[HN Gopher] Police are telling ShotSpotter to alter evidence fro...
___________________________________________________________________
Police are telling ShotSpotter to alter evidence from gunshot-
detecting AI
Author : danso
Score : 357 points
Date : 2021-07-26 14:27 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.vice.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.vice.com)
| zucked wrote:
| Shotspotter concerns me - the city I live in has paid millions
| for a system and recently expanded it. I am not aware of _any_
| data that has been published from the system, even fuzzed data.
| That doesn't pass the sniff test for me.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Wow, millions?! Do they have any cost/benefit data for this
| system?
| fnordfnordfnord wrote:
| Of course not. They're hoping that a noise will some day
| coincide with a crime so then they can write a press release
| lauding the technology and the smart decision maker for
| buying it.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Find some like-minded people (perhaps including journalists),
| pool some resources, and use FOIA to sue. If your chief of
| police equivocates, call them a liar. Treat them like
| criminals, accuse them of running a protection racket.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| On one hand, it seems that Shotspotter lacks the accuracy to be
| used in court. On the other hand, it seems like a valuable
| probabilistic tool to help police perform detective work and
| collect real admissible evidence. The problem seems to confusing
| the two.
|
| You can use an Ouija board to help find video evidence, but the
| video evidence still needs to show something incriminating.
| ChrisKnott wrote:
| In the Williams case, I feel like the key information is how
| likely ShotSpotter is to miss a gunshot completely.
|
| They have video footage that shows the suspect and victim in
| the suspect's car alone at 11:46. If the victim was shot at
| 11:46 then this is extremely strong evidence of guilt,
| especially as it would also show the suspect lied. It seems
| reasonable to me that an algorithm might mistake a gunshot from
| inside a car as a firecracker out on the street. The
| classification aspect is not important. What the defence have
| to argue is not just that this sound is a firecracker, but the
| actual shot that killed the victim (which by the suspect's
| account happened in the same place), was not captured.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| I'm not familiar enough with the case to guess at strategy.
|
| The keys seems to be: If police have any evidence besides
| ShotSpotter to connect the time and place of the shooting
| with the video of the two of them together.
| ChrisKnott wrote:
| I don't they necessarily need other evidence for the time.
| The article and most of the comments here are focussing on
| its inaccuracy in geolocation and classification, but it
| seems to be an accurate recording of loud sounds that ring
| out across the city. A high false positive rate actually
| works against the suspect. He needs it to have missed one.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| I think that really depends on the frequency of loud
| sounds detected. If possible gunshots are detected every
| 2 minutes, false negatives don't really matter in this
| case.
| kyleblarson wrote:
| Vice conveniently leaves out the fact that Toledo had a gun in
| his hand with the slide locked back which means he had emptied
| the clip. There is video of this.
| ellenhp wrote:
| Not to be pedantic but that's not what that means. That means
| that the slide was pulled back then released with the slide
| lock activated either manually or by an empty magazine. It's
| advisable to store pistols in this way with the magazine
| removed because it's generally the least threatening
| configuration a pistol can be in short of being disassembled.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Assumes facts not in evidence, to wit that he had a full clip
| at the outset of the incident.
| Zigurd wrote:
| All technical support, including DNA, fingerprints, hair, fiber,
| etc. in law enforcement should be controlled outside of police
| departments and prosecutors, and should be made equally available
| to defendants as well as police and prosecutors.
|
| With the level of conflict of interest, you can't call it
| "science."
| MisterTea wrote:
| Using privacy badger and noticing Vice pages now redirect to a
| 404 AFTER loading. Guess I'm not reading the article.
| bell-cot wrote:
| Privacy Badger, Firefox, and NoScript here, and I can read the
| article fine. I'd suggest you try a few js-blocking add-ons.
| cratermoon wrote:
| Cops Lie. Here's a few examples.
|
| https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/nypd-shake...
|
| https://popculture.com/trending/news/target-starbucks-tampon...
