16 ms·

ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood

523 points by kogir 3y ago

petee 3y ago
I had no idea ShotSpotter was recording conversations, always assumed the nature of analyzing for a sound signature would be throwing much of the data away immediately
- wahnfrieden 3y ago
  That’s because it’s generalized surveillance tech marketed to the public as personal safety tech (which it is not per the data)
- verteu 3y ago
  > assumed the nature of analyzing for a sound signature would be throwing much of the data away immediately (INACCURATE, SEE EDIT) It does. The "conversations recorded by ShotSpotter sensors" were a few seconds before/after the shooting, and consisted of people saying things like "[shooter's name] Why are you going to [shoot] me like that, [shooter's name]"? [1] [1] 'The recording of the second shot also captured the voice of Tyrone Lyles, apparently addressing the person who shot him: "Ar, Ar, why are you going to do me like that, Ar."' https://casetext.com/case/people-v-johnson-5116 https://casetext.com/case/people-v-johnson-5116 edit: I was wrong. Apparently "the detectors keep hours or days of continuous audio": https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/shotspotter-ceo-answers-questions-gunshot https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/shotspotter-ceo...
- hcfman 3y ago
  Well, yeah... that's what an acoustic sensor is. It would get more objection if they called them microphones.
JoeyBananas 3y ago
I've experienced living in a neighborhood covered by shot spotter and hearing gun shots outside, and I think shot spotter is great. I want the cops to actually show up and arrest whoever is terrorizing everybody. Thank you very much
- gffrd 3y ago
  Has having ShotSpotter in your neighborhood increased the safety? Is there faster response? higher arrest rate? decrease in crime?
  - SOLAR_FIELDS 3y ago
    Is there any verifiable third party evidence that ShotSpotter (or whatever it’s called now) can even do what it claims to?
    - birdofhermes 3y ago
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  - spamizbad 3y ago
    In Chicago they will respond to them aggressively . Gang members have figured this out and will have “decoy” shots fired before a hit takes place to tie up police.
    - munificent 3y ago
      What a perfect example of Campbell's Law.
  - JoeyBananas 3y ago
    When there was shooting outside of my apartment, shot spotter called the cops instantly. It isn't supposed to govern the city, it's only supposed to spot the gun shots.
- rideontime 3y ago
  Do they?
  - grubbs 3y ago
    Even in Baltimore where police response times can be total garbage..they will show up for shot spotter. At least from my experience. Calling 911 for anything else there is a long delay unfortunately. Last time I called for a car jacking right outside my home I was on hold for ten mins. Cops didn't arrive for another 20.
standardUser 3y ago
I had no idea. Two key takeaways... > Conversations recorded by ShotSpotter sensors have twice been introduced as evidence in criminal trials. In one case the court allowed it, in another the court did not. > ShotSpotter sensor correlates fairly well with your household income. The wealthier you are, the less surveilled you are.
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summarity 3y ago
Wait what this is real? I thought it was just a plot point invented for Person of Interest
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- aspenmayer 3y ago
  Person of Interest is a criminally underrated show.
  - lucubratory 3y ago
    Feels pretty incredibly prescient in the current era, hey.
    - aspenmayer 3y ago
      Considering the scale, depth, and breadth of Palantir usage in Ukraine these days, I would be inclined to agree. https://time.com/6691662/ai-ukraine-war-palantir/ https://time.com/6691662/ai-ukraine-war-palantir/
- jacurtis 3y ago
  84 metro areas in the US are covered by Shotspotter. It is very real.
delichon 3y ago
> It's not perfect, but the distance from your house to a ShotSpotter sensor correlates fairly well with your household income. The wealthier you are, the less surveilled you are. To give ABQ police the benefit of the doubt, that pattern could also be compatible with more gun crime equaling more surveillance. It would be nice to have enough gun crime and sensor location data to see how true that is. When the sensors are as dense as they are, it's not clear that knowing the sensor locations is an advantage to offenders, at least in the gunshot spotting role.
- bombcar 3y ago
  It sounds like shotspotters are likely to be near where shots are; and that the wealthier you are the more likely you’d NOT want to be where the shots are.
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  - Aurornis 3y ago
    Putting surveillance for gun crime in areas with the highest rates of gun crime is obviously what’s happening. I think the author and some commenters are nervous about claims that gun crime is inversely correlated with neighborhood wealth, which creates some of these strange accusations that some other bias is at play. If you pull up a map of crime in most cities the inverse correlation with home prices is obvious. If nothing else, high crime rates rapidly crush property values as everyone wants to leave those areas.
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    - jakelazaroff 3y ago
      > If you pull up a map of crime in most cities the inverse correlation with home prices is obvious. If the police department spends the majority of its resources on certain areas, it will respond to the majority of incidents and make the majority of arrests in those areas. You can truthfully say "look, these numbers are higher than anywhere else!" but that doesn't necessarily mean there's more crime happening there — it could also mean the residents are overpoliced relative to other neighborhoods. With regard to the article, why is it obvious that police are putting surveillance in areas with the highest rates of gun crime?
throwawaysleep 3y ago
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aaron695 3y ago
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crtified 3y ago
I can't help but think how easily such a system - which is hardly sophisticated, in technical principle - could be used to pinpoint things that are 'problematic' in my neighbourhood. Loutish vehicle behaviour of various kinds. The loud Harley Davidson and dirt-bike signatures associated with the comings-and-goings of local gang members. Squealing tyres of deliberate burn-outs on the road. The occasional fool loudly blasting down the road at twice the speed limit. Things which the current system of "wait until someone gets annoyed enough or gets the courage to call the police to complain, and one might arrive 15 minutes later, by which time the coop has been long flown" allow to run mostly unchecked. But those thoughts go hand in hand with a vague but distinct discomfort.
- ryukoposting 3y ago
  Some of the illegal things you listed aren't things that benefit much from a hastily dispatched response. If you want to catch people on cars or dirt bikes driving down the street, you kinda have to already be there. Also, a couple of the things you listed are nuisances, but not illegal activity in their own right. ShotSpotters don't repel crime, let alone prevent it. They're intentionally covert, as shown in the OP, which gives credence to the notion that they aren't intended to deter criminal activity from the surrounding area. If anything, repelling/deterring crime would defeat the purpose of the technology. At best, ShotSpotter merely detects crime, and its effectiveness in that capacity is kept a secret. The world of police tech is a knee-deep in snake oil. A bit of transparency would go a long way for ShotSpotter.
  - crtified 3y ago
    > Some of the illegal things you listed aren't things that benefit much from a hastily dispatched response. If you want to catch people on cars or dirt bikes driving down the street, you kinda have to already be there. Yes and no. Intelligence (in the data sense of the word) can accrue usage patterns. You might not catch them that time, but you know where they'll be next time. What routes they travel. Where to focus. If it's a live event, the police officer is not having to stand there fruitlessly questioning a witness about which direction the offender hooned off in 5 minutes ago - the system is already telling them, by tracking the relevant data. It's a form of telemetry. And it's also quite a disturbing (to use an overused phrase!, but which I hope is justified here) slippery slope.
simonw 3y ago
If anyone wants the raw data, it's available in window._Flourish_data variable on https://flo.uri.sh/visualisation/16818696/embed https://flo.uri.sh/visualisation/16818696/embed Which means you can extract it with my https://shot-scraper.datasette.io/ https://shot-scraper.datasette.io/ tool like this: shot-scraper javascript \ 'https://flo.uri.sh/visualisation/16818696/embed' _Flourish_data \ > /tmp/data.json That's a 25MB file. I loaded it into SQLite like this: cat /tmp/data.json | jq .events | \ sqlite-utils insert /tmp/shots.db locations - Then opened it up in Datasette with https://datasette.io/plugins/datasette-cluster-map https://datasette.io/plugins/datasette-cluster-map to see them on a map.
- wferrell 3y ago
  Thank you!
- prophesi 3y ago
  Thanks! And alternatively you can create an anchor element in the console with `href` set as a JSON stringified representation of `window._Flourish_data`. Then set a download attribute with the filename you'd like, and simulate a click to download it. To use it in leaflet, you'll need to iterate over the `events` array and change `lon` to `lng` before adding each point to the leaflet map.
  - blatherard 3y ago
    An even simpler option to get the data, at least in firefox, is to open the console, enter `window._Flourish_data` then right-click the result and select "Copy Object" which will put the json in your paste buffer and you can then paste it into a file.
    - prophesi 3y ago
      This is when HN is at its peak. Duly noted!
    - simonw 3y ago
      Or use the copy() function to copy it straight to your clipboard.
ryukoposting 3y ago
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itishappy 3y ago
What are the potential downsides to police oversight? > But, if asked, they provide a form letter written by ShotSpotter. Their contract prohibits the disclosure of any actual data. A potentially dystopian surveillance apparatus is installed citywide, and the police can't discuss about it's efficiency because the company that sold it to them won't let them?
- nerdponx 3y ago
  Some bumbling police chief might say something stupid that would draw media attention to ShotSpotter and their massive data collection operation. You definitely wouldn't want that to happen.
- TaylorAlexander 3y ago
  The police know what’s good for them. They have extraordinary powers and the more they can keep the public in the dark about what they do, the more freedom they have to act with impunity.
loteck 3y ago
I would request that a crowd as technically sophisticated as HN move past marketing claims when discussing this system. "Gunshot detection" is pure marketing. The devices are hot mics — public audio surveillance. The software layer triggers alerts on loud noises, which are sent off to a facility that is little more than a call center, for characterization by a human worker there. This system detects door slams and popped volleyballs just as well as it detects gun fire (which is to say, imperfectly on all counts).
- Aurornis 3y ago
  > This system detects door slams and popped volleyballs just as well as it detects gun fire (which is to say, imperfectly on all counts). Sound classification moved far beyond what you’re claiming years ago. If you set the threshold at “imperfectly” then no system will ever meet your bar, because perfect is an unreasonable threshold. However, the claim that we’re unable to differentiate between gunshots and car doors is extremely incorrect.
