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> It's not perfect, but the distance from your house to a ShotSpotter sensor correlates fairly well with your household income. The wealthier you are, the less

> It's not perfect, but the distance from your house to a ShotSpotter sensor correlates fairly well with your household income. The wealthier you are, the less surveilled you are. To give ABQ police the benefit of the doubt, that pattern could also be compatible with more gun crime equaling more surveillance. It would be nice to have enough gun crime and sensor location data to see how true that is. When the sensors are as dense as they are, it's not clear that knowing the sensor locations is an advantage to offenders, at least in the gunshot spotting role.

bombcar 3y ago
It sounds like shotspotters are likely to be near where shots are; and that the wealthier you are the more likely you’d NOT want to be where the shots are.
- deleted 3y ago
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- Aurornis 3y ago
  Putting surveillance for gun crime in areas with the highest rates of gun crime is obviously what’s happening. I think the author and some commenters are nervous about claims that gun crime is inversely correlated with neighborhood wealth, which creates some of these strange accusations that some other bias is at play. If you pull up a map of crime in most cities the inverse correlation with home prices is obvious. If nothing else, high crime rates rapidly crush property values as everyone wants to leave those areas.
  - deleted 3y ago
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  - jakelazaroff 3y ago
    > If you pull up a map of crime in most cities the inverse correlation with home prices is obvious. If the police department spends the majority of its resources on certain areas, it will respond to the majority of incidents and make the majority of arrests in those areas. You can truthfully say "look, these numbers are higher than anywhere else!" but that doesn't necessarily mean there's more crime happening there — it could also mean the residents are overpoliced relative to other neighborhoods. With regard to the article, why is it obvious that police are putting surveillance in areas with the highest rates of gun crime?
    - thereisnospork 3y ago
      >With regard to the article, why is it obvious that police are putting surveillance in areas with the highest rates of gun crime? Because there are nicer neighborhoods and less than nice neighborhoods? In so far as I can tell this is true to various degrees in every place I've ever lived or visited. Colloquially, some neighborhoods have manicured lawns, other neighborhoods have cars on blocks - it's 'obvious'[0] that the latter warrants more policing. [0]The truth of it is arguable, perhaps, but it is very obvious.
      - Blahah 3y ago
        > it's 'obvious'[0] that the latter warrants more policing. Is it? I don't see it as at all obvious. It seems utterly ridiculous to me to increase policing in sync with socioeconomic deprivation. The blindingly obvious thing is to invest in solving the problems that cause the disparity, not to criminalize people who are living in poverty.
        philwelch 3y ago
        Crime is one of the problems that causes the disparity.
        deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      - jakelazaroff 3y ago
        It’s actually incredibly unclear why houses with cars on blocks would warrant more policing than houses with manicured lawns. Why don’t you elaborate?
        resolutebat 3y ago
        "Incredibly unclear"? Really? Not the OP, but let's spell it out: Manicuring a lawn is expensive and serves no useful purpose, so most practitioners have disposable income and/or spare time, and care about keeping up appearances. Putting a car up on blocks implies it's being used for spare parts, which is generally not something the well-off need to engage in (they buy new and use professionals for repairs as needed), and having one on your front lawn in particular implies that you value spare parts more than appearances. So both are reasonable proxies of wealth, and wealth correlates inversely with the kind of violent crime you could detect with gunshots.
  - kstenerud 3y ago
    > Putting surveillance for gun crime in areas with the highest rates of gun crime is obviously what’s happening. This is in fact the crux of the problem. By significantly increasing monitoring of areas with higher crime rates, you inadvertently create a vicious cycle feedback loop: The more you monitor an area, the more samples you get, biasing the stats (because your sampling is no longer uniform). Then these stats are used to justify more monitoring and policing in the area, further biasing your data.
    - thereisnospork 3y ago
      The point is supposed to be that the monitoring and increased policing makes at least certain crimes impossible therefore improving the area for the rest of us. The farce is the utter failure of the 'survalience state' to actually catch and prosecute people.
      - resolutebat 3y ago
        Perhaps in the US. Some surveillance states like Singapore and China are quite effective at catching criminals (thoughtcrime and otherwise).
    - Aurornis 3y ago
      > The more you monitor an area, the more samples you get, biasing the stats So by monitoring an area with high crime rate, you catch more crime, which results in more policing for the area with a confirmed high crime rate? And that's a bad thing?