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/31/us/police-mcdonalds-coffe...
|
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/08/1...
|
| https://popculture.com/trending/news/nypd-called-out-falsely...
|
| https://www.oregonlive.com/crime/2019/07/police-lieutenant-w...
|
| https://www.foxla.com/news/deputies-arrest-kpcc-reporter-cov...
|
| https://www.courier-journal.com/story/news/local/breonna-tay...
|
| https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/939zda/how-stupid-do-cops...
|
| https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/jmv94x/testilying-cops-ar...
|
| https://www.ocregister.com/2020/09/25/oc-sheriffs-deputies-w...
|
| https://www.cjr.org/special_report/officials-say-chicago-pol...
|
| https://fair.org/home/6-elements-of-police-spin-an-object-le...
| pmarreck wrote:
| There needs to be a law that any technology used by law
| enforcement in the course of doing business is open-source.
|
| I don't see how this isn't already the case given the lives at
| stake
| avh02 wrote:
| How hard would it be to create a community network of crappy
| microphones to do what shotspotter does? You have a million
| phones that all have gps and microphones
| kawfey wrote:
| If i was a programmer, I would be making this. a small alexa-
| like array of microphones on a RasPi for rough direction
| estimate, times a bunch of networked units microphones to get
| precise-ish TDoA, mounted on rooftops...
|
| I've always wanted to do this to record and report on the
| number of gunshots I hear every night - hundreds go unreported
| - and to get an accurate direction less prone to reflections.
| Also to start an ML library to recognize thunder vs. fireworks
| vs. dumpster lids vs. planks of lumber vs. misfires vs.
| gunshots and other percussive noises.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| If it meant an increased likelihood of catching the cops in a
| lie, I'd host such a device on my roof.
|
| I'd just want an easy way to audit the outbound data so I could
| become confident that it was only recording cases of: "Holy
| crap that was an EXPLOSION" and not recording cases of: "Did
| you hear what that guy said in his back yard?"
|
| It's not like anybody creating explosions has a reasonable
| right to privacy. Everybody heard it, it might as well be
| public record. This would just add timestamps.
| Vaslo wrote:
| Oh man the privacy folks are gonna hammer this comment hard.
| jaegerpicker wrote:
| I'm a huge privacy advocate but it makes some sense. If the
| police and government is corrupt and using this tech,
| creating a non-corrupt open-source community driven
| alternative to combat the corruption is probably a net win
| despite the privacy issues. The real win is to destroy the
| Police surveillance state and tech but we as a people (the
| US) seem incapable of real policing change. :(
| Retric wrote:
| I don't think people firing guns have a reasonable
| expectation of privacy. Voluntarily submitting cellphone data
| is already used for several things like traffic congestion
| via Waze and related apps.
|
| I am vary pro privacy, but as long as it's voluntary I don't
| have an issue with this.
| rspeele wrote:
| It would depend strongly on whether the phone is analyzing
| the data from the mic and reporting to a server "possible
| gunshot heard, GPS coords X,Y, volume-level 60%, gunshot-
| like-score 75%" or whether the phone is sending raw
| recordings from the mic to a server and trusting that the
| server is only checking them for gunshot sound (not, say,
| saving your private conversations).
|
| And of course it's difficult for the average user of an app
| to tell the difference, or even for a tech savvy user to
| tell without investing some time and effort.
| Retric wrote:
| I am going to assume significant processing would need to
| happen on the device or your uploading audio 24/7 which
| would have heavy bandwidth implications. I don't think
| uploading individual sub 2 second sound clips with time
| stamps is significant from a privacy standpoint, but it
| might be in the middle of a long gunfight.
| jaegerpicker wrote:
| Yes hopefully all the analysis would happen on device but
| that limits anything like a google home/alexa. Last I
| looked neither device allowed processing on device.
| avh02 wrote:
| I'd not put that on my primary device either, maybe leave
| a spare plugged in near an open window, etc
| adrr wrote:
| There are also the home assistance devices like Amazon Echos
| that have an always on Mic. Amazon could be a huge surveillance
| network for police with Ring video feed and a shot spotter
| network of echo devices if they went down that road.