  - loteck 3y ago
    Shotspotter falsely classifies popped volleyball as gunshot: https://www.wtol.com/article/news/local/false-shotspotter-alert-in-east-toledo-tuesday/512-75fb9bb6-b9cf-49dd-889e-d31782ed9967 https://www.wtol.com/article/news/local/false-shotspotter-al... Slamming doors: https://www.axios.com/2022/04/07/campaign-zero-against-shotspotter-crime https://www.axios.com/2022/04/07/campaign-zero-against-shots... This list can go on. Jackhammer, nail gun, normal hammers. https://voiceofsandiego.org/2020/09/22/shotspotter-sensors-send-sdpd-officers-to-false-alarms-more-often-than-advertised/ https://voiceofsandiego.org/2020/09/22/shotspotter-sensors-s...
    - jacurtis 3y ago
      Yes there are false positives. This is an alert system and doesn't have to be perfect. This is the difference between a sensor in a self-driving car and a sensor for something like Shotspotter. If a self-driving car sensor has a 1% fail rate, then it is useless and would cause crashes and death. It couldn't be used. But if shotspotter is 1% inaccurate, then it just sends police to a street corner where there is actually just road construction or a volleyball popped. The consequences are pretty low to nil. Many people might not know this all calls have priorities in a policing system, they are not treated equal. So Shotspotter alerts are very low priority to officers. The same is true for home alarm systems. Home alarm systems trigger false alarms constantly. Police treat them as very low priority as a result. So if a 911 call comes in or an eyewitness reported shooting, or even a wreckless driver or suspected DUI, the police will treat that first. In fact if they are on the way to a shotspotter alert and encounter something else, they will stop for it. This is to say, that the false positives aren't as important as everyone makes them out to be. If a false positive happens, it means that a cop that's sitting on a random street corner gets moved to a street corner where the false alarm from Shotspotter fired. There's not really any harm being done here.
incanus77 3y ago
Timely, as a boy was shot at last week in Chicago while setting off fireworks that triggered a ShotSpotter alert: https://chicago.suntimes.com/crime/2024/02/27/chicago-police-officer-shotspotter-alert-opened-fire-boy-lighting-fireworks https://chicago.suntimes.com/crime/2024/02/27/chicago-police...
- sbierwagen 3y ago
  He was setting off fireworks on January 25? Is there a holiday on that day I'm not aware of?
  - bilbo0s 3y ago
    You're stretching man. We're a nation of laws, not of your awareness. It's just the words on the page. Was there a law being broken or not. In this case the answer was no. The police then proceeded to write up multiple claims of illegal activity that were all demonstrable falsehoods, and your defense of the illegal activity on the part of the police is that you aren't aware of a holiday? This is just the sort of thing we need to stamp out before these thugs kill either some other innocent kid, or cause a real police officer to be hurt or killed while trying to control the inevitable community reaction to their bird brained behavior. These cops need to be off the force yesterday. Yes they are liabilities waiting to happen. Yes they are dishonest. But the real reason we need to get rid of them is because they are unpredictable. We have no idea what anyone who will shoot at innocent kids and lie about it today will do tomorrow. Honest cops are predictable. Dishonest cops are just loose cannons and we need to cut them out at every opportunity.
  - 9935c101ab17a66 3y ago
    Can I ask why you’re concerned about the legitimacy of the kids reasoning for setting off fireworks? Like, if he was shot and killed on a holiday, it’s not his fault, but it’s perfectly reasonable to be shot and killed by a police officer when a opaque surveillance system reports gunshots on non-holidays?
    - sbierwagen 3y ago
Vaslo 3y ago
One thing missed in this writing is that shotspotter also saves lives. In my city, people shot in the alley and left for dead are found shortly after they are shot because of the detection. Without this tech, some would be left to a slow death in an alley where no one would find them until morning.
- loteck 3y ago
  It may incidentally do that? But if it reliably saved lives you would be selling it to ambulance dispatchers. In reality, ambulance dispatchers would look at the high rate of Shotspotter dispatching a car and finding absolutely nothing and immediately recognize this proposal would harm people by sending emergency services on wild goose chases while real emergencies suffer longer wait times.
nimbius 3y ago
Hard to imagine this can discern between things like engine backfires, fireworks and garbage trucks effectively enough to be anything more than a really expensive checkmark on some captains yearly performance review.
- jacurtis 3y ago
  They can't. There are a lot of false positives. That has always been one of the biggest criticisms of Shotspotter.
chris_wot 3y ago
Sounds like it might be a good idea to add a sound maker near these devices.
cratermoon 3y ago
It's used the way police use any technology: to over-police the poor and non-white communities. https://www.cnn.com/2024/02/24/us/shotspotter-cities-choose-not-to-use/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2024/02/24/us/shotspotter-cities-choose-...
- xeckr 3y ago
  How is it "overpolicing" if those communities truly experience more gun violence than others?
  - w0z_ 3y ago
    You can't fight a radical with logic.
jcrawfordor 3y ago
Hello all, occasionally I write what I consider "Albuquerque content" and I do not expect it to become broadly popular. This article is something I put together very quickly and it probably assumes a certain degree of familiarity with the political context around policing in Albuquerque (which either side will tell you is very contentious) and, more broadly, policing and civil justice. Even without the currently evolving bribery scandal, the level of public trust in APD (and even the city council's confidence in APD) is very low. APD's transparency and accountability, or lack thereof, has been a common locus of the debate. On the other hand, another major issue has been APD's chronic understaffing, and APD contends that ShotSpotter and other elements of their real-time program help to close the gap that results from their limited personnel. With gun crime as one of the foremost issues in the city, whether you view APD positively or negatively, ShotSpotter is a big part of the discussion right now. Historically, APD's use of pervasive surveillance technology has been a flashpoint in the debate. APD has live access to perhaps 3-4 thousand cameras across the city (they aren't very transparent about this and it depends on how far along the APS integration project is), they have used facial recognition against driver's license photos and other sources since 2014, they have installed ALPR throughout the city and recently expanded retention to one year, etc. This is all fed into the Real-Time Crime Center, which uses a data fusion product from a vendor called Genetec to provide sort of a futuristic point-and-click data system that combines ShotSpotter detections with video feeds with service call records etc. to produce sort of a dossier on any given person or location. Unfortunately, there are a lot of things going on in city politics, especially with regard to crime and policing, and so the topic of surveillance has mostly fallen out of public attention. Still, APD's refusal to say in any detail what parts of the city were covered by ShotSpotter has been one of the big ongoing frustrations, particularly among those who favor police reform. I mostly wrote this article to highlight that there is finally information on the matter available. The concerns about how distribution of sensors and, more broadly, use of surveillance technology impacts civil rights and quality of life in the city are mentioned mainly as an aside and I do not attempt to articulate the pros and cons. That would require a rather lengthy piece as the topic is complex, and currently the greater part of the controversy isn't even about the wisdom of deploying ShotSpotter, but rather over whether or not ShotSpotter even works (and, consequently, whether or not it's simply a waste of city money, at a rate of around $5 million).
xeckr 3y ago
>Many assumed that ShotSpotter coverage was concentrated in disadvantaged parts of the city, an unsurprising outcome but one that could contribute to systemic overpolicing. The author presents this as a negative but it is obviously a good thing. If there was an increase in gunfire in my neighbourhood I would hope that police increases their presence, lest the "disadvantages" begin to accumulate.
- TaylorAlexander 3y ago
  Your argument assumes that the devices are only used as marketed. My understanding is that this assumption doesn’t hold, and that police regularly use these systems as an excuse to harass people in poor neighborhoods. The reports I have read suggest that police will enter a neighborhood they want to patrol, and if they see someone they don’t like they can claim they were called in by shotspotter, then shake down the person and if they find something, arrest them for that. This is textbook over-policing, which I assure you would not want to have done to you, and that is the precise concern mentioned in the quote.
  - xeckr 3y ago
    You are suggesting that police regularly invent false positives for ShotSpotter. Is there any evidence to support this? This would seem like something that would easily show up on an audit.
    - TaylorAlexander 3y ago
      Sourcing this for you, I see that there has indeed been a great deal of rigorous investigation, reporting, and lawsuits regarding the ways ShotSpotter leads to overpolicing, though I had misremembered one thing - the false detections come from the system itself, though this does also lead police to perceive areas as more dangerous and then patrol them more often, leading to measured increases in stop and frisk pat downs. The ACLU has a thorough article breaking down reporting from the City of Chicago Inspector General, Northwestern School of Law’s MacArthur Justice Center, Vice news and the Associated Press. ACLU article with links to the other reports here: https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/four-problems-with-the-shotspotter-gunshot-detection-system https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/four-problems-w... Key takeaways from the reporting linking ShotSpotter to over policing listed here: 1) ShotSpotter false alarms send police on numerous trips (in Chicago, more than 60 times a day) into communities for no reason and on high alert expecting to potentially confront a dangerous situation. Given the already tragic number of shootings of Black people by police, that is a recipe for trouble. 2) Indeed, the Chicago IG’s analysis of Chicago police data found that the “perceived aggregate frequency of ShotSpotter alerts” in some neighborhoods leads officers to engage in more stops and pat downs. 3) The placement of sensors in some neighborhoods but not others means that the police will detect more incidents (real or false) in places where the sensors are located. That can distort gunfire statistics and create a circular statistical justification for over-policing in communities of color.
chasd00 3y ago
In Dallas I hear the pop-pop-pop of gunfire virtually every night in my oakcliff neighborhood. Even when the Cowboys score a touchdown you hear gunfire. The police have basically given up.
- grugagag 3y ago