      - ryandrake 3y ago
        By monitoring any area more, you find more crime, which results in that area being considered as "high crime" and in turn increasing monitoring--that's the cycle OP is talking about.
        philwelch 3y ago
        That’s an oversimplification. First of all, unless you’re completely overwhelmed and not even bothering to enforce certain laws, you’re going to find out about most of the serious crime that takes place. Law enforcement is made aware of homicides either through missing persons reports or the discovery of dead bodies. Armed robberies and grand theft are usually reported if, for no other reason, than to create a paper trail for insurance claims. People who get shot or stabbed badly enough to end up in a hospital, end up in a hospital so there’s a reporting mechanism there. It’s not normal for most major crimes to happen completely outside of the attention of law enforcement unless things have gone very very wrong (which admittedly they have in many American cities). And much of the time, you can infer where these crimes happened. The benefit of increasing patrols and surveillance in a specific area is more about gathering evidence to solve crimes, and less about discovering those crimes to begin with. In some cases you might end up discovering more crime (especially when gangs are involved and people are intimidated into not reporting crimes) but if you monitor areas where any serious crime would already get reported in the first place, you won’t actually find more serious crime there.
  - bandrami 3y ago
    If you let inequality and unofficial segregation fester long enough eventually every map is the same map
  - Tabular-Iceberg 3y ago
    Including the businesses that don’t want to be robbed, looted or have to pay into a protection racket. So those who are forced to stay have no way of making an honest living. The notion that poverty causes crime rather than crime causes poverty is a great disservice to the poor.
  - bnralt 3y ago
    I've noticed a lot of people start with the desire to not enforce laws, and work from there. So when there's more law enforcement activity in poorer areas, we get claims that the poor are being targeted and overpoliced. But when the wealthier people say they want more law enforcement in their area, the response is always "Why are safe areas like yours trying to take these law enforcement resources away from the poor areas who need it?" The positions are entirely inconsistent, but that's because anything is being said in an effort to remove enforcement. This was stated pretty explicitly a few years back with "Defund The Police", and now that it's lost popularity it's being pushed covertly. Ironically, for all the talk about needing to remove police to help the poor, it's the poor who have suffered the most from the massive increase in crime these policies have caused. Here's a community meeting from a poorer area a few months back, where the residents are complaining that people who live in safer areas are running an experiment in their areas that's leading to a massive spike in crime and death[1]. [1] https://wjla.com/news/local/gun-violence-shootings-crime-youth-anacostia-coordinating-council-mayor-muriel-bowser-lamont-mitchell-ron-moten-grapple-with-spike-in-violent-crime-in-dc-phillip-pannell https://wjla.com/news/local/gun-violence-shootings-crime-you...
    - skippyboxedhero 3y ago
      The funniest part is having a (presumably) wealthy person knowledgeably inform poor people, who are the victims of these crimes, that they are "overpoliced". From the point of view of someone who can roll into a poor area, say they are "overpoliced", and roll out again...yes, it probably does that seem way. That is because they aren't likely to get shot so the police are the problem, not the bullets. For the person who can get shot, the bullets are the issue (this isn't limited to this area, you are seeing in multiple policy areas that wealthy people enthusiastically advocate for the state to be rolled back like some kind of giga-Milton Friedman...as with libertarians, they aren't the ones that have to deal with the consequences of this).
      - bnralt 3y ago
        Yeah, I always get the impression that the people talking about this really haven't spoken to the people in these neighborhoods. I've walked in neighborhoods here where the longtime residents came up to me and told me I should leave because it was dangerous (and I've spoken to others who have had a similar experience). It's always the people who grew up in suburbs and moved to the city as an adult who are dismissive of crime. Crime and poor schools are usually what make "bad neighborhoods" bad. It's why many of the people there will save and downsize to move to nicer neighborhoods. Whenever I've talked to people living in those areas, they always want more enforcement and to have their neighborhoods cleaned up. A lot of people want to speak for the residents there, without ever actually speaking to the residents there.
  - micromacrofoot 3y ago
    > high crime rates rapidly crush property values as everyone wants to leave those areas it's a nitpick, but I think it's the reverse... property values don't appreciate as quickly in these areas, in this current market if you told millennials that gun violence lowered house values they'd probably fire off a few shots themselves
- lotsofpulp 3y ago