| ghostbrainalpha wrote:
| How would the phone differentiate between real gun shots, and
| the gun shot noises my phone hears every day from the
| Television I watch, or video games I play?
| avh02 wrote:
| You'd have to corroborate with the network I guess
| mabbo wrote:
| If we want to rely on this technology as being unbiased and
| accurate, then it must be a purely one-directional flow of
| information. Data should only flow from SpotShotter to the
| police, and never in the other direction. No questions, no
| inquiries, no anything. As soon as you do, you introduce bias or
| at least the ability for bias to exist, intentional or otherwise.
|
| If the SpotShotter technology is as good as they claim, there
| should never be a need. And if the police can't make a case with
| what SpotShotter gives them, they shouldn't rely on it.
| cryptonector wrote:
| But also this should flow to the public in real-time for
| archival and should be tamper-evident to prevent alterations.
| Like a blockchain.
| Decker87 wrote:
| It will always flow back, at least in the form of dollars
| spent.
| fnordfnordfnord wrote:
| > then it must be a purely one-directional flow of information.
|
| That's absolutely not possible.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| We used a shot detection system... in Afghanistan. Not really
| sure it's needed in the United States.
| rhizome wrote:
| For some reason this isn't a felony offense by anybody involved.
| Hokusai wrote:
| > Greene found a fifth shot, despite there being no physical
| evidence at the scene that Simmons had fired. Rochester police
| had also refused his multiple requests for them to test his hands
| and clothing for gunshot residue.
|
| This is the same that giving queues to a dog to bark to be able
| to inspect someone or a vehicle. New tech, old tricks. No
| technology will work if the people using it is corrupt.
| Leparamour wrote:
| >No technology will work if the people using it is corrupt.
|
| Put it on a blockchain then.
|
| Edit: I'm serious. Blockchain is exactly meant for application
| inside zero-trust environments. If you think it's impossible to
| put a video on blockchain, just have software making hash-
| fingerprints at regular time intervals and save those on a
| blockchain to make tampering with the video evident.
| ahoy wrote:
| No amount of new technology, training, equipment, or funding
| with change this. US policing is fundamentally a broken system.
| asdff wrote:
| It still blows my mind how police are allowed to turn off body
| cams while on the clock. That should be considered an offense
| like a government official burning public documents, because
| that's basically what is going on when you turn off the video.
| It's uncanny how the cameras are almost always off whenever
| something controversial happens.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _It still blows my mind how police are allowed to turn off
| body cams while on the clock. That should be considered an
| offense like a government official burning public documents,
| because that 's basically what is going on when you turn off
| the video_
|
| It depends on the jurisdiction. In some police departments,
| turning off a body camera is a punishable offense, up to and
| including firing.
|
| It's up to your city leaders to enforce this, and override
| the local police union's resistance, if possible.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Sometimes there are also privacy laws that would need to be
| addressed at the state level. For example, many places
| prohibit the camera from being active in a private
| residence unless permission is granted by the resident.
| kbenson wrote:
| Unless police see what they believe is a crime in
| progress, they aren't supposed to enter a private
| residence without permission anyway, right? I'm not sure
| how that can't be easily dealt with even in the
| problematic states by saying that permission for the
| police to enter the premises is also permission for them
| to record.
| giantg2 wrote:
| They could be responding to a non-criminal call, like a
| welfare check. Permission to enter isn't considered the
| same as permission to record in some states.
|
| Yes, they could change the laws about recording. In many
| cases, not just for police, they probably should.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > They could be responding to a non-criminal call, like a
| welfare check.
|
| Armed law enforcement responding to calls without an
| evident need for armed law enforcement is itself a
| problem.
| kbenson wrote:
| Probably true, and goes to complaints from police
| officers that they're also expected to be counselors as
| well as enforcers.
|
| On the other hand, asking someone to go into a situation
| that may put themselves at risk (for some cases of
| welfare checks) without appropriate training or equipment
| (or leaving the distinction of which is which to some
| third party not on the scene) doesn't seem like a good
| idea either, and at the point where you have a force
| that's equipped to protect themselves and possibly
| restrain others, that begins to sounds a lot like a
| police force, so I can see why they just use the police.
