I 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
This doesn't surprise me. I would say I hear things that sound like gunshots (maybe 50% certain) multiple times per day. Of the times when I'm 100% sure they're gunshots, it's very very rare that a crime ends up being reported, at least going by the local police incident maps.
local thieves in the big Canadian city where I live often set off fireworks, which, if timed well, sound quite similar to gun shots, as a way of causing distractions.
set off a few "gun battles" on the other side of a suburb and then boost the cars or break into the stores.
there was speculation there actual shootings happening, but the stats don't back that up -- lots of calls and disturbances, but few actual attacks.
Is 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
The 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.
I 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 ?
Legally 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.
There 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!
> 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:
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.
I 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.
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.
American 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.
> 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.
Like 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.
I'm finding it difficult to accept that police are the only demographic who are immune to alarm fatigue.
In fact, it would seem that not only are they immune to it, but respond paradoxically, in contrast to - well, everyone else, from college kids to IT staff to doctors to other public safety people.
This leads me to believe that The Real Problem are the people with guns who use them to shoot other people, not automatic alarms.
It'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.
I'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.
(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.)
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:
Acoustics would also struggle to determine friend from foe, if tanks or arty, and then you'd have to deal with dissipation and echoes and other weird effects. with a radar you actually can spot the the shell trajectory and turn that into a parabolic arc. then make some rough guesses as to how far they've traveled since then ("shoot and scoot"), and you can map out a firing solution that covers most of a given area.
MLRS/rocket arty is great for that since it can fire off a lot of ordinance quickly, at the cost of long reload times. saturate the grid square before their artillery can get away.
Radars get you into the EW cat-and-mouse game, tho.
