148 replies
18h5m
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
Because there are nicer neighborhoods and less than nice neighborhoods? In so far as I can tell this is true to various degrees in every place I've ever lived or visited. Colloquially, some neighborhoods have manicured lawns, other neighborhoods have cars on blocks - it's 'obvious'[0] that the latter warrants more policing.
[0]The truth of it is arguable, perhaps, but it is very obvious.
It’s actually incredibly unclear why houses with cars on blocks would warrant more policing than houses with manicured lawns. Why don’t you elaborate?
"Incredibly unclear"? Really? Not the OP, but let's spell it out:
Manicuring a lawn is expensive and serves no useful purpose, so most practitioners have disposable income and/or spare time, and care about keeping up appearances.
Putting a car up on blocks implies it's being used for spare parts, which is generally not something the well-off need to engage in (they buy new and use professionals for repairs as needed), and having one on your front lawn in particular implies that you value spare parts more than appearances.
So both are reasonable proxies of wealth, and wealth correlates inversely with the kind of violent crime you could detect with gunshots.
The reason it’s unclear is that nothing either of you have said has anything to do with policing.
Edit: you added the correlation bit after I replied, but why do you believe that to be the case? If you have more police in an area, of course they’ll hear more gunshots there. That doesn’t necessarily mean there actually are more gunshots.
What you’re actually saying is “poor people need more policing”, which is A) offensive and B) counterproductive.
Why?
Let's imagine a city divided in two halves of equal population. West City is poor and has a high crime rate, East City is rich and has a low crime rate. Should police resources be allocated equally to both? How about public health facilities or welfare payments?
In the real world, wealth is relatively easily measured and crime rate is not. The question no one seems to be willing to answer is: why do you believe poor people commit more crime?
It's not a matter of belief, there's a well known link between poverty and crime.
The ultimate reason is that if you are poor, the proceeds of crime (theft, burglary, robbery etc) are comparatively more meaningful than to somebody who is wealthy, while the cost of getting caught is comparatively less. A rich professional does not steal loaves of bread to feed their family, because they don't need to and they risk losing their entire livelihood if they do. If you're poor, unemployed and your kids are hungry, the risk/reward calculus is very different.
The most costly form of theft — by far — is not burglary or robbery but wage theft. That is a crime overwhelmingly committed by rich professionals and rarely enforced. So if we really want to get serious about stopping theft, we should allocate much more resources to investigating businesses than putting beat cops on the street.
There’s not actually a well known link between poverty and crime in the way you imply. We’ve just decided that we only care about some people committing some crime some of the time.
Ah, so this is what you were so keen to steer the conversation to. Alas, despite the name, wage theft is not considered a criminal act (misdemeanor/felony) in most US states, so enforcement is left to the Department of Labor and the IRS, not police.
Now I'd agree with you that society should be putting more resources into combating this, but I'm still going to ask you to respond to my earlier question: for the hypothetical city with high-crime and low-crime halves, which should the police focus on?
I’m not really steering the conversation anywhere. Wage theft is a felony in many states. Which is the point I’m making: crime is socially constructed, and two big reasons that some areas are “low crime” and some are “high crime” is that we’ve decided to A) selectively criminalize things and B) selectively enforce those laws.
As to your question: if you are playing SimCity and you have a little number in your omniscient UI that reads “crime rate” and police are your one lever to address that, by all means add more police to the area. But in the real world that’s not how things work.
Everything you say, is an attempt to make people look elsewhere, but at the obvious place.
Your point is that crime is spread in a manner, unrelated to where society think crime happens, that there is no correlation between crime and poverty of a neighborhood, and that most likely an inverse relationship between race and crime?
Oh, and according to you, one important way to arrive at your conclusion is to change our definition of crime.
Some crimes, like shoplifting, are hard to measure because it often goes unreported because the defunded police don't respond to them. But the murder rate is easy to measure.
When people put bars on their windows on the ground floor, it is not the police causing them to be willing to spend the money on that.
Crime can also cause poverty. For example, if the family breadwinner goes to jail, the family slips into poverty.
Is the murder rate easy to measure?
As best we can tell, “stand your ground” laws in states like Florida result in hundreds of deaths each year. How many of those would be considered murder in other states?
Police killed over 1,300 people last year. How many of those people truly posed an immediate danger to others, and how many were murdered by a trigger-happy cop who was not held accountable by his colleagues?
Crime, even serious crime like murder, is socially constructed. It’s not objective; society decides what’s illegal and who gets to do it anyway.
Yes. The medical examiner decides if a death is homicide or not.
Lacks context - the number of homicides in the same year.
They're still considered homicide.
That figure is for all deaths where police were involved. A subset of that would be the police killing. Furthermore, if someone points a gun at a policeman, and the policeman kills him in response, that is self-defense, not murder. There are officers killed while on duty, too:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_law_enforcement_office...
Less than 10% of homicides result from police action.
In Washington state, each death from a police encounter are investigated by law, and charges get filed if the officer broke the law. That would include being trigger-happy.
It's objective enough. My larger point is there aren't a lot of (or even any) homicides that go undetected in wealthy communities. Furthermore, your figures lack context as you didn't compare with the total amount of homicides. Your figures are not enough to claim that the higher homicide rates in poor communities are the result of police murders.
