I did R&D work for an NGO developing a clone of shotspotter and its kind. I spent an enormous amount of time examining all the variants on the market, including the last two decades of military versions from around the world. I documented all of their various accuracies across all the various axes, how many microphones they used, etc. I also went deep into the academic research to learn all the varied algorithms in use.
When I mentioned it to a family member who is also a police officer, he related that a shotspotter had detected an explosion "right in a guy's backyard." It was clear to me that no device on the market, nor algorithm could figure out that close of a pinpoint. Of course I kept my mouth shut so as to not ruin a holiday. But that was just more undoing of my trust and more indoctrination in one is supposed to remain in a state of denial or cognitive dissonance.
Anyway, just another police technology like polygraphs, DNA, and fingerprints with two stories. One, what it actually does, and two, what police pretend it does.
A piece of advice because you're using a throwaway account: it will be easier for people to believe your claims if you give some kind of inside information about why it doesn't work other than "it just doesn't work"
I really wanted to include references to the research I did, but I was laid off at short notice (ahem, fired) for unspecified reasons, but it might have had to do with not introducing myself with pronouns. Not that I'm against it, I just felt that my freedom included the freedom to not use them. I was let go on a dime and didn't get to collect my research before I left.
But to briefly summarize how these systems specify their accuracy, it's usually with a range of angles. e.g. +/- 10 degrees horizontal, and +- 15 degrees vertical. I just did a quick google search to try to see if anyone has rolled up the various devices like I did, but nothing. However, here's one decent, non-paywalled paper that shows results under very ideal conditions:
As far as my words: "no device on the market, nor algorithm could figure out that close of a pinpoint", not your words: "why it doesn't work," consider the accuracy in an empty field in the above paper, but then add in several factors, including:
1. reflections, particularly in a dense urban environment, can causing reverberation 2. humidity and temperature fluctuations, particularly as they vary vertically causing acoustic lensing effects. also temperature fluctuations affecting sensor differently from air. e.g. direct sun heating sensor. 3. extremely high dynamic range of the signal. 4. synchronization of detectors, 5. vandalism of detectors 6. accuracy of layout of detectors, 7. characterization of detector beam. 8. detector distance
This is not to say most of these can't be mitigated and improved, but they cost more money and time to work on all of them at the same time. The highly idealized results (open blank field) of a single shot in the above paper gave results +/- 8m in one direction and +/- 5m in the other direction with an average sensor distance of ~60m. So you're seeing about ~15% error in one direction and 6% in the other under ideal conditions and within a very short range. As sound propagates, the PV field evolves exponentially and it blurs and gets quieter and background noises interfere more.
Note that I mentioend the systems generally specify angles (polar coords), but i used rectilinear here bc I have a diff job and don't have the time to convert just for the sake of this convo, but that would be a step I wish I had time for.
If you want even more inside information from that side of the family, I will let you know that parallel construction with pseudo-private information is very real. This member, again trying to relate to me, brags about using social media to figure out many cases, hinting at having advanced access to e.g. facebook. I would go so far as to say that if you want to get away with crime, police will likely defer their attention to the low-hanging fruit of what they can solve with social media.
for those who asked for papers, here some that I vaguely recognize from my research. Most of these are paywalled, and I used my privileged access from a fancy school to get to them:
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
"I looked into that and it's actually this... I still love you dad. You're just wrong about a thing that's all. It's even ok if you still want to think I'm the one who's wrong because hey maybe I am."
Helps people learn that domination and submission, or utter seperation, are not the only ways to have peace and cooperation.
Strange. Probably the embarrassing parts relate to the after the fact reclassification of reports after the fact by Shotspotter employees.
The first system was in Redwood City, CA. I once went to a talk by the designer. They had leased analog audio lines to each microphone. At the microphone end, they had something like a logarithmic amplifier, which traded dynamic range for frequency response. The idea is that you don't want to saturate when it picks up a bang. The audio feeds went to an IBM PC at the police station with some multichannel analog input cards. A program written in LabView running under DOS did the analysis. It was looking for a sharp upward spike from multiple microphones. Then it took the time deltas and computed a position. No attempt to compensate for bounces off buildings, etc. Fairly coarse resolution, down to the side of a block, not a building. It was pretty simple.
My assumption is that if the methods are shown to be highly inaccurate it could invalidate many criminal prosecutions which could open them up to lawsuits from law enforcement
I would guess that the “compensate for bounces off buildings” part is the Achilles heel of this technology.
When I worked in telecom we had similar problems with reflections in phone lines, which is a highly controlled environment compared to anything that could potentially reflect sound in a city. And even then we weren’t trying to locate something in 3-dimensional space with reflections, just decode information in spite of them. The more I think about it the more this technology sounds like vaporware except in really ideal conditions, like an open field in the middle of farmland or something.
Accurate or not, so we really want companies installing microphones all over where we live that sends the data to the police? That is worse than 1984 because in 1984 the police didn’t have ai profiling everything it finds. Ie, imagine a company that was competent who did this
The origianl was a 1990s weatherproof omnidirectional microphone on top of a telephone pole, connected to an analog phone line. That would be pretty hopeless at picking up conversations at ground level. Combining signals from microphones maybe a block apart yielded direction.
Today, there are steerable microphone arrays.[1] That technology was first demonstrated around 2010. Now it's commercially available. Simple ones with a few channels are used for video conferencing. Surveillance microphone arrays that record a few hundred microphone channels individually exist. These allow steering the beam during playback, so the surveillance operator can choose where to listen long after the recording. Needs a lot of bandwidth and storage, but no worse than HD video. Still, the range of that sort of thing for voice is maybe 10 meters. They're installed on ceilings, not outdoors.
If they don’t reveal their methodology then how could this be used as evidence? Shouldn’t that lead to the entire case being thrown out if the police were alerted by this? Seems ridiculous to not allow the defense to see the methodology, even radar guns get that treatment.
> If they don’t reveal their methodology then how could this be used as evidence?
It isn't used as evidence; it's used to manufacture pretext to justify collecting "real" evidence. SpotShotter is not an ignorant party: they understand that the service they sell to police departments is a pretextual laundromat for busting up whoever the police feel did the crime.
That's the crux of this case: SpotShotter is being asked to produce evidence that they are compelled to produce, and they'd rather take the loss in this instance (and continue to use it for parallel construction) elsewhere.
In my experience you are 100% correct. This is also the potential use case for non-warrant based Ring/Nest video and audio along with smart speaker collected audio. I’m also certain this company and those like it are consistently looking for opportunities to advertise and sell the parallel construction utility of their services.
I’m a lawyer who practices exclusively in criminal defense. In particular I’m a supervising attorney for a large public defender’s office and I’ve represented somewhere around 5,000 clients in my career.
Lovely answer. May I politely suggest that you mention this stuff when next you post as it would be great to know there is real heft behind it and something HN'ers can rely on. There are too many unbacked opinions and gut-feelings around. But thanks.
That's where the parallel construction part applies: ShotSpotter lets the police do "vibes based" policing (to put it nicely), and then parallel construct their way backwards to a "legitimate" source of evidence.
(If I'm being pedantic, "fruit of the poisonous tree" usually refers to illegally obtained evidence, which ShotSpotter is technically not. It's purely a source of investigatory pretext.)
My understanding is that "contempt of court" is used to either punish someone's "bad" behavior or compel them to do something the court believes they are required to do.
In this case, wouldn't they just keep getting punished for contempt (racking up fines presumably) forever until they fulfil the court's request?
> Discovery orders such as these typically cannot be appealed before final judgment is issued. However, contempt-of-court sanctions for violating a discovery order can be appealed. The request for a so-called “friendly” contempt-of-court order is designed to allow ShotSpotter to effectively appeal the discovery order by appealing the contempt order.
The cops can only raid if there is probable cause of a crime, rather than a civil tort. But in principle, the person refusing to comply with the discovery order can be locked up in jail until the info is forthcoming. I don't think that is supposed to happen in this case.
I don’t understand the argument here. Suppose shotspotter is deeply flawed and often confuses fireworks and car backfires for gunshots, how could that have any impact on this case or the legality of it?
I don’t see it as any different than if a police officer is out patrolling, hears a car backfire, and confuses it for a gunshot. If he then detains someone as a part of his investigation and discovers some other crime, he still has probable cause because it wasn’t unreasonable for him to confuse a loud bang for a gunshot and for him to investigate.
The same holds true for shotspotter, regardless of if it makes mistakes. Even if shotspotter has some bug in their acoustic analysis that identifies loud bangs where there isn’t one, ie: total false positives, so long as it sometimes does detect a real gunshot, the police have probable cause to investigate.
Imagine I made a magic "crime detection" box that called the police each time a crime was "detected".
Now imagine all it did was randomly pick a number from 1 to 100 each day and if it were a 1 or a 2, it "detected" a crime, giving probable cause to police to search people near the box.
Now imagine I almost exclusively put the boxes in areas where black people without a lot of money lived.
You could see this would be something of a problem, right?
