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US Justice Department Urged to Investigate Gunshot Detector Purchases
- 4gotunameagain 3y agoI don't seem to understand what's the civil liberties union points. If there are more gunshot incidents in neighbourhoods with predominately black people, they shouldn't be installed as so to not appear "racist" ? What am I missing ?
- joemazerino 3y ago[flagged]
- 3seashells 3y agoFree travel tickets to places without the system?
- User23 3y agoThe problem is the people doing the shooting not the locations they're doing the shooting in.
- giraffe_lady 3y agoI just want to point out that while you're being nasty, I do 100% want to tear down your system. Police apply tools like this to justify the policies and abuses they were already going to do. It should not exist.
- networkchad 3y ago[dead]
- suckitsam 3y agoDo you have a source for this? Which policies and abuses have been linked to shot spotter systems? These are among the least-worrying systems because they don't indiscriminately capture information about passers-by (or even suspected offenders, for that matter). It literally just notifies them that it thinks there were gunshots and attempts to localize them to a particular block.
- reaperman 3y agohttps://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...
- giraffe_lady 3y agoAmerican police are empowered to do pretty much anything if they believe someone has a gun, including shoot people in the back while fleeing, or with their hands up, or unannounced for simply holding an object. This system gives police a cause to go out looking for that situation, and a reason to arrive ready to shoot. Like come on man, the entire thing could not be better designed to push police into shooting folks.
- jstarfish 3y ago> This system gives police a cause to go out looking for that situation, and a reason to arrive ready to shoot. Like come on man, the entire thing could not be better designed to push police into shooting folks. You have an interesting point, but how an acoustic sensor any different than someone making a shots-fired call to 911? Police are going to arrive on-scene with the same assumptions.
- giraffe_lady 3y agoLike so many other safety and privacy things, the difference is simply the scale and automation. Like how there's little philosophical or legal difference between a detective sitting and listening to your phone calls and an automated system scanning them and listening for keyword. But the real consequences are very different despite that! The automation allows it to be used more freely at low cost, to go "fishing" for crimes rather than investigate a specific instance. And a wider net will catch more false positives, and with the shotspotter having cops show up guns blazing to teenagers with fireworks for example is a heavy consequence. Since these choices affect peoples' lives in real ways, we're obligated to consider the actual effects, rather than the philosophical foundation. It may not be "any different" in an abstract sense, but this concrete instance is very different and we have to consider that in its use.
- lookdangerous 3y agoIt's your system too. It helps keep all of us more safe, and more alive, than we would be without anything. If you succeed in tearing down our system, it will be a very bad time for everyone.
- giraffe_lady 3y agoI'm not saying we should have nothing, I'm saying we shouldn't have this. If our policing system kept us safe americans would be the safest people in history. In fact our safety would have doubled over the last few decades, as our police spending has. Does that fit your experience or knowledge? My position here is that this system isn't failing at its purpose but that its purpose is in fact something other than keeping us safe. We should tear it down and construct a different system, specialized towards that goal. And anyway this "all of us" viewpoint is one you can have based on your experience but I can't have based on mine. My people are taught to fear the police, they are a terror to us. The only violence I have ever experienced in my life has been at the hands of police. You're asking me to believe they keep me safe when my experience and the data show me otherwise.
- landemva 3y ago> It helps keep all of us more safe Are there good data and studies to support this claim?
- josefresco 3y agoThere is no proof (currently) that these systems were (or were not) only deployed in the highest gun high-crime areas. We're assuming police used data (and not racial prejudice) to place cameras, but I didn't see anything in the article to support that. That's something an investigation would reveal!