  > and that the wealthier you are the more likely you’d NOT want to be where the shots are. The way this is phrased sounds like “the poorer you are, the more likely you would want to be where the shots are”. Which is obviously false.
  - bombcar 3y ago
    One person wants to be where the shot is (he pulled the trigger) but yeah, most of the poor people would rather be away but lack the ability.
- jojobas 3y ago
  You see, both gentrification and white flight are bad, and so is the very existence of low-crime underpoliced neighborhoods.
jonahx 3y ago
> that could also be compatible with more gun crime equaling more surveillance Not just could -- without more information, it's the far more likely and economical explanation. The phrasing in the article imo is intentionally inflammatory.
- deleted 3y ago
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- nerdponx 3y ago
  It's not inflammatory, it's a statement of fact. Of course the public surveillance is located in the areas where crime is most likely to occur! But an important side effect is that innocent people in those areas now are more surveilled than other people. So it becomes yet another injustice inflicted on people who already tend to suffer more greatly from injustice than others. Maybe there are offsetting factors. If the surveillance makes neighborhoods significantly safer, then maybe local residents will be happy to be surveilled in exchange. The article is stating a fact of correlation, not causality. But the particular outcome of "greater surveillance" clearly happens, regardless of why it occurs, and regardless of other offsetting considerations.
standardUser 3y ago
I don't think the article is suggesting there is a conspiracy wherein the police decided to target lower income areas because they are poor. It is certainly because incidences of those crimes are higher in those areas. What I think the article is suggesting is that policies like these, particularly when implemented without sufficient transparency or oversight, can cause dystopian-sounding outcomes, such as poor people's conversations being constantly recorded by the government while wealthier people remain un-surveilled.
fasthands9 3y ago
I'm curious if the author lives in the wealthier or non wealthy region. I do not own a gun. I currently live in a city and would be happy to learn they were installing shot spotter near me. It's maybe the least intrusive type of surveillance there is. It just says a signal if there is a loud noise in public. edit: previous statement not correct but leaving it up as it's been responded to
- JoshTriplett 3y ago
  From the article: > Conversations recorded by ShotSpotter sensors have twice been introduced as evidence in criminal trials. In one case the court allowed it, in another the court did not. The possibility clearly exists, and depending on interpretation of state law, it may be permissible for ShotSpotter to record conversations on the street for future use as evidence.
  - deleted 3y ago
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  - fasthands9 3y ago
    Fair enough. My previous statement was incorrect. Edited above. I understand the hypothetical case they could be misused but I'm still not aware of any cases they actually were. >On June 8, 2007, the Shotspotter acoustic gunshot detection and location system recorded two gunshots from the corner of 83rd Avenue and Birch Street in Oakland, California. The first one, at 11:10:22 p.m., was at 8236 Birch Street, and the second one, 24 seconds later at 11:10:46 p.m., was at 1775 83rd Avenue. Those addresses are less than 10 feet apart. The recording of the second shot also captured the voice of Tyrone Lyles, apparently addressing the person who shot him: "Ar, Ar, why are you going to do me like that, Ar." I am happy shotspotter helped in the prosecution of this person who needlessly killed someone. I realize there could be ways to abuse this for things having nothing to do with gun violence, but you could also say DUI traffic stops or DNA collection could be misued. That doesn't mean they are misused.
    - kortilla 3y ago
itishappy 3y ago
> Many assumed that ShotSpotter coverage was concentrated in disadvantaged parts of the city, an unsurprising outcome but one that could contribute to systemic overpolicing. Also > Conversations recorded by ShotSpotter sensors have twice been introduced as evidence in criminal trials.
- Scoundreller 3y ago
  > Conversations recorded by ShotSpotter sensors have twice been introduced as evidence in criminal trials. More importantly, how many times were collected conversations used and acted upon in an investigation and not been introduced as evidence?
  - lucubratory 3y ago
    Exactly, instituting pervasive audio surveillance is bad even if it's rarely used in court, because it can and will still be used for parallel construction.
bastawhiz 3y ago
> more gun crime equaling more surveillance But if you're not listening for the guns then you're not going to find the crime that does happen, will you? It's either saying "we don't care about it because it's less frequent" (which is stupid—you still build a fire station in places where buildings burn down less frequently) or "it's easier to keep ourselves busy when we fish in a barrel".
- curtisblaine 3y ago