I would have a problem with that, but I don’t think that’s what’s going on here.
My gut feeling is that shotspotter mostly works and is mostly accurate, regardless of what Vice reported. I can imagine how I’d build such a system and I don’t think it would be very complicated. You don’t need any powerful signal processing or AI, this entire idea was feasible 20 years ago.
And secondly, I think that if any technology is rolled out by a city in a way that’s discriminatory, that falls squarely on the city and their police department, not on the technology company that sold it to them.
The problem is not that no one could build a system to detect and triangulate gunshot sounds.
The problem is that this specific company seems to be strong on marketing claims and light on engineering legwork. There have also been some implications that point to (in my opinion) post-indictment editing of records to gin up post-hoc probable cause in some cases. No smoking gun (ugh) to prove it but concerning.
What is known is that ShotSpotter reports seem to rarely create useful leads for police. It would hardly be the first (or second, third, fourth, et al) time someone promised to revolutionize policing only to hand over snake oil. Then when the money faucet begins to dry up some companies just can't help fabricating proof of their technology or even falsifying evidence to make sure police "see the value" in continuing to pay for it. Most police departments are being taken for a ride. Some fully understand the wink-wink-nod-nod going on and appreciate the company's "flexibility".
Your "gut feeling" does not comport with any evidence presented so far. Until SpotShotter is compelled to reveal their techniques and present them to the defense, as the defense is entitled under law, it's just a magic box that conveniently agrees with the police when they want it to.
> My gut feeling is that shotspotter mostly works and is mostly accurate
I don't want to base our legal system on your gut feelings. If ShotSpotter is mostly accurate, then they should have no problem releasing the requested material and proving that's the case.
Otherwise I will have to assume it's just the magic crime detection box as described above.
East Palo Alto has shotspotter installed throughout. In summer of 2020 there were several weeks of nightly nearly non stop fireworks. Shotspotter should have been able to help the police pinpoint the locations of these illegal fireworks yet no enforcement actually happened.
Now part of that might be because of the defacto police strike in response to "defund the police", but the noise went on long enough and was heard in nearby wealthy cities enough that actually motivated police forces were pushing to fix the problem and yet shotspotter proved useless.
This leads to the allegation that shotspotter doesn't actually work at all and is just there so when a hothead young cop does something wrong without thinking the police department can, after the fact, get shotspotter to gin up some probable cause.
I would think the system will have difficult time materializing high rates of people that have been shot, which tends to be the chief metric for where it's deployed.
Imagine if there were 100 gun murders in a city in one year and you had a magic box that was 100% accurate at detection of location of gun shots within 1 mile and the city could only afford to buy 10 magic boxes.
Would you put those magic boxes near where previous gun crimes have been committed or would you put those boxes in places based on the race and sexual orientation and disability status and gender of the people living in the city?
Well how useful is that anyway? Probably not useful for evidence or crime prevention. I imagine most murders are known about fairly quickly due to a corpse (except say by “professionals”) or people hear the gunshot and call in.
Logically I would say spending the money on gun control would be better, but politically that seems like a no no. Make carrying in the street illegal with jail time, and use the money in a gun amnesty.
To me this is obviously unethical, but wouldn't this also be obviously unconstitutional in the US? At least if done deliberately? 14th amendment and all that.
Assuming the question were to reach the Supreme Court, and not considering the possibilities in the various Circuits, there is a substantial chance all of the Supreme Court’s various composition over the last 50 years would uphold the use.
First consideration would be applicable legal standard, which practically always errs on the side of the State, second is the reasonableness of statistical methodology presenting the locations based on crime statistics.
I would not personally argue for its constitutionality, but given the precedents stemming from pretextual patrolling cases, it isn’t as clear cut as one might hope.
The magic box already exists, it's called people who call the cops to report gunshots every time they hear fireworks are a car backfiring.
If you think it's wrong for police to investigate a shotspotter alert because it might be a false positive then the logical conclusion of that line of thinking is that it should be illegal for the cops to show up to investigate when someone calls in to report gunshots, since those are mostly false positives too.
Shotspotter stores the raw audio so you can just ask for the audio and evaluate for yourself whether a reasonable person would identify that as a gunshot.
Either hearing a gunshot is not probable cause to pull someone over (in which case Shotspotter's accuracy and methodology is irrelevant), or hearing a noise that sounds sufficiently like a gunshot is indeed probable cause, in which case you can just listen to the audio yourself and make a determination about whether or not there was a true gunshot-like noise or the company invented a fake alert out of thin air. I don't see any scenario in which the methodology or accuracy of Shotspotter's devices is at all relevant to this case. The relevant fact here is whether this particular bit of audio can be reasonably classified as a gunshot, not the broader accuracy of the system over the whole data set.
"Someone hearing a gunshot" is not probable cause to pull someone over, just as someone calling in a gunshot to the police is not probable cause to pull someone over.
The article isn't clear. The defense claims that the driver was pulled over solely from the shotspotter alert:
>>Attorneys from the Cook County Public Defender Office, contending the police pulled the man over solely based on a ShotSpotter alert, subpoenaed the company as a third party to find out whether that was the case.
but that seems unlikely -- it would be really expensive and low-yield to pull over everyone in the vicinity of a gunshot. It would be about the same as with regular human ears hearing a bang: go to the source, then pull over cars with evidence further differentiating them as a possible locus of crime.
So probably shotspotter got the cop to that location, where he saw other, more crime-specific evidence. But without more info about this case I couldn't say for sure.
> it would be really expensive and low-yield to pull over everyone in the vicinity of a gunshot
Expensive and low-yield for whom? For the officer who's been directed their by the robot, they're incentivized to do so; it makes them look like they're doing their jobs instead of doing nothing. What's built into the system to penalize them for inconveniencing / endangering a bunch of people with nothing to show for it?
Searching a car and catching a criminal always makes them look better than just searching a car. [1]And I’m not sure how your point, if you have one beyond making yourself look smart, relates to the broader issue of whether shotspotter was the only evidence, which was the focus of that comment.
And if you’re economizing on time, I can assure that a better use of it would be to answer the challenge you kept dodging (or “misinterpreting” as a opportunity to show off irrelevant knowledge):
At this point I’m just going to assume you have no idea if 7% is a good threshold or not, but still see so problem with shouting it because it sounds good.
[1] In case you forgot, the only reason you were outraged was because the search did catch a criminal that it shouldn’t have. So obviously someone cares about catching a criminal!
Sorry, I'm not sure where you're picking up "outrage" from my comment. You were asserting "It would be really expensive and low-yield to pull over everyone in the vicinity of a gunshot" and I was asking 'for whom?' I don't see how incentives are aligned for that to be expensive at all for the person doing the pulling over, and I tend to evaluate people's behavior on the assumption that, all other things being equal, they'll do what they're most incentivized to in a given situation most of the time.
It's expensive for the community, to be sure, but the cop's not incentivized immediately to care about that.
>Sorry, I'm not sure where you're picking up "outrage" from my comment.
It wasn't in that comment, it was in the premise of all your previous posts that it is outrag^W^W^W^W^W suboptimal for someone to be pulled over and eventually arrested for DUI when the original instigating cause was a false positive for gunfire.
IOW, the entire reason you're talking about this case, is because they did not pull over everyone in the vicinity but prioritized those that were more likely to be committing crime, based on other signals. That's how we got to this case to begin with! And yet, I'm having to remind you that you're arguing with yourself.
Do you consider it too much to ask that you remember the context of what you're talking about? And for others not have to remind you?
Also, thanks for the confirmation that you don't have a substantive answer to the substantive question, "what probability threshold is appropriate for police to enter in preparation for an active shooter" -- I had always assumed your comment was bad-faith to begin with. Especially when you deny that comments such as these are expressing something similar to outrage:
The article suggests that the police can go to Shotspotter and ask for some other convenient sound or perhaps even no sound at all(?) to be retroactively reclassified as a gunshot where they wanted it to be, so they can then use that as an excuse to stop the person they already wanted to or already did but didn't have a valid reason to. That's worse than random and worse than a policeman honestly mistaking a backfire for a gunshot.
The cop that heard the backfire would likely be called to testify that fact in court. If they fail to show up, and the arresting officer (a different cop) claimed they made a probable-cause traffic stop based on what the other cop heard, and that cop refuses to testify, the prosecution is going to have a bad time.
Probably not. Cop said it, court saw it written, that settles it. Now prove your innocence without the ability to face your accuser. They're a cop, of course they're 100% correct in everything they wrote down, so... yeah, pay your ticket.
I've seen this a few more times than I'm the slightest fan of, for me and other people accused of "impossible things" in cars (like "being clocked far faster than the car is capable of having accelerated to based on where it turned onto the road").
The prosecution has no problems with, "But the cop wrote that they saw you doing 70 in a 35, wrote the ticket for 45, and they're not here, so you're guilty."
A better analogy would be, if you asked the cop how he decides it’s a gun firing vs some other innocuous cause, and his department refused to allow the records of his brain scans to be admitted into evidence to determine if he were perfectly consistent in going after gun-like sounds (assuming it were a department that had brain scans going on for officers on duty).
