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Why is ShotSpotter using "AI" to analyze this? It's time-based triangulation of a loud noise. It must be nice to make a living on a grift like this.
by mplewis 5y ago
Why is ShotSpotter using "AI" to analyze this? It's time-based triangulation of a loud noise.
It must be nice to make a living on a grift like this.
- throwaway0a5e 5y agoBecause gunshots are rare and if you're just triangulating loud noise you're gonna be overwhelmed by false positives. Even if you do basic filtration to try and tease out the sound of a gunshot vs everything else you're still gonna get overwhelmed by false positives.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- dylan604 5y agoI don't know enough about the procedures, but would citizens calling 911 to report gun shots help coroborate and help weed out false positives?
- tdeck 5y agoMany citizens can't tell the difference between gunshots and other explosive sounds like fireworks.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- tolbish 5y agoIf ShotSpotter can't either then it effectively useless.
- sneak 5y agoIt's not useless, sometimes it can be used to fuel a prosecution against an innocent person who happens to be a racial minority. Police locking up black people in America is the reason police in America were created.
- gunapologist99 5y ago> Police locking up black people in America is the reason police in America were created. Formal policing in America has a long and sometimes infamous history, but it definitely did not begin with "locking up black people"; it varied based on the locale. For example, in NYC, it goes back to the Tammany Hall days and was notoriously corrupt. In the west (where there were very few black people, and those that were there were free), police forces began with various marshals and sheriffs who were hired, typically by the merchants, to tame the wild western towns. According to Time, "The first publicly funded, organized police force with officers on duty full-time was created in Boston in 1838." https://time.com/4779112/police-history-origins/ https://time.com/4779112/police-history-origins/
- mplewis 5y agoThe Boston police were started to defend the rights of property owners, not citizens. In the South, post-Civil War, police used gold star badges because they were adapted from the gold star badges used by slave patrols. You should learn more about the history of policing in America: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-history-of-american-police-and-the-ku-klux-klan/id1373812661?i=1000479236210 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-history-of-america...
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Clubber 5y ago>In the west (where there were very few black people According to Smithsonian Magazine, 1 in 4 cowboys were black. I suspect popular culture (movies) are what's to blame for this misconception. Many fled to the West after the Civil War to find work. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/lesser-known-history-african-american-cowboys-180962144/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/lesser-known-history-...
- tdeck 5y agoIf I remember correctly from a radio story, the police can listen to a recording of the shot report before investigating to confirm it sounds like a gun.
- micromacrofoot 5y agoMy local PD tells me it can tell the difference, but they're also pretty well-known liars.
- dylan604 5y agoMaybe it gets harder around june/july/new years, but the rest of the year has very little firework activity.
- timbargo 5y agoI live in Chicago. We have fireworks year round, some neighborhoods more often than others. Usually you will hear fireworks far more frequently than you hear gunshots.
- panopticon 5y agoI think that depends on the city/neighborhood. We heard fireworks pretty regularly throughout the year when we lived in San Jose. And they became more frequent after the Flyod protests. On the flip side, we heard far more gunshots than fireworks when we lived in Kansas City.
- Anechoic 5y agoIt's presumably some sort of machine learning to distinguish gunshots from firecrackers, backfires and other kinds of impulsive sounds one would find in a city. It just does not appear to work well.
- imroot 5y agoCincy PD disables alerts for ShotSpotter on the 4th of July and disables it during baseball/football games downtown because the pyro from the games causes false alarms.
- zozin 5y agoIt’s just marketing speak. If your tech product doesn’t use AI, machine learning or have an algorithm then it won’t look as bright and shiny to customers.
- gmueckl 5y agoI m not convinced that simple triangulation works in a city environment. Sound reflected off of buildings can mess things up good. I can think of several ways in which a later reflection can be louder than the initial sound.
- bob1029 5y agoTriangluation works in these cases if you apply some DSP tricks (marketed in this case as AI). Multipath interference can be mitigated to a large extent with multiple listening devices calibrated against a known acoustic impulse - i.e. intentionally firing something like a gun at a precise time & location known to the system beforehand.