  If you were to design a system to spot a certain kind of crime in real time, would you place it in zones historically more plagued by that kind of crime or in zones that experienced it scarcely? It's hard to buy into the rhetoric of "it's only fair if you monitor the crime equally" if you have already independently sampled it for decades and by now know the zones where it's much likely to happen. Would you patrol a desert in the same way you patrol a busy road intersection if you're trying to prevent car accidents?
  - cratermoon 3y ago
    > would you place it in zones historically more plagued by that kind of crime You mean these zones? https://whitecollarcrime.zone/ https://whitecollarcrime.zone/
    - kortilla 3y ago
      For shotspotter? No. If someone made a system for detecting fraud, embezzlement, or insider trading, you bet your ass it would be deployed there.
  - User23 3y ago
    The problem is Bayesian priors look an awful lot like racism to the unaided eye, enough so that it's really hard to justify them. Or maybe it's racism masquerading as a Bayesian prior. I don't see how to know for sure either way.
    - 3y ago
defrost 3y ago
There's an interesting control system feedback complaint with a lot to it; * historically there's been a lot of "black crime" in the US due to the US police watching black neighbourhoods excessively and being absent elsewhere .. take this all the way back in time to Tulsa and before. * Subsequently there's been a lot of "black crime" as neighbourhoods have been destroyed by occasional mobs (Tulsa), frequent division by freeways and toxic waste dumps, and the removal of many adult males to the prison system as a result of all the "observed crime" leading to an excess of young males with few prospects. * Based on that data the modern survellience goes to where all the crime has been created^H observed. Meanwhile entire areas of US cities get on by considerably less police present and oversight and a great deal less observed crime.
- whatwhaaaaat 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - nerdponx 3y ago
    Their statement about observed crime was an historical claim (as in: "historically there's been a lot of ...").
    - whatwhaaaaat 3y ago
      his point was that he thinks low income areas are being targeted with a higher police presence. That is so wrong it’s hard to believe oc has ever been to a city in the us. I actually doubt he has for any serious amount of time. High tax areas are covered with police in US cities at a rate far above poor inner city areas.
  - aCoreyJ 3y ago
    Big cities are pretty safe. For instance you more likely to be a victim of a crime in rural northern Wisconsin, like Barron County, than you are in Milwaukee. Don't let your narrative be shaped by stats that aren't proportional.
h0l0cube 3y ago
> It would be nice to have enough gun crime and sensor location data to see how true that is. The main thread of the article is that ShotSpotter operate without scrutiny. The problematic aspects of their deployment are the false positives... > APD received about 14,000 ShotSpotter reports last year. The accuracy of these reports, in terms of their correctly identifying gunfire, is contested. SoundThinking claims impressive statistics, but has actively resisted independent evaluation. A Chicago report found that only 11.3% of ShotSpotter reports could be confirmed as gunfire. .. and false charges > This ought to give us pause, as should the fact that ShotSpotter has been compellingly demonstrated to manipulate their "interpretation" of evidence to fit a prosecutor's narrative---even when ShotSpotter's original analysis contradicted it. Linked article: 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... .. and as highlighted in another comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39577403 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39577403), cops shooting kids playing with fireworks https://chicago.suntimes.com/crime/2024/02/27/chicago-police-officer-shotspotter-alert-opened-fire-boy-lighting-fireworks https://chicago.suntimes.com/crime/2024/02/27/chicago-police...
dmamills 3y ago
This is just another example of how American Police budgets have gotten out of hand. A budget that allows for a municipal police force to install 721 "AI powered" recording devices. That are purchased from a publicly traded company, and deployed in areas guaranteed to funnel people into the for profit privatized prison system. What a wonderful use of tax dollars. Protecting and serving the path to a better society.
qingcharles 3y ago
There is a ShotSpotter on the lightpole outside my door. My household income is about $2400/yr. My hood is a warzone though (South Side Chicago), so not unexpected lol
BHSPitMonkey 3y ago
> To give ABQ police the benefit of the doubt, that pattern could also be compatible with more gun crime equaling more surveillance. It would be nice to have enough gun crime and sensor location data to see how true that is. The very point of the article is that, absent leaks like this one, there could be no way for anybody to independently study or verify the fairness of the sensor distribution, or even the real efficacy of the reports the system produces—which is a troubling situation to be in when the state has an outsized amount of power to prosecute people based on potential junk science that will be hard for defendants to challenge in court. The answer isn't to give police departments the benefit of the doubt (which they so rarely earn), but to demand better transparency and citizen oversight of the technology poised to be used against us.