But that’s a ridiculously non-applicable analogy. Any request for such brain scans would be deemed, at least in almost all conceivable circumstances as over reach by the defense. In reality all the cop has to do is say based on his training and experience he is comfortable in distinguishing the sound of gun fire in a city environment.
The proper analogy is to say that this company is not allowing for the experience and training testimony to be shown to the court. That would be how I would argue against probable cause in this case. However, as another comment in the thread discusses, this is probably not an issue since there is a heavy dose of parallel construction argument going on.
What perplexes me is that in the USA we have a constitutional right to face our accuser in court. But this is a piece of software.
> In one case, a 65-year-old grandfather was held in Cook County Jail for nearly a year at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic before his case was dismissed due to insufficient evidence.
Prosecutors accuse him of shooting his passenger, but he claims that another car pulled up next to him and shot his passenger instead. In either case shotspotter both correctly identified a gunshot and the location of the gunshot, so what exactly did they do wrong here? By the defendant's own admission the gunshot that triggered the alert was real! Unless crucial details are being omitted somewhere it seems like a hatchet job to me.
Pretty sure the scenario you described with an actual police officer does not count as probable cause either. You can't just start detaining people because you heard fireworks, even if you mistook it for a gunshot.
If the officer lied about having probable cause (e.g., by telling ShotSpotter to fabricate alerts or to re-classify an alert after a stop to manufacture probable cause), the case can be thrown out.
But we can't know if the officer lied because SpotShotter refuses to reveal how their black box works. Since the officer's word is like unto God's in most courtrooms, the defendant is kinda stuck.
If the police officer was lying about hearing a gunshot to perform an illegal search, or the police officer used the “I heard a gunshot” excuse six times a day, then that would be a problem.
Okay but I don’t think the argument here is that there was no “bang” sound, only that the company with technology for classifying bangs might not be perfectly consistent, which is still a higher burden than applied to a police officer investigating a bang sound.
The problem is at least with police, presumably (and I understand this doesn't functionally work due to the dysfunction of the police & court systems) if the police kills and/or maims an innocent person due to their error, they can be held responsible for their stupid decision.
One of these cases is a class action on behalf of people who have been wrongly arrested because of spotshotter - the case is also trying to get the police to stop using it because of this - if it's wrong most of the time police do not have probable cause - they have improbable cause
It's plausible that ShotSpotter's main motivation is that there isn't much benefit (e.g., increased sales) to complying with the defense's request, but the costs could be huge, both for collecting the requested information in the required manner, and for the ramifications if they cannot produce information that the court believed they should have been able to produce. Discovery can be extremely expensive even when the ultimate assessment of a company's technology is favorable (and thus there's no decrease in sales).
I dunno if this company deserves that benefit of the doubt.
Honestly, given their history, they probably just don't want to reveal that their entire business is snake oil, basically existing solely to make money by enabling law enforcement to create crimes out of thin air.
If their science was sound they wouldn't have to resort to such tactics...
Look how accurate raspberry pi powered ADSB plane tracking networks are — and that’s a much harder problem: they have no funding, they’re doing triangulation at the speed of light, and they’re doing it without GPS clock sources. You could also point to the lightning tracker networks that work in roughly the same way.
Given a few million dollars to outfit their nodes with good GPS units and good microphone arrays, I’d expect their technology to be very good.
Edit: I think a novel implementation here is that they often use one mic array (several mics mounted around one tower or vehicle) as opposed to a dispersed network at them. If they made that work effectively, I think IMO it's different enough as to be novel and patent worthy. But it also strikes me as the kind of technology that should be defensible on its own merits, and legitimate copycats easy enough to identify, rather than blanket squelching tactics and going after journalists. That's what snake oil salesman do, not companies with actually superior technology. Read the Vice reports. Their effectiveness record isn't great except in their first party sponsored research.
"[Office of Inspector General] Finds That ShotSpotter Alerts Rarely Lead to Evidence of a Gun-Related Crime and That Presence of the Technology Changes Police Behavior"
"Police watchdogs in Chicago have issued a report about the city’s use of ShotSpotter’s acoustic gunshot detection system, finding that only 9 percent of ShotSpotter alerts led to evidence of gun crime."
"Court documents recently reviewed by VICE have revealed that ShotSpotter, a company that makes and sells audio gunshot detection to cities and police departments, may not be as accurate or reliable as the company claims. In fact, the documents reveal that employees at ShotSpotter may be altering alerts generated by the technology in order to justify arrests and buttress prosecutors’ cases."
"And according to the testimony of a ShotSpotter employee and expert witness in court documents reviewed by VICE, claims about the accuracy of the classification come from the marketing department of the company—not from engineers."
Just to point out: on a signals processing level, I suspect that monitoring a signal that's designed to be tracked is much simpler than triangulating a sound using an incomplete acoustic profile. We can track planes via ADS-B with consumer hardware because it's a constrained and well-defined problem that was designed with automation in mind; this is not the case for the noises made by guns in an unknown environment.
I wonder if cell site networks could collect the same data. Cell towers are already mounted high up, have data connections and high precision GPS data. Adding a microphone array seems like it would be cheap and easy.
Regardless of if it works or not, I suspect some people don't actually want it to work because of the implications: it means there is another viable method for tackling gun crime than "take all the guns." It's easier if it doesn't work, then the only solution is a total gun ban.
Nobody said they were actually doing crimes at the home, just that the cops thought they were. Which hey, maybe they are, maybe they aren’t. But using unrelated crimes and fake data to raid their house under a false pretext is still not ok, and is still unconstitutional.
If the cops think they’re committing a crime, they should actually find enough probably cause to get actual paperwork, not just create junk to justify going after the ‘usual suspects’.
That is for each count of contempt and each incident of said contempt, in theory every refusal is a new count. I had a trial in February with a witness who refused to answer any questions, each refusal was ruled a contempt and the Judge settled at 7.5 years total for all the refusals (judge later amended to 3 years, but it is on appeal at the moment). All that to say, it could be more severe but it is unlikely that any jail will result.
Forgive me if im wrong, but i was under the impression that jailing someone for contempt was very rare and mostly only happened in extreme cases, of which this does not seem to be one.
> The defense also requested ShotSpotter produce any data on sensors misidentifying gunfire or the location of alerts, as well as data on gunfire ShotSpotter failed to identify.
I frequently misunderstand how features work in common applications, especially nuances of models and processes; so I can only imagine the difficulty gaining a precise understanding and context for a non technical person; e.g. a lawyer or jury.
Unrelated: as someone not from Chicago, it's surprising that a company exists solely to detect gunshots. Depressing.
"Discovery orders such as these typically cannot be appealed before final judgment is issued. However, contempt-of-court sanctions for violating a discovery order can be appealed. The request for a so-called “friendly” contempt-of-court order is designed to allow ShotSpotter to effectively appeal the discovery order by appealing the contempt order."
This is an audio surveillance company which sells itself to cities as a gunshot detection system. Based on how they appear to be acting in court, it would be reasonable to assume that either:
(1) Their methodology is about to be debunked, or;
(2) It's about to be revealed that they were working with police to allow them to manufacture reasons to arrest people.
Would results of discovery be public record? If so, I could also see:
3) They don't want their "secret sauce" made publicly available.
That would both open them up to commercial competition, and make their product less reliable in court, as anti-Shotspotter experts would start figuring out how to effectively argue against the product's methodology.
In general I think technology like this should have to be fully transparent if it is used as the basis for public entities' decisions, but so far the arguments against that practice seem to have won out. For example, good luck getting source code or design documents to contest an automated red light or speeding ticket.
I agree that there is definitely moral hazard when it comes to after the fact "corrections", particularly if the analyst knows the outcome desired by police. The company's track record looks pretty poor in this respect.
In general though, I think there are legitimate reasons for manual analysis. Any machine learning approach to a problem like this is going to have to balance false positives and false negatives, and there is necessarily going to be a somewhat arbitrary cutoff. Detecting bang-like noises in a large city is likely going to have a pretty conservative cutoff to avoid DDOSing the police with calls. For example say the company sets their cutoff for automatic reporting at 90% confidence, but when the police ask them to review a specific time period, it turns out there was a shot detected with 89% confidence, and manual analysis indicates a false negative. That is probably still useful information, and it would definitely be useful to include this data point with the correct classification in future iterations of the model.
They could ask for the information to be under seal to protect their commercial interests.
The actual technology is not all that complex. Transient detection and triangulation by decorrelation from a microphone (edit: not microwave!) array. You could probably prototype it in a week if you leaned on an established FFT library. Obviously they would not want to reveal their source code and so on, but if you know digital audio you know this isn't that hard.
I think what they really want to conceal is not the technology but its use in operation. I don't know what Chicago pays for the service, but Sacramento CA spends about $1m a year on it and Sac is a fairly small city.
https://www.sacbee.com/news/local/article231997777.html
While true the tech is not complex, I believe the discrepancy is "how accurate is it and is the data being manipulated to fit a crime" versus "the data is accurate and leading to fair justice outcomes."