|
| There's probably some solutions along the lines of
| different shifts for those with different training with
| different load outs, or additional trained personnel in
| sets of police, but all of those also have some problems
| I can see and don't address officers being dispatched
| that are prone to use force because of a prior
| altercation that day/week or trauma at some prior date.
| zepto wrote:
| > Armed law enforcement responding to calls without an
| evident need for armed law enforcement is itself a
| problem.
|
| It's fairly obvious that in a country where citizens are
| free to be armed, police must be armed too.
| kbenson wrote:
| I think what's being discussed is not that police should
| be unarmed, but that police should not be the first
| choice to respond to situations where they currently
| often are.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| Yes, police should not be the welfare patrol. However
| they are, because they are out and about and often would
| be the nearest public authority to respond to such a
| need, and governments don't want to fund the social
| programs that they legislate. It's the same reason
| teachers are imposed upon to be defacto child-welfare
| social workers.
|
| Police should enforce the law/investigate crimes.
|
| Teachers should teach.
|
| If we're going to have social welfare programs, we need
| to provide personnel to do that work, not pile it upon
| other professions as an unwanted secondary
| responsibility.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > It's fairly obvious that in a country where citizens
| are free to be armed, police must be armed too
|
| Even granting that for the sake of argument, it is less
| obvious that government-public interactions not for the
| purposes of arresting criminals or otherwise responding
| to or preventing apparent actual or imminent crime need
| to involve police.
| rhizome wrote:
| Firing isn't decertification and the punishment isn't even
| that bad.
|
| > _It 's up to your city leaders to enforce this, and
| override the local police union's resistance, if possible._
|
| It's only possible in jurisdictions where DAs and/or Mayors
| can get elected without an endorsement from law-
| enforcement, and look at SF for an example of what police
| do when one slips through the cracks.
|
| By far, most US government is ruled by law enforcement, not
| the other way around, and this isn't even touching the
| nationwide police rebellion we've been enduring.
| Afton wrote:
| > It's only possible in jurisdictions where DAs and/or
| Mayors can get elected without an endorsement from law-
| enforcement, and look at SF for an example of what police
| do when one slips through the cracks.
|
| As someone who doesn't live in SF, what are some of the
| examples? This is a good faith question, but I'm not
| really sure what I would google to know what you mean.
| relaxing wrote:
| The 1975 SF police strike, which ended when the police
| detonated a bomb at the mayor's house.
| kelnos wrote:
| Wow, I'd never heard about this, but just read the
| Wikipedia blurb[0]. It doesn't appear to be established
| fact that the bomb was indeed placed by the police, but
| it doesn't seem like it would have been surprising if
| they had.
|
| Pretty shameful that Mayor Alioto override the Supes and
| caved to the police's demands rather than calling in the
| National Guard and taking the entire striking force into
| custody. But I guess people don't always make the best
| decisions while their lives are being threatened...
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Police_De
| partmen...
| xupybd wrote:
| There has to be bathroom breaks right?
| asdff wrote:
| I would say it should be off for bathroom breaks of
| course. The main issue isn't these edge cases, but that
| these cops are shutting them off when they are
| approaching a person. Its not like they were taking a
| poop then the call came in and they had to pull up their
| pants and run and didn't have time to flick it on. They
| see a situation about to play out where they could end up
| looking bad in a court of law so they try and remove a
| potential source of evidence that could be used against
| them.
| kbenson wrote:
| From what I've seen, the cameras don't really catch those
| angles to give video on that, and even if they did,
| that's a problem easily solved through a piece of fabric
| around the problematic area (as opposed to on the camera,
| which could be accidentally left in place). Beyond that,
| requiring sounds from the bathroom be audible is not too
| much to ask, IMO.
|
| If it came down to it being absolutely essential, you
| could have one office take the camera off (but leave it
| running), and hand it to their partner to point at the
| bathroom door as that officer enters and uses the
| bathroom, and they put it back on as they exit the
| bathroom.