None of this addresses my point. You can measure dead bodies. Whether or not those get counted in the murder rate depends on social factors — are police honestly investigating themselves? are there laws that exculpate killing humans? etc
Arizona has a bill in the works that would make it legal to kill people trespassing anywhere on one’s land, intended to allow farmers with large plots of land to shoot migrants. The bill will probably get vetoed, but in a world where it passes it’s very likely that the number of killings will increase but the number of murders will drop.
Dead bodies are objective. “Murder” is not.
Because poor people tend to be stupid and only stupid people commit violent crimes
So let me get your point straight: your worry is that since wealthy areas have less sensors gun-crime in those areas will go under reported?
Idk about your neck of the woods but where i live if I hear a gunshot I call the police with a high probability. If i see someone brandishing weapons i do the same. And of course i call the police/emergency services if i see someone with a gunshot wound. These all create the statistical evidence independent of the sensor systems.
When I was little, the family a couple doors down had cars up on blocks in front. My mom lamented that, she thought it was awful.
Enter my teen years. I had cars up on blocks in the driveway. My poor mom!
What seems more obvious to me is that the more surveillance you do in any area (regardless of whether the lawns are manicured), the more crime you're going to find there. If you put 5 cops patrolling the wealthiest, nicest areas of your city, and 1 cop patrolling a less wealthy less nice area, the 5 cops will find more crime than the 1 cop. Even if you don't assume crime is uniformly distributed (which it probably isn't), it's logical that more surveillance -> more crime found.
Yeah, that’s the original point I made which is currently being downvoted.
I think there's a lot of quiet classism going on in this thread, and it's easier for these guys to just drive by and hit the downvote button than to actually speak their mind and tell us why they think poor people -> criminals.
The causation more likely goes the other way: When an area gets the reputation of being higher crime (because of reality or because of bias from more police saturation), that area becomes cheaper to live in, and poorer people can then afford to live there.
In Seattle, the bank tellers are behind bulletproof glass. In the surrounding communities, there's no bulletproof glass.
I don't think it's more police presence that causes banks to install the armor. More likely it's the lack of police presence that results in armored banks.
Uhm, I’ve only seen one bank in Seattle like that (in pioneer square), maybe there are more south Seattle?
Definitely my Bank of America branch in Ballard doesn’t have bullet proof glass.
Capitol Hill.
Isn’t that called de-gentrification, or maybe ghetto-ization? However, I think it’s the opposite with property crime (richer neighborhoods attract property crime because their is lots of property to steal).
I'm not sure there are lot of murders, carjackings, breakins, etc., in wealthier neighborhoods going undetected. Why would wealthier victims be less likely to report crime?
Is it? I don't see it as at all obvious. It seems utterly ridiculous to me to increase policing in sync with socioeconomic deprivation. The blindingly obvious thing is to invest in solving the problems that cause the disparity, not to criminalize people who are living in poverty.
Crime is one of the problems that causes the disparity.
This is in fact the crux of the problem. By significantly increasing monitoring of areas with higher crime rates, you inadvertently create a vicious cycle feedback loop: The more you monitor an area, the more samples you get, biasing the stats (because your sampling is no longer uniform). Then these stats are used to justify more monitoring and policing in the area, further biasing your data.
So by monitoring an area with high crime rate, you catch more crime, which results in more policing for the area with a confirmed high crime rate?
And that's a bad thing?
It's biasing the sample. For example, drug usage among teens are roughly the same between white, hispanic and african americans but african americans are more likely to be arrested and charged for drug possession or usage. Here the difference is probably because african americans are stopped and searched more even though their usage is about the same as whites.
Are the rates of drug dealing the same through?
Let me put it this way. The biggest drug epidemic of this century was the opioid crisis. Half a million Americans died. The primary people responsible are white billionaires, and we know exactly who they are — yet they were never even arrested.
This is whataboutism.
Some sort of system which detects prescription abuse should not be deployed over utility poles in low income neighborhoods. It should be deployed where abuse is happening, for instance in pharmacy computers etc.
Also "white billionaire" part is low key racist against blacks. They are "incidentally" whites billionaire criminals, they can as well be black billionaire criminals, unless there's a fundamental difference in criminal tendencies among races.
Read the thread again; the comment I responded to literally asked if there was a difference in rates of drug dealing between white people and Black people.
Or a fundamental difference in billionaire tendencies, don't forget that possibility.
The difference being that they convinced doctors to hand this stuff out like candy. It was all legal. Which is why it got that bad in the first place.
Right, which is why it’s asinine to talk about “crime rate” as though it weren’t wholly dependent on whom we as a society want to call criminals.
"Asinine" is a bit much. There can be huge problems that aren't illegal, but that doesn't mean the crime rate is totally useless. You just have to treat it carefully, like any measurement.
And the rates of drug-related violence and property crimes.
It’s probably a cultural factor. Most criminal enterprises want to be discreet in order to avoid detection by law enforcement and rival enterprises. Whereas the black criminal community has made an entire industry of advertising their criminality through music and fashion.
By monitoring any area more, you find more crime, which results in that area being considered as "high crime" and in turn increasing monitoring--that's the cycle OP is talking about.