- jstarfish 3y ago> We're assuming police used data (and not racial prejudice) to place cameras, but I didn't see anything in the article to support that. I'm not sure what good assumptions do for anybody. The media tells us one thing, law enforcement tells us another. Did you know 38% of all serial killers...are black [men]? I didn't. The media and academia don't dare touch that particular narrative, but the data says it in no uncertain terms. See for yourself: https://www.fbi.gov/file-repository/serialmurder-pathwaysforinvestigations.pdf/view https://www.fbi.gov/file-repository/serialmurder-pathwaysfor... Of the most prolific 36 offenders (killed 5 or more victims), 22 were white and 11 were black. Settling stereotypes: you're still more likely to be raped/killed by someone you know, not some random black guy. White men killed white victims 37.5% of the time, black victims, 10.8%. Black men were less discriminating, but still mostly hunted their own-- 16% white and 17.9% black victims. Crazy, right? I assumed the FBI started combining gang violence in the stats for serial murder, since those killings do technically fit (murders punctuated by cooling-off period, etc.)-- but organized crime hits were deliberately omitted from the study! The majority of all serial murder victims are white (60%) female (75.4%) and killed via strangulation for sex (81.5%). That's no surprise, but we're led to believe it's all middle-aged white guys in aviator glasses that go around butchering prozzies (a stereotype in itself). Wayne Williams was just an anomaly that happened that one time way back in the 80s; black serial killers don't exist, don't be silly. The DC snipers? Is that a superhero movie? I'm not defending Shotspotter (guns accounted for a single-digit percentage of victims, so it's pointless by every metric) but I can't help but feel we're being collectively misled by media-driven outrage that BLM lent credibility to. The counterarguments are always the same-- overpolicing, unfair justice system, etc. They fall flat in this particular domain. Vague words like "overpolicing" and "inequality" are not enough to substantiate claims of prejudice against individuals convicted of five or more counts of murder, committed serially over the course of years. The arguments become all the more absurd when the implication is that the police are racist, the entire justice system is corrupt, the FBI can't fucking count, all the witnesses are lying, the forensics are junk science, and it's innocent people being framed for killing everyone they disagree with. QAnon is more plausible-- there are fewer actors involved. The system has its problems, but it's not believable that there's this much cross-jurisdictional conspiracy going on to indict 10% of the population. They didn't do any of this to Snowden or Assange (the best they came up with was a dubious rape claim, and both were enemies of the state that agencies had an interest in silencing). Even white serial killers don't go out of their way to target black victims. But the narrative is that everyone is racist and out to get them? The data continues to show black-on-black violence is the biggest threat to black people, but intervention is met with cynicism, belligerence (from milquetoast white people), or else the "you're not allowed to ask questions, you're persecuting them, you x-ist" playbook everyone from the Catholic church to the Branch Davidians, the FLDS, the Jehovah's Witnesses, and the kink-cultists of today trot out to rouse their community against nosy outsiders and distract from the abuses they have an interest in concealing. Remember how long each of these institutions got away with their shenanigans due to lack of transparency? Notice how nothing is changing for the black community-- and only getting worse, as the NYT so frequently opines? Is it really the police getting worse, or was the problem with violence in this community underreported to begin with? I'm not actually making an argument either way-- I don't have a clue what is going on here, but I'm concerned about the lack of due diligence that anybody is able to conduct when one side offers actual data and the other only brings histrionics and a handful of exceptions to the table. I don't trust either side, but to date we've only really listened to a single one of them-- the news-as-entertainment industry's take on it. Are you not entertained?
- evanjrowley 3y agoThere is also a line of thinking that the system should not be installed at all, under any circumstance, because it is ineffective: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/07/its-time-police-stop-using-shotspotter https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/07/its-time-police-stop-u... https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/four-problems-with-the-shotspotter-gunshot-detection-system https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/four-problems-w...
- hnburnsy 3y agoExactly, when I saw the headline I was thinking, great, the DOJ will stop this wasteful spending on fradulent technology. Nope.
- catlover76 3y agoThe first link doesn't just say "ineffective"; it suggests that the gunshot data being generated is fraudulent.
- danielfoster 3y agoThe issue involves both the placement (in low income black neighborhoods) and accuracy (allegedly low). According to critics, ShotSpotter has thousands of false positives. Naturally when police think shots have been fired, their response is going to be much different than an innocent knock on the door. Imagine riding your bike down the street as a kid and dozens of cops suddenly arrive with their guns drawn. So assuming the stats on low accuracy are correct, the use of Shotspotter seems to unjustly subject black residents to potentially harmful high-stakes police calls with no apparent benefit.