bombcar 3y ago

It sounds like shotspotters are likely to be near where shots are; and that the wealthier you are the more likely you’d NOT want to be where the shots are.

deleted 3y ago
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Aurornis 3y ago
Putting surveillance for gun crime in areas with the highest rates of gun crime is obviously what’s happening. I think the author and some commenters are nervous about claims that gun crime is inversely correlated with neighborhood wealth, which creates some of these strange accusations that some other bias is at play. If you pull up a map of crime in most cities the inverse correlation with home prices is obvious. If nothing else, high crime rates rapidly crush property values as everyone wants to leave those areas.
- deleted 3y ago
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- jakelazaroff 3y ago
  > If you pull up a map of crime in most cities the inverse correlation with home prices is obvious. If the police department spends the majority of its resources on certain areas, it will respond to the majority of incidents and make the majority of arrests in those areas. You can truthfully say "look, these numbers are higher than anywhere else!" but that doesn't necessarily mean there's more crime happening there — it could also mean the residents are overpoliced relative to other neighborhoods. With regard to the article, why is it obvious that police are putting surveillance in areas with the highest rates of gun crime?
  - thereisnospork 3y ago
    >With regard to the article, why is it obvious that police are putting surveillance in areas with the highest rates of gun crime? Because there are nicer neighborhoods and less than nice neighborhoods? In so far as I can tell this is true to various degrees in every place I've ever lived or visited. Colloquially, some neighborhoods have manicured lawns, other neighborhoods have cars on blocks - it's 'obvious'[0] that the latter warrants more policing. [0]The truth of it is arguable, perhaps, but it is very obvious.
    - Blahah 3y ago
      > it's 'obvious'[0] that the latter warrants more policing. Is it? I don't see it as at all obvious. It seems utterly ridiculous to me to increase policing in sync with socioeconomic deprivation. The blindingly obvious thing is to invest in solving the problems that cause the disparity, not to criminalize people who are living in poverty.
      - philwelch 3y ago
        Crime is one of the problems that causes the disparity.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
    - jakelazaroff 3y ago
      It’s actually incredibly unclear why houses with cars on blocks would warrant more policing than houses with manicured lawns. Why don’t you elaborate?
      - resolutebat 3y ago
        "Incredibly unclear"? Really? Not the OP, but let's spell it out: Manicuring a lawn is expensive and serves no useful purpose, so most practitioners have disposable income and/or spare time, and care about keeping up appearances. Putting a car up on blocks implies it's being used for spare parts, which is generally not something the well-off need to engage in (they buy new and use professionals for repairs as needed), and having one on your front lawn in particular implies that you value spare parts more than appearances. So both are reasonable proxies of wealth, and wealth correlates inversely with the kind of violent crime you could detect with gunshots.
- kstenerud 3y ago
  > Putting surveillance for gun crime in areas with the highest rates of gun crime is obviously what’s happening. This is in fact the crux of the problem. By significantly increasing monitoring of areas with higher crime rates, you inadvertently create a vicious cycle feedback loop: The more you monitor an area, the more samples you get, biasing the stats (because your sampling is no longer uniform). Then these stats are used to justify more monitoring and policing in the area, further biasing your data.
  - thereisnospork 3y ago
    The point is supposed to be that the monitoring and increased policing makes at least certain crimes impossible therefore improving the area for the rest of us. The farce is the utter failure of the 'survalience state' to actually catch and prosecute people.
    - resolutebat 3y ago
      Perhaps in the US. Some surveillance states like Singapore and China are quite effective at catching criminals (thoughtcrime and otherwise).
  - Aurornis 3y ago
    > The more you monitor an area, the more samples you get, biasing the stats So by monitoring an area with high crime rate, you catch more crime, which results in more policing for the area with a confirmed high crime rate? And that's a bad thing?
    - ryandrake 3y ago
      By monitoring any area more, you find more crime, which results in that area being considered as "high crime" and in turn increasing monitoring--that's the cycle OP is talking about.
      - philwelch 3y ago