  Are people shooting blanks?
  - demondemidi 3y ago
    I've never actually seen "blanks" at any sporting goods or gun store in the 15 years I was really into guns. Reloaders typically reload rifle bullets, so I find it highly unlikely anyone is shooting blanks. Especially during drunken sportsing celebrations.
    - sbierwagen 3y ago
      If you're buying ammo online and sorting by cost per round, it's easy to make an expensive mistake: https://twitter.com/westernunion2k/status/1417122995957506049 https://twitter.com/westernunion2k/status/141712299595750604...
  - chasd00 3y ago
    No just random gunfire. People in their cars shooting in the air and then speeding off. They’re definitely not shooting at people otherwise it would be national news every night. I think the local police have resorted to a “just please aim in a safe direction” stance instead of trying to stop them. New years is especially annoying. Something like shotspotter wouldn’t work for this because by the time you get the info and call it in the people doing the shooting are miles away and there isn’t a crime scene per se to investigate.
    - sbierwagen 3y ago
      >otherwise it would be national news every night. Well, Dallas had 246 murders last year. https://www.dallasnews.com/news/crime/2024/01/11/1-year-246-dead-dallas-sees-rise-in-murders-in-2023-as-violent-crime-drops/ https://www.dallasnews.com/news/crime/2024/01/11/1-year-246-... That's a killing every other day, and obviously does not include nonfatal shootings. While it is true that there is lots of death in the news, most murders are not newsworthy. For instance, did you know there were 21 school shootings in 2020? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_the_United_States_(2000%E2%80%93present)#2020s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_th... Surprising, right? You certainly didn't hear about a shooting every other week that year. (Granted, 2020 was an unusual year, news wise.) But look at the descriptions of the shootings: "A large group of men jumped a fence to gain access to Atascocita High Schools football field, when an argument escalated and a 19-year-old was killed.[503]". "At Sonora High School in downtown Sonora, a student named Eric Aguiar, 17, was shot and killed in the High School's parking lot.[507]". "A 20-year-old University of Alabama at Birmingham student was shot and killed in a campus parking lot outside the student center. Investigators believed the shooting occurred during an arranged meeting to sell headphones.[513]". Parking lots, dangerous places! Dallas could have a thousand murders a year, or five thousand, and you'd never hear about them-- if the murders were boring enough.
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knicholes 3y ago
I think it's lame to limit the detection to just gun shots. Like the web has analytics, I think real life could have audiolytics. One example: I can collect all the data I want from my backyard and give a report to my neighbor about exactly how long and how loudly their dog has been barking. I can hear which birds have been in my backyard. I can... hear what a customer says about my product in-store and offer them coupons at checkout or later or get feedback about my product...
- TaylorAlexander 3y ago
  I would actually really love to live in a world where I can have a reasonable expectation of privacy when going about my day. A personal bird recorder is fine, but I absolutely would not want a networked system of sensitive microphones available for unlimited data gathering spread across my town. The prevalence of Ring cameras already makes some neighborhoods havens of surveillance, I’d rather we not expand things like that.
- hcfman 3y ago
  Well yeah. How the project is now you can localize anything manually if you can hear it on 4 mics surrounding it. Sometimes three. Automatic localization. The techniques of training the model would likely be the same or similar for other similar sounds.
leumon 3y ago
Things like ShotSpotter are only fighting the symptoms. As an european I find it ridiculus to hear that such thing even exists. Why would we not simply ban the guns themselves?
- dudus 3y ago
  Americans love guns more than freedom.
  - pizzafeelsright 3y ago
    Guns maintain freedom.
- AvocadoPanic 3y ago
  The criminal element largely responsible for gun crime would criminally ignore the ban. They're already shooting people. The US shares a 3,145 kilometer long border with Mexico, unfortunately there are at best 1,044 km of border 'barriers' in place. People, guns, money and drugs are smuggled across the border daily.
  - Eextra953 3y ago
    Guns aren't smuggled in from the Southern border. If anything guns are smuggled out of the USA into mexico, how do you think the cartels get their guns?
    - AvocadoPanic 3y ago
      Guns in bulk are smuggled south, guns come north with criminals. You can see this in the seizure stats. In the context of banning guns, any movement north is too much.
- Tabular-Iceberg 3y ago
  How do you propose fighting the cause? I have nothing in principle against a society that completely bans guns, but are you prepared to strike enough terror into the population that breaking the law and getting guns anyway becomes unthinkable?
goldenshale 3y ago
It just makes sense to put the sensors near the phenomena being sensed, and if people know where they are they could be manipulated. If guns are going off and people are getting caught, that seems like effective policing, not over or under policing.
ALittleLight 3y ago
I've also been blogging about ShotSpotter and review the evidence that the system is good or bad. https://quickthoughts.substack.com/p/shotspotter-good-or-bad https://quickthoughts.substack.com/p/shotspotter-good-or-bad There's a lot of evidence that ShotSpotter detects almost all gunshots and that's been validated by multiple third party groups. ShotSpotter also seems to alert to things that are either false positives (construction sounds, fireworks, etc) or are not useful. Chicago IG says 9/10 times when officers respond to a ShotSpotter alert they find nothing. 1/10 times it leads to an arrest, but the arrest isn't always strictly related to the ShotSpotter event - e.g. police responding to an event stop a speeding car and discover drug paraphernalia or an unrelated gun. Some cities, e.g. Atlanta, discontinued ShotSpotter over cost benefit concerns. From their analysis it seemed a better use of money to hire more officers than use ShotSpotter. Still, it's in use in 84 metro areas today. Ultimately, I think it should be up to the local community. The individual community is the one who will most benefit (if it is beneficial) and suffer from increased police incursions.
- hcfman 3y ago
  Fine but it’s about time there was external validation possible from the public and transparency about the math.
  - ALittleLight 3y ago
    In some cities there is - kind of. DC, for example, publishes all ShotSpotter events publicly and you can download all records of their events. You can notice by plotting their events that there is a lot of extra "shots fired" on January first (probably from fireworks). If you knew of gunshots at a specific geographic coordinate you could confirm or deny with the DC data. I suppose you could also go to some specific spot in DC and fire a gun to see if they could detect it - but I don't recommend that. https://opendata.dc.gov/datasets/DCGIS::shot-spotter-gun-shots/about https://opendata.dc.gov/datasets/DCGIS::shot-spotter-gun-sho...
brikym 3y ago
I have some noisy neighbours and I've thought of the same idea for controlling noise in neighbourhoods. You could have a microphone on every lamp post and send people fines for violating the rules.
- llm_trw 3y ago
  I've been having a nightmarish time trying to track down intermittent low frequency industrial noise. It's over the EPA regulations, it's neighborhood wide, and it is on for 2 hours between 11pm and 1am on random days. The EPA did monitoring of the house and site but couldn't pinpoint where it was coming from because of how low frequency it was. This isn't surveillance, this is the equivalent of finding who is dumping raw sewage in your drinking water.
  - chris_va 3y ago
    Now I am curious For 20Hz noise, are there too many reflections to use an oscilloscope with 3 mics on a 25ft baseline to triangulate it (you'd have to elevate the mics)?
  - 392 3y ago
    Buy a whole load of the same model voice recorder, label them with tape for location, spread them out and record till batteries die, pull data to PC, repeat until get a sample? Someone above mentioned microsecond accurate clocks on raspberry pi being used for TDOA.
    - hcfman 3y ago
      Yep. This project https://github.com/hcfman/sbts-aru https://github.com/hcfman/sbts-aru
  - hcfman 3y ago
    If there are any uniquely identify able patterns such that you found find that point on all microphones then deployment my sbts-aru project in four places surrounding it might very well localize it for you
devaiops9001 3y ago
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fargle 3y ago
i broadly agree with the sentiment in this article, especially the "no public oversight" part. but this: > The reader can probably infer how this coverage pattern relates to race and class in Albuquerque. It's not perfect, but the distance from your house to a ShotSpotter sensor correlates fairly well with your household income. is facetious and is almost certainly argued in bad faith. well, duh. the distance to the nearest "shot spotter" box also correlates with the incidence of crime and gunfire in the area. to bring up racism or classism is unhelpful. that correlation is unfortunate, likely true, and also not the problem at hand.
- BriggyDwiggs42 3y ago
  Actually this is a direct example of how systemic racism works. The goal isn’t to surveil minorities more, it’s just that the system watches places where crimes occur. Consider that, when an area has more surveillance, more people who commit crimes are caught. All of a sudden, you’re disproportionately catching minority criminals. Better put in more surveillance to cover the higher crime rates in those minority communities. I get they can’t necessarily do anything about this, since they’re gonna put microphones where it’s most efficient, but maybe it’s yet another argument against mass surveillance.
  - fargle 3y ago
    > hey’re gonna put microphones where it’s most efficient, but maybe it’s yet another argument against mass surveillance. BINGO!
  - whatshisface 3y ago
    >Consider that, when an area has more surveillance, more people who commit crimes are caught. All of a sudden, you’re disproportionately catching minority criminals. Turn the coin over to the other side - you're catching criminals victimizing minorities. Nothing is simple, is it.
    - BriggyDwiggs42 3y ago
      Uh sure, but that doesn’t effect the placement of new surveillance systems, which is the reason I mentioned it. Also, I think you’re sort of saying that because you think catching them is a huge success, and that that offsets the harm, but it’s not gonna do a ton of good when nothing has been fixed about the underlying causes. At best the victims get catharsis, where if that money imprisoning the criminal were spent on something like providing economic opportunities or funding schools they’d likely benefit more and be more secure against future crime (not that its either or).
gmerc 3y ago
A few year down the road the Shirky principle demands a revelation that ShorSpotter sponsored the NRA. It’s amazing lime 500 years later, there’s still a developed country on earth that hasn’t figured the externalities of gunpowder
- deleted 3y ago
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m0llusk 3y ago