Wouldn't "red teaming" ShotSpotter solve for this to see how accurate they are? A team would perform controlled firings in known locations under various auditory scenes with the city's approval, and then request the data from ShotSpotter to see how accurate they are (without revealing you are performing an exercise). ShotSpotter then doesn't have to reveal their methodology, as their data provided from a blind test will reveal the accuracy regardless of how they arrive at conclusions. The system is either accurate or it isn't (with a measured level of confidence), and this can be tested for without ShotSpotter's consent (as long as they continue to provide data to the customer per their contract).
This would work to give some evidence for the accuracy levels of the automated parts of the system, at least for true positives vs false negatives, but doesnt test for how the system generates false positives.
A bigger problem is that this doesnt approach any of the process problems with the human moderated parts of the system. For that you would need cooperation from the law enforcement customer. The customer would need to make a request like "are you sure you didnt find any gun shots around this time and place?" and see how the company responds.
That would tell you if it correctly detected gunshots... but it wouldn't tell you if it falsely reported certain sounds as gunshots, if it works in all weather, etc.
> and make their product less reliable in court, as anti-Shotspotter experts would start figuring out how to effectively argue against the product's methodology.
If their methodology has weaknesses which allow those arguments, then its kind of a travesty of justice not to allow them.
It's phenomenally hard. Echos, indirect routing (bouncing off buildings), sound waves changing speed as they go through various materials (like a lens). It's a very hard problem.
Heck, a truly calibrated surround sound system requires using a microphone to measure the volume in place.
> It's phenomenally hard. Echos, indirect routing (bouncing off buildings), sound waves changing speed as they go through various materials (like a lens). It's a very hard problem.
I doubt they've solved (or even have non trivial mitigations for) any of those subproblems, based on stories of how often they apply human "corrections". The portion they've implemented may be very easy to replicate.
I would definitely object to any system that required a car to creep along every block and regularly make a simulated gunshot sound. It sounds prohibitively annoying.
Google was collecting point cloud data of US cities 15 years ago, I assume some GIS vendor somewhere is selling a copycat dataset to self driving car startups.
I'm sensitive to the idea their methodology could be used to create a competing product, and think the court could get the experts to agree to event more stringent than normal NDAs to examine it. But I think if a computer system is going to be used to convict someone, experts effectively arguing against it's methodology is good. In fact, I think experts should have access to various machines that could convict someone.
I don't really care about a red light camera (as the image shows the license plate and the red light at the same time), but there are tons of other technical solutions that need to be examined.
For real. I wonder how active phone microphones and geolocation are generally -- I know there are a host of location tracking (marketing) companies that use app geolocated data as their sources.
I was on a jury where we were forced to acquit a guy of vehicular manslaughter because a vendor representative couldn’t properly explain how NTP works on a red light camera under cross examination. It was gross.
They are being ordered to disclose and they are refusing to do it. The article says the lawyer requested to be held in "friendly contempt." I'm pretty sure that doesn't exist. It would probably be more accurate to say that the lawyer conceded the company was in contempt (i.e. they were refusing the order to produce and maybe even conceding it was legal) and was requesting a light sanction. The strategy seems rather bold.
I am not versed in Illinois contempt law, but judges have very broad constitutional authority to sanction people or companies for intentional failure to comply with a lawful order. In this case, you could expect the judge to do something like order the company to pay five thousand dollars per day until they disclose the records.
There could be an argument that the judge could legally order the sheriff to seize their servers or throw the CEO in jail until the company complies, but for some reason stuff like that doesn't seem to ever happen in the corporate context.
> This procedure is often called “friendly contempt,” a recognition that the contemnor has not acted “with
contumacious disregard for the court’s authority,” but requires a contempt finding and sanction for the purpose of
obtaining appellate review. See Klaine v. S. Ill. Hosp. Servs., 2016 IL 118217, ¶ 6; Zagorski v. Allstate Ins. Co., 2016 IL
App (5th) 140056, ¶¶ 16-17. In many cases, the contemnor has even requested the finding and sanction for that purpose.
See Ctr. Partners, Ltd. v. Growth Head GP, LLC, 2012 IL 113107, ¶ 20.
The main reason to ask for "friendly contempt" (as per your article) is to get a contempt order in place so it can be appealed. Until then, there is no reason for an appeals court to look at the decision.
So this is the lawyer asking to appeal the original judge's order of disclosure, and this is the obscure process that makes that happen.
My expertise goes as far as drama TV - but uh since this is a corporation, wouldn't the fine be more like average daily revenue /2 ? A night in the pokey seems pretty common, and that's kinda as close as you can get for the company.
Maybe a night in jail isn't all that common though. Sure seems reasonable and effective.
I can't think of any off the top of my head, but I'm sure there are a few where the evil journalist or priest is held in contempt hindering finding the bad guy.
Wow, thanks for the link. I had no idea about this.
Promotional material issued by ATSC claimed that the ADE 651 could detect such item as guns, ammunition, drugs, truffles, human bodies, contraband ivory and bank notes at distances of up to 1 kilometre (0.62 mi), underground, through walls, underwater or even from aircraft at an altitude of up to 5 kilometres (3.1 mi).[12] In a promotional video, McCormick claimed that the device could detect elephants from 48 kilometres (30 mi) away.[13]
I remember during the US invasion of Iraq when it made the news that coalition forces were using them. The company was just one of many that made billions of US dollars just disappear into an Iraq-sized hole https://www.cnbc.com/2014/06/19/how-the-us-lost-billions-ove...
I remember hearing that The Jehovah's Witnesses are in contempt of court and pay that fine instead of releasing internally held information about alleged child abuse incidents.
I live in a city where ShotSpotter is often used to detect gun violence and it seems, at least from local reporting, that it's often accurate in detecting gunfire and often finds victim(s) on the scene, often uncooperative with police.
In so far as I can tell, it seems to be doing its job, though I understand there are several institutions here which obviously are not trustworthy.
This is a classic example of the survivorship bias: local reporting doesn't report on the unknown proportion of cases that are false positives or wild goose chases. It also doesn't divulge where the police are putting their thumb on the scale by having ShotSpotter edit the "evidence" after the fact, as is alleged in this case.
(Not the OP) For background, this is the company that supposedly locates gunshot sounds in cities (and sometimes battlefields) by microphone triangulation. It doesn't work all that well and is selectively deployed in minority areas and is used by police to selectively enforce crimes, sometimes also altering the evidence. Vice did a few articles on them and the company tried to sue but had it tossed out. Shady all around.
Police said ShotSpotter, a surveillance system that uses hidden microphone sensors to detect the sound and location of gunshots, generated an alert for that time and place.
Except that’s not entirely true, according to recent court filings.
That night, 19 ShotSpotter sensors detected a percussive sound at 11:46 p.m. and determined the location to be 5700 South Lake Shore Drive—a mile away from the site where prosecutors say Williams committed the murder, according to a motion filed by Williams’ public defender. The company’s algorithms initially classified the sound as a firework. ...
But after the 11:46 p.m. alert came in, a ShotSpotter analyst manually overrode the algorithms and “reclassified” the sound as a gunshot. Then, months later and after “post-processing,” another ShotSpotter analyst changed the alert’s coordinates to a location on South Stony Island Drive near where Williams’ car was seen on camera.
In 2016, Rochester, New York, police looking for a suspicious vehicle stopped the wrong car and shot the passenger, Silvon Simmons, in the back three times. They charged him with firing first at officers.
The only evidence against Simmons came from ShotSpotter. Initially, the company’s sensors didn’t detect any gunshots, and the algorithms ruled that the sounds came from helicopter rotors. After Rochester police contacted ShotSpotter, an analyst ruled that there had been four gunshots—the number of times police fired at Simmons, missing once.
Paul Greene, ShotSpotter’s expert witness and an employee of the company, testified at Simmons’ trial that “subsequently he was asked by the Rochester Police Department to essentially search and see if there were more shots fired than ShotSpotter picked up,” according to a civil lawsuit Simmons has filed against the city and the company. Greene found a fifth shot, despite there being no physical evidence at the scene that Simmons had fired. Rochester police had also refused his multiple requests for them to test his hands and clothing for gunshot residue.
Curiously, the ShotSpotter audio files that were the only evidence of the phantom fifth shot have disappeared.
Both the company and the Rochester Police Department “lost, deleted and/or destroyed the spool and/or other information containing sounds pertaining to the officer-involved shooting,” according to Simmons’ civil suit
What I don't understand about this is what basis they could possibly have for making such a correction? The data is X, their algorithm says Y about it. Are they just claiming that "analysts" are better at triangulating than whatever their algorithm is? It's not like image classification, where it's at least plausible that a person can meaningfully "correct mistakes."
Their profit depends on pleasing the police departments that make these requests. They probably thought nobody would ever find out or care, which is why they sued to keep journalists quiet.
Kind of like speeding and red light cameras, though they could be placing small enough microphones that you wouldn't see them while driving/walking by.
