be eagerly pointing to the dramatic drop in homicides on a graph, coinciding with their invasion of the school, and not just sort of implying it.

My daughter hears about gun threats at her high school weekly. I don't know how many are actual threats, but they have implemented a transparent bag policy, it's a real problem.

If it was a real problem they'd have metal detectors and security rather than security theater.

Who exactly is paying for those, and the training and staff to effectively operate and maintain them?

The taxpayer: this is a drop in the bucket in the areas that need them.

> they have implemented a transparent bag policy, it's a real problem.

This makes the assumption that all policies have a reasonable justification, so that the existence of a real problem can be inferred by the implementation of a policy which would only make sense if (1) there was a real problem, and (2) the policy was an effective mitigation.

I would suggest that this assumption is both false and dangerous, in that it makes one trivially manipulable by anyone in a position to set policy.

You are correct in that I did not specify what the actual problem is. There is a problem of perception, which the transparent bag policy will at least partly address, at relatively little cost. The problem of perception is almost certainly more troublesome than the reality in the majority of cases - the exceptions being notable - and while transparent bags may not be an effective deterrent, that doesn't mean they don't serve as one at all. There is also, in this case, a very real and well-known problem in American schools, including multiple guns confiscated and at least one credible threat in the past semester at this particular school.

I too kind of roll my eyes at the bag policy but it's at least an acknowledgement that something needs to be done about the problem - more than we've gotten from our politicians in the past two decades.

I'm sorry, I hope I don't come off like I'm minimizing a real problem here, but from the outside looking in, it just feels like an entirely alien line of reasoning that could only describe a solution to an imagined problem. However, I'm also missing the lived experience of what being in the US is like right now, and especially missing the context of being a child with peers that make threats like that weekly. I'm empathetic to that situation, but not to the framing that surveillance is somehow stopping those weekly rumours from being weekly atrocities. That's a huge leap.

> However, I'm also missing the lived experience of what being in the US is like right now,

I’m in the US and this story feels extremely foreign to me. Even hearing a rumor about a gun threat at my kids’ school or any of my friends’ kids’ schools would be a topic of discussion for the next year with parent-teacher meetings, the school communicating with parents to shed light on what happened, action plans, and so on. Fortunately nothing like that has happened, but this is the level of communication that happens for even rumored threats.

The US is a huge place, though. Some times I don’t think outsiders understand how big and diverse this country is.

When I was in school, the administration would work itself up into fits about "gangs infiltrating the schools" because an 11 year old wore a red or blue hat to class, clearly gang colors and a sign of the times.

This was in a wealthy suburb where people like that have to make up imaginary threats in order to feel something, and what better population to fret about than the kids.

There was also a wealthy suburb with an actual gang whose existence was swept under the rug for years until they murdered a random 16 year old: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/07/01/how-a-homegrow...

The cops' reluctance to investigate probably had something to do with the fact that some of the gang members were white student athletes with very wealthy families.

That's a real thing that actually happened, my school administration was worried about "ethnic" gangs and rappers they saw on MTV turning 11 year old white kids into, using their words, "gangstas". Same people were running around like headless chickens about "rainbow parties" and FPS games a couple of years before.

They're not saying how many of these "spotted threats" are false positives.

I'm sure they're "real" threats to muh auhtoritah.

How dare some teenager thumb their nose at the almighty rules of the state by <checks notes> vaping in the bathroom.

Probably flagging vapes and recorders as guns . . .

>The fact it’s then immediately followed up with stats about gun violence does sort of imply we’re talking about serious threats…

Or they're trying to appeal to the emotion of "the usual demographic suspects" who they need to simp for this.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com