That’s an oversimplification.
First of all, unless you’re completely overwhelmed and not even bothering to enforce certain laws, you’re going to find out about most of the serious crime that takes place. Law enforcement is made aware of homicides either through missing persons reports or the discovery of dead bodies. Armed robberies and grand theft are usually reported if, for no other reason, than to create a paper trail for insurance claims. People who get shot or stabbed badly enough to end up in a hospital, end up in a hospital so there’s a reporting mechanism there. It’s not normal for most major crimes to happen completely outside of the attention of law enforcement unless things have gone very very wrong (which admittedly they have in many American cities). And much of the time, you can infer where these crimes happened.
The benefit of increasing patrols and surveillance in a specific area is more about gathering evidence to solve crimes, and less about discovering those crimes to begin with. In some cases you might end up discovering more crime (especially when gangs are involved and people are intimidated into not reporting crimes) but if you monitor areas where any serious crime would already get reported in the first place, you won’t actually find more serious crime there.
The devices monitor specifically for gunshots. I find it hard to believe that gunshots in wealthy area's often go undetected, with or without those devices.
Yes, in a country filled with badly trained police that open deadly fire upon hearing a firework[0] or an acorn dropping on a car hood, more police presence is a bad thing.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39577403
The point is supposed to be that the monitoring and increased policing makes at least certain crimes impossible therefore improving the area for the rest of us.
The farce is the utter failure of the 'survalience state' to actually catch and prosecute people.
Perhaps in the US. Some surveillance states like Singapore and China are quite effective at catching criminals (thoughtcrime and otherwise).
Putting aside how easy it is to compensate for this (e.g. report gunshots per area under surveillance), I'm curious how much crime estimates based on ShotSpotter or general policing differ from the frequency with which dead bodies are produced by an area. This latter measure mostly immune to overpolicing bias.
So this might be true for things like increased patrols for drug crimes as an example, but this doesn't apply to shootings. Shootings get reported no matter where they are. When someone shoots a gun in a wealthy part of town, it's not going unreported... Shot spotter simply allows for an instant report instead of having to wait for a phone call. Wealthy areas aren't getting away with more shootings just because of less patrols.
I've noticed a lot of people start with the desire to not enforce laws, and work from there. So when there's more law enforcement activity in poorer areas, we get claims that the poor are being targeted and overpoliced. But when the wealthier people say they want more law enforcement in their area, the response is always "Why are safe areas like yours trying to take these law enforcement resources away from the poor areas who need it?"
The positions are entirely inconsistent, but that's because anything is being said in an effort to remove enforcement. This was stated pretty explicitly a few years back with "Defund The Police", and now that it's lost popularity it's being pushed covertly.
Ironically, for all the talk about needing to remove police to help the poor, it's the poor who have suffered the most from the massive increase in crime these policies have caused. Here's a community meeting from a poorer area a few months back, where the residents are complaining that people who live in safer areas are running an experiment in their areas that's leading to a massive spike in crime and death[1].
[1] https://wjla.com/news/local/gun-violence-shootings-crime-you...
The funniest part is having a (presumably) wealthy person knowledgeably inform poor people, who are the victims of these crimes, that they are "overpoliced".
From the point of view of someone who can roll into a poor area, say they are "overpoliced", and roll out again...yes, it probably does that seem way. That is because they aren't likely to get shot so the police are the problem, not the bullets.
For the person who can get shot, the bullets are the issue (this isn't limited to this area, you are seeing in multiple policy areas that wealthy people enthusiastically advocate for the state to be rolled back like some kind of giga-Milton Friedman...as with libertarians, they aren't the ones that have to deal with the consequences of this).
Yeah, I always get the impression that the people talking about this really haven't spoken to the people in these neighborhoods. I've walked in neighborhoods here where the longtime residents came up to me and told me I should leave because it was dangerous (and I've spoken to others who have had a similar experience). It's always the people who grew up in suburbs and moved to the city as an adult who are dismissive of crime.
Crime and poor schools are usually what make "bad neighborhoods" bad. It's why many of the people there will save and downsize to move to nicer neighborhoods. Whenever I've talked to people living in those areas, they always want more enforcement and to have their neighborhoods cleaned up.
A lot of people want to speak for the residents there, without ever actually speaking to the residents there.
In my area teachers are assigned somewhat randomly to schools. The goodness or badness of a school is 100% correlated with the kids, not the teachers. A single disruptive child can stop a class. When most of the class is disruptive, good luck teaching anything to anyone
Yeah, our government here spent years pouring money into low performing high schools to revitalize them, to little avail. Here's an interesting article on a very expensive (they spend $63,000 a year per student) boarding school they sent some kids to for free, that didn't have much of an impact[1].
Finally, what they did was they decided to split in half the high performing cohort from the best/wealthiest high school into two high schools. This cohort was now much smaller than the maximum capacity for either high school, which allows for a lot of out of boundary seats.
The problem is, even still they don't seem to be able to admit how important a high performing cohort is. If they did, there are plenty of things they could do to attract more of them to public schools and neighborhood high schools. For instance, there's at least one high school in the city that is very low performing, but has a large number of very high performing students in boundary. The parents want the school to guarantee some high level classes for their students, but it won't. They want the school to provide a safe environment, but the school can't commit to that (it's hard to remove students even if they are repeatedly violent). And if they do, they run the risk of national media reporters (who would never send their kids to these types of schools themselves) going after them[2].