Of course that seems like a small nitpick given the content of the passage I copied from the article.
>In Chicago, a government watchdog says Shotspotter alerts have only led to evidence of gun crime in 9 percent of cases.
>fewer than 2 in 10 investigatory stops following ShotSpotter alerts resulted in the recovery of a gun
9% actually seems like a lot? Considering that most criminals don't stick around after illegally discharging a firearm. And 1 in 5 resulting in the recovery in a gun? Vice is really bending over backwards to pretend that these numbers are bad.
Well, I'm a layperson to anything related to criminal investigation, but this is a little concerning to me.
If you're in a particularly crime ridden area, my concern is how many of those 9% are the right evidence against the right person. It's pretty terrible if all it took to nab the wrong person was shoddy evidence from a shady and secretive company that is accused of having manipulated the evidence in the past. It is still quite terrible even if it's often correct, because that makes it much harder for someone who is innocent to do anything about it.
Still, it's possible that the numbers Vice is showing does not demonstrate the problem.
No, these numbers are meaningless without a null hypothesis to compare them to. If you stop random people in the monitored areas, at the right time of day, how many guns do you find?
You are not required to have committed a crime to be legally searched. If you're fleeing the area where gunshots have been reported, it's not unreasonable to search you.
So to rephrase your argument, shotspotter allows police to arrest people with made up evidence. You say that is a good thing, because they were criminals anyway.
You have an interesting concept of the rule of law.
Not OP, but probable cause is not "made up evidence." If there's a report of a noise that sounds like a gunshot, and that results in a search of people who are running, and that search finds an illegal gun, that's reasonable.
Why does this scenario presume that people are running? Even with this technology, it seems exceedingly unlikely that police are arriving on the scene within seconds of a possible gunshot; it's much more likely that they're corralling bystanders and frisking them.
And why does your scenario presume that the situation is completely cold?
The average police response time in Chicago is 5-6 minutes[0]. I'm going to bet that active shootings are on the fast side of the average. Having lived in Chicago for 7 years, I can tell you there are areas where you regularly see police patrolling.
Not completely cold. I would just be mildly surprised if someone lingered around for 5-6 minutes and then ran.
In any case, this is all supposition. We aren’t being allowed to review the actual evidence, so for all I know SpotShotter is just telling the police what they’re asking it to.
I'm sorry, what's the premise here? People don't run away from random gunfights that happen on the street? Honestly, I feel like it's more likely that a random person is not involved if they are running.
9% would be a lot, if we had strong evidence that SpotShotter was the source of hard evidence leading to a gun seizure, and not simply legal pretext for frisking people who the police think look suspicious (or, more accurately, would otherwise like to target but lack admissible evidence to do so).
It's the same problem that Stop and Frisk[1] in NYC had: you can make the contraband recovery numbers look fantastic, if you're willing to sweep peoples' civil rights under the rug.
Honestly, I'd be surprised if 9% weren't below the rate from random searches. It's tragically quite common - and, to a point, quite rational - to carry a gun in some neighborhoods.
>9% actually seems like a lot? Considering that most criminals don't stick around after illegally discharging a firearm.
Are you under the impression that the only evidence of a firearm being discharged is carried away by the person firing the gun? I was under the impression that evidence of a gunshot is kind of famously objective because of the presence of bullets, bullet holes, casings, victims, property destruction etc.
By your reasoning, it’s a feasible proposition that criminals regularly patch up bullet holes and what, fireman carry their victims away from the scene?
Find the bullet hole, and you've found the property destruction, and the bullet is either embedded in the property destruction or fragmented all of over the place, as bullets often do. So you could have just said "property damage."
But tell you what, I'll go downtown and shoot a black paintball in a random direction, and tell you roughly where I was when I shot it, within 100m. It will be your job to find where that paintball hit. Good luck finding your evidence.
>casings
Casings are easier to find, but still very difficult if you don't have the precise location of where the shooting took place.
>victims
Firearm discharges don't always result in victims, or even victims willing to come forward.
What are you honestly expecting cops to do when there's a gunshot report? Spend hours combing the city for some rogue bullet holes? It's not realistic. The best evidence you're going to get is rushing to the area where shots were reported and finding someone fleeing.
So your answer to my initial question is “Yes. I believe that it is a reasonable assumption that all of the evidence of a gunshot is carried away by the shooter.”
That’s a fascinating position! Based on how difficult it is to find any evidence whatsoever, would you conclude that gunshots are essentially inconsequential 91% of the time? If I believed that, I would advocate for the legalization of recreational firearm discharge in populated areas, since obviously they rarely actually cause any noticeable issue.
Edit:
A tech company going “Beep boop loud noise! Give us more public funds for our technology that we refuse to explain!” is not the same thing as an actual report of gunfire to me. As for what I expect the police to do? Nothing. Literally nothing at all, anywhere at any time. They’re not obligated to, and in my experience, that’s what they usually do. Nothing.
I forgot to add “witnesses and complainants” as something that could be considered evidence of gunfire, but I’m assuming they can also be carried away
The reframing is that it have cops reason to go in armed and expecting an active shooter when 93% of the time there was no reason to expect that, and 4 it of 5 times SS reports led to civilians being stopped for no justification.
The reality is in those areas cops are always armed and expecting active shooters. Look up the gunplay stats for places like Back of The Yards in Chicago.
Lived in Chicago (but not the south side) and can agree that the gun violence there is extreme. It's an war zone every day, with thousands of shootings a year and hundreds of homicides.
That said, I don't think anyone is opposed to technology that can locate gunshots and deliver law enforcement to the right places. The gripe is that this company in particular has a history of being opaque and trying to cover up their failings, leading to questions about the effectiveness of their underlying technology and data integrity. The public can't tell whether this is a legitimate social good based on an effective tool or if the company is just ripping off tax payers and sometimes outright working with crooked cops to fabricate probable cause.
Not every cop is crooked, and not every acoustic triangulation technology is fake. But this company isn't being transparent or well intentioned enough for the public, or even a limited group of outside experts, to make that determination. And they have a history of being willing to corrupt their data, altering evidence to facilitate false records from crooked cops.
The right tools in the wrong hands can still be a problem. We don't know if this is the right tool, but the company has shown itself to be the wrong hands.
In that case, a technology encouraging them to go out expecting armed resistance when no crime has been committed is an obvious danger for the community.
>You'd have to ask London police, since they don't.
No, I wouldn't, because your facts are wrong. Yes, London police are generally unarmed, but they still get called to respond to situations where there is a likely armed suspect, and in those cases, they send in special units that are armed.
The question here -- that you avoided -- is, what is the appropriate probability before sending in such an officer, and is it higher than the 7% in the situation you cited? You were asking others to be outraged that there was "only" a 7% chance of an actual armed shooter. In an attempt to move the discussion forward, I asked what the appropriate value is, so as to appropriately judge whether such intervention was unwarranted.
To which your entire response was to shoehorn in an irrelevant factoid about London and falsely imply I'm not aware of it. (And, of course, work in a Fermi reference, because, why not?)
If I may make a suggestion: next time someone asks a substantive question, and you don't have a substantive answer, just don't reply. That's a much better approach for the forum than what you just did.
If your claim is that the police should always show up armed and expecting to be shot at in the United States because the Second Amendment guarantees the right of a private citizen to own a firearm, then the conclusion is that every instance of calling the police out to respond is a possible fatal shooting in the making. That is definitely a conclusion others have reached (https://dontcallthepolice.com/about/).
In that context, ShotSpotter's mechanism bordering on ascientific prognostication should be considered dangerous to the community because it is increasing the chances of fatal encounters for no benefit. It's basically SWATting with a fancy corporate branding.
>If your claim is that the police should always show up armed and expecting to be shot at in the United States
What part of my comment is that (or anything else you've said) responding to? I asked a simple question: what is the appropriate "probability of a shooter" that justifies going in with a protocol that expects one? Now you're just guessing things that have little to do with what I said.
Let’s tighten that up, some. Canadian police are armed with lethal weapons and need to go into active shooter situations less often than the U.S., which is a wildcard outlier of gun violence, second only to active war zones.
You're both misreading the question. The question was not "how often do police go in expecting a shooter?" The question was, "what 'probability of there being a shooter' justifies going in armed/with a protocol that expects one?" User:shadowgovt, if you followed the thread, was asking us to be outraged that they went in when it was "only" 7%:
You're assuming the "gunshot alerts" are actually gunshots, though. As noted, the sensors will identify other sounds as gunshots, and the company won't reveal its methodology so... do you live in a neighborhood with 50k gunshots, or 5k gunshots and 45k backfiring cars / fireworks / loud songs with gunshot sound effects?
