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ShotSpotter requests to be held in contempt rather than disclose its methodology
- irq-1 4y agoSo when is the CEO going to jail for contempt? Or does that not apply to companies, only actual human beings?
- tjpnz 4y agoIn the US you can receive 6 months in jail for contempt. Perhaps the company should cease trading for the same period.
- throwaway17_17 4y agoThat is for each count of contempt and each incident of said contempt, in theory every refusal is a new count. I had a trial in February with a witness who refused to answer any questions, each refusal was ruled a contempt and the Judge settled at 7.5 years total for all the refusals (judge later amended to 3 years, but it is on appeal at the moment). All that to say, it could be more severe but it is unlikely that any jail will result. *Not Legal Advise*
- bawolff 4y agoForgive me if im wrong, but i was under the impression that jailing someone for contempt was very rare and mostly only happened in extreme cases, of which this does not seem to be one.
- public_defender 4y agoThis is an audio surveillance company which sells itself to cities as a gunshot detection system. Based on how they appear to be acting in court, it would be reasonable to assume that either: (1) Their methodology is about to be debunked, or; (2) It's about to be revealed that they were working with police to allow them to manufacture reasons to arrest people.
- toomuchtodo 4y agoWhat is the likely outcome of this? Can ShotSpotter be compelled to disclose?
- public_defender 4y agoThey are being ordered to disclose and they are refusing to do it. The article says the lawyer requested to be held in "friendly contempt." I'm pretty sure that doesn't exist. It would probably be more accurate to say that the lawyer conceded the company was in contempt (i.e. they were refusing the order to produce and maybe even conceding it was legal) and was requesting a light sanction. The strategy seems rather bold. I am not versed in Illinois contempt law, but judges have very broad constitutional authority to sanction people or companies for intentional failure to comply with a lawful order. In this case, you could expect the judge to do something like order the company to pay five thousand dollars per day until they disclose the records. There could be an argument that the judge could legally order the sheriff to seize their servers or throw the CEO in jail until the company complies, but for some reason stuff like that doesn't seem to ever happen in the corporate context.
- thereare5lights 4y ago> The article says the lawyer requested to be held in "friendly contempt." I'm pretty sure that doesn't exist. It's a thing https://cdn.ymaws.com/www.idc.law/resource/resmgr/quarterly_v26-27/27.2.30.pdf https://cdn.ymaws.com/www.idc.law/resource/resmgr/quarterly_... > This procedure is often called “friendly contempt,” a recognition that the contemnor has not acted “with contumacious disregard for the court’s authority,” but requires a contempt finding and sanction for the purpose of obtaining appellate review. See Klaine v. S. Ill. Hosp. Servs., 2016 IL 118217, ¶ 6; Zagorski v. Allstate Ins. Co., 2016 IL App (5th) 140056, ¶¶ 16-17. In many cases, the contemnor has even requested the finding and sanction for that purpose. See Ctr. Partners, Ltd. v. Growth Head GP, LLC, 2012 IL 113107, ¶ 20.
- HWR_14 4y ago
- cratermoon 4y agoAnother ADE 651? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADE_651 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADE_651
- stygiansonic 4y agoWow, thanks for the link. I had no idea about this. Promotional material issued by ATSC claimed that the ADE 651 could detect such item as guns, ammunition, drugs, truffles, human bodies, contraband ivory and bank notes at distances of up to 1 kilometre (0.62 mi), underground, through walls, underwater or even from aircraft at an altitude of up to 5 kilometres (3.1 mi).[12] In a promotional video, McCormick claimed that the device could detect elephants from 48 kilometres (30 mi) away.[13]
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- cratermoon 4y agoI remember during the US invasion of Iraq when it made the news that coalition forces were using them. The company was just one of many that made billions of US dollars just disappear into an Iraq-sized hole https://www.cnbc.com/2014/06/19/how-the-us-lost-billions-over-nine-years-in-iraq.html https://www.cnbc.com/2014/06/19/how-the-us-lost-billions-ove...
