5 ms·

I don’t understand the argument here. Suppose shotspotter is deeply flawed and often confuses fireworks and car backfires for gunshots, how could that have any

I don’t understand the argument here. Suppose shotspotter is deeply flawed and often confuses fireworks and car backfires for gunshots, how could that have any impact on this case or the legality of it? I don’t see it as any different than if a police officer is out patrolling, hears a car backfire, and confuses it for a gunshot. If he then detains someone as a part of his investigation and discovers some other crime, he still has probable cause because it wasn’t unreasonable for him to confuse a loud bang for a gunshot and for him to investigate. The same holds true for shotspotter, regardless of if it makes mistakes. Even if shotspotter has some bug in their acoustic analysis that identifies loud bangs where there isn’t one, ie: total false positives, so long as it sometimes does detect a real gunshot, the police have probable cause to investigate.

subroutine 4y ago
The cop that heard the backfire would likely be called to testify that fact in court. If they fail to show up, and the arresting officer (a different cop) claimed they made a probable-cause traffic stop based on what the other cop heard, and that cop refuses to testify, the prosecution is going to have a bad time.
- SilasX 4y ago
  A better analogy would be, if you asked the cop how he decides it’s a gun firing vs some other innocuous cause, and his department refused to allow the records of his brain scans to be admitted into evidence to determine if he were perfectly consistent in going after gun-like sounds (assuming it were a department that had brain scans going on for officers on duty).
  - throwaway17_17 4y ago
    But that’s a ridiculously non-applicable analogy. Any request for such brain scans would be deemed, at least in almost all conceivable circumstances as over reach by the defense. In reality all the cop has to do is say based on his training and experience he is comfortable in distinguishing the sound of gun fire in a city environment. The proper analogy is to say that this company is not allowing for the experience and training testimony to be shown to the court. That would be how I would argue against probable cause in this case. However, as another comment in the thread discusses, this is probably not an issue since there is a heavy dose of parallel construction argument going on.
- Syonyk 4y ago
  > ...the prosecution is going to have a bad time. Probably not. Cop said it, court saw it written, that settles it. Now prove your innocence without the ability to face your accuser. They're a cop, of course they're 100% correct in everything they wrote down, so... yeah, pay your ticket. I've seen this a few more times than I'm the slightest fan of, for me and other people accused of "impossible things" in cars (like "being clocked far faster than the car is capable of having accelerated to based on where it turned onto the road"). The prosecution has no problems with, "But the cop wrote that they saw you doing 70 in a 35, wrote the ticket for 45, and they're not here, so you're guilty."
rockemsockem 4y ago
Pretty sure the scenario you described with an actual police officer does not count as probable cause either. You can't just start detaining people because you heard fireworks, even if you mistook it for a gunshot.
PuppyTailWags 4y ago
The problem is at least with police, presumably (and I understand this doesn't functionally work due to the dysfunction of the police & court systems) if the police kills and/or maims an innocent person due to their error, they can be held responsible for their stupid decision.
evan_ 4y ago
If the police officer was lying about hearing a gunshot to perform an illegal search, or the police officer used the “I heard a gunshot” excuse six times a day, then that would be a problem.
- SilasX 4y ago
  Okay but I don’t think the argument here is that there was no “bang” sound, only that the company with technology for classifying bangs might not be perfectly consistent, which is still a higher burden than applied to a police officer investigating a bang sound.
trs8080 4y ago
If the officer lied about having probable cause (e.g., by telling ShotSpotter to fabricate alerts or to re-classify an alert after a stop to manufacture probable cause), the case can be thrown out.
- brewdad 4y ago
  But we can't know if the officer lied because SpotShotter refuses to reveal how their black box works. Since the officer's word is like unto God's in most courtrooms, the defendant is kinda stuck.
alasdair_ 4y ago
Imagine I made a magic "crime detection" box that called the police each time a crime was "detected". Now imagine all it did was randomly pick a number from 1 to 100 each day and if it were a 1 or a 2, it "detected" a crime, giving probable cause to police to search people near the box. Now imagine I almost exclusively put the boxes in areas where black people without a lot of money lived. You could see this would be something of a problem, right?
- pxmpxm 4y ago
  I would think the system will have difficult time materializing high rates of people that have been shot, which tends to be the chief metric for where it's deployed.
- gitfan86 4y ago
  Imagine if there were 100 gun murders in a city in one year and you had a magic box that was 100% accurate at detection of location of gun shots within 1 mile and the city could only afford to buy 10 magic boxes. Would you put those magic boxes near where previous gun crimes have been committed or would you put those boxes in places based on the race and sexual orientation and disability status and gender of the people living in the city?
  - SicSemperUranus 4y ago
    To me this is obviously unethical, but wouldn't this also be obviously unconstitutional in the US? At least if done deliberately? 14th amendment and all that.
    - throwaway17_17 4y ago
      Assuming the question were to reach the Supreme Court, and not considering the possibilities in the various Circuits, there is a substantial chance all of the Supreme Court’s various composition over the last 50 years would uphold the use. First consideration would be applicable legal standard, which practically always errs on the side of the State, second is the reasonableness of statistical methodology presenting the locations based on crime statistics. I would not personally argue for its constitutionality, but given the precedents stemming from pretextual patrolling cases, it isn’t as clear cut as one might hope.
tomcam 4y ago
What perplexes me is that in the USA we have a constitutional right to face our accuser in court. But this is a piece of software. > In one case, a 65-year-old grandfather was held in Cook County Jail for nearly a year at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic before his case was dismissed due to insufficient evidence. I mean, WTF.
- esoterica 4y ago
  I dug up the story behind that 65 year old grandfather. https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/criminal-justice/ct-shotspotter-chicago-man-jailed-20210820-krlg7y2gt5gwxozolqvvslsni4-story.html https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/criminal-justice/ct-shot... Prosecutors accuse him of shooting his passenger, but he claims that another car pulled up next to him and shot his passenger instead. In either case shotspotter both correctly identified a gunshot and the location of the gunshot, so what exactly did they do wrong here? By the defendant's own admission the gunshot that triggered the alert was real! Unless crucial details are being omitted somewhere it seems like a hatchet job to me.
  - tomcam 4y ago
    Great points. Thanks for doing that research. I should’ve done it myself and I am embarrassed that I did not.
sacrosancty 4y ago
The article suggests that the police can go to Shotspotter and ask for some other convenient sound or perhaps even no sound at all(?) to be retroactively reclassified as a gunshot where they wanted it to be, so they can then use that as an excuse to stop the person they already wanted to or already did but didn't have a valid reason to. That's worse than random and worse than a policeman honestly mistaking a backfire for a gunshot.
Taniwha 4y ago
One of these cases is a class action on behalf of people who have been wrongly arrested because of spotshotter - the case is also trying to get the police to stop using it because of this - if it's wrong most of the time police do not have probable cause - they have improbable cause

