3 ms·

> selectively deployed in minority areas God this phrasing gets so annoying. If white neighborhood residents were being murdered in their streets, you really d

> 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 ago
  It’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 ago
    The 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.
    - bergenty 4y ago
      When there has been a continuous stream of “bigot master plots” it understandably becomes hard to distinguish conspiracy from conscientious intent. If you look at the current situation without any of the prior historical context it does bring up the question of how does law enforcement deal with this situation because their historical actions have led to a catch 22 situation where action or inaction is vilified. Maybe a coordinated and public attempt at cleaning up the police force that goes hand in hand with a nationwide, simultaneous move to clean up the hood?
      - pxmpxm 4y ago
        Certainly a prudent, rational idea. However my sneaking suspicion is that the recent attention to the former of the two has was designed for a completely different objective; a betting man would posit we'll be having this discussion again in 2024: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=blacks%20lives%20matter https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=b...
n8cpdx 4y ago
Portland, OR is moving towards potentially implementing ShotSpotter. The population is 6% Black. The homicide victims are 50% Black. We have twice the homicide count of Seattle, or more homicides than Seattle and SF combined. Portland is smaller than both cities, so it is very concerning. Unfortunately the licensing model for ShotSpotter is such that it is only deployed in the high homicide neighborhoods due to cost. I have to imagine the marginal cost of an extra sq mile is low. I’d like to see a diversity discount or something so that it would be economical to put the system everywhere and dispel the racial bias issue. Or maybe charge per homicide or gun recovered instead.
foerbert 4y ago
That's predicated on their ability to help catch murderers as well as their inability to allow police to enforce other kinds of crime. It's also possible for good-faith efforts to play into a feedback system that ends up resulting in racial injustices. They can even do that while doing other good things too. Then you have the uncomfortable and terrifically subjective question on your hands of weighing the costs and the benefits - both now and into the future. I don't think you can dismiss this as being largely about race, nor dismiss it as irrelevant to race. In some ways, it'd be easiest if it doesn't work. That way the questions get real simple.
mbesto 4y ago
> You think he doesn’t want these devices? Don't Chinese people want the social credit system too? You clearly glossed over the more important factor "is used by police to selectively enforce crimes, sometimes also altering the evidence". So, no, your "buddy in Humbolt park" doesn't want this when he gets accused of a crime he didn't commit. He wants actual systematic changes to an impoverished areas - black or white. > If white neighborhood residents were being murdered in their streets Hilarious, because this statement displays your inherent bias, which is that you automatically presume white neighborhoods are rich and therefore don't have problems with residents shooting each other!
- dang 4y ago
  Please don't take HN threads further into flamewar. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
BoorishBears 4y ago
You're answering a point no one made. No one is saying crime is good, yet your comment is mostly trying to sell how bad gun violence is? During the "war on drugs" black men were getting snatched left and right, destroying communities. Now the fruits of that come back to create violence, and your answer is to push an expensive heavily flawed automated police lead generator? Shotspotter is broken. It constantly results in false alarms and false stops to go with them, it's not effective enough to be reproducible, they openly admit to letting police override their classifications... It's an expensive farce that isn't helping anyone.
woodruffw 4y ago
> 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! If there were similar amounts of homicide in white areas, white residents would be using their political clout to demand solutions, not pretextual pseudoscience. And this is, in fact, what we see: white neighborhoods get beat cops who live nearby, while black neighborhoods get surveillance and patrol cars with humps from the next county over.
bitbckt 4y ago
“I have a friend in Humbolt park” reads like “I have a [black/brown/asian/etc.] friend”. Have a little self-awareness.
- pxmpxm 4y ago
  Having spent a decade plus in chicago, I would suggest you go visit HP one hot summer night. It may make you reconsider that twitter cliche you wrote.
- selectodude 4y ago
  Lots of white people living in Humboldt Park. Are you at all familiar with Chicago?
  - bitbckt 4y ago
    Sure am, and that response is proof of the point.
dang 4y ago
Please don't take HN threads into flamewar. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32259253 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32259253.