- solardev 4y ago(Not the OP) For background, this is the company that supposedly locates gunshot sounds in cities (and sometimes battlefields) by microphone triangulation. It doesn't work all that well and is selectively deployed in minority areas and is used by police to selectively enforce crimes, sometimes also altering the evidence. Vice did a few articles on them and the company tried to sue but had it tossed out. Shady all around. https://www.vice.com/en/topic/shotspotter https://www.vice.com/en/topic/shotspotter https://www.techdirt.com/2022/07/08/judge-tosses-defamation-suit-brought-by-shotspotter-against-vice-media-for-reporting-on-its-shady-tactics/ https://www.techdirt.com/2022/07/08/judge-tosses-defamation-...
- monksy 4y agoYou're telling me that cities are picking minority areas to put these in just for ill intent? Also, the devices don't "enforce crimes", they only alert approximate areas where a gunshot/firework may have gone off at.
- warkdarrior 4y agoHopefully what is being enforced is the law, not the crimes.
- elil17 4y agoSometimes police manage to enforce both…
- PuppyTailWags 4y agoI don't think anyone truly intends ill. However, someone who chooses a technology that doesn't have real evidence of working as well as it's advertised, and then uses applications of that technology on primarily minority populations, the result can only be concluded as illness on the people.
- lkschubert8 4y agoI'm hard pressed to believe that there aren't some folks who have ill intent. The problem is weeding them out from people who are just using crappy metrics and people who just barely know what's going on.
- Nextgrid 4y agoMy understanding is that "contempt of court" is used to either punish someone's "bad" behavior or compel them to do something the court believes they are required to do. In this case, wouldn't they just keep getting punished for contempt (racking up fines presumably) forever until they fulfil the court's request?
- lelandfe 4y ago> Discovery orders such as these typically cannot be appealed before final judgment is issued. However, contempt-of-court sanctions for violating a discovery order can be appealed. The request for a so-called “friendly” contempt-of-court order is designed to allow ShotSpotter to effectively appeal the discovery order by appealing the contempt order. Sounds strategic
- EMIRELADERO 4y agoPardon my ignorance, but couldn't the court just order the police to raid the company and forcefully retrieve the data?
- throwaway81523 4y agoThe cops can only raid if there is probable cause of a crime, rather than a civil tort. But in principle, the person refusing to comply with the discovery order can be locked up in jail until the info is forthcoming. I don't think that is supposed to happen in this case.
- lkschubert8 4y agoMy understanding is after being found in contempt you then try to appeal that. Disclaimer: Definitely not a lawyer by any definition.
- assbuttbuttass 4y agoWhat does it mean for a corporation to be held in contempt of court? I guess they will pay a fine and never have to produce those documents?
- pclmulqdq 4y agoUsually the idea is to compel discovery, so it would be a fine of several thousand dollars a day until they give up the info.
- JetAlone 4y agoI remember hearing that The Jehovah's Witnesses are in contempt of court and pay that fine instead of releasing internally held information about alleged child abuse incidents.
- anewpersonality 4y agoThe US should mandate every gunshot be accompanied by a loud ultrasonic tone that can easily identify the occurrence to any recording device. The tone could eventually be modulated with the guns serial number.
- SV_BubbleTime 4y ago
- abduhl 4y agoOf course it doesn’t concern them. They’re an ideologue.
- bandyaboot 4y agoIf I’m understanding your reply, you seem to think that it should be obvious to anyone with an understanding of how guns work, that this idea wouldn’t work/isn’t feasible/is a bad idea in some other way. So, wouldn’t it be more productive and informative to state that opinion and support it?