|
| The whole point of a camera system is to be a reliable
| audit trail of interactions that police have been in, for
| both their benefit and the public's benefit. Every
| exception you allow that lets things happen without the
| camera is a problem for an audit, so you try to reduce
| those as much as possible.
| giantg2 wrote:
| "If it came down to it being absolutely essential, you
| could have one office take the camera off (but leave it
| running), and hand it to their partner to point at the
| bathroom door as that officer enters and uses the
| bathroom, and they put it back on as they exit the
| bathroom."
|
| This is probably the most foolproof. The fabric idea
| wouldn't be a good idea considering many public restrooms
| are multi-person. So the concern is with the privacy of
| others, not just the officer.
| kbenson wrote:
| That's a good point. At the same time I'm not sure what
| level of privacy people expect in a _public_ bathroom.
| Anything you don 't want someone seeing should be done
| within a stall. At best I would consider a public
| restroom as having increased privacy, but by no means
| being private.
|
| I understand that's probably a hard sell though, as
| people have some idea that it's verboten to record in the
| open space of a public restroom (it's definitely frowned
| upon, but I think police cameras are a good exception to
| have, especially if they need to enter the restroom to
| perform their jobs because that's where a disturbance
| is), so whatever gets more camera use in the end I'm on
| board with, from a practical standpoint.
| giantg2 wrote:
| "At the same time I'm not sure what level of privacy
| people expect in a public bathroom."
|
| They expect that the law should be followed, which
| stipulates no recording. Companies have tried for a long
| time to have security cameras in bathrooms, but it's not
| allowed. Now if they're responding to a call, then maybe
| that's an exception. Or they could change the law to
| allow recording in the bathroom, but there will probably
| be a ton of public pushback.
| kbenson wrote:
| I'm not saying the law should be ignored. I'm just not
| entirely sure why the law exists as it does, or think
| that it's ill written to account for certain situations.
| A large bathroom with twenty people (or more! bathrooms
| at large events or in large airports can be big) in it is
| not what I would consider private.
|
| I think (but could be wrong) what most people actually
| care about is that their stall is private (or in the case
| of urinals, that someone isn't to the side recording what
| they consider a small private wall space area), but since
| that's hard to account for and some stalls/urinals
| already have poor privacy to the rest of the bathroom, we
| got what we have now.
|
| Honestly, to me it seems like a lot of bother to hide
| bits of our body that we should all be a lot less
| concerned about shame about in the first place, but I'm
| not holding my breath on any change there in the U.S.
| smegger001 wrote:
| Perhapes we should just require the camera to be turned
| on and on their person for them to have the legal
| privileges and protections that we grant to law officers.
| If they turn it off or leave it behind for example during
| a restroom break then they are, under the eyes of the
| law, a civilian until it is turned back on. and any
| evidence "found" somewhere that they had gone without the
| camera while off the clock as it were is either
| inadmissible or must have a hire bar to be able to be
| used. so on planting drugs on a piss break to just walk
| in again with the camera on and "find it"
| gnicholas wrote:
| > _At the same time I 'm not sure what level of privacy
| people expect in a public bathroom. Anything you don't
| want someone seeing should be done within a stall._
|
| If a man at a baseball game went into the restroom and up
| to the trough holding a smartphone that was clearly
| recording, he would undoubtedly find trouble. People
| expect not to be recorded in the bathroom.
| cryptonector wrote:
| I would rather there be a way to turn off audio than have
| the camera come off its officer.
| cryptonector wrote:
| It's enough to have the ability to turn off audio. That's
| useful for restroom breaks, but also for when officers
| are not interacting with the public, since they should
| have some privacy for cooler talk (well, maybe they
| should, or maybe they shouldn't, but I've not thought
| enough about that myself).
| JohnJamesRambo wrote:
| It shouldn't even have an on/off button.
| Leparamour wrote:
| Although I agree with you in general, I think this is for
| practical reasons. It's not helpful to record 24/7, outside
| of police operations with regard to battery capacity and
| limits to bandwidth and data storage.