Interesting how takes on ShotSpotter vary depending on the context and situation. In San Jose it was used to help enforce rules against firing guns in the air. In these cases there would usually be reports to police, but finding the shooter was extremely difficult. With ShotSpotter it became possible to identify locations on individual lots. Using this information enforcement became much more effective and there was a huge reduction in celebratory gunfire. In a large number of these cases no charges needed to be filed as gun owners were often uninformed, apologetic, and compliant. From the start of this program it was explicitly stated that ShotSpotter information would only be used by constables on patrol and would not be admitted as evidence in court. System coverage was based on where crimes were being reported. That such criteria overlap with race and class makes sense without necessarily being connected. It would be interesting to know if there might be some reasonable bounds that could be used to enable ShotSpotter to be used without being considered intrusive surveillance. Having information about gunshots or possible gunshots can be extremely useful for responders who need to understand where events are happening. This does not necessarily mean that the system has to be open to other uses, especially recording and replay of audio.
IceHegel 3y ago
This phrase "systemic overpolicing" and ShotSpotter both come from the same mind - the mind of the state. The state - which like most organizations is concerned mostly with preserving itself - has an interest in the surveillance of the population and in shifting blame from it's failures to deal with poverty and crime to skapegoats: the police, racism, property taxes, etc. The west is run by priests (professors, advisors, journalists, students, diplomats) with the support of the merchants. Priests always pretend it is flipped, but it's not. One "tell" is that the priests are never the villains in Hollywood movies. The other groups (warriors, merchants, and peasants) all do even villain duty. Bias shot-spotter placement is a classic case of priests blaming merchants. There might even be something to the substance, but the priests run the show - not SoundThinking Inc.
- skim_milk 3y ago
  Hmm - preservers, creators, and destroyers doing their jobs. Is this not what a healthy, functional society looks like, at least in any philosophy grounded in (albeit painful) reality? Or would you rather the preservers stop doing their job and let the others discover the consequences of their self-destructive fantasy? We might learn how pathetically dependent everyone is on each other for the N+1th time in recorded history.
holonsphere 3y ago
Spoiler alert: with a secondary audio source you can map out physical spaces as easily as one might with lidar
heywire 3y ago
Something along these same lines — I feel like I’m seeing those “Flock” cameras everywhere now. So between Shotspotter and Flock, you’re pretty much always under surveillance.
- hyperdimension 3y ago
  Those flock cameras make me unreasonably angry. I've considered filing a FOIA request about them but can't figure out quite what I'd be asking for. Data retention? Frequency of queries? Efficacy?
jjallen 3y ago
Do these record audio constantly or only after shootings? Seems like societally we would want audio to be recorded after shootings?
hcfman 3y ago
I have a project for the Raspberry Pi that provides for sound localization via time difference of arrival (TDOA). In a similar manner I suppose as shotspotter. There was a case recently in America where a grandfather was jailed for a significant part of a year based on a shotspotter localization and no other physical evidence such as gunshot residue. If citizens in such areas run their own systems they would have a means to provide counter evidence to that provided by shotspotter. Currently they have no means to do that. Even the times of the shots they have to take shot spotters word for it. Recordings by citizens themselves is an inherently safer approach because their sphere of influence is considerably smaller. Recordings are written to a separate partition on an SD card, it’s pretty simple to encrypt this partition as well if you like, I’ve done that. For those who are interested each node can be made very cheaply. It will run on a Raspberry Pi zero with a 7 euro GPS. It can also run portably on batteries. Here are relevant links: https://github.com/hcfman/sbts-aru https://github.com/hcfman/sbts-aru https://hackaday.com/2023/12/30/localizing-fireworks-launches-with-a-raspberry-pi/ https://hackaday.com/2023/12/30/localizing-fireworks-launche... https://medium.com/@kim_94237/tdoa-sound-localization-with-the-raspberry-pi-3e777469c4fa https://medium.com/@kim_94237/tdoa-sound-localization-with-t...
- pontifier 3y ago
  This is fantastic! I have been thinking about building something like this myself. I'm definitely going to deploy this in my area. I hear gunshots almost every weekend. Heard 2 sets of gunfire about an hour ago.
  - reducesuffering 3y ago
    Please get out of Pine Bluff and sell your properties for whatever you can recoup. You are putting yourself into way too much danger for a father of 3. There is a very real chance you will die by your constant confrontations with thieves there. It's not worth it. Years later you don't have progress on any business there. It's not the place to be for you.
    - pontifier 3y ago
Tabular-Iceberg 3y ago
I don’t understand the pearl clutching over what parts of town these sensors get concentrated in. Wouldn’t it just be wasteful to put them in areas where people don’t have the habit of shooting each other? Is it really overpolicing when those who do are made to face the consequences?
showship 3y ago
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nonrandomstring 3y ago
This is a strange conversation, because surely people realise that all CCTV cameras made in the past 10 years have microphones and record audio? Audio street surveillance is ubiquitous.
Moldoteck 3y ago
instead of fixing the reasons these shootings happen, usa as usual tries to ameliorate the consequences with more surveillance/technology
Communitivity 3y ago
Several of us are noting the less than 5% success rate in finding definitive evidence of shots fired, and calling the tech a failure. I disagree, because of the importance of preventing active shooters. With this kind of system you are going to want to lean toward false positives vs false negatives. There is definitely a lot of room for improvement though. Improvement could come through better ML use/training, better sensors, and better human in the loop analysts. I am firmly with Benjamin Franklin, in that "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.". But Franklin himself was in favor of collective security, and Franklin said this in support of the state's authority to provide collective security ( https://www.npr.org/2015/03/02/390245038/ben-franklins-famous-liberty-safety-quote-lost-its-context-in-21st-century https://www.npr.org/2015/03/02/390245038/ben-franklins-famou... ). Also, these sensors monitor public spaces, where no expectation of privacy exists. So I am for more sensors, video cameras on the sensors, more ML on the sensor data, and better training for analysts, but I am also for complete transparency on where sensors are and how they are used, with a publicly released report from annual external party review of police conduct in the use or abuse of sensor data.
- wl 3y ago
  Several people are misinterpreting a Chicago Inspector General report that examined call disposition records on ShotSpotter alerts and found approximately 10% were coded with dispositions indicating a firearms offense. The misinterpretation is conflating this with a false positive rate of 90%, never mind that the police are disincentivized to thoroughly search for shell casings rather than just moving on to the next call if there are no victims, shooters, witnesses, or any other obvious evidence of a shooting on scene. It implies, at best, a rough lower bound on the false positive rate. Additionally, the author of this article is claiming the police in Albuquerque have suggested to him that when they send forensics teams to the site of detected shootings, they "find definitive evidence of actual shots fired in less than five percent of cases." This would be at least twice as bad as the rough lower bound suggested by the Chicago Inspector General report and seems way out of line with other experiences I've heard.
Jun8 3y ago
Here’s my ask before you enter your perfectly argued comment here: if you have 30 mins read these NYT profiles of 12 children lost to gun crime: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/12/14/magazine/gun-violence-america-child-deaths.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/12/14/magazine/gun-.... If you’re passionate about this subject and have lots of time go and volunteer at high crime communities (if you dare), for example in high schools. I did the latter for three years, volunteering to help the Ace Tech High School (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACE_Amandla_Charter_High_School https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACE_Amandla_Charter_High_Sch...) more than 10 years ago, as part of their Robotics Team. The problems I saw were myriad but it was common to see lockers decorated with flowers, for kids who died recently. I totally understand and agree with the educated person’s poverty, bias, etc. arguments. But when a problem gets this bad first you need to stop it, and then work on long term goals. Just answer this question: if your child had 10% chance of getting shot and killed walking to/from from school, what would your position be on any technology that can reduce that by even 1%.
- lolinder 3y ago
  > Just answer this question: your child had 10% chance of getting shot and killed walking to/fro from school, what would your position be on any technology that can reduce that by even 1%. Just to put some actual perspective on the numbers: about 40 kids are killed in all of New Mexico each year and about 20 of those are suicides (still tragic but not the walking-home-from-school kind). That's still too many, but is nowhere near 10%. You're inflating the numbers to trigger emotions. Making wide scale policy decisions based on your emotions surrounding anecdotal incidents is not a good policy. I feel for the families that lose their children, but I don't believe that acting for the sake of acting is safe. Acting in the heat of a crisis is how we got the TSA and the NSA, which we still haven't managed to get rid of. The risk of creating an enormous and impossible to get rid of surveillance state to save 1% of 20 kids per year (2 kids every 10 years) frankly isn't worth it.
  - Jun8 3y ago
    I’m talking about high crime areas in big cities. Here’s a data point from Chicago: in May 2021, up to that time in the year 108 children were shot, 16 of them died: https://abc7chicago.com/amp/chicago-shootings-child-shot-teen-kid/10663331/ https://abc7chicago.com/amp/chicago-shootings-child-shot-tee... It’s not the “heat of the crisis”, this has been going on for years now here. See this WaPo article from 2013, from when Michelle Obama attended the funeral of a 15 year-old girl: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/michelle-obama-heads-to-chicago-for-slain-teenagers-funeral/2013/02/09/418a9ea4-716e-11e2-8b8d-e0b59a1b8e2a_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/michelle-obama-heads...
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zzz999 3y ago
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mamaluigie 3y ago
They are probably solar powered running on something with low power so they don't have to restrict the locations of hiding these devices to areas directly connected to the electrical grid.
Slava_Propanei 3y ago
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523 points by kogir 3y ago