- mwint 4y agoIt’s a lot like saying knives should be required to emit such a sound. A knife is a purely mechanical device, there’s no good way to require an electronic device in a way that won’t be ripped off by every criminal immediately. In the same way, you can’t DRM trigger pulls. Further, this loud tone would require enough power that you’re talking about replaceable batteries. Those batteries can be removed.
- userbinator 4y agoI read the comment you're replying to as being satire/sarcasm, given how outrageous it is.
- baltimore 4y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law
- asperous 4y ago"Discovery orders such as these typically cannot be appealed before final judgment is issued. However, contempt-of-court sanctions for violating a discovery order can be appealed. The request for a so-called “friendly” contempt-of-court order is designed to allow ShotSpotter to effectively appeal the discovery order by appealing the contempt order."
- pledess 4y agoIt's plausible that ShotSpotter's main motivation is that there isn't much benefit (e.g., increased sales) to complying with the defense's request, but the costs could be huge, both for collecting the requested information in the required manner, and for the ramifications if they cannot produce information that the court believed they should have been able to produce. Discovery can be extremely expensive even when the ultimate assessment of a company's technology is favorable (and thus there's no decrease in sales). For background: https://iaals.du.edu/sites/default/files/documents/publications/ediscovery_view_front_lines2007.pdf https://iaals.du.edu/sites/default/files/documents/publicati...
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- solardev 4y agoI dunno if this company deserves that benefit of the doubt. Honestly, given their history, they probably just don't want to reveal that their entire business is snake oil, basically existing solely to make money by enabling law enforcement to create crimes out of thin air. If their science was sound they wouldn't have to resort to such tactics...
- nickysielicki 4y agoWhy are you so skeptical of their technology? Look how accurate raspberry pi powered ADSB plane tracking networks are — and that’s a much harder problem: they have no funding, they’re doing triangulation at the speed of light, and they’re doing it without GPS clock sources. You could also point to the lightning tracker networks that work in roughly the same way. Given a few million dollars to outfit their nodes with good GPS units and good microphone arrays, I’d expect their technology to be very good.
- danuker 4y agoIn ADS-B, planes broadcast their locations.
- shaburn 4y ago
- nickysielicki 4y agoI don’t understand the argument here. Suppose shotspotter is deeply flawed and often confuses fireworks and car backfires for gunshots, how could that have any impact on this case or the legality of it? I don’t see it as any different than if a police officer is out patrolling, hears a car backfire, and confuses it for a gunshot. If he then detains someone as a part of his investigation and discovers some other crime, he still has probable cause because it wasn’t unreasonable for him to confuse a loud bang for a gunshot and for him to investigate. The same holds true for shotspotter, regardless of if it makes mistakes. Even if shotspotter has some bug in their acoustic analysis that identifies loud bangs where there isn’t one, ie: total false positives, so long as it sometimes does detect a real gunshot, the police have probable cause to investigate.
- subroutine 4y agoThe cop that heard the backfire would likely be called to testify that fact in court. If they fail to show up, and the arresting officer (a different cop) claimed they made a probable-cause traffic stop based on what the other cop heard, and that cop refuses to testify, the prosecution is going to have a bad time.
- SilasX 4y agoA better analogy would be, if you asked the cop how he decides it’s a gun firing vs some other innocuous cause, and his department refused to allow the records of his brain scans to be admitted into evidence to determine if he were perfectly consistent in going after gun-like sounds (assuming it were a department that had brain scans going on for officers on duty).
- throwaway17_17 4y agoBut that’s a ridiculously non-applicable analogy. Any request for such brain scans would be deemed, at least in almost all conceivable circumstances as over reach by the defense. In reality all the cop has to do is say based on his training and experience he is comfortable in distinguishing the sound of gun fire in a city environment. The proper analogy is to say that this company is not allowing for the experience and training testimony to be shown to the court. That would be how I would argue against probable cause in this case. However, as another comment in the thread discusses, this is probably not an issue since there is a heavy dose of parallel construction argument going on.