[1] https://twitter.com/notcomplex_/status/1762607726817923545 [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/23/podcasts/nice-white-paren...
it's a nitpick, but I think it's the reverse... property values don't appreciate as quickly in these areas, in this current market if you told millennials that gun violence lowered house values they'd probably fire off a few shots themselves
If you let inequality and unofficial segregation fester long enough eventually every map is the same map
Including the businesses that don’t want to be robbed, looted or have to pay into a protection racket. So those who are forced to stay have no way of making an honest living.
The notion that poverty causes crime rather than crime causes poverty is a great disservice to the poor.
The way this is phrased sounds like “the poorer you are, the more likely you would want to be where the shots are”. Which is obviously false.
One person wants to be where the shot is (he pulled the trigger) but yeah, most of the poor people would rather be away but lack the ability.
You see, both gentrification and white flight are bad, and so is the very existence of low-crime underpoliced neighborhoods.
I'm curious if the author lives in the wealthier or non wealthy region.
I do not own a gun. I currently live in a city and would be happy to learn they were installing shot spotter near me.
It's maybe the least intrusive type of surveillance there is. It just says a signal if there is a loud noise in public.
edit: previous statement not correct but leaving it up as it's been responded to
Shotspotter is trash.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/chicago-watchdog-harshly...
https://twitter.com/greg_doucette/status/1512138327205589004 (criminal defense attorney)
https://boingboing.net/2022/04/12/shotspotter-wastes-million...
I supported units with them while I was a contractor to the US Army, and the soldiers I talked to didn't think much of it either.
It works very well where I live (DC) and I and people I know have seen police respond to actual things with shotspotter
Many shootings where nobody calls it in and cops respond with shotspotter
How would you know no one called it in?
Also ShotSpotter has false positives. You have no way of knowing if you (or it) even heard a gun or one of many other things.
What's the problem with false positives in this case?
I'm pretty sure, "don't bother with this technology which reports shots to the cops, because it has false positives" is a very weak argument.
If the false positive rate is 5%, it’s probably not much of a problem in terms of the overall balance of effectiveness.
If the false positive rate is 95%, it’s pretty obviously going to be a diversion of police resources from whatever else they could be doing if not responding to zero-value alerts.
https://www.edgewortheconomics.com/experience-independent-au...
This claims the false positive rate is under 3%. It's based on Shotspotter's statistics and "independent audit" statistics.
Not sure how trustworthy either is, but without better stats from anywhere else I have no reason to doubt the claim the false positive is pretty low.
Seems like even if false positive rate was at 50% it wouldn't be that big of a deal. Cities have police on patrol at all times anyway - it would just mean sending someone to drive 5 minutes away to see if there is visible a disturbance instead of them driving around the area they were currently randomly patrolling.
If police show up to your family residence with guns drawn for a false positive, you might have a different perspective.
Here is one instance
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Seth_Rich
We talked to the cops (not in this instance but in another homicide)
You’re probably thinking of Boomerang, not ShotSpotter if you’re talking about military use.
Maybe? I thought it was the same system of microphones just mounted on a vehicle, maybe it was different.
Anyway, they found it unhelpful. "Wouldn't even notice our own gun shots" and stuff like that.
Yeah, you’re thinking of Boomerang. ShotSpotter did some limited body-worn stuff for the military back in the day, but the vehicle mounted stuff is all Boomerang. Entirely different approaches (distributed microphones vs. a single microphone array at the expected target) done by different companies.
as a community we really ought to be suspicious of claims like this. There's another word for "acoustic sensor" and it's "microphone". When a corporation says "trust us, we only use the data for good", we should collectively raise our eyebrows, knowing that when data is collected for one stated purpose and stored, that the data at rest will always be used for additional purposes. Once data is collected, the number of things it may be used for is always unbounded; any claims to the contrary should not be taken at face value.
Is there any evidence of shotspotter using the data that it collects for something other than good? Even if shotspotter collected audio that didn't contain gunshot-like sounds (which they don't; without a triggering event, the sensors never write the audio out to a file or send it over the network for review), how could they monitize it or do anything malicious with it? How could they tie loose audio of people walking around to the identities of those people (besides the method in the two court cases cited by the article, where homicide detectives listened to the audio of the shootings and heard verbal exchanges incident to the shootings where the victim verbally identified the shooters)?
It it's so amusing to me that people who carry around a phone 24/7 spend time imagining these intricate Rube Goldberg surveillance systems to be afraid of.
This isn't intricate or Rube Goldberg.
When I joined Google I started thinking to myself "geez, we care so much. why does HN hate us?"
It clicked for me when someone pointed out that even if you trust group of employees X with a mountain of data, nothing prevents group of Y from eventually selling it. And after what I saw my last couple years, I'm utterly convinced some McKinsey-ite will be telling 2050's CEO that's a great idea and in fact the moral option. Maximize shareholder value => stonk go up => Americans have safe retirements.
Why am I talking about Google?