|
| One could propose a system where recording is triggered
| automatically when leaving the patrol car (BLE dongle) and
| can only be reset by a centralized authority.
| jackson1442 wrote:
| Recording 24/7 is a simple problem- they turn off when
| placed on a charging dock in the station. With how
| microSD is progressing I don't think it's necessary to
| disable in a patrol car. Perhaps it could somehow
| communicate with the clock in/out system and only be
| disabled when the officer is not clocked in to work?
| Then, lunch would be off the clock and off the camera.
|
| I don't see how it's too different from stores recording
| their cashiers 24/7.
| jimbob45 wrote:
| Body cams are a silly idea in the first place. If you're so
| distrustful of your police that you feel the need to place
| cams on them, then you need to go back to the drawing board
| and address the root problem - the trustworthiness of your
| police force.
|
| There's no reason to treat cops as second-class citizens.
| There's no evidence to suggest widespread power-abuse,
| despite all the FUD from BLM. Are there some bad apples?
| Sure, but there are bad apples in every profession and steps
| like that only punish good officers and make corrupt officers
| more careful when they perform misdeeds.
|
| You cannot neuter the power of every profession of authority.
| All you're going to do is build instinctive and reflexive
| mistrust of anyone in authority before they've done anything
| wrong, just like the reflexive mistrust BLM has whenever
| anyone interacts with an African-American.
| chipotle_coyote wrote:
| I hear the "bad apple" thing a lot when it comes to
| discussions of bad cops, and it's usually in the context
| you're using it, e.g., "sure, there are some bad apples,
| but you can't hold everyone responsible for them."
|
| Yet the actual old folk wisdom was "one bad apple can spoil
| the barrel," or as Benjamin Franklin rephrased it in _Poor
| Richard 's Almanack,_ "the rotten apple spoils his
| companion." The entire point is that we _don 't_ get to
| just say "it's one bad apple." A barrel with one bad apple
| in it quickly becomes a barrel of bad apples.
|
| The uproar we've seen isn't just about example after
| example of police brutality, poor treatment of minorities,
| and abuse of power. It's about the overwhelming resistance
| among the police to change, to accountability, even to
| self-examination. It's about how the reaction, by and
| large, to "bad apples" isn't to say "we need to get rid of
| that one," but rather to say "we need to protect our own."
|
| We _don 't_ treat police as second-class citizens; we
| entrust them with extraordinary power and latitude. In
| return, shouldn't we be holding them to an extraordinarily
| high standard?
| jackson1442 wrote:
| What? A body cam is useful for the same reason that AWS
| CloudTrail and other audit logs are useful-- auditing? What
| part of policing necessitates that it is done in secret?
|
| > but there are bad apples in every profession
|
| A "bad apple" software engineer probably over-reports hours
| or is neglectful in their job. A "bad apple" cashier
| probably skims off the top of sales. A "bad apple"
| executive probably enriches their personal wealth.
|
| A "bad apple" cop probably results in ruining the lives of
| other people through wrongful arrests, excessive force, or
| other means.
|
| Some people simply should be held to a higher standard
| because of the responsibilities of their position. When you
| can quite literally be the arbiter of life and death at
| times, you should be held to a higher standard.
| jimbob45 wrote:
| I don't agree with your analogy. The post-arrest reports
| that the police fill out is closer to the audit log. A
| better analogy for SWEs would be keyloggers imo.
|
| Also, a "bad apple" SWE can be far and away worse than
| anything a cop could possibly do. "Bad apple" SWEs are
| people like Julian Assange, Kim DotCom, and Sammy Kamkar.
| Those people ruin entire _classes_ of lives.
|
| This "higher standard" argument is a slippery slope. Cops
| actually don't have very large responsibilities. Worst
| case, they kill 10 or so people before they're brought
| down. Consider Mark Begor, CEO of Equifax, who leaked the
| identities of millions. Should we force him to install a
| key logger on all of his PCs? Should we have him wear a
| body cam at work? He's certainly someone from whom
| millions would benefit were he to be locked in a dungeon
| to work for the rest of his life.