- 14 4y agoThe charges should be dropped in order for this man to have a fair trial. I hope there is some justice in this situation
- nomilk 4y ago> The defense also requested ShotSpotter produce any data on sensors misidentifying gunfire or the location of alerts, as well as data on gunfire ShotSpotter failed to identify. I frequently misunderstand how features work in common applications, especially nuances of models and processes; so I can only imagine the difficulty gaining a precise understanding and context for a non technical person; e.g. a lawyer or jury. Unrelated: as someone not from Chicago, it's surprising that a company exists solely to detect gunshots. Depressing.
- avowud 4y agoTo my knowledge, you only need 3 active points to triangulate a location[0]. [0]: https://www.usgs.gov/media/images/triangulation-locate-earthquake https://www.usgs.gov/media/images/triangulation-locate-earth...
- baltimore 4y agoThink about how echoes from buildings and cars mess up this simple model.
- Animats 4y agoStrange. Probably the embarrassing parts relate to the after the fact reclassification of reports after the fact by Shotspotter employees. The first system was in Redwood City, CA. I once went to a talk by the designer. They had leased analog audio lines to each microphone. At the microphone end, they had something like a logarithmic amplifier, which traded dynamic range for frequency response. The idea is that you don't want to saturate when it picks up a bang. The audio feeds went to an IBM PC at the police station with some multichannel analog input cards. A program written in LabView running under DOS did the analysis. It was looking for a sharp upward spike from multiple microphones. Then it took the time deltas and computed a position. No attempt to compensate for bounces off buildings, etc. Fairly coarse resolution, down to the side of a block, not a building. It was pretty simple.
- jjeaff 4y agoMy guess is that they don't want to reveal their methods because they are still crude and obvious.
- Gibbon1 4y agoDon't want to reveal their methods cause patent infringement.
- nickysielicki 4y agoHow long ago was this?
- jschveibinz 4y agoI would like to post a slightly different angle to the discussion. Assumption: the majority of commenters are working in technology fields, and perhaps even technology startups. Let’s say that you have developed some software product that works pretty well for certain applications, but is certainly not perfect. But it works well enough that your customers are paying you to use your product. Now, your customers decide to use your product in a way that you have neither intended nor prescribed. (In fact, your product comes with a disclaimer.) In doing so, they end up in court. And you get hauled into the middle of it. Should you have to expose your technology? This could endanger your entire business.
- trs8080 4y agoIf your technology is being used as justification for incarcerating people and as a way for law enforcement to circumvent the law and escalate routine encounters into violence, then yes. https://www.vice.com/en/article/qj8xbq/police-are-telling-shotspotter-to-alter-evidence-from-gunshot-detecting-ai https://www.vice.com/en/article/qj8xbq/police-are-telling-sh... https://www.vice.com/en/article/5db8vk/police-are-using-gunshot-detection-tech-to-justify-stop-and-frisks https://www.vice.com/en/article/5db8vk/police-are-using-guns... https://www.vice.com/en/article/88nd3z/gunshot-detecting-tech-is-summoning-armed-police-to-black-neighborhoods https://www.vice.com/en/article/88nd3z/gunshot-detecting-tec...
- kmeisthax 4y agoIf the law hinges upon how your secret algorithm works then it should not be a secret. I'd rather have my secret sauce cloned by China[0] than live under Maoism[1]. This sounds unfair to you, but sometimes the fair solution creates more injustice than it solves. This is the same reason why we have the EPA Superfund program. Love Canal might not have been the polluter's fault[2] but the "fair" alternative was to let everyone sit in court while they and their kids die from toxic waste. [0] tbh the biggest problem with Chinese IP theft is that they don't share their plunder [1] At least I'm assuming "keeping the law secret" is something Mao did, I might just be being an ignorant American [2] If I remember correctly New York State or the county government actually threatened to use eminent domain to force the polluter to sell the toxic waste dump to them.