People talk past eachother on this stuff. The problem isn't that "have they ever done anything bad?", it's that the incentive structure is set up such that something that crosses the line will eventually happen. They have an incentive to keep the customer happy.
And as the article, and comments below from 1.5 hours before you posted point out, there's no room for argument on that: this already happened. A court threw out info because it was illegally obtained.
These devices don't send audio over the network unless a shooting-like noise is detected. I get it, if the state can listen to all of our communications that are immediately coincident with shootings, what privacy will any of us have?
But in all seriousness, you should actually read the section for that court case. Here's all of the text for that case from the link:
""" Commonwealth v. Denison, No. BRCR2012-0029 (Mass. Super. Ct. Oct. 7, 2015) "ShotSpotter is a listening and recording system that runs 24/7, attuned to the sound of gunfire. When the system hears gunfire, or what it recognizes as gunfire, it locates it, reports it, preserves the recording, and send the recording to the customer within seconds.” The defendant, charged with first degree murder, moved to suppress a recording made by ShotSpotter of an verbal exchange among numerous individuals before and after the fatal gunshots. The court rejected that the argument that the defendant had a reasonable expectation of privacy under the Massachusetts Declaration of Rights because the exchange was “audible by anyone passing and was in fact heard by a crowd of neighbors and other witnesses.” However, the court found that the exchange was an “oral communication” and that the recording was a prohibited “interception” under the Massachusetts Wiretap Act because the defendant had no knowledge that the exchange was being recorded. The court also found that the interception was “willful” because the police had “purposefully directed the placement of the sensors.” The court granted the motion to suppress: “the continuous secret audio surveillance of selective urban neighborhoods ** is the type of surreptitious eavesdropping as an investigative tool that the Legislature sought to prohibit." """ [0]
The verbal exchange was recorded because it was incident to the shooting that triggered the recording. In addition to recording the shooter(s) shoot the victim(s), it also recorded the shooter(s) and victim(s) speak before the shooting. This was in public so there wasn't an expectation of privacy, and I can't imagine this is the kind of recording that the Massachusetts's legislature "sought to prohibit".
[0] https://www.mass.gov/files/documents/2018/01/08/CRIMINAL%20E...
How does this jibe with the fact that the police can apparently request a ShotSpotter operator review of audio recordings for up to 30 days if a known shooting is missed by the system? How does this jibe with the fact that the system has apparently at least twice recorded voice conversations that were used (and thrown out in one case due to violating wiretap laws) in court cases?
Edit and even if we trust ShotSpotter to do the right thing, how do we know their systems are secure enough to keep those recordings away from less-honorable actors?
The website says the audio buffer on the sensor holds the last 30 hours before overwriting. So police have less than 30 hours to flag a missed shooting so shotspotter staff can check sensors for audio around the shooting time.
Regarding the court cases, I literally included the entire linked info for one of those Court cases in the post you're responding to. For both of the cases, the verbal exchange was at the same time as the shooting. In the other case, the victim verbally identifies the person about to murder them just before they were murdered. The argument that shotspotter is a wiretap falls apart under the slightest bit of scrutiny and there's no way the legislature meant to protect the right of people to be free from audio recording while shooting someone in public.
It seems plainly to be a wiretap under the laws of my state (MA): anything “capable of transmitting, receiving, amplifying or recording a wire or oral communication.”
With some additional carve outs, none of which appear to apply to ShotSpotter.
I’m not arguing that properly scoped and protected ShotSpotter couldn’t be allowed by MA legislators, but it sure doesn’t fall apart under scrutiny by my reading of the law.
The court seems to agree in the text you copied in your upthread quote:
Which I think is the proper interpretation of the written law.
I’d also like to enjoy being free from audio recording while near loud noises. And the argument that it is a wiretap has apparently not fallen apart in at least one court of law.
And regarding your last question, the first of the two court cases where verbal communications were captured (because they were at the same time as the shooting), was in 2007. So shotspotter has been around for a while.
Have there been any breaches where less-honorable actors have managed to hack into sensors and exfiltrate data? Have there been any breaches of the actual recordings of shootings?
Being skeptical of face value claims makes sense if they have never been used before. But, they've been in place in some cities since before 2000 and after searching I'm still not aware of any incident audio from it was used that didn't have to do with a gunshot.
Looking into it more all the cases of audio being used in court, that was not audio of gunshots, was audio immediately after a gunshot. Spotshotter is open about recording that and it seems completely reasonable to me this audio should be used.
What's most boggling to me about the criticism is Albuquerque apparently has 10,000 cameras law enforcement has access to. I know we likely disagree on the usefulness of those, but if you are privacy concerned why would shotspotter even be on the same level of concern as cameras that don't need a gunshot to start filming?
https://apnews.com/article/albuquerque-crime-cameras-technol...
From the article:
Fair enough. My previous statement was incorrect. Edited above.
I understand the hypothetical case they could be misused but I'm still not aware of any cases they actually were.
I am happy shotspotter helped in the prosecution of this person who needlessly killed someone. I realize there could be ways to abuse this for things having nothing to do with gun violence, but you could also say DUI traffic stops or DNA collection could be misued. That doesn't mean they are misused.
But that’s not how shotspotter is supposed to work. It’s supposed to detect gunshots, not be used for evidence of voice recordings. If that was the point they could just put microphones recording everyone and play them back whenever there was a crime.