- 4gotunameagain 3y agoI get the criticism if the accuracy is allegedly low, I still don't see the connection with race. Is it more acceptable to unjustly subject non black residents to potentially harmful high-stakes police calls ?
- supertrope 3y agoLegally police need evidence of some crime (probable cause) to stop and investigate an individual. This is so police can't just randomly confront people or even worse illegally discriminate based on race. Police have historically used minor traffic violations like tail light failure, the smell of marijuana, or "furtive movements" as loopholes to the requirement of probable cause. A technowiz device provides an excuse to just stop and frisk everyone near the alert even if the cause was a car backfiring.
- 3seashells 3y agoThese work by sound right. So in theory the same principle could be used to triangulate artillery with cellphones by sound?
- dredmorbius 3y agoRadar-based counter-battery fire already exists and would be far more accurate, as radar tends to propagate more predictably (and faster) than sound. Though yes, that's an option, it's called artillery sound ranging: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artillery_sound_ranging https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artillery_sound_ranging> A subset of acoustic location: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_location https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_location> Audio-based range-finders were used extensively in WWII: <https://yewtu.be/watch?v=04F5osXK4vw https://yewtu.be/watch?v=04F5osXK4vw> (Tom Scott: "Testing the sound mirrors that protected Britain") Also: <https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/german-world-war-ii-aircraft-sound-detector-or-acoustic-news-photo/526929302 https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/german-world-w...> Optical rangefinders were also used: <https://www.navalgazing.net/Rangefinding https://www.navalgazing.net/Rangefinding> (I've tried but failed to find large audio/sound based naval rangefinders, which essentially consisted of gigantic ear trumpets, roughly the size of a human. Used in WWII by both US and Japanese navies as I recall.)
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- 3seashells 3y agoTopography + weather+ cellphones = cheap sound detection network, non detectable by harm (yet)
- dredmorbius 3y agoCellphones are not exactly nondetectable.
- dredmorbius 3y agoI'm realising belatedly that you likely meant HARM, not harm. As in high-speed anti-radiation missile: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-radiation_missile https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-radiation_missile> I don't know how vulnerable counter-battery radar is to radiation-seeking missile attacks, though suspect that's a risk. Wikipedia mentions the risk, and links a reference for further information, though I'm not finding information there based on a quick skim: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counter-battery_radar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counter-battery_radar> <https://web.archive.org/web/20141226051243/http://armypubs.army.mil/doctrine/DR_pubs/dr_a/pdf/fm3_09x12.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20141226051243/http://armypubs.a...> (PDF)
- tomatotomato37 3y agoI know a police officer who said the department got rid of their detector after it flooded them in noise, either from completely false reports, bad isolation of places like shooting ranges, or just pointless stuff like some redneck plinking cans in his trailer park
- thelastparadise 3y ago> or just pointless stuff like some redneck plinking cans in his trailer park This is rather offensive to a large subset of people, btw.
- Spastche 3y agoanyone offended by that isn't worth listening to
- sdfghswe 3y ago>> or just pointless stuff like some redneck plinking cans in his trailer park > This is rather offensive to a large subset of people, btw. Is that offensive to rednecks or to people plinking cans?
- amanaplanacanal 3y agoMaybe people living in trailer parks? Not a redneck, but I have lived in a trailer park and shot a can or two in my day.
- Kerb_ 3y agoIs it? All the rednecks I know love plinking cans in the trailer park or state land behind where they live. Join them plinking for an afternoon, you'll realize they aren't that uptight as long as you're respectful
- thefurdrake 3y ago> large subset of people [citation needed]
- 3y ago
- mydogmuppet 3y agoMmmm. Imagine the horror of living in a society where gunshots are the norm. Sana'a, Eritrea, Detroit, Memphis, West Bank..... grim.