I had no idea ShotSpotter was recording conversations, always assumed the nature of analyzing for a sound signature would be throwing much of the data away immediately

wahnfrieden 3y ago
That’s because it’s generalized surveillance tech marketed to the public as personal safety tech (which it is not per the data)
verteu 3y ago
> assumed the nature of analyzing for a sound signature would be throwing much of the data away immediately (INACCURATE, SEE EDIT) It does. The "conversations recorded by ShotSpotter sensors" were a few seconds before/after the shooting, and consisted of people saying things like "[shooter's name] Why are you going to [shoot] me like that, [shooter's name]"? [1] [1] 'The recording of the second shot also captured the voice of Tyrone Lyles, apparently addressing the person who shot him: "Ar, Ar, why are you going to do me like that, Ar."' https://casetext.com/case/people-v-johnson-5116 https://casetext.com/case/people-v-johnson-5116 edit: I was wrong. Apparently "the detectors keep hours or days of continuous audio": https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/shotspotter-ceo-answers-questions-gunshot https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/shotspotter-ceo...
hcfman 3y ago
Well, yeah... that's what an acoustic sensor is. It would get more objection if they called them microphones.

JoeyBananas 3y ago

I've experienced living in a neighborhood covered by shot spotter and hearing gun shots outside, and I think shot spotter is great. I want the cops to actually show up and arrest whoever is terrorizing everybody. Thank you very much

gffrd 3y ago
Has having ShotSpotter in your neighborhood increased the safety? Is there faster response? higher arrest rate? decrease in crime?
- SOLAR_FIELDS 3y ago
  Is there any verifiable third party evidence that ShotSpotter (or whatever it’s called now) can even do what it claims to?
  - birdofhermes 3y ago
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- spamizbad 3y ago
  In Chicago they will respond to them aggressively . Gang members have figured this out and will have “decoy” shots fired before a hit takes place to tie up police.
  - munificent 3y ago
    What a perfect example of Campbell's Law.
- JoeyBananas 3y ago
  When there was shooting outside of my apartment, shot spotter called the cops instantly. It isn't supposed to govern the city, it's only supposed to spot the gun shots.
rideontime 3y ago
Do they?
- grubbs 3y ago
  Even in Baltimore where police response times can be total garbage..they will show up for shot spotter. At least from my experience. Calling 911 for anything else there is a long delay unfortunately. Last time I called for a car jacking right outside my home I was on hold for ten mins. Cops didn't arrive for another 20.

standardUser 3y ago

I had no idea. Two key takeaways... > Conversations recorded by ShotSpotter sensors have twice been introduced as evidence in criminal trials. In one case the court allowed it, in another the court did not. > ShotSpotter sensor correlates fairly well with your household income. The wealthier you are, the less surveilled you are.

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summarity 3y ago

Wait what this is real? I thought it was just a plot point invented for Person of Interest

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aspenmayer 3y ago
Person of Interest is a criminally underrated show.
- lucubratory 3y ago
  Feels pretty incredibly prescient in the current era, hey.
  - aspenmayer 3y ago
    Considering the scale, depth, and breadth of Palantir usage in Ukraine these days, I would be inclined to agree. https://time.com/6691662/ai-ukraine-war-palantir/ https://time.com/6691662/ai-ukraine-war-palantir/
jacurtis 3y ago
84 metro areas in the US are covered by Shotspotter. It is very real.

delichon 3y ago

> It's not perfect, but the distance from your house to a ShotSpotter sensor correlates fairly well with your household income. The wealthier you are, the less surveilled you are. To give ABQ police the benefit of the doubt, that pattern could also be compatible with more gun crime equaling more surveillance. It would be nice to have enough gun crime and sensor location data to see how true that is. When the sensors are as dense as they are, it's not clear that knowing the sensor locations is an advantage to offenders, at least in the gunshot spotting role.

bombcar 3y ago
It sounds like shotspotters are likely to be near where shots are; and that the wealthier you are the more likely you’d NOT want to be where the shots are.
- deleted 3y ago
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- Aurornis 3y ago
  Putting surveillance for gun crime in areas with the highest rates of gun crime is obviously what’s happening. I think the author and some commenters are nervous about claims that gun crime is inversely correlated with neighborhood wealth, which creates some of these strange accusations that some other bias is at play. If you pull up a map of crime in most cities the inverse correlation with home prices is obvious. If nothing else, high crime rates rapidly crush property values as everyone wants to leave those areas.
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  - jakelazaroff 3y ago
    > If you pull up a map of crime in most cities the inverse correlation with home prices is obvious. If the police department spends the majority of its resources on certain areas, it will respond to the majority of incidents and make the majority of arrests in those areas. You can truthfully say "look, these numbers are higher than anywhere else!" but that doesn't necessarily mean there's more crime happening there — it could also mean the residents are overpoliced relative to other neighborhoods. With regard to the article, why is it obvious that police are putting surveillance in areas with the highest rates of gun crime?

throwawaysleep 3y ago

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aaron695 3y ago

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crtified 3y ago

I can't help but think how easily such a system - which is hardly sophisticated, in technical principle - could be used to pinpoint things that are 'problematic' in my neighbourhood. Loutish vehicle behaviour of various kinds. The loud Harley Davidson and dirt-bike signatures associated with the comings-and-goings of local gang members. Squealing tyres of deliberate burn-outs on the road. The occasional fool loudly blasting down the road at twice the speed limit. Things which the current system of "wait until someone gets annoyed enough or gets the courage to call the police to complain, and one might arrive 15 minutes later, by which time the coop has been long flown" allow to run mostly unchecked. But those thoughts go hand in hand with a vague but distinct discomfort.

ryukoposting 3y ago
Some of the illegal things you listed aren't things that benefit much from a hastily dispatched response. If you want to catch people on cars or dirt bikes driving down the street, you kinda have to already be there. Also, a couple of the things you listed are nuisances, but not illegal activity in their own right. ShotSpotters don't repel crime, let alone prevent it. They're intentionally covert, as shown in the OP, which gives credence to the notion that they aren't intended to deter criminal activity from the surrounding area. If anything, repelling/deterring crime would defeat the purpose of the technology. At best, ShotSpotter merely detects crime, and its effectiveness in that capacity is kept a secret. The world of police tech is a knee-deep in snake oil. A bit of transparency would go a long way for ShotSpotter.
- crtified 3y ago
  > Some of the illegal things you listed aren't things that benefit much from a hastily dispatched response. If you want to catch people on cars or dirt bikes driving down the street, you kinda have to already be there. Yes and no. Intelligence (in the data sense of the word) can accrue usage patterns. You might not catch them that time, but you know where they'll be next time. What routes they travel. Where to focus. If it's a live event, the police officer is not having to stand there fruitlessly questioning a witness about which direction the offender hooned off in 5 minutes ago - the system is already telling them, by tracking the relevant data. It's a form of telemetry. And it's also quite a disturbing (to use an overused phrase!, but which I hope is justified here) slippery slope.

simonw 3y ago

If anyone wants the raw data, it's available in window._Flourish_data variable on https://flo.uri.sh/visualisation/16818696/embed https://flo.uri.sh/visualisation/16818696/embed Which means you can extract it with my https://shot-scraper.datasette.io/ https://shot-scraper.datasette.io/ tool like this: shot-scraper javascript \ 'https://flo.uri.sh/visualisation/16818696/embed' _Flourish_data \ > /tmp/data.json That's a 25MB file. I loaded it into SQLite like this: cat /tmp/data.json | jq .events | \ sqlite-utils insert /tmp/shots.db locations - Then opened it up in Datasette with https://datasette.io/plugins/datasette-cluster-map https://datasette.io/plugins/datasette-cluster-map to see them on a map.

wferrell 3y ago
Thank you!
prophesi 3y ago
Thanks! And alternatively you can create an anchor element in the console with `href` set as a JSON stringified representation of `window._Flourish_data`. Then set a download attribute with the filename you'd like, and simulate a click to download it. To use it in leaflet, you'll need to iterate over the `events` array and change `lon` to `lng` before adding each point to the leaflet map.
- blatherard 3y ago
  An even simpler option to get the data, at least in firefox, is to open the console, enter `window._Flourish_data` then right-click the result and select "Copy Object" which will put the json in your paste buffer and you can then paste it into a file.
  - prophesi 3y ago
    This is when HN is at its peak. Duly noted!
  - simonw 3y ago
    Or use the copy() function to copy it straight to your clipboard.

ryukoposting 3y ago

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itishappy 3y ago

What are the potential downsides to police oversight? > But, if asked, they provide a form letter written by ShotSpotter. Their contract prohibits the disclosure of any actual data. A potentially dystopian surveillance apparatus is installed citywide, and the police can't discuss about it's efficiency because the company that sold it to them won't let them?

nerdponx 3y ago
Some bumbling police chief might say something stupid that would draw media attention to ShotSpotter and their massive data collection operation. You definitely wouldn't want that to happen.
TaylorAlexander 3y ago
The police know what’s good for them. They have extraordinary powers and the more they can keep the public in the dark about what they do, the more freedom they have to act with impunity.

loteck 3y ago

I would request that a crowd as technically sophisticated as HN move past marketing claims when discussing this system. "Gunshot detection" is pure marketing. The devices are hot mics — public audio surveillance. The software layer triggers alerts on loud noises, which are sent off to a facility that is little more than a call center, for characterization by a human worker there. This system detects door slams and popped volleyballs just as well as it detects gun fire (which is to say, imperfectly on all counts).