The voice recordings were only picked up because they were incident to shootings. Without the shooting, the audio wouldn't have been written out to file or ever be heard by anyone.
Says who? The people behind these invasive systems who push back hard on the slightest attempt at basic accountability?
100% this, IMO any of these law enforcement vendors like ShotSpotter, Harris (stingray), Taser/Axon, etc. which insist on keeping any and all details secret deserve zero trust. Anything they say without actual data analyzed by an independent third party is worth less than what I scooped out of my cats' box this morning.
The public conversation relies on public data, so if your company doesn't want the public to have the data then your company and its clients should not be given any benefit of the doubt by the public.
Yeah, but the only reason anyone listened to those sections (or was even able to listen to these sections) of tape was because they contained shootings. These systems work on a rolling buffer storage system; they're constantly recording to a buffer that contains the last N minutes of audio and if a triggering event occurs, it gets written out to a file that is reviewed by a person and if it contains a gunshot, that person confirms there was a gunshot (ie that it wasn't a firework or something) and a notification goes out to the relevant police district/precinct/whatever for that area. If there's just people talking but no gunshots, the buffer never writes out and it's overwritten before too long.
Do I have an expectation of privacy in a conversation I have in public?
This is probably false. There have been two convictions as a result of recordings of conversations that happened through the devices.
I, for one, do not want microphones capable of recording my conversations placed near me by the government. Not because I'm paranoid the government is conspiring against me, but rather because I have zero confidence they're storing those recordings securely, being handled by only authorized persons, and being deleted within a timely manner.
It sounds like you are paranoid. Why would the government be listening to a conversation you might be having near a device used for tracking gunshots? Is there some little man somewhere just waiting to pounce on you or anyone just for that purpose?
I don't know how effective these devices are but any tool that helps the police go after criminals is a good thing and no one should be fighting against good things.
Over a two year period in the US, there were over 600 cases where police officers and civilians with access to law enforcement databases violated internal policies and safeguards to access private data about "romantic partners, business associates, neighbors, journalists and others for reasons that have nothing to do with daily police work". This is certainly an undercount, as this is just who got caught and the department didn't cover it up. These are the cases they admitted to doing it and were charged, so the records are public.
"Among those punished: an Ohio officer who pleaded guilty to stalking an ex-girlfriend and who looked up information on her; a Michigan officer who looked up home addresses of women he found attractive; and two Miami-Dade officers who ran checks on a journalist after he aired unflattering stories about the department."
https://apnews.com/general-news-699236946e3140659fff8a2362e1...
The same thing may have occurred with an office just sitting in his squad car on a street corner. Will we now pull them off the streets for that reason? Will we require them to keep their windows rolled up or wear noise cancelling ear muffs?
The cases you cite are of people who did things wrong. The cases you cite have nothing to do with the advantages this gives to the police in protecting citizens and solving crimes.
Why do people keep fighting against the police who are trying to defend us against crimes? In general, these tools help and don't hurt anyone. Lest anyone forgets, the police are on our side.
“paranoid” is a symptom of a disease involving delusions (ie false beliefs) and is not a synonym for “anxious about”.
It’s also not paranoia if the government does actively conspire to imprison as many people as possible on flimsy evidence.
Both possible usages are incorrect here.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not after you
The author’s neighborhood is mentioned in the article.
“The "pocket of poverty" south of Downtown where I live, the historically Spanish Barelas and historically Black South Broadway, are predictably well covered.”
just remember, the shotspotter may well make police come.... AFTER you were shot... why the aversion to getting a gun??
Also, that there is a veil of secrecy of the system's installation and exact capabilities suggest that incorrect or excessive reports could provide pretense for more invasive policing.
There's an interesting control system feedback complaint with a lot to it;
* historically there's been a lot of "black crime" in the US due to the US police watching black neighbourhoods excessively and being absent elsewhere .. take this all the way back in time to Tulsa and before.
* Subsequently there's been a lot of "black crime" as neighbourhoods have been destroyed by occasional mobs (Tulsa), frequent division by freeways and toxic waste dumps, and the removal of many adult males to the prison system as a result of all the "observed crime" leading to an excess of young males with few prospects.
* Based on that data the modern survellience goes to where all the crime has been created^H observed.
Meanwhile entire areas of US cities get on by considerably less police present and oversight and a great deal less observed crime.
Keep telling yourself all that nonsense while the cities crumble around you.
Wealthy areas absolutely have a higher police per capita presence than even the most well funded low income neighborhood. Why are those areas not “observing” all this dreamed up extra crime? Hell sometimes these places pay for their own security.
How about a culture of violence and crime being glorified?
Big cities are pretty safe. For instance you more likely to be a victim of a crime in rural northern Wisconsin, like Barron County, than you are in Milwaukee.
Don't let your narrative be shaped by stats that aren't proportional.
People say this but I'm skeptical. I regularly leave valuables in my car. My windows have never been broken. I've never had anything stolen. Nor do I know anyone who has.
All the stores have free-to-use, unlocked public bathrooms. All the product is available on the shelf for anyone to grab.