pxmpxm 4y ago

bergenty 4y ago
It’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 ago
  The 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.
  - bergenty 4y ago
    When there has been a continuous stream of “bigot master plots” it understandably becomes hard to distinguish conspiracy from conscientious intent. If you look at the current situation without any of the prior historical context it does bring up the question of how does law enforcement deal with this situation because their historical actions have led to a catch 22 situation where action or inaction is vilified. Maybe a coordinated and public attempt at cleaning up the police force that goes hand in hand with a nationwide, simultaneous move to clean up the hood?
    - pxmpxm 4y ago
      Certainly a prudent, rational idea. However my sneaking suspicion is that the recent attention to the former of the two has was designed for a completely different objective; a betting man would posit we'll be having this discussion again in 2024: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=blacks%20lives%20matter https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=b...

n8cpdx 4y ago

Portland, OR is moving towards potentially implementing ShotSpotter. The population is 6% Black. The homicide victims are 50% Black. We have twice the homicide count of Seattle, or more homicides than Seattle and SF combined. Portland is smaller than both cities, so it is very concerning. Unfortunately the licensing model for ShotSpotter is such that it is only deployed in the high homicide neighborhoods due to cost. I have to imagine the marginal cost of an extra sq mile is low. I’d like to see a diversity discount or something so that it would be economical to put the system everywhere and dispel the racial bias issue. Or maybe charge per homicide or gun recovered instead.

foerbert 4y ago

That's predicated on their ability to help catch murderers as well as their inability to allow police to enforce other kinds of crime. It's also possible for good-faith efforts to play into a feedback system that ends up resulting in racial injustices. They can even do that while doing other good things too. Then you have the uncomfortable and terrifically subjective question on your hands of weighing the costs and the benefits - both now and into the future. I don't think you can dismiss this as being largely about race, nor dismiss it as irrelevant to race. In some ways, it'd be easiest if it doesn't work. That way the questions get real simple.

mbesto 4y ago

> You think he doesn’t want these devices? Don't Chinese people want the social credit system too? You clearly glossed over the more important factor "is used by police to selectively enforce crimes, sometimes also altering the evidence". So, no, your "buddy in Humbolt park" doesn't want this when he gets accused of a crime he didn't commit. He wants actual systematic changes to an impoverished areas - black or white. > If white neighborhood residents were being murdered in their streets Hilarious, because this statement displays your inherent bias, which is that you automatically presume white neighborhoods are rich and therefore don't have problems with residents shooting each other!

dang 4y ago
Please don't take HN threads further into flamewar. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

BoorishBears 4y ago

You're answering a point no one made. No one is saying crime is good, yet your comment is mostly trying to sell how bad gun violence is? During the "war on drugs" black men were getting snatched left and right, destroying communities. Now the fruits of that come back to create violence, and your answer is to push an expensive heavily flawed automated police lead generator? Shotspotter is broken. It constantly results in false alarms and false stops to go with them, it's not effective enough to be reproducible, they openly admit to letting police override their classifications... It's an expensive farce that isn't helping anyone.

woodruffw 4y ago

> 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! If there were similar amounts of homicide in white areas, white residents would be using their political clout to demand solutions, not pretextual pseudoscience. And this is, in fact, what we see: white neighborhoods get beat cops who live nearby, while black neighborhoods get surveillance and patrol cars with humps from the next county over.

bitbckt 4y ago

“I have a friend in Humbolt park” reads like “I have a [black/brown/asian/etc.] friend”. Have a little self-awareness.

pxmpxm 4y ago
Having spent a decade plus in chicago, I would suggest you go visit HP one hot summer night. It may make you reconsider that twitter cliche you wrote.
selectodude 4y ago
Lots of white people living in Humboldt Park. Are you at all familiar with Chicago?
- bitbckt 4y ago
  Sure am, and that response is proof of the point.

dang 4y ago

Please don't take HN threads into flamewar. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32259253 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32259253.