Aurornis 3y ago
> This system detects door slams and popped volleyballs just as well as it detects gun fire (which is to say, imperfectly on all counts). Sound classification moved far beyond what you’re claiming years ago. If you set the threshold at “imperfectly” then no system will ever meet your bar, because perfect is an unreasonable threshold. However, the claim that we’re unable to differentiate between gunshots and car doors is extremely incorrect.
- loteck 3y ago
  Shotspotter falsely classifies popped volleyball as gunshot: https://www.wtol.com/article/news/local/false-shotspotter-alert-in-east-toledo-tuesday/512-75fb9bb6-b9cf-49dd-889e-d31782ed9967 https://www.wtol.com/article/news/local/false-shotspotter-al... Slamming doors: https://www.axios.com/2022/04/07/campaign-zero-against-shotspotter-crime https://www.axios.com/2022/04/07/campaign-zero-against-shots... This list can go on. Jackhammer, nail gun, normal hammers. https://voiceofsandiego.org/2020/09/22/shotspotter-sensors-send-sdpd-officers-to-false-alarms-more-often-than-advertised/ https://voiceofsandiego.org/2020/09/22/shotspotter-sensors-s...
  - jacurtis 3y ago
    Yes there are false positives. This is an alert system and doesn't have to be perfect. This is the difference between a sensor in a self-driving car and a sensor for something like Shotspotter. If a self-driving car sensor has a 1% fail rate, then it is useless and would cause crashes and death. It couldn't be used. But if shotspotter is 1% inaccurate, then it just sends police to a street corner where there is actually just road construction or a volleyball popped. The consequences are pretty low to nil. Many people might not know this all calls have priorities in a policing system, they are not treated equal. So Shotspotter alerts are very low priority to officers. The same is true for home alarm systems. Home alarm systems trigger false alarms constantly. Police treat them as very low priority as a result. So if a 911 call comes in or an eyewitness reported shooting, or even a wreckless driver or suspected DUI, the police will treat that first. In fact if they are on the way to a shotspotter alert and encounter something else, they will stop for it. This is to say, that the false positives aren't as important as everyone makes them out to be. If a false positive happens, it means that a cop that's sitting on a random street corner gets moved to a street corner where the false alarm from Shotspotter fired. There's not really any harm being done here.

incanus77 3y ago

Timely, as a boy was shot at last week in Chicago while setting off fireworks that triggered a ShotSpotter alert: https://chicago.suntimes.com/crime/2024/02/27/chicago-police-officer-shotspotter-alert-opened-fire-boy-lighting-fireworks https://chicago.suntimes.com/crime/2024/02/27/chicago-police...

sbierwagen 3y ago
He was setting off fireworks on January 25? Is there a holiday on that day I'm not aware of?
- bilbo0s 3y ago
  You're stretching man. We're a nation of laws, not of your awareness. It's just the words on the page. Was there a law being broken or not. In this case the answer was no. The police then proceeded to write up multiple claims of illegal activity that were all demonstrable falsehoods, and your defense of the illegal activity on the part of the police is that you aren't aware of a holiday? This is just the sort of thing we need to stamp out before these thugs kill either some other innocent kid, or cause a real police officer to be hurt or killed while trying to control the inevitable community reaction to their bird brained behavior. These cops need to be off the force yesterday. Yes they are liabilities waiting to happen. Yes they are dishonest. But the real reason we need to get rid of them is because they are unpredictable. We have no idea what anyone who will shoot at innocent kids and lie about it today will do tomorrow. Honest cops are predictable. Dishonest cops are just loose cannons and we need to cut them out at every opportunity.
- 9935c101ab17a66 3y ago
  Can I ask why you’re concerned about the legitimacy of the kids reasoning for setting off fireworks? Like, if he was shot and killed on a holiday, it’s not his fault, but it’s perfectly reasonable to be shot and killed by a police officer when a opaque surveillance system reports gunshots on non-holidays?
  - sbierwagen 3y ago

Vaslo 3y ago

One thing missed in this writing is that shotspotter also saves lives. In my city, people shot in the alley and left for dead are found shortly after they are shot because of the detection. Without this tech, some would be left to a slow death in an alley where no one would find them until morning.

loteck 3y ago
It may incidentally do that? But if it reliably saved lives you would be selling it to ambulance dispatchers. In reality, ambulance dispatchers would look at the high rate of Shotspotter dispatching a car and finding absolutely nothing and immediately recognize this proposal would harm people by sending emergency services on wild goose chases while real emergencies suffer longer wait times.

nimbius 3y ago

Hard to imagine this can discern between things like engine backfires, fireworks and garbage trucks effectively enough to be anything more than a really expensive checkmark on some captains yearly performance review.

jacurtis 3y ago
They can't. There are a lot of false positives. That has always been one of the biggest criticisms of Shotspotter.

chris_wot 3y ago

Sounds like it might be a good idea to add a sound maker near these devices.

cratermoon 3y ago

It's used the way police use any technology: to over-police the poor and non-white communities. https://www.cnn.com/2024/02/24/us/shotspotter-cities-choose-not-to-use/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2024/02/24/us/shotspotter-cities-choose-...

xeckr 3y ago
How is it "overpolicing" if those communities truly experience more gun violence than others?
- w0z_ 3y ago
  You can't fight a radical with logic.

jcrawfordor 3y ago

Hello all, occasionally I write what I consider "Albuquerque content" and I do not expect it to become broadly popular. This article is something I put together very quickly and it probably assumes a certain degree of familiarity with the political context around policing in Albuquerque (which either side will tell you is very contentious) and, more broadly, policing and civil justice. Even without the currently evolving bribery scandal, the level of public trust in APD (and even the city council's confidence in APD) is very low. APD's transparency and accountability, or lack thereof, has been a common locus of the debate. On the other hand, another major issue has been APD's chronic understaffing, and APD contends that ShotSpotter and other elements of their real-time program help to close the gap that results from their limited personnel. With gun crime as one of the foremost issues in the city, whether you view APD positively or negatively, ShotSpotter is a big part of the discussion right now. Historically, APD's use of pervasive surveillance technology has been a flashpoint in the debate. APD has live access to perhaps 3-4 thousand cameras across the city (they aren't very transparent about this and it depends on how far along the APS integration project is), they have used facial recognition against driver's license photos and other sources since 2014, they have installed ALPR throughout the city and recently expanded retention to one year, etc. This is all fed into the Real-Time Crime Center, which uses a data fusion product from a vendor called Genetec to provide sort of a futuristic point-and-click data system that combines ShotSpotter detections with video feeds with service call records etc. to produce sort of a dossier on any given person or location. Unfortunately, there are a lot of things going on in city politics, especially with regard to crime and policing, and so the topic of surveillance has mostly fallen out of public attention. Still, APD's refusal to say in any detail what parts of the city were covered by ShotSpotter has been one of the big ongoing frustrations, particularly among those who favor police reform. I mostly wrote this article to highlight that there is finally information on the matter available. The concerns about how distribution of sensors and, more broadly, use of surveillance technology impacts civil rights and quality of life in the city are mentioned mainly as an aside and I do not attempt to articulate the pros and cons. That would require a rather lengthy piece as the topic is complex, and currently the greater part of the controversy isn't even about the wisdom of deploying ShotSpotter, but rather over whether or not ShotSpotter even works (and, consequently, whether or not it's simply a waste of city money, at a rate of around $5 million).

xeckr 3y ago

>Many assumed that ShotSpotter coverage was concentrated in disadvantaged parts of the city, an unsurprising outcome but one that could contribute to systemic overpolicing. The author presents this as a negative but it is obviously a good thing. If there was an increase in gunfire in my neighbourhood I would hope that police increases their presence, lest the "disadvantages" begin to accumulate.

TaylorAlexander 3y ago
Your argument assumes that the devices are only used as marketed. My understanding is that this assumption doesn’t hold, and that police regularly use these systems as an excuse to harass people in poor neighborhoods. The reports I have read suggest that police will enter a neighborhood they want to patrol, and if they see someone they don’t like they can claim they were called in by shotspotter, then shake down the person and if they find something, arrest them for that. This is textbook over-policing, which I assure you would not want to have done to you, and that is the precise concern mentioned in the quote.
- xeckr 3y ago
  You are suggesting that police regularly invent false positives for ShotSpotter. Is there any evidence to support this? This would seem like something that would easily show up on an audit.
  - TaylorAlexander 3y ago
    Sourcing this for you, I see that there has indeed been a great deal of rigorous investigation, reporting, and lawsuits regarding the ways ShotSpotter leads to overpolicing, though I had misremembered one thing - the false detections come from the system itself, though this does also lead police to perceive areas as more dangerous and then patrol them more often, leading to measured increases in stop and frisk pat downs. The ACLU has a thorough article breaking down reporting from the City of Chicago Inspector General, Northwestern School of Law’s MacArthur Justice Center, Vice news and the Associated Press. ACLU article with links to the other reports here: https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/four-problems-with-the-shotspotter-gunshot-detection-system https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/four-problems-w... Key takeaways from the reporting linking ShotSpotter to over policing listed here: 1) ShotSpotter false alarms send police on numerous trips (in Chicago, more than 60 times a day) into communities for no reason and on high alert expecting to potentially confront a dangerous situation. Given the already tragic number of shootings of Black people by police, that is a recipe for trouble. 2) Indeed, the Chicago IG’s analysis of Chicago police data found that the “perceived aggregate frequency of ShotSpotter alerts” in some neighborhoods leads officers to engage in more stops and pat downs. 3) The placement of sensors in some neighborhoods but not others means that the police will detect more incidents (real or false) in places where the sensors are located. That can distort gunfire statistics and create a circular statistical justification for over-policing in communities of color.

chasd00 3y ago

In Dallas I hear the pop-pop-pop of gunfire virtually every night in my oakcliff neighborhood. Even when the Cowboys score a touchdown you hear gunfire. The police have basically given up.