|
| Of course not. We're supposed to believe in liberty and
| the innate good in man, despite whatever FUD BLM would
| have you believe.
| jdhendrickson wrote:
| "Worst case, they kill 10 or so people before they're
| brought down."
|
| Really? This is your argument for why they should not
| have to wear cameras? You then drag BLM into this at the
| end.
|
| I have noticed an uptick in older accounts suddenly
| commenting more, and more of this divisive language
| usually accompanied by a poorly thought out premise that
| would never have flown on Hacker News a year or two ago.
|
| Commentary like this really makes me wonder if the site
| is being targeted using inauthentic traffic as covered in
| depth by Sophie Zhang.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophie_Zhang_(whistleblower
| ) it's pretty interesting.
| jimbob45 wrote:
| No, that was part of my argument as to why SWEs have the
| capacity to abuse their positions of power far worse than
| police can.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| maybelsyrup wrote:
| > Consider Mark Begor, CEO of Equifax, who leaked the
| identities of millions. Should we force him to install a
| key logger on all of his PCs? Should we have him wear a
| body cam at work?
|
| Lol yes absolutely where do I sign this petition
| throwawaysha256 wrote:
| >I don't agree with your analogy. The post-arrest reports
| that the police fill out is closer to the audit log. A
| better analogy for SWEs would be keyloggers imo.
|
| Which everyone should have enabled for the exact same
| reasons: auditing
|
| All SSH sessions (every character you send) to our qa and
| higher environments are recorded and saved for later
| auditing.
| giantg2 wrote:
| In theory, there should be no controversial actions when the
| cameras are on, for the simple fact that everyone can
| see/hear what happened. The policy can be controversial, but
| whether the actions were consistent with policy should be
| evident.
| xwdv wrote:
| Have you never heard of the 5th Ammendment?
| heavyset_go wrote:
| > _It 's uncanny how the cameras are almost always off
| whenever something controversial happens._
|
| It's because the body cameras that are bought by police
| departments aren't marketed as devices that keep cops honest,
| but as devices that protect them from the lying public.
| That's why they're sold with features that allow the wearer
| to turn them on and off, and with buttons that trigger the
| camera to only capture small clips of video. Cops only want
| to turn them on when they feel like they might need to prove
| something in court later.
| apendleton wrote:
| There are also potentially privacy considerations... for
| example, in jurisdictions where body-cam data is a matter of
| public record, should officers be recording while inside
| someone's house where that person has a reasonable
| expectation of privacy?
|
| And even assuming the footage isn't automatically public,
| what about the evidentiary value against the house's
| occupants? Currently, police need a warrant to execute a
| search of someone's residence, but there's a "plain view"
| exception: if while the officer is in the house anyway
| (either because the occupant let them in, or because they
| entered due to exigent circumstances like a violent crime in
| progress), if they happen to see evidence of a crime in plain
| view while there -- a gun, drugs, whatever -- they don't need
| a warrant to use that as evidence. If the officer has a
| camera on the whole time, that potentially means the officer
| could use not just what they happened to see in the moment,
| but retroactively whatever can be seen in the footage after
| the fact, which likely significantly expands the extent of
| plain-view evidence that can be used without a warrant. Some
| have asserted that video-recording itself constitutes a
| fourth-amendment search if the officer is someplace where the
| person has an expectation of privacy, though I don't think
| this question has been adjudicated.
|
| Also, in two-party-consent states, capturing body camera
| audio might also require either a warrant or consent for the
| capturing of at least some kinds of interactions.
|
| I think body cams are net-good, but it's more complicated
| than it seems at first blush.
| r00fus wrote:
| At the very least if any situation requires official
| capacity, the officer shouldn't have the camera off. The
| camera should have features like "toggle off for 5m" or
| "turn off persistent but you can't act as LE".
|
| The situation remains that law enforcement has no real
| checks on their own power, and they've moved to restrict or
| block such checks on their power.