- aaron695 4y ago
- renewiltord 4y agoLaundering police positions is a pretty profitable industry. I think once I have my American citizenship, I'd like to give it a shot. The small-time stuff like police dog training[0], etc., and the obvious stuff like AI face recognition won't play. But there's a lot of stuff like this that can be relatively decent business. Everyone who could prosecute you is sort of on your side, so you're safe. And it has a naturally monopoly-esque situation since every time you play along you build a trust that you have their back. Ideally, I'd like to replace police dogs to give police probable cause. Policing is a huge industry in America, and it's not realistically going to be reformed because there is also a lot of crime in America, so it's a lasting business. I'm mildly worried someone else will get there first. But we'll see. I have a couple of ideas. 0: Though if you could run a large-scale single source of training with some sort of certification program, that would work. Dogs are a fantastic laundering device, but I don't like that it linearly scales cost to add more. You can force recurring revenue by getting "periodic retraining" into the process, which will play really well with everyone.
- intelVISA 4y agoYou just need to figure out the tech they had in Minority Report and put it on AWS.
- renewiltord 4y agoHahaha, the pre-crime stuff? Love it. No, something boring, you know. A "likely crime-involved vehicle" automatic camera tech that uses just a cross-referenced DB and ultimately just detects vehicle make. This stuff is mostly about doing the bizdev to get into a place. And police are like any other users. If you get a 10% detection rate, you'll hold the contract. And you can get that if it's like a "hit this button to perform scan" thing and you almost always return true. After all, they won't hit it unless they think something anyway. Whatever, the specifics of the product design are irrelevant details. It's about the bizdev. They still use polygraphs in the Federal Government. The device itself doesn't have to do anything.
- thfuran 4y agoThere's really no need to shit up the country even worse.
- randyrand 4y ago> selectively deployed in minority areas God this phrasing gets so annoying. If white neighborhood residents were being murdered in their streets, you really don’t think they’d put these devices there? Residents would be itching for them! It’s about catching murders - putting these devices in places with the most gun violence. Having police catch murderers is something we all want - rich neighborhoods included - and something that takes resources and effort to do. It’s something that we are privledged to have, compared to many other places in the world that just let poor people kill each other without legal recourse. Good people in these neighborhoods want policing. I have a friend in Humbolt park, and he practically has PTSD from constant gunfire. You think he doesn’t want these devices? Bad correlations ad nauseam.
- pxmpxm 4y ago
- bergenty 4y agoIt’s not really that simple though. You can always go back less than 40 years and point out that street gangs were a response to police harassment. That communities were selectively devastated with targeted infusions of dangerous and addictive drugs. That there is a continuous pattern of profiling based on superficial attributes. A bad summer can ruin a person’s life, I don’t understand how we don’t expect generation abuse to do the same. Clearly the “sub Saharan level” life expectancy is not a racial attribute but contained within precise geographical boundaries in a prosperous country. You could say it’s purely cultural and if you wanted to be more edgy a “racial or genetic” failing, but really it’s the system that has deliberately and purposefully failed them and any current circumstance cannot be considered mutually exclusive of the very recent past, let alone the past few centuries. For counter examples, look how long the richest and most dominant countries for the vast majority of human history— China and India — took to recover from a much less brutal form of dominance.
- pxmpxm 4y agoThe explanation I had in mind was more directed to the narrative over reality when it comes to shotspotter, rather than the mechanics of structural poverty incentives that invariably drive people toward illicit income that's fraught with violence. We've had 50+ years of various great society type programs that are designed with negative net-of-transfers earned income gradient, and those were squarely aimed at racial strata, but it's a huge stretch to claim that a thing that listens for gunshots in a place where tens of people get shot weekly is some sort of bigot master plot. Also tangentially speaking, anyone seeing a race dimension in "subsaharan africa life expectancy" is merely looking in a mirror.