subroutine 4y ago

The cop that heard the backfire would likely be called to testify that fact in court. If they fail to show up, and the arresting officer (a different cop) claimed they made a probable-cause traffic stop based on what the other cop heard, and that cop refuses to testify, the prosecution is going to have a bad time.

SilasX 4y ago
A better analogy would be, if you asked the cop how he decides it’s a gun firing vs some other innocuous cause, and his department refused to allow the records of his brain scans to be admitted into evidence to determine if he were perfectly consistent in going after gun-like sounds (assuming it were a department that had brain scans going on for officers on duty).
- throwaway17_17 4y ago
  But that’s a ridiculously non-applicable analogy. Any request for such brain scans would be deemed, at least in almost all conceivable circumstances as over reach by the defense. In reality all the cop has to do is say based on his training and experience he is comfortable in distinguishing the sound of gun fire in a city environment. The proper analogy is to say that this company is not allowing for the experience and training testimony to be shown to the court. That would be how I would argue against probable cause in this case. However, as another comment in the thread discusses, this is probably not an issue since there is a heavy dose of parallel construction argument going on.
Syonyk 4y ago
> ...the prosecution is going to have a bad time. Probably not. Cop said it, court saw it written, that settles it. Now prove your innocence without the ability to face your accuser. They're a cop, of course they're 100% correct in everything they wrote down, so... yeah, pay your ticket. I've seen this a few more times than I'm the slightest fan of, for me and other people accused of "impossible things" in cars (like "being clocked far faster than the car is capable of having accelerated to based on where it turned onto the road"). The prosecution has no problems with, "But the cop wrote that they saw you doing 70 in a 35, wrote the ticket for 45, and they're not here, so you're guilty."

rockemsockem 4y ago

Pretty sure the scenario you described with an actual police officer does not count as probable cause either. You can't just start detaining people because you heard fireworks, even if you mistook it for a gunshot.