grugagag 3y ago
Are people shooting blanks?
- demondemidi 3y ago
  I've never actually seen "blanks" at any sporting goods or gun store in the 15 years I was really into guns. Reloaders typically reload rifle bullets, so I find it highly unlikely anyone is shooting blanks. Especially during drunken sportsing celebrations.
  - sbierwagen 3y ago
    If you're buying ammo online and sorting by cost per round, it's easy to make an expensive mistake: https://twitter.com/westernunion2k/status/1417122995957506049 https://twitter.com/westernunion2k/status/141712299595750604...
- chasd00 3y ago
  No just random gunfire. People in their cars shooting in the air and then speeding off. They’re definitely not shooting at people otherwise it would be national news every night. I think the local police have resorted to a “just please aim in a safe direction” stance instead of trying to stop them. New years is especially annoying. Something like shotspotter wouldn’t work for this because by the time you get the info and call it in the people doing the shooting are miles away and there isn’t a crime scene per se to investigate.
  - sbierwagen 3y ago
    >otherwise it would be national news every night. Well, Dallas had 246 murders last year. https://www.dallasnews.com/news/crime/2024/01/11/1-year-246-dead-dallas-sees-rise-in-murders-in-2023-as-violent-crime-drops/ https://www.dallasnews.com/news/crime/2024/01/11/1-year-246-... That's a killing every other day, and obviously does not include nonfatal shootings. While it is true that there is lots of death in the news, most murders are not newsworthy. For instance, did you know there were 21 school shootings in 2020? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_the_United_States_(2000%E2%80%93present)#2020s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_th... Surprising, right? You certainly didn't hear about a shooting every other week that year. (Granted, 2020 was an unusual year, news wise.) But look at the descriptions of the shootings: "A large group of men jumped a fence to gain access to Atascocita High Schools football field, when an argument escalated and a 19-year-old was killed.[503]". "At Sonora High School in downtown Sonora, a student named Eric Aguiar, 17, was shot and killed in the High School's parking lot.[507]". "A 20-year-old University of Alabama at Birmingham student was shot and killed in a campus parking lot outside the student center. Investigators believed the shooting occurred during an arranged meeting to sell headphones.[513]". Parking lots, dangerous places! Dallas could have a thousand murders a year, or five thousand, and you'd never hear about them-- if the murders were boring enough.

deleted 3y ago

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knicholes 3y ago

I think it's lame to limit the detection to just gun shots. Like the web has analytics, I think real life could have audiolytics. One example: I can collect all the data I want from my backyard and give a report to my neighbor about exactly how long and how loudly their dog has been barking. I can hear which birds have been in my backyard. I can... hear what a customer says about my product in-store and offer them coupons at checkout or later or get feedback about my product...

TaylorAlexander 3y ago
I would actually really love to live in a world where I can have a reasonable expectation of privacy when going about my day. A personal bird recorder is fine, but I absolutely would not want a networked system of sensitive microphones available for unlimited data gathering spread across my town. The prevalence of Ring cameras already makes some neighborhoods havens of surveillance, I’d rather we not expand things like that.
hcfman 3y ago
Well yeah. How the project is now you can localize anything manually if you can hear it on 4 mics surrounding it. Sometimes three. Automatic localization. The techniques of training the model would likely be the same or similar for other similar sounds.

leumon 3y ago

Things like ShotSpotter are only fighting the symptoms. As an european I find it ridiculus to hear that such thing even exists. Why would we not simply ban the guns themselves?

dudus 3y ago
Americans love guns more than freedom.
- pizzafeelsright 3y ago
  Guns maintain freedom.
AvocadoPanic 3y ago
The criminal element largely responsible for gun crime would criminally ignore the ban. They're already shooting people. The US shares a 3,145 kilometer long border with Mexico, unfortunately there are at best 1,044 km of border 'barriers' in place. People, guns, money and drugs are smuggled across the border daily.
- Eextra953 3y ago
  Guns aren't smuggled in from the Southern border. If anything guns are smuggled out of the USA into mexico, how do you think the cartels get their guns?
  - AvocadoPanic 3y ago
    Guns in bulk are smuggled south, guns come north with criminals. You can see this in the seizure stats. In the context of banning guns, any movement north is too much.
Tabular-Iceberg 3y ago
How do you propose fighting the cause? I have nothing in principle against a society that completely bans guns, but are you prepared to strike enough terror into the population that breaking the law and getting guns anyway becomes unthinkable?

goldenshale 3y ago

It just makes sense to put the sensors near the phenomena being sensed, and if people know where they are they could be manipulated. If guns are going off and people are getting caught, that seems like effective policing, not over or under policing.

ALittleLight 3y ago

I've also been blogging about ShotSpotter and review the evidence that the system is good or bad. https://quickthoughts.substack.com/p/shotspotter-good-or-bad https://quickthoughts.substack.com/p/shotspotter-good-or-bad There's a lot of evidence that ShotSpotter detects almost all gunshots and that's been validated by multiple third party groups. ShotSpotter also seems to alert to things that are either false positives (construction sounds, fireworks, etc) or are not useful. Chicago IG says 9/10 times when officers respond to a ShotSpotter alert they find nothing. 1/10 times it leads to an arrest, but the arrest isn't always strictly related to the ShotSpotter event - e.g. police responding to an event stop a speeding car and discover drug paraphernalia or an unrelated gun. Some cities, e.g. Atlanta, discontinued ShotSpotter over cost benefit concerns. From their analysis it seemed a better use of money to hire more officers than use ShotSpotter. Still, it's in use in 84 metro areas today. Ultimately, I think it should be up to the local community. The individual community is the one who will most benefit (if it is beneficial) and suffer from increased police incursions.

hcfman 3y ago
Fine but it’s about time there was external validation possible from the public and transparency about the math.
- ALittleLight 3y ago
  In some cities there is - kind of. DC, for example, publishes all ShotSpotter events publicly and you can download all records of their events. You can notice by plotting their events that there is a lot of extra "shots fired" on January first (probably from fireworks). If you knew of gunshots at a specific geographic coordinate you could confirm or deny with the DC data. I suppose you could also go to some specific spot in DC and fire a gun to see if they could detect it - but I don't recommend that. https://opendata.dc.gov/datasets/DCGIS::shot-spotter-gun-shots/about https://opendata.dc.gov/datasets/DCGIS::shot-spotter-gun-sho...

brikym 3y ago

I have some noisy neighbours and I've thought of the same idea for controlling noise in neighbourhoods. You could have a microphone on every lamp post and send people fines for violating the rules.

llm_trw 3y ago
I've been having a nightmarish time trying to track down intermittent low frequency industrial noise. It's over the EPA regulations, it's neighborhood wide, and it is on for 2 hours between 11pm and 1am on random days. The EPA did monitoring of the house and site but couldn't pinpoint where it was coming from because of how low frequency it was. This isn't surveillance, this is the equivalent of finding who is dumping raw sewage in your drinking water.
- chris_va 3y ago
  Now I am curious For 20Hz noise, are there too many reflections to use an oscilloscope with 3 mics on a 25ft baseline to triangulate it (you'd have to elevate the mics)?
- 392 3y ago
  Buy a whole load of the same model voice recorder, label them with tape for location, spread them out and record till batteries die, pull data to PC, repeat until get a sample? Someone above mentioned microsecond accurate clocks on raspberry pi being used for TDOA.
  - hcfman 3y ago
    Yep. This project https://github.com/hcfman/sbts-aru https://github.com/hcfman/sbts-aru
- hcfman 3y ago
  If there are any uniquely identify able patterns such that you found find that point on all microphones then deployment my sbts-aru project in four places surrounding it might very well localize it for you

devaiops9001 3y ago

[flagged]

fargle 3y ago

i broadly agree with the sentiment in this article, especially the "no public oversight" part. but this: > The reader can probably infer how this coverage pattern relates to race and class in Albuquerque. It's not perfect, but the distance from your house to a ShotSpotter sensor correlates fairly well with your household income. is facetious and is almost certainly argued in bad faith. well, duh. the distance to the nearest "shot spotter" box also correlates with the incidence of crime and gunfire in the area. to bring up racism or classism is unhelpful. that correlation is unfortunate, likely true, and also not the problem at hand.

BriggyDwiggs42 3y ago
Actually this is a direct example of how systemic racism works. The goal isn’t to surveil minorities more, it’s just that the system watches places where crimes occur. Consider that, when an area has more surveillance, more people who commit crimes are caught. All of a sudden, you’re disproportionately catching minority criminals. Better put in more surveillance to cover the higher crime rates in those minority communities. I get they can’t necessarily do anything about this, since they’re gonna put microphones where it’s most efficient, but maybe it’s yet another argument against mass surveillance.
- fargle 3y ago
  > hey’re gonna put microphones where it’s most efficient, but maybe it’s yet another argument against mass surveillance. BINGO!
- whatshisface 3y ago
  >Consider that, when an area has more surveillance, more people who commit crimes are caught. All of a sudden, you’re disproportionately catching minority criminals. Turn the coin over to the other side - you're catching criminals victimizing minorities. Nothing is simple, is it.
  - BriggyDwiggs42 3y ago
    Uh sure, but that doesn’t effect the placement of new surveillance systems, which is the reason I mentioned it. Also, I think you’re sort of saying that because you think catching them is a huge success, and that that offsets the harm, but it’s not gonna do a ton of good when nothing has been fixed about the underlying causes. At best the victims get catharsis, where if that money imprisoning the criminal were spent on something like providing economic opportunities or funding schools they’d likely benefit more and be more secure against future crime (not that its either or).

gmerc 3y ago

A few year down the road the Shirky principle demands a revelation that ShorSpotter sponsored the NRA. It’s amazing lime 500 years later, there’s still a developed country on earth that hasn’t figured the externalities of gunpowder

deleted 3y ago
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m0llusk 3y ago

Interesting how takes on ShotSpotter vary depending on the context and situation. In San Jose it was used to help enforce rules against firing guns in the air. In these cases there would usually be reports to police, but finding the shooter was extremely difficult. With ShotSpotter it became possible to identify locations on individual lots. Using this information enforcement became much more effective and there was a huge reduction in celebratory gunfire. In a large number of these cases no charges needed to be filed as gun owners were often uninformed, apologetic, and compliant. From the start of this program it was explicitly stated that ShotSpotter information would only be used by constables on patrol and would not be admitted as evidence in court. System coverage was based on where crimes were being reported. That such criteria overlap with race and class makes sense without necessarily being connected. It would be interesting to know if there might be some reasonable bounds that could be used to enable ShotSpotter to be used without being considered intrusive surveillance. Having information about gunshots or possible gunshots can be extremely useful for responders who need to understand where events are happening. This does not necessarily mean that the system has to be open to other uses, especially recording and replay of audio.