        That’s an oversimplification. First of all, unless you’re completely overwhelmed and not even bothering to enforce certain laws, you’re going to find out about most of the serious crime that takes place. Law enforcement is made aware of homicides either through missing persons reports or the discovery of dead bodies. Armed robberies and grand theft are usually reported if, for no other reason, than to create a paper trail for insurance claims. People who get shot or stabbed badly enough to end up in a hospital, end up in a hospital so there’s a reporting mechanism there. It’s not normal for most major crimes to happen completely outside of the attention of law enforcement unless things have gone very very wrong (which admittedly they have in many American cities). And much of the time, you can infer where these crimes happened. The benefit of increasing patrols and surveillance in a specific area is more about gathering evidence to solve crimes, and less about discovering those crimes to begin with. In some cases you might end up discovering more crime (especially when gangs are involved and people are intimidated into not reporting crimes) but if you monitor areas where any serious crime would already get reported in the first place, you won’t actually find more serious crime there.
- bandrami 3y ago
  If you let inequality and unofficial segregation fester long enough eventually every map is the same map
- Tabular-Iceberg 3y ago
  Including the businesses that don’t want to be robbed, looted or have to pay into a protection racket. So those who are forced to stay have no way of making an honest living. The notion that poverty causes crime rather than crime causes poverty is a great disservice to the poor.
- bnralt 3y ago
  I've noticed a lot of people start with the desire to not enforce laws, and work from there. So when there's more law enforcement activity in poorer areas, we get claims that the poor are being targeted and overpoliced. But when the wealthier people say they want more law enforcement in their area, the response is always "Why are safe areas like yours trying to take these law enforcement resources away from the poor areas who need it?" The positions are entirely inconsistent, but that's because anything is being said in an effort to remove enforcement. This was stated pretty explicitly a few years back with "Defund The Police", and now that it's lost popularity it's being pushed covertly. Ironically, for all the talk about needing to remove police to help the poor, it's the poor who have suffered the most from the massive increase in crime these policies have caused. Here's a community meeting from a poorer area a few months back, where the residents are complaining that people who live in safer areas are running an experiment in their areas that's leading to a massive spike in crime and death[1]. [1] https://wjla.com/news/local/gun-violence-shootings-crime-youth-anacostia-coordinating-council-mayor-muriel-bowser-lamont-mitchell-ron-moten-grapple-with-spike-in-violent-crime-in-dc-phillip-pannell https://wjla.com/news/local/gun-violence-shootings-crime-you...
  - skippyboxedhero 3y ago
    The funniest part is having a (presumably) wealthy person knowledgeably inform poor people, who are the victims of these crimes, that they are "overpoliced". From the point of view of someone who can roll into a poor area, say they are "overpoliced", and roll out again...yes, it probably does that seem way. That is because they aren't likely to get shot so the police are the problem, not the bullets. For the person who can get shot, the bullets are the issue (this isn't limited to this area, you are seeing in multiple policy areas that wealthy people enthusiastically advocate for the state to be rolled back like some kind of giga-Milton Friedman...as with libertarians, they aren't the ones that have to deal with the consequences of this).
    - bnralt 3y ago
      Yeah, I always get the impression that the people talking about this really haven't spoken to the people in these neighborhoods. I've walked in neighborhoods here where the longtime residents came up to me and told me I should leave because it was dangerous (and I've spoken to others who have had a similar experience). It's always the people who grew up in suburbs and moved to the city as an adult who are dismissive of crime. Crime and poor schools are usually what make "bad neighborhoods" bad. It's why many of the people there will save and downsize to move to nicer neighborhoods. Whenever I've talked to people living in those areas, they always want more enforcement and to have their neighborhoods cleaned up. A lot of people want to speak for the residents there, without ever actually speaking to the residents there.
- micromacrofoot 3y ago
  > high crime rates rapidly crush property values as everyone wants to leave those areas it's a nitpick, but I think it's the reverse... property values don't appreciate as quickly in these areas, in this current market if you told millennials that gun violence lowered house values they'd probably fire off a few shots themselves
lotsofpulp 3y ago
> and that the wealthier you are the more likely you’d NOT want to be where the shots are. The way this is phrased sounds like “the poorer you are, the more likely you would want to be where the shots are”. Which is obviously false.
- bombcar 3y ago
  One person wants to be where the shot is (he pulled the trigger) but yeah, most of the poor people would rather be away but lack the ability.
jojobas 3y ago
You see, both gentrification and white flight are bad, and so is the very existence of low-crime underpoliced neighborhoods.