I don't know about the accuracy of these sensors or the statistics cited, but having lived in and around Chicago for over 20 years, including 2 years on the south side, there are a lot of shootings. Summers are especially bad. Most weekends have double digit body counts. I don't know how many gun shots I've heard in Chicago over the years, but I can tell you how many cars back firing I've heard: zero. I've also heard a ton of fireworks. Southside around the 4th of July? Looks and sounds like a warzone. At least it did down near Bronzeville when I lived there. And before you question my ability to discern a difference, I can. I grew up shooting rifles & shotguns and happened to have a vehicle that back fired with some regularity. Gun shits tend to have a sharper report, a back fire lasts longer, a bit "boomier".
And while I like the concept behind ShotSpotter, the company, it's methods and its data governance are... Shoddy. That's probably the most charitable I can put it from what I've read about them.
Yeah, I know nothing about Chicago so I'm not challenging anyone's anecdotal experience. Just pointing out that ShotSpotter, as a source, is potentially pretty awful.
Another thing I didn't point out in my comment is that ShotSpotter also changes its data if police tell them to. Which seems like either an admission that their sensor is not very good, or that they're willing to compromise good data when told to.
I wouldn't want to live in a community with even 10% of the loud noises being gunshots, no. Saying that there's only 5k real gunshots doesn't make it sound any better.
Maybe we should focus on why there's so many gunshots in these specific communities.
Sure, that sounds like a great thing to focus on, but in this particular thread that's specifically about ShotSpotter it mainly serves to change the subject.
The topic has expanded to the related topics, as conversations do. ShotSpotter wouldn't even exist, much less be the topic of criticism, if there wasn't a rampant problem with gun violence in these communities.
The allegation is that gun violence is a requirement for ShotSpotter, but not the reason for it. The reason for it is that a magic wand that generates probable cause wherever and whenever you need it is extremely valuable to a police force that is judged by metrics like "How many guns did you find today?"
The gun violence is just the camouflage that provides plausible deniability. If ShotSpotter had been founded in London they'd have called it "StabSpotter."
Is hearing cars backfire particularly unusual? I hear it once or twice a week.
I also hear kids shooting fireworks, and those modifications people do to their motorcycles and cars to make them sound like they're backfiring (even if they aren't; I don't know how these things work).
It markets itself as pinpointing gunshots and police use that as probable cause. Either they reveal something of their methodology so that courts can determine if police reliance on them is reasonable or police shouldn't be allowed to use them.
The issue is that ShotSpotter may be profiting by giving police an excuse to search people when they would not otherwise have sufficient legal grounds.
An assessment of "sufficient" cannot be determined without understanding how the ShotSpotter system works. Therefore the argument is that police should not be able to use them as probable cause if they don't give some insight into how they work.
This is no different than other technologies. DNA testing wouldn't be admissible in legal actions either if the tests were essentially black boxes that couldn't be scrutinized.
But some minority demographics commit disproportionate (edit: violent) crime per capita so you expect some proportional scaling (more crime = more need for crime detection) if they happen to live in cities/areas where that's the case. (Usually big cities)
That depends entirely on what you consider as crime worth pursuing.
For example, it's well documented wage theft is a much bigger crime in terms of monetary value than all forms of robberies combined. But those criminals don't get nearly the same level of enforcement as robbers do.
I'm surprised to see this is somewhat true in the US. In Canada rural crime rates are higher than urban ones, but that trend doesn't seem to hold for the US (per sources below)
Of course extrapolating from "average crime rate" to "location of hotspots" might be suspect in both cases...
Bloomberg article with some nice graphs, and really good links to sources (at the end of it) - the text focuses on NYC but the second line chart in particular (based off of linked CDC data) does a good job of answering this question: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-06-07/is-new...
If you'll look past the unempathetic title of this website, and the nasty tone of the author, you'll see some of how violent crime clusters in Chicago (data visualization)
Since sound speed varies with air density and air density varies with humidity, and humidity is relative and varies greatly in urban areas because of heat absorption/reflection of buildings vs trees, how would this technology be even remotely accurate or reliable?
If it was up in the atmosphere with long consistent pockets of air, maybe. On the ground, no way.
It's not out of the question for it to work to some extent -- the question is what extent, when, how, and when it doesn't work. We can't make those determinations because the company is covering that up.
Even your ears can somewhat locate sound sources in 3D space, just not with perfect accuracy, especially in complex soundscapes like cities.
Sure, but if a city that is predominantly black, whose government is predominantly black, decides to use shot spotter, it would be silly to claim that it is being deployed in minority areas in order to oppress minorities.
You win! The commenter made a grave semantic mistake by not adding "in the US" to "minority" and now their comment is completely meaningless and without merit.
OP's comment implied that it is a tool used by the majority(whites) to deploy in minority(black) areas, in order to oppress them.
I provided an example of basically the blackest city in America deploying it within their own city. Why did they deploy a tool of oppression on themselves?
It seems you were very distracted that I pointed out that whites are a minority within Jackson MS, but that was really just an offhand comment and not the point of the post.
> OP's comment implied that it is a tool used by the majority(whites) to deploy in minority(black) areas, in order to oppress them.
The OP said nothing like this. You're projecting a lot of personal biases onto their comment. But you know that, and are trying to hone in a single example in order to strawman/red-herring valid concerns about the technology and its effects.
> It seems you were very distracted that I pointed out that whites are a minority within Jackson MS, but that was really just an offhand comment and not the point of the post.
That was the whole point of your post. You literally said nothing else.
> The OP said nothing like this. You're projecting a bad-faith argument onto their comment. But you know that, and are trying to hone in a single example in order to strawman valid concerns about the technology and its effects.
Yes, I will admit I am projecting, or rather assuming, bad-faith on their part, or at least sneaky rhetorical tactics. I used to assume good faith, but the past 5 years or so have made me realize that very few people operate this way. If I see someone making a point, and an underspecified part of their post or a part where they use vague language may give a certain impression, and it just so happens that that certain impression furthers the point they were trying to make(rather than diminish it, or be orthogonal to the point), then I assume there was intent to do such a thing.
OP said:
> It doesn't work all that well and is selectively deployed in minority areas and is used by police to selectively enforce crimes, sometimes also altering the evidence.
Yes, I suppose it sometimes may be selectively deployed in minority areas in order to oppress them, but without any kind of mention of the rate that that happens, this appears to be OP trying to convince you that it may be worse than it is. If you didn't know anything about cars, and I said that cars are used to intentionally murder people, you would probably have a worse perception of cars than if you had a more thorough understanding of their usage.
Therefore, my point was to show that shot spotter is not just used to oppress minorities, I provided an example of a predominantly black city choosing to use the technology, which almost certainly means there are uses of the tech that aren't about oppressing minorities.
> That was the whole point of your post. You had nothing else substantive to say.
I'm sorry, but I understand my point better than you do. I apologize for not being more explicit earlier. Hope my post helped.
As someone who has lived in majority-black towns in the south most of my life, those words are simply not used in the way you are using them. Blacks in the south are universally considered a minority, even in those geographies where they are actually the demographic majority.
Sure, and that wasn't the point of my post. My point is that black people who run the government that governs over an almost entirely black population still choose to use shot spotter.
Surely there is some merit there that is not merely keeping minorities down, or maybe all the black people running the government just secretly hate blacks.
Do you seriously think by "minority" they meant at the local populace level and not national populace level? When has that ever been the colloquial use?
Systems overtly or tacitly designed to fuck minorities tend to successfully fuck minorities even when operation of local mechanics are effected by minority agents.
This may be non obvious but for example black cops tend to use disproportionate force against black suspects in areas where such behavior is culturally and systemically tolerated. Cops and suspects are in an adversarial situation and being part of team cop or team suspect is more important than sharing a skin color.
>Systems overtly or tacitly designed to fuck minorities tend to successfully fuck minorities even when operation of local mechanics are effected by minority agents.
An infallible argument; the oppressee can just as well be opressor, because otherwise we'd have to reconsider our preferred conjecture.
Well in the context of this argument, it's moreso that a black fellow isn't racist towards black people because s/he is black... which tends to hold.
Also it's my experience that if an all black community decides to enact public policy that goes against the narrative, it's almost exclusively young white progressives that come up with these sorts of agency-removing arguments to protect their preferred worldview
Cultures and systems can select for biased treatment of groups even when looking exclusively at the local segment of a larger system which happens to have black decision makers. If you look out your window into America today and don't see systemic racism either statistically or with your own eyeballs I honestly don't know what to say to you.
The topic of discussion is a company that produces a product that due to echos and analysis doesn't actually know where or if guns are fired being deployed in shitty crime ridden neighborhoods where disproportionately minorities being poorer are obliged to live. In the context of the gun shot imaginer system they have been literally caught doctoring data to match what the police wanted to be true in order to obtain a conviction.
Multiple things can be true. The shot spotter can be deployed in areas where gun fire actually and truly is more common, it can be misused to shake down or frame people in that area, such behavior can primarily be misused against people in that area, because more poor black people are obliged to live their they can in turn fall victim to such bad behavior more frequently even if not specifically targeted by law enforcement. Further faced with multi decade scare tactics and shitty public defenders poor people and by extension disproportionately minorities flinch and cop pleas.
This is how you fill your prisons up with black people.