When I go on travel to more urban locations, that's not what I see. Unfortunately the urban blight is creeping closer every year, and judging by the crime reports, in a few years or decades I too will be experiencing these joys.
I have heard in especially bad-off areas desperate meth addicts are a theft issue. Usually they target people they know, so small comfort as it may be to their friends and relatives, it's usually not a random crime.
City centers have far, far more theft crime objectively from a dollar value perspective. The vast majority of this crime comes from two sources: employers and police. This is widely documented fact.
I am extremely pro-labor and would have much stricter enforcement and severer penalties for wage theft, but home burglary, carjackings, and muggings are qualitatively different than wage theft and it does not make sense to compare the two.
Double checking I think I'm wrong. I may have been thinking of some specific crime. But Milwaukee is specifically bad due to historical segregation issues. Anyway drug and addiction issues have hit rural issues really bad
I'm familiar enough with Barron County, WI to doubt this. I grew up in neighboring Rusk County and my mother spends about half her time in Cumberland. While there are some disturbing incidents of violent crime, very few people there would feel that are at high risk of being a crime victim.
My quick attempt at searching suggests violent crime is 220/100K for Barron (https://www.areavibes.com/barron-wi/crime/) versus 1,509/100K for Milwaukee (https://www.areavibes.com/milwaukee-wi/crime/). That site gives Barron an "A" for crime versus an "F" for Milwaukee.
These stats aren't quite perfect, since this is for Barron the town versus Barron the county, but it really doesn't seem to support your view. The other small towns in Barron County that I checked were rated even better than Barron itself and rated as "A+".
I'm willing to believe that there is some axis on which your statement is correct but I doubtful it's the one that most people would use. Can you offer any more support for your position than just your say so?
Edit: As a quick gauge for others, I'll mention that most cars are still kept unlocked. The joke was that they were only locked in the fall, to prevent people from "gifting" you their excess zucchini. My father always left the keys in his cars as well, in case someone needed to borrow it. Our house was locked only if we left for long vacations. The key was lost sometime after I left home, and no attempt was made to replace it. I'm not nearly as familiar with Milwaukee, but I'd be surprised if this is the norm there.
Those could all be true and still the statement true.
For example if all crime in Barron county was entirely random as to selection of victim, and in Milwaukee it 100% only happened to poor blacks, then infinite crime in Milwaukee could never affect you unless you were poor and black, whereas Barron county could affect anyone.
But I suspect that there’s a sleight of hand on “crime” - people usually mean crime by force against another, but technically suicide by meth overdose is two or three crimes.
I agree it's possible with some definition of crime, and I'd be interested to see what that definition is. I also think there's an interesting effect where it's possible for there to be less of some kinds of crimes in "high crime areas" because people take greater precautions. I also agree with OP's comment that drug related problems in Northern Wisconsin have gotten much worse since I last lived there. Still, I'd like to see the stats rather than just the assertion.
Isn’t Milwaukee one of the most segregated cities in the country with low income higher crimes areas juuust outside city lines? Great example.
Their statement about observed crime was an historical claim (as in: "historically there's been a lot of ...").
his point was that he thinks low income areas are being targeted with a higher police presence. That is so wrong it’s hard to believe oc has ever been to a city in the us. I actually doubt he has for any serious amount of time. High tax areas are covered with police in US cities at a rate far above poor inner city areas.
I lived in Menlo Park for a number of years in the late 80s and early 90s - in group house a few blocks away from the border with East Palo Alto. At the time, East PA was poor and had a massively underfunded police department. This resulted in drug dealers realizing the city was a great place to deal from - as the probability they'd get caught was really low. In 1992, East PA had the US's highest per capita murder rate. (We'd hear small arms fire many nights and I remember listening to the radio and hearing a BBC reporter calling in a report from less than a mile away from my house (talking from a phone booth in the since demolished Whiskey Gulch neighborhood) - talking about a war zone like atmosphere with dealers openly carrying Uzi's.) Anyway, in spite of all this nothing ever happened on our street. We walked around without any fear of crime at all. Correlation isn't causation, but it's hard to shake an impression that having an actual police department had something to do with that. Incentives matter and culture tends to follow if they change hard enough.
As a test, you can call the police from an address in a wealthy area, report a crime in progress, and do the same from an address in a poor area, and time how long it takes before they show up.
"The police disproportionately focus on poor areas for drug possession / traffic offences / white collar crime" is an important criticism, and the kind of thing awareness of which leads to reform and fairness in policing.
"There's just as much gun crime in rich areas as poor ones, but the police focus on the poor areas because of historical racism" is an extraordinary claim that should require extraordinary evidence, and the kind of thing that holds back improvements in police work.
I guess you could believe that when rich people are murdered it is not reported and quietly hushed up, but when poor people are the full force of the state swings into action.
Hasn't that historically been the opposite? If a rich/white person is murdered, it's a headline-grabbing tragedy. Even serial killers are more likely to evade detection if their targets are minorities, though the reasons for that are more complicated than just systemic prejudice.
That's the point. Believing the things that would have to be true for GGGP's viewpoint to be even plausible, let alone true, requires a complete divorce from reality.
Gotcha! The comment parent of mine makes a lot more sense now.
Exactly. If it had been drug crime, I’d be totally prepared to believe everyone in a rich area is coked beyond reason and gets away with it.