jonahx 3y ago

> that could also be compatible with more gun crime equaling more surveillance Not just could -- without more information, it's the far more likely and economical explanation. The phrasing in the article imo is intentionally inflammatory.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
nerdponx 3y ago
It's not inflammatory, it's a statement of fact. Of course the public surveillance is located in the areas where crime is most likely to occur! But an important side effect is that innocent people in those areas now are more surveilled than other people. So it becomes yet another injustice inflicted on people who already tend to suffer more greatly from injustice than others. Maybe there are offsetting factors. If the surveillance makes neighborhoods significantly safer, then maybe local residents will be happy to be surveilled in exchange. The article is stating a fact of correlation, not causality. But the particular outcome of "greater surveillance" clearly happens, regardless of why it occurs, and regardless of other offsetting considerations.

standardUser 3y ago

I don't think the article is suggesting there is a conspiracy wherein the police decided to target lower income areas because they are poor. It is certainly because incidences of those crimes are higher in those areas. What I think the article is suggesting is that policies like these, particularly when implemented without sufficient transparency or oversight, can cause dystopian-sounding outcomes, such as poor people's conversations being constantly recorded by the government while wealthier people remain un-surveilled.

fasthands9 3y ago

I'm curious if the author lives in the wealthier or non wealthy region. I do not own a gun. I currently live in a city and would be happy to learn they were installing shot spotter near me. It's maybe the least intrusive type of surveillance there is. It just says a signal if there is a loud noise in public. edit: previous statement not correct but leaving it up as it's been responded to

JoshTriplett 3y ago
From the article: > Conversations recorded by ShotSpotter sensors have twice been introduced as evidence in criminal trials. In one case the court allowed it, in another the court did not. The possibility clearly exists, and depending on interpretation of state law, it may be permissible for ShotSpotter to record conversations on the street for future use as evidence.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- fasthands9 3y ago
  Fair enough. My previous statement was incorrect. Edited above. I understand the hypothetical case they could be misused but I'm still not aware of any cases they actually were. >On June 8, 2007, the Shotspotter acoustic gunshot detection and location system recorded two gunshots from the corner of 83rd Avenue and Birch Street in Oakland, California. The first one, at 11:10:22 p.m., was at 8236 Birch Street, and the second one, 24 seconds later at 11:10:46 p.m., was at 1775 83rd Avenue. Those addresses are less than 10 feet apart. The recording of the second shot also captured the voice of Tyrone Lyles, apparently addressing the person who shot him: "Ar, Ar, why are you going to do me like that, Ar." I am happy shotspotter helped in the prosecution of this person who needlessly killed someone. I realize there could be ways to abuse this for things having nothing to do with gun violence, but you could also say DUI traffic stops or DNA collection could be misued. That doesn't mean they are misused.
  - kortilla 3y ago

itishappy 3y ago

> Many assumed that ShotSpotter coverage was concentrated in disadvantaged parts of the city, an unsurprising outcome but one that could contribute to systemic overpolicing. Also > Conversations recorded by ShotSpotter sensors have twice been introduced as evidence in criminal trials.

Scoundreller 3y ago
> Conversations recorded by ShotSpotter sensors have twice been introduced as evidence in criminal trials. More importantly, how many times were collected conversations used and acted upon in an investigation and not been introduced as evidence?
- lucubratory 3y ago
  Exactly, instituting pervasive audio surveillance is bad even if it's rarely used in court, because it can and will still be used for parallel construction.

bastawhiz 3y ago

> more gun crime equaling more surveillance But if you're not listening for the guns then you're not going to find the crime that does happen, will you? It's either saying "we don't care about it because it's less frequent" (which is stupid—you still build a fire station in places where buildings burn down less frequently) or "it's easier to keep ourselves busy when we fish in a barrel".