This is literally what systemic racism means. Its a racist outcome of a fucked up system even when said system isn't consciously malicious and lets be a little honest with each other. We both know that there is plenty of honest bigotry. There are plenty of folks in government and plenty of folks in uniform that wouldn't mind donning a sheet and burning a cross in their neighbors lawn.
America was born in racism and as much as we hope to generation by generation make it more equal some of us remain more equal than others and a lot of us like it that way.
No, as that would be a purposeful misinterpretation of the intent of the original poster, if it was obvious they didn't mean it to be interpreted that way.
Even if the response that used it differently was meant to make a valid point (I believe it was, as they expanded on it later), the way they used minority did nothing to help that point and instead caused unnecessary contention.
It would have been far more effective for their point to say "Jackson MS has a population and police department that are both majority black, and they still choose to deploy shotspotter in black neighborhoods.". Then we could jump right to exploring reasons why that might be, including valid uses of shotspotter because of effectivenessas well as other incentives regardless of it's effectiveness.
Eh, I don't think that actually changes my point. Even as a reframing, when looked at with respect to how well it communicated its point and fostered understanding and discussion of that point, it was poorly executed.
It's worded in a way that implies racism. You could write "high crime areas" or "low socioeconomic status neighborhoods" or any of a dozen equally accurate terms. Instead, the author chose something vague (are they being placed in Jewish neighborhoods? Chinese neighborhoods? Indian? Hispanic?) And suggestive.
If something has a racist outcome then I don’t see how its “implied” to be racist. It is racist. They just didn’t say anything about whether it was intentional (which no one can know except people who decided where to put the systems).
Ah, then it must be racism keeping white people out of the NBA, right? Maybe not intentional racism, but the outcome is racist. Or Jewish people are overrepresented in Congress - I'm not saying it's some kind of intentional cabal, but you can't deny that it's a "racist outcome". Very few Chinese and Japanese people, per capita, are arrested for violent crime in the US. Is this because the police intentionally avoid arresting Chinese and Japanese criminals or do they subconsciously avoid arresting them because of implicit biases? Or maybe there is some other, much simpler, solution.
The reason violent crime enforcement disproportionately affects black people in the United States is because black people disproportionately commit violent crime. Black people, for example, commit most of the murders in the United States despite not being most of the population.
It is not racist to notice and react to crime. On the contrary, it is racist to insist that law abiding black people, the vast majority, endure high rates of crime. Reducing and hobbling law enforcement necessitates that citizens who might be protected are not.
Honestly I do think it's racism that ultimately is responsible for the demographics of professional sports in the US. The system is powered by people and people do not consider all the players in the same way, e.g. https://www.brookings.edu/blog/how-we-rise/2020/03/06/march-....
That's without getting into the socio-economic factors that lead people to pursue sports as a career rather than playing in school and then going on to be an architect or whatever it is.
The rest of your comments have been dissected and examined to such an extreme over the last like... 80 years... that I don't have anything new to add to the discussion.
Your link is completely unrelated to the claim that racism is responsible for the demographics of sports. It discusses the tendency of athletes with dark skin to be described as big and strong and light skinned athletes to be described as smart or knowledgeable.
The issue is that black people are overrepresented in the NBA. This is a "racist outcome" per the language of an ancestor comment. Is it because the league is prejudiced against white people and keeping them out? Prejudiced against black people and expressing the prejudice, for some reason, by admitting more black players to the league? Or, could it possibly be that black people are just more likely to be good at basketball? Black people are ~15% of the US population and ~75% of the NBA. Must be an awful lot of racism there...
Well the system wouldn’t really be a problem if it wasn’t faulty. It’s the false positives that are an issue. You could put it next to the house of the biggest gun nut in America and it still wouldn’t be a fair system because it just doesn’t work well.
I don't think anyone truly intends ill. However, someone who chooses a technology that doesn't have real evidence of working as well as it's advertised, and then uses applications of that technology on primarily minority populations, the result can only be concluded as illness on the people.
I'm hard pressed to believe that there aren't some folks who have ill intent. The problem is weeding them out from people who are just using crappy metrics and people who just barely know what's going on.
I mean, I genuinely think most people don't intend ill. The most nasty, abusive people I know simply believe that they are in the moral right. In fact, believing that being morally right justifies their behavior is the biggest sign to me of a dangerous person, not a person who knowingly thinks evil things.
The only question then is whether the police biased these installations in minority neighborhoods without connecting it to high amounts of shootings, which could easily be proven with data.
That's the sort of thing that would be useful in court if it's true.
Are local police required to publish where they are deploying ShotSpotters? Shootings and racial demographic data is certainly already public.
I've read the entire Vice court report and don't remember seeing that data. Haven't read the Chicago one.
Edit: reading the original Motherboard source all of the examples were described as small 'pilot programs' so they were usually only a single part of each city, in Cleveland for example :
> the Cleveland Police Foundation—has been deployed in a small section of Southeast Cleveland that city officials have described as a high-crime area.
> Those neighborhoods also happen to be among the least white in the city and those hit hardest by economic recession and the pandemic, according to local community organizers.
> The area the division chose for Shotspotter accounted for 37 percent of all shots fired calls, 37 percent of felonious assaults, and 45% of all homicides within district four, Sergeant Jennifer Ciaccia wrote to Motherboard in an email.
You seem to imply that intent is all that matters. But the law and history regarding discrimination in the US is more nuanced.
For example, perhaps literacy tests in order to vote in the Jim Crow south were purely based out of concern that only informed voters should be able to vote. Assuming they were applied evenly to both whites and minorities (they weren't), one could draw the conclusion that even though most of the people prohibited from voting were minorities, the intent wasn't racist.
So basically even if we assume the data shows they were only deployed to the highest crime areas (and for sake of discussion we're not debating the legitimacy of that data like you could with biased Jim Crow literacy tests AND feigning that shotspotter actually provides some IRL value), it would still be discrimination because in a wider context it's just another tool that contributes to the oppression of minorities?
Which, in the sum of everything, ultimately out-ranks the value of attempting to address the homicides and gun violence that plagues their communities through law enforcement. Therefore it's a net negative for society?
(Apologies if I'm being overly literal here, my brain tends to seek the most rational explanations for everything).
Yeah I guess I was thinking of "ill intent" through a certain societal lens of their intent not their own personal lens. Which is admittedly a pretty subjective view. But, I would still argue someone doing something like a politician acting against the interests of their constituency for monetary gain to be ill intent regardless of their own moral justification. And that exact example seems to happen a lot.
Edit: Also to be clear I agree that the vast majority of people aren't these actors. The problem is it is very easy for someone with ill intent to get things moving in the direction they want. Very few systems stand up to real world abuse by a sufficiently motivated bad actor.
I feel like you wouldn't work for a company like this unless you somehow believed that all the bullshit they were doing was for the greater good. I would imagine police probably also don't see themselves as racist-in-a-bad-way but as heroes, otherwise why would you ever work there? That's where all this "thin blue line" craziness comes from. I mean, I get it, wanting to protect people in your community from crooks and scumbags that hurt them is natural. It's easy to trick yourself into thinking that these little exceptions to civil rights are justified.
I would like to post a slightly different angle to the discussion.
Assumption: the majority of commenters are working in technology fields, and perhaps even technology startups.
Let’s say that you have developed some software product that works pretty well for certain applications, but is certainly not perfect. But it works well enough that your customers are paying you to use your product.
Now, your customers decide to use your product in a way that you have neither intended nor prescribed. (In fact, your product comes with a disclaimer.)
In doing so, they end up in court. And you get hauled into the middle of it.
Should you have to expose your technology? This could endanger your entire business.
If your technology is being used as justification for incarcerating people and as a way for law enforcement to circumvent the law and escalate routine encounters into violence, then yes.
If the law hinges upon how your secret algorithm works then it should not be a secret. I'd rather have my secret sauce cloned by China[0] than live under Maoism[1].
This sounds unfair to you, but sometimes the fair solution creates more injustice than it solves. This is the same reason why we have the EPA Superfund program. Love Canal might not have been the polluter's fault[2] but the "fair" alternative was to let everyone sit in court while they and their kids die from toxic waste.
[0] tbh the biggest problem with Chinese IP theft is that they don't share their plunder
[1] At least I'm assuming "keeping the law secret" is something Mao did, I might just be being an ignorant American
[2] If I remember correctly New York State or the county government actually threatened to use eminent domain to force the polluter to sell the toxic waste dump to them.
Yes. This is a foundational cornerstone of our legal system: we do not incarcerate people based on evidence that they cannot question or review.
Believe it or not, this is not a unique problem for technology fields. Courts have long understood that techniques are possibly sensitive, and allow for a broad variety of discovery techniques to accommodate the defendant's rights. A common one for software is to have an independent, court-overseen third party review the code and produce an affidavit affirming that the code does what it claims. Another is to only allow review of techniques in a controlled environment, where the defense cannot steal intellectual property.
Soo, can lets say someone work with the court, shoot random shots and fireworks around a city. Give the court their exact locations from which shots(gun and fireworks) were fired and ask ShotSpotter to identify gun sounds to that of fireworks and also figure out the locations.