- FounderBurr 4y agoBeing held in contempt will not stop disclosure. Not a very bright attorney.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- CodeWriter23 4y agoIf I were the Judge, I’d be like “have your CEO turn himself into my bailiff and you can have your contempt order”. If they remain unresponsive, issue an arrest warrant for the CEO.
- hnThrow280 4y agoI did R&D work for an NGO developing a clone of shotspotter and its kind. I spent an enormous amount of time examining all the variants on the market, including the last two decades of military versions from around the world. I documented all of their various accuracies across all the various axes, how many microphones they used, etc. I also went deep into the academic research to learn all the varied algorithms in use. When I mentioned it to a family member who is also a police officer, he related that a shotspotter had detected an explosion "right in a guy's backyard." It was clear to me that no device on the market, nor algorithm could figure out that close of a pinpoint. Of course I kept my mouth shut so as to not ruin a holiday. But that was just more undoing of my trust and more indoctrination in one is supposed to remain in a state of denial or cognitive dissonance. Anyway, just another police technology like polygraphs, DNA, and fingerprints with two stories. One, what it actually does, and two, what police pretend it does.
- pkongx 4y ago> I documented all of their various accuracies across all the various axes If sharable, any links to these documents?
- daenz 4y agoA piece of advice because you're using a throwaway account: it will be easier for people to believe your claims if you give some kind of inside information about why it doesn't work other than "it just doesn't work"
- hnThrow280 4y agohi thanks everyone for the feedback. I really wanted to include references to the research I did, but I was laid off at short notice (ahem, fired) for unspecified reasons, but it might have had to do with not introducing myself with pronouns. Not that I'm against it, I just felt that my freedom included the freedom to not use them. I was let go on a dime and didn't get to collect my research before I left. But to briefly summarize how these systems specify their accuracy, it's usually with a range of angles. e.g. +/- 10 degrees horizontal, and +- 15 degrees vertical. I just did a quick google search to try to see if anyone has rolled up the various devices like I did, but nothing. However, here's one decent, non-paywalled paper that shows results under very ideal conditions: http://nms.lcs.mit.edu/papers/ipsn07-girod.pdf http://nms.lcs.mit.edu/papers/ipsn07-girod.pdf As far as my words: "no device on the market, nor algorithm could figure out that close of a pinpoint", not your words: "why it doesn't work," consider the accuracy in an empty field in the above paper, but then add in several factors, including: 1. reflections, particularly in a dense urban environment, can causing reverberation 2. humidity and temperature fluctuations, particularly as they vary vertically causing acoustic lensing effects. also temperature fluctuations affecting sensor differently from air. e.g. direct sun heating sensor. 3. extremely high dynamic range of the signal. 4. synchronization of detectors, 5. vandalism of detectors 6. accuracy of layout of detectors, 7. characterization of detector beam. 8. detector distance This is not to say most of these can't be mitigated and improved, but they cost more money and time to work on all of them at the same time. The highly idealized results (open blank field) of a single shot in the above paper gave results +/- 8m in one direction and +/- 5m in the other direction with an average sensor distance of ~60m. So you're seeing about ~15% error in one direction and 6% in the other under ideal conditions and within a very short range. As sound propagates, the PV field evolves exponentially and it blurs and gets quieter and background noises interfere more. Note that I mentioend the systems generally specify angles (polar coords), but i used rectilinear here bc I have a diff job and don't have the time to convert just for the sake of this convo, but that would be a step I wish I had time for. If you want even more inside information from that side of the family, I will let you know that parallel construction with pseudo-private information is very real. This member, again trying to relate to me, brags about using social media to figure out many cases, hinting at having advanced access to e.g. facebook. I would go so far as to say that if you want to get away with crime, police will likely defer their attention to the low-hanging fruit of what they can solve with social media. for those who asked for papers, here some that I vaguely recognize from my research. Most of these are paywalled, and I used my privileged access from a fancy school to get to them: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/5680318 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/5680318 https://tj.uettaxila.edu.pk/index.php/technical-journal/article/view/1579 https://tj.uettaxila.edu.pk/index.php/technical-journal/arti... https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/8635092 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/8635092 https://www.spiedigitallibrary.org/conference-proceedings-of-spie/6201/62011R/Operational-outcomes-of-the-SECURES-urban-gunshot-detection-technology-for/10.1117/12.665025.short?SSO=1 https://www.spiedigitallibrary.org/conference-proceedings-of... https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-81-322-1823-4_15 https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-81-322-1823-4_... https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/6637700 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/6637700 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/7098998 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/7098998 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8289452 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8289452
- remflight 4y agoIf they don’t reveal their methodology then how could this be used as evidence? Shouldn’t that lead to the entire case being thrown out if the police were alerted by this? Seems ridiculous to not allow the defense to see the methodology, even radar guns get that treatment.