IceHegel 3y ago

This phrase "systemic overpolicing" and ShotSpotter both come from the same mind - the mind of the state. The state - which like most organizations is concerned mostly with preserving itself - has an interest in the surveillance of the population and in shifting blame from it's failures to deal with poverty and crime to skapegoats: the police, racism, property taxes, etc. The west is run by priests (professors, advisors, journalists, students, diplomats) with the support of the merchants. Priests always pretend it is flipped, but it's not. One "tell" is that the priests are never the villains in Hollywood movies. The other groups (warriors, merchants, and peasants) all do even villain duty. Bias shot-spotter placement is a classic case of priests blaming merchants. There might even be something to the substance, but the priests run the show - not SoundThinking Inc.

skim_milk 3y ago
Hmm - preservers, creators, and destroyers doing their jobs. Is this not what a healthy, functional society looks like, at least in any philosophy grounded in (albeit painful) reality? Or would you rather the preservers stop doing their job and let the others discover the consequences of their self-destructive fantasy? We might learn how pathetically dependent everyone is on each other for the N+1th time in recorded history.

holonsphere 3y ago

Spoiler alert: with a secondary audio source you can map out physical spaces as easily as one might with lidar

heywire 3y ago

Something along these same lines — I feel like I’m seeing those “Flock” cameras everywhere now. So between Shotspotter and Flock, you’re pretty much always under surveillance.

hyperdimension 3y ago
Those flock cameras make me unreasonably angry. I've considered filing a FOIA request about them but can't figure out quite what I'd be asking for. Data retention? Frequency of queries? Efficacy?

jjallen 3y ago

Do these record audio constantly or only after shootings? Seems like societally we would want audio to be recorded after shootings?

hcfman 3y ago

I have a project for the Raspberry Pi that provides for sound localization via time difference of arrival (TDOA). In a similar manner I suppose as shotspotter. There was a case recently in America where a grandfather was jailed for a significant part of a year based on a shotspotter localization and no other physical evidence such as gunshot residue. If citizens in such areas run their own systems they would have a means to provide counter evidence to that provided by shotspotter. Currently they have no means to do that. Even the times of the shots they have to take shot spotters word for it. Recordings by citizens themselves is an inherently safer approach because their sphere of influence is considerably smaller. Recordings are written to a separate partition on an SD card, it’s pretty simple to encrypt this partition as well if you like, I’ve done that. For those who are interested each node can be made very cheaply. It will run on a Raspberry Pi zero with a 7 euro GPS. It can also run portably on batteries. Here are relevant links: https://github.com/hcfman/sbts-aru https://github.com/hcfman/sbts-aru https://hackaday.com/2023/12/30/localizing-fireworks-launches-with-a-raspberry-pi/ https://hackaday.com/2023/12/30/localizing-fireworks-launche... https://medium.com/@kim_94237/tdoa-sound-localization-with-the-raspberry-pi-3e777469c4fa https://medium.com/@kim_94237/tdoa-sound-localization-with-t...

pontifier 3y ago
This is fantastic! I have been thinking about building something like this myself. I'm definitely going to deploy this in my area. I hear gunshots almost every weekend. Heard 2 sets of gunfire about an hour ago.
- reducesuffering 3y ago
  Please get out of Pine Bluff and sell your properties for whatever you can recoup. You are putting yourself into way too much danger for a father of 3. There is a very real chance you will die by your constant confrontations with thieves there. It's not worth it. Years later you don't have progress on any business there. It's not the place to be for you.
  - pontifier 3y ago

Tabular-Iceberg 3y ago

I don’t understand the pearl clutching over what parts of town these sensors get concentrated in. Wouldn’t it just be wasteful to put them in areas where people don’t have the habit of shooting each other? Is it really overpolicing when those who do are made to face the consequences?

showship 3y ago

[flagged]

nonrandomstring 3y ago

This is a strange conversation, because surely people realise that all CCTV cameras made in the past 10 years have microphones and record audio? Audio street surveillance is ubiquitous.

Moldoteck 3y ago

instead of fixing the reasons these shootings happen, usa as usual tries to ameliorate the consequences with more surveillance/technology

Communitivity 3y ago

Several of us are noting the less than 5% success rate in finding definitive evidence of shots fired, and calling the tech a failure. I disagree, because of the importance of preventing active shooters. With this kind of system you are going to want to lean toward false positives vs false negatives. There is definitely a lot of room for improvement though. Improvement could come through better ML use/training, better sensors, and better human in the loop analysts. I am firmly with Benjamin Franklin, in that "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.". But Franklin himself was in favor of collective security, and Franklin said this in support of the state's authority to provide collective security ( https://www.npr.org/2015/03/02/390245038/ben-franklins-famous-liberty-safety-quote-lost-its-context-in-21st-century https://www.npr.org/2015/03/02/390245038/ben-franklins-famou... ). Also, these sensors monitor public spaces, where no expectation of privacy exists. So I am for more sensors, video cameras on the sensors, more ML on the sensor data, and better training for analysts, but I am also for complete transparency on where sensors are and how they are used, with a publicly released report from annual external party review of police conduct in the use or abuse of sensor data.

wl 3y ago
Several people are misinterpreting a Chicago Inspector General report that examined call disposition records on ShotSpotter alerts and found approximately 10% were coded with dispositions indicating a firearms offense. The misinterpretation is conflating this with a false positive rate of 90%, never mind that the police are disincentivized to thoroughly search for shell casings rather than just moving on to the next call if there are no victims, shooters, witnesses, or any other obvious evidence of a shooting on scene. It implies, at best, a rough lower bound on the false positive rate. Additionally, the author of this article is claiming the police in Albuquerque have suggested to him that when they send forensics teams to the site of detected shootings, they "find definitive evidence of actual shots fired in less than five percent of cases." This would be at least twice as bad as the rough lower bound suggested by the Chicago Inspector General report and seems way out of line with other experiences I've heard.

Jun8 3y ago

Here’s my ask before you enter your perfectly argued comment here: if you have 30 mins read these NYT profiles of 12 children lost to gun crime: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/12/14/magazine/gun-violence-america-child-deaths.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/12/14/magazine/gun-.... If you’re passionate about this subject and have lots of time go and volunteer at high crime communities (if you dare), for example in high schools. I did the latter for three years, volunteering to help the Ace Tech High School (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACE_Amandla_Charter_High_School https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACE_Amandla_Charter_High_Sch...) more than 10 years ago, as part of their Robotics Team. The problems I saw were myriad but it was common to see lockers decorated with flowers, for kids who died recently. I totally understand and agree with the educated person’s poverty, bias, etc. arguments. But when a problem gets this bad first you need to stop it, and then work on long term goals. Just answer this question: if your child had 10% chance of getting shot and killed walking to/from from school, what would your position be on any technology that can reduce that by even 1%.

lolinder 3y ago
> Just answer this question: your child had 10% chance of getting shot and killed walking to/fro from school, what would your position be on any technology that can reduce that by even 1%. Just to put some actual perspective on the numbers: about 40 kids are killed in all of New Mexico each year and about 20 of those are suicides (still tragic but not the walking-home-from-school kind). That's still too many, but is nowhere near 10%. You're inflating the numbers to trigger emotions. Making wide scale policy decisions based on your emotions surrounding anecdotal incidents is not a good policy. I feel for the families that lose their children, but I don't believe that acting for the sake of acting is safe. Acting in the heat of a crisis is how we got the TSA and the NSA, which we still haven't managed to get rid of. The risk of creating an enormous and impossible to get rid of surveillance state to save 1% of 20 kids per year (2 kids every 10 years) frankly isn't worth it.
- Jun8 3y ago
  I’m talking about high crime areas in big cities. Here’s a data point from Chicago: in May 2021, up to that time in the year 108 children were shot, 16 of them died: https://abc7chicago.com/amp/chicago-shootings-child-shot-teen-kid/10663331/ https://abc7chicago.com/amp/chicago-shootings-child-shot-tee... It’s not the “heat of the crisis”, this has been going on for years now here. See this WaPo article from 2013, from when Michelle Obama attended the funeral of a 15 year-old girl: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/michelle-obama-heads-to-chicago-for-slain-teenagers-funeral/2013/02/09/418a9ea4-716e-11e2-8b8d-e0b59a1b8e2a_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/michelle-obama-heads...

deleted 3y ago

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zzz999 3y ago

[flagged]

mamaluigie 3y ago

They are probably solar powered running on something with low power so they don't have to restrict the locations of hiding these devices to areas directly connected to the electrical grid.

Slava_Propanei 3y ago

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