If ShotSpotter is able to figure it out correctly only then they are are allowed to NOT disclose their tech otherwise it would be very illegal to keep it undisclosed because people can literally get arrested on the wrong leads generated by a piece of tech.
Hey, can I request to be held in "friendly contempt" if they ever show up with a warrant to search my house or phone or laptop? At the airport, can I skip having my bag searched yet still fly and suffer no real consequences because "friendly contempt?"
What a fucking awesome new legal principle invention that I am sure everyone will get to enjoy equally!
Laundering police positions is a pretty profitable industry. I think once I have my American citizenship, I'd like to give it a shot. The small-time stuff like police dog training[0], etc., and the obvious stuff like AI face recognition won't play. But there's a lot of stuff like this that can be relatively decent business. Everyone who could prosecute you is sort of on your side, so you're safe. And it has a naturally monopoly-esque situation since every time you play along you build a trust that you have their back.
Ideally, I'd like to replace police dogs to give police probable cause. Policing is a huge industry in America, and it's not realistically going to be reformed because there is also a lot of crime in America, so it's a lasting business.
I'm mildly worried someone else will get there first. But we'll see. I have a couple of ideas.
0: Though if you could run a large-scale single source of training with some sort of certification program, that would work. Dogs are a fantastic laundering device, but I don't like that it linearly scales cost to add more. You can force recurring revenue by getting "periodic retraining" into the process, which will play really well with everyone.
Hahaha, the pre-crime stuff? Love it. No, something boring, you know. A "likely crime-involved vehicle" automatic camera tech that uses just a cross-referenced DB and ultimately just detects vehicle make. This stuff is mostly about doing the bizdev to get into a place. And police are like any other users. If you get a 10% detection rate, you'll hold the contract. And you can get that if it's like a "hit this button to perform scan" thing and you almost always return true. After all, they won't hit it unless they think something anyway.
Whatever, the specifics of the product design are irrelevant details. It's about the bizdev. They still use polygraphs in the Federal Government. The device itself doesn't have to do anything.
If I were the Judge, I’d be like “have your CEO turn himself into my bailiff and you can have your contempt order”. If they remain unresponsive, issue an arrest warrant for the CEO.
God this phrasing gets so annoying. If white neighborhood residents were being murdered in their streets, you really don’t think they’d put these devices there? Residents would be itching for them!
It’s about catching murders - putting these devices in places with the most gun violence.
Having police catch murderers is something we all want - rich neighborhoods included - and something that takes resources and effort to do. It’s something that we are privledged to have, compared to many other places in the world that just let poor people kill each other without legal recourse.
Good people in these neighborhoods want policing. I have a friend in Humbolt park, and he practically has PTSD from constant gunfire. You think he doesn’t want these devices?
That's predicated on their ability to help catch murderers as well as their inability to allow police to enforce other kinds of crime.
It's also possible for good-faith efforts to play into a feedback system that ends up resulting in racial injustices. They can even do that while doing other good things too.
Then you have the uncomfortable and terrifically subjective question on your hands of weighing the costs and the benefits - both now and into the future.
I don't think you can dismiss this as being largely about race, nor dismiss it as irrelevant to race.
In some ways, it'd be easiest if it doesn't work. That way the questions get real simple.
> God this phrasing gets so annoying. If white neighborhood residents were being murdered in their streets, you really don’t think they’d put these devices there? Residents would be itching for them!
If there were similar amounts of homicide in white areas, white residents would be using their political clout to demand solutions, not pretextual pseudoscience. And this is, in fact, what we see: white neighborhoods get beat cops who live nearby, while black neighborhoods get surveillance and patrol cars with humps from the next county over.
Portland, OR is moving towards potentially implementing ShotSpotter.
The population is 6% Black. The homicide victims are 50% Black. We have twice the homicide count of Seattle, or more homicides than Seattle and SF combined. Portland is smaller than both cities, so it is very concerning.
Unfortunately the licensing model for ShotSpotter is such that it is only deployed in the high homicide neighborhoods due to cost. I have to imagine the marginal cost of an extra sq mile is low.
I’d like to see a diversity discount or something so that it would be economical to put the system everywhere and dispel the racial bias issue. Or maybe charge per homicide or gun recovered instead.
You're answering a point no one made. No one is saying crime is good, yet your comment is mostly trying to sell how bad gun violence is?
During the "war on drugs" black men were getting snatched left and right, destroying communities. Now the fruits of that come back to create violence, and your answer is to push an expensive heavily flawed automated police lead generator?
Shotspotter is broken. It constantly results in false alarms and false stops to go with them, it's not effective enough to be reproducible, they openly admit to letting police override their classifications...
It's an expensive farce that isn't helping anyone.
Don't Chinese people want the social credit system too?
You clearly glossed over the more important factor "is used by police to selectively enforce crimes, sometimes also altering the evidence". So, no, your "buddy in Humbolt park" doesn't want this when he gets accused of a crime he didn't commit. He wants actual systematic changes to an impoverished areas - black or white.
> If white neighborhood residents were being murdered in their streets
Hilarious, because this statement displays your inherent bias, which is that you automatically presume white neighborhoods are rich and therefore don't have problems with residents shooting each other!
It’s not really that simple though. You can always go back less than 40 years and point out that street gangs were a response to police harassment. That communities were selectively devastated with targeted infusions of dangerous and addictive drugs. That there is a continuous pattern of profiling based on superficial attributes. A bad summer can ruin a person’s life, I don’t understand how we don’t expect generation abuse to do the same. Clearly the “sub Saharan level” life expectancy is not a racial attribute but contained within precise geographical boundaries in a prosperous country. You could say it’s purely cultural and if you wanted to be more edgy a “racial or genetic” failing, but really it’s the system that has deliberately and purposefully failed them and any current circumstance cannot be considered mutually exclusive of the very recent past, let alone the past few centuries.
For counter examples, look how long the richest and most dominant countries for the vast majority of human history— China and India — took to recover from a much less brutal form of dominance.
The explanation I had in mind was more directed to the narrative over reality when it comes to shotspotter, rather than the mechanics of structural poverty incentives that invariably drive people toward illicit income that's fraught with violence.
We've had 50+ years of various great society type programs that are designed with negative net-of-transfers earned income gradient, and those were squarely aimed at racial strata, but it's a huge stretch to claim that a thing that listens for gunshots in a place where tens of people get shot weekly is some sort of bigot master plot.
Also tangentially speaking, anyone seeing a race dimension in "subsaharan africa life expectancy" is merely looking in a mirror.
When there has been a continuous stream of “bigot master plots” it understandably becomes hard to distinguish conspiracy from conscientious intent.
If you look at the current situation without any of the prior historical context it does bring up the question of how does law enforcement deal with this situation because their historical actions have led to a catch 22 situation where action or inaction is vilified. Maybe a coordinated and public attempt at cleaning up the police force that goes hand in hand with a nationwide, simultaneous move to clean up the hood?
Certainly a prudent, rational idea. However my sneaking suspicion is that the recent attention to the former of the two has was designed for a completely different objective; a betting man would posit we'll be having this discussion again in 2024:
The US should mandate every gunshot be accompanied by a loud ultrasonic tone that can easily identify the occurrence to any recording device. The tone could eventually be modulated with the guns serial number.
How would that work anyway? It's not something someone would notice you disabling when you go to the range, unlike full auto/DIAS conversions and short barrels where someone might notice, you literally can't notice unless you have an ultrasonic detector. Are there going to be ATF agents hanging out at ranges trying to see loose wires hanging out of people's guns or guns that don't produce ultrasonic noises when fired? I assume that's not going to happen. Anyway, it's not legal to ban guns without the ultrasonic speakers anyway, because there's no way the military is going to have ones that can't be turned of on their guns. No historical precedent for anything like that either, and ~all of current guns don't have ultrasonic speakers on them, so the Heller "common use" thing is there as well.
If I’m understanding your reply, you seem to think that it should be obvious to anyone with an understanding of how guns work, that this idea wouldn’t work/isn’t feasible/is a bad idea in some other way. So, wouldn’t it be more productive and informative to state that opinion and support it?
It’s a lot like saying knives should be required to emit such a sound. A knife is a purely mechanical device, there’s no good way to require an electronic device in a way that won’t be ripped off by every criminal immediately. In the same way, you can’t DRM trigger pulls.
Further, this loud tone would require enough power that you’re talking about replaceable batteries. Those batteries can be removed.
When I mentioned it to a family member who is also a police officer, he related that a shotspotter had detected an explosion "right in a guy's backyard." It was clear to me that no device on the market, nor algorithm could figure out that close of a pinpoint. Of course I kept my mouth shut so as to not ruin a holiday. But that was just more undoing of my trust and more indoctrination in one is supposed to remain in a state of denial or cognitive dissonance.
Anyway, just another police technology like polygraphs, DNA, and fingerprints with two stories. One, what it actually does, and two, what police pretend it does.