But gun crimes are different (unless they’re saying something like “possession” but in most states that’s some variation of legal unless a felon).
Please don't engage in ideological warfare, it's boring and against site guidelines.
No reasonable person could look at any meaningful measure of violent crime rates and come to your conclusions.
Ah yes so it's police presence that makes crime the number one cause of death for young black males.
You can control for this by just looking at homicides. Dead bodies are pretty objective. And the homicides also follow the same trend as the general crime rate.
But if you're not listening for the guns then you're not going to find the crime that does happen, will you? It's either saying "we don't care about it because it's less frequent" (which is stupid—you still build a fire station in places where buildings burn down less frequently) or "it's easier to keep ourselves busy when we fish in a barrel".
If you were to design a system to spot a certain kind of crime in real time, would you place it in zones historically more plagued by that kind of crime or in zones that experienced it scarcely? It's hard to buy into the rhetoric of "it's only fair if you monitor the crime equally" if you have already independently sampled it for decades and by now know the zones where it's much likely to happen.
Would you patrol a desert in the same way you patrol a busy road intersection if you're trying to prevent car accidents?
The problem is Bayesian priors look an awful lot like racism to the unaided eye, enough so that it's really hard to justify them. Or maybe it's racism masquerading as a Bayesian prior. I don't see how to know for sure either way.
Also if such devices (and law enforcement) worked well to reduce crime, the crime would move to less-surveilled areas. We don't see that happening anywhere.
I didn't realize that there's a conservation law for crime. Is this some kind of ingenious application of Noether's theorem that I haven't heard of?
If you're going to be sarcastic, you should to make a point that makes sense.
Criminals react to successful surveillance and law enforcement. It's idiotic to suggest that they wouldn't.
You are still claiming that crime is conserved. It's not possible, even likely, that a reduced cost-benefit for committing crime shifts preferences toward some non-criminal activity with a more attractive risk-reward profile?
Conservation of crime isn't a claim I made and it isn't relevant to my comment.
If ShotSpotter were successful, crime would move to a different area and/or go down. Arrests would be made, so it's impossible to assume crime rates wouldn't change in that scenario.
Neither happening in correlation with ShotSpotter installation, which is one way we know these tactics don't actually work.
Violent crime is not a zero-sum game.
You mean these zones? https://whitecollarcrime.zone/
For shotspotter? No.
If someone made a system for detecting fraud, embezzlement, or insider trading, you bet your ass it would be deployed there.
you can definitely tell gun crime has happened without listening to the sounds of it. people die, get hurt, police reports are made etc. we don't typically determine if gun crime has happened by... listening do we?
Also
More importantly, how many times were collected conversations used and acted upon in an investigation and not been introduced as evidence?
Exactly, instituting pervasive audio surveillance is bad even if it's rarely used in court, because it can and will still be used for parallel construction.
Not just could -- without more information, it's the far more likely and economical explanation. The phrasing in the article imo is intentionally inflammatory.
It's not inflammatory, it's a statement of fact.
Of course the public surveillance is located in the areas where crime is most likely to occur! But an important side effect is that innocent people in those areas now are more surveilled than other people. So it becomes yet another injustice inflicted on people who already tend to suffer more greatly from injustice than others.
Maybe there are offsetting factors. If the surveillance makes neighborhoods significantly safer, then maybe local residents will be happy to be surveilled in exchange.
The article is stating a fact of correlation, not causality. But the particular outcome of "greater surveillance" clearly happens, regardless of why it occurs, and regardless of other offsetting considerations.
I don't think the article is suggesting there is a conspiracy wherein the police decided to target lower income areas because they are poor. It is certainly because incidences of those crimes are higher in those areas.
What I think the article is suggesting is that policies like these, particularly when implemented without sufficient transparency or oversight, can cause dystopian-sounding outcomes, such as poor people's conversations being constantly recorded by the government while wealthier people remain un-surveilled.
There is a ShotSpotter on the lightpole outside my door. My household income is about $2400/yr. My hood is a warzone though (South Side Chicago), so not unexpected lol
The main thread of the article is that ShotSpotter operate without scrutiny. The problematic aspects of their deployment are the false positives...
.. and false charges
Linked article: https://www.vice.com/en/article/qj8xbq/police-are-telling-sh...
.. and as highlighted in another comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39577403), cops shooting kids playing with fireworks
https://chicago.suntimes.com/crime/2024/02/27/chicago-police...
This is just another example of how American Police budgets have gotten out of hand. A budget that allows for a municipal police force to install 721 "AI powered" recording devices. That are purchased from a publicly traded company, and deployed in areas guaranteed to funnel people into the for profit privatized prison system.
What a wonderful use of tax dollars. Protecting and serving the path to a better society.
The very point of the article is that, absent leaks like this one, there could be no way for anybody to independently study or verify the fairness of the sensor distribution, or even the real efficacy of the reports the system produces—which is a troubling situation to be in when the state has an outsized amount of power to prosecute people based on potential junk science that will be hard for defendants to challenge in court.
The answer isn't to give police departments the benefit of the doubt (which they so rarely earn), but to demand better transparency and citizen oversight of the technology poised to be used against us.