PuppyTailWags 4y ago

The problem is at least with police, presumably (and I understand this doesn't functionally work due to the dysfunction of the police & court systems) if the police kills and/or maims an innocent person due to their error, they can be held responsible for their stupid decision.

evan_ 4y ago

If the police officer was lying about hearing a gunshot to perform an illegal search, or the police officer used the “I heard a gunshot” excuse six times a day, then that would be a problem.

SilasX 4y ago
Okay but I don’t think the argument here is that there was no “bang” sound, only that the company with technology for classifying bangs might not be perfectly consistent, which is still a higher burden than applied to a police officer investigating a bang sound.

trs8080 4y ago

If the officer lied about having probable cause (e.g., by telling ShotSpotter to fabricate alerts or to re-classify an alert after a stop to manufacture probable cause), the case can be thrown out.

brewdad 4y ago
But we can't know if the officer lied because SpotShotter refuses to reveal how their black box works. Since the officer's word is like unto God's in most courtrooms, the defendant is kinda stuck.

alasdair_ 4y ago

Imagine I made a magic "crime detection" box that called the police each time a crime was "detected". Now imagine all it did was randomly pick a number from 1 to 100 each day and if it were a 1 or a 2, it "detected" a crime, giving probable cause to police to search people near the box. Now imagine I almost exclusively put the boxes in areas where black people without a lot of money lived. You could see this would be something of a problem, right?

pxmpxm 4y ago
I would think the system will have difficult time materializing high rates of people that have been shot, which tends to be the chief metric for where it's deployed.
gitfan86 4y ago
Imagine if there were 100 gun murders in a city in one year and you had a magic box that was 100% accurate at detection of location of gun shots within 1 mile and the city could only afford to buy 10 magic boxes. Would you put those magic boxes near where previous gun crimes have been committed or would you put those boxes in places based on the race and sexual orientation and disability status and gender of the people living in the city?
- SicSemperUranus 4y ago
  To me this is obviously unethical, but wouldn't this also be obviously unconstitutional in the US? At least if done deliberately? 14th amendment and all that.
  - throwaway17_17 4y ago
    Assuming the question were to reach the Supreme Court, and not considering the possibilities in the various Circuits, there is a substantial chance all of the Supreme Court’s various composition over the last 50 years would uphold the use. First consideration would be applicable legal standard, which practically always errs on the side of the State, second is the reasonableness of statistical methodology presenting the locations based on crime statistics. I would not personally argue for its constitutionality, but given the precedents stemming from pretextual patrolling cases, it isn’t as clear cut as one might hope.

tomcam 4y ago

What perplexes me is that in the USA we have a constitutional right to face our accuser in court. But this is a piece of software. > In one case, a 65-year-old grandfather was held in Cook County Jail for nearly a year at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic before his case was dismissed due to insufficient evidence. I mean, WTF.

esoterica 4y ago
I dug up the story behind that 65 year old grandfather. https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/criminal-justice/ct-shotspotter-chicago-man-jailed-20210820-krlg7y2gt5gwxozolqvvslsni4-story.html https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/criminal-justice/ct-shot... Prosecutors accuse him of shooting his passenger, but he claims that another car pulled up next to him and shot his passenger instead. In either case shotspotter both correctly identified a gunshot and the location of the gunshot, so what exactly did they do wrong here? By the defendant's own admission the gunshot that triggered the alert was real! Unless crucial details are being omitted somewhere it seems like a hatchet job to me.
- tomcam 4y ago
  Great points. Thanks for doing that research. I should’ve done it myself and I am embarrassed that I did not.

sacrosancty 4y ago

The article suggests that the police can go to Shotspotter and ask for some other convenient sound or perhaps even no sound at all(?) to be retroactively reclassified as a gunshot where they wanted it to be, so they can then use that as an excuse to stop the person they already wanted to or already did but didn't have a valid reason to. That's worse than random and worse than a policeman honestly mistaking a backfire for a gunshot.

Taniwha 4y ago

One of these cases is a class action on behalf of people who have been wrongly arrested because of spotshotter - the case is also trying to get the police to stop using it because of this - if it's wrong most of the time police do not have probable cause - they have improbable cause