- woodruffw 4y ago> If they don’t reveal their methodology then how could this be used as evidence? It isn't used as evidence; it's used to manufacture pretext to justify collecting "real" evidence. SpotShotter is not an ignorant party: they understand that the service they sell to police departments is a pretextual laundromat for busting up whoever the police feel did the crime. That's the crux of this case: SpotShotter is being asked to produce evidence that they are compelled to produce, and they'd rather take the loss in this instance (and continue to use it for parallel construction) elsewhere.
- throwaway17_17 4y agoIn my experience you are 100% correct. This is also the potential use case for non-warrant based Ring/Nest video and audio along with smart speaker collected audio. I’m also certain this company and those like it are consistently looking for opportunities to advertise and sell the parallel construction utility of their services.
- zasdffaa 4y agoWhat experience have you in this area? (genuine qtn)
- throwaway17_17 4y agoI’m a lawyer who practices exclusively in criminal defense. In particular I’m a supervising attorney for a large public defender’s office and I’ve represented somewhere around 5,000 clients in my career.
- strngeattractor 4y agoRandom but, I job shadowed at shotspotter back in highschool...maybe they were much smaller back then. I recall a small office space in San Jose
- shmde 4y agoSoo, can lets say someone work with the court, shoot random shots and fireworks around a city. Give the court their exact locations from which shots(gun and fireworks) were fired and ask ShotSpotter to identify gun sounds to that of fireworks and also figure out the locations. If ShotSpotter is able to figure it out correctly only then they are are allowed to NOT disclose their tech otherwise it would be very illegal to keep it undisclosed because people can literally get arrested on the wrong leads generated by a piece of tech.
- irishloop 4y agoI live in a city where ShotSpotter is often used to detect gun violence and it seems, at least from local reporting, that it's often accurate in detecting gunfire and often finds victim(s) on the scene, often uncooperative with police. In so far as I can tell, it seems to be doing its job, though I understand there are several institutions here which obviously are not trustworthy.
- woodruffw 4y agoThis is a classic example of the survivorship bias: local reporting doesn't report on the unknown proportion of cases that are false positives or wild goose chases. It also doesn't divulge where the police are putting their thumb on the scale by having ShotSpotter edit the "evidence" after the fact, as is alleged in this case.
- NonNefarious 4y agoShotSpotter = lowlife trash: https://www.vice.com/en/article/qj8xbq/police-are-telling-shotspotter-to-alter-evidence-from-gunshot-detecting-ai https://www.vice.com/en/article/qj8xbq/police-are-telling-sh...
- NonNefarious 4y ago
- Brian_K_White 4y agoHey, can I request to be held in "friendly contempt" if they ever show up with a warrant to search my house or phone or laptop? At the airport, can I skip having my bag searched yet still fly and suffer no real consequences because "friendly contempt?" What a fucking awesome new legal principle invention that I am sure everyone will get to enjoy equally!
- egberts1 4y agoit is too bad that we don’t have a phase-array sound detector antenna that of a constant 360 degree sweep, oh wait.