curtisblaine 3y ago
If you were to design a system to spot a certain kind of crime in real time, would you place it in zones historically more plagued by that kind of crime or in zones that experienced it scarcely? It's hard to buy into the rhetoric of "it's only fair if you monitor the crime equally" if you have already independently sampled it for decades and by now know the zones where it's much likely to happen. Would you patrol a desert in the same way you patrol a busy road intersection if you're trying to prevent car accidents?
- cratermoon 3y ago
  > would you place it in zones historically more plagued by that kind of crime You mean these zones? https://whitecollarcrime.zone/ https://whitecollarcrime.zone/
  - kortilla 3y ago
    For shotspotter? No. If someone made a system for detecting fraud, embezzlement, or insider trading, you bet your ass it would be deployed there.
- User23 3y ago
  The problem is Bayesian priors look an awful lot like racism to the unaided eye, enough so that it's really hard to justify them. Or maybe it's racism masquerading as a Bayesian prior. I don't see how to know for sure either way.
  - 3y ago

defrost 3y ago

There's an interesting control system feedback complaint with a lot to it; * historically there's been a lot of "black crime" in the US due to the US police watching black neighbourhoods excessively and being absent elsewhere .. take this all the way back in time to Tulsa and before. * Subsequently there's been a lot of "black crime" as neighbourhoods have been destroyed by occasional mobs (Tulsa), frequent division by freeways and toxic waste dumps, and the removal of many adult males to the prison system as a result of all the "observed crime" leading to an excess of young males with few prospects. * Based on that data the modern survellience goes to where all the crime has been created^H observed. Meanwhile entire areas of US cities get on by considerably less police present and oversight and a great deal less observed crime.

whatwhaaaaat 3y ago
[flagged]
- nerdponx 3y ago
  Their statement about observed crime was an historical claim (as in: "historically there's been a lot of ...").
  - whatwhaaaaat 3y ago
    his point was that he thinks low income areas are being targeted with a higher police presence. That is so wrong it’s hard to believe oc has ever been to a city in the us. I actually doubt he has for any serious amount of time. High tax areas are covered with police in US cities at a rate far above poor inner city areas.
- aCoreyJ 3y ago
  Big cities are pretty safe. For instance you more likely to be a victim of a crime in rural northern Wisconsin, like Barron County, than you are in Milwaukee. Don't let your narrative be shaped by stats that aren't proportional.

h0l0cube 3y ago

> It would be nice to have enough gun crime and sensor location data to see how true that is. The main thread of the article is that ShotSpotter operate without scrutiny. The problematic aspects of their deployment are the false positives... > APD received about 14,000 ShotSpotter reports last year. The accuracy of these reports, in terms of their correctly identifying gunfire, is contested. SoundThinking claims impressive statistics, but has actively resisted independent evaluation. A Chicago report found that only 11.3% of ShotSpotter reports could be confirmed as gunfire. .. and false charges > This ought to give us pause, as should the fact that ShotSpotter has been compellingly demonstrated to manipulate their "interpretation" of evidence to fit a prosecutor's narrative---even when ShotSpotter's original analysis contradicted it. Linked article: 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... .. and as highlighted in another comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39577403 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39577403), cops shooting kids playing with fireworks https://chicago.suntimes.com/crime/2024/02/27/chicago-police-officer-shotspotter-alert-opened-fire-boy-lighting-fireworks https://chicago.suntimes.com/crime/2024/02/27/chicago-police...

dmamills 3y ago

This is just another example of how American Police budgets have gotten out of hand. A budget that allows for a municipal police force to install 721 "AI powered" recording devices. That are purchased from a publicly traded company, and deployed in areas guaranteed to funnel people into the for profit privatized prison system. What a wonderful use of tax dollars. Protecting and serving the path to a better society.

qingcharles 3y ago

There is a ShotSpotter on the lightpole outside my door. My household income is about $2400/yr. My hood is a warzone though (South Side Chicago), so not unexpected lol

BHSPitMonkey 3y ago

> To give ABQ police the benefit of the doubt, that pattern could also be compatible with more gun crime equaling more surveillance. It would be nice to have enough gun crime and sensor location data to see how true that is. The very point of the article is that, absent leaks like this one, there could be no way for anybody to independently study or verify the fairness of the sensor distribution, or even the real efficacy of the reports the system produces—which is a troubling situation to be in when the state has an outsized amount of power to prosecute people based on potential junk science that will be hard for defendants to challenge in court. The answer isn't to give police departments the benefit of the doubt (which they so rarely earn), but to demand better transparency and citizen oversight of the technology poised to be used against us.