| syshum wrote:
| >> in jurisdictions where body-cam data is a matter of
| public record
|
| Where is this mythical land, because many times people have
| to go to court to get a court order to release the footage,
| i would love to know where body cam footage is public
| record.
|
| >>If the officer has a camera on the whole time, that
| potentially means the officer could use not just what they
| happened to see in the moment, but retroactively whatever
| can be seen in the footage after the fact, which likely
| significantly expands the extent of plain-view evidence
| that can be used without a warrant.
|
| While an interesting topic, i dont believe this is in view
| of the context.
|
| Further how many times does this issue really come up in
| the course of time. Seems like you are attempting to
| highlight edge cases in order to defend police corruption
| and their ability to hide their activities under the guise
| of public privacy.
|
| Most of the body cam footage "lost" or "offline" is when
| the police are killing people in the plain outdoors in
| other public venue's not when they are protecting Grandma's
| privacy from the big bad public.
| OminousWeapons wrote:
| > Further how many times does this issue really come up
| in the course of time.
|
| One possibly common case would be police officers
| operating on hospital grounds. Video taping patients who
| have not broken any laws is an enormous invasion of
| privacy.
| jackson1442 wrote:
| Maybe there could be an independent review committee that
| reviews footage before release ensuring no impertinent
| PII is released. This, of course, would only work if the
| committee was _truly_ independent (i.e. commissioned for
| {x} years with a set budget by a higher level of
| government), and potentially would need to be anonymous
| in the event of a divisive case.
| apendleton wrote:
| > Seems like you are attempting to highlight edge cases
| in order to defend police corruption and their ability to
| hide their activities under the guise of public privacy.
|
| I'm not sure where you're getting that from what I wrote.
|
| I'm not saying police shouldn't use bodycams (I
| explicitly said I think they're a net good). I think
| there might be specific circumstances where not recording
| might be appropriate (e.g., if they're inside someone's
| house). I think those circumstances, if they exist,
| should be determined as a matter of department policy,
| and not left to the whims of individual officers, and
| that in circumstances other than those, officers should
| have to be recording at all times, and there should be
| consequences if they don't. Things officers do in public
| would pretty obviously be examples of that.
|
| The only thing I was pushing back on was the notion that
| it's universally the case that LEOs should need to have
| cameras on for every minute of ever shift.
| syshum wrote:
| I think that for recording cops effective it needs to be
| for their entire shift. Where needed we should address
| the privacy and 4th amendment concerns in legal updates.
|
| Police get away with literally murder, and 4th amendment
| has soo many holes in it that police hardly need to look
| at their body cam when they can just say "hey I smell
| weed" or "did you hear that" to get in... So neither of
| them are something we should hold the roll out of body
| cams over
|
| Body Cams have already caught cops planting evidence
| because they were not smart enough to know that when they
| turn it on it saves the last 3 mins of "off" time...
|
| Body Cams are needed most urgently.
| kelnos wrote:
| > _I think there might be specific circumstances where
| not recording might be appropriate (e.g., if they 're
| inside someone's house)._
|
| On the other hand, though, I think being inside someone's
| house is when having a recording is the most critical.
| Without video recordings, it's just the officer's word
| against the defendant's, and courts will more often
| believe the officer's version of events.
|
| Out in public, it's possible -- and in some places,
| likely -- that a concerned passerby would be recording
| what's going on, reducing the value of & need for the
| police body-cam video.
| kelnos wrote:
| Right, but also consider that what you're describing is a
| matter of law, and we're already talking about changing law
| (to require body cameras to be always-on), so why not
| change the other stuff too?
|
| Change the "plain view" exception to only apply to stuff
| the officer notices while physically there; if they see it
| in footage later, it's not admissible in court, and not
| grounds for a search warrant. Change the recording-consent
| laws to not apply to police body cameras.
|
| And regarding privacy, have retention policies: if there's
| no legal hold on some body cam footage (part of an active
| investigation or court proceeding, etc.), it gets deleted
| after 90 days (or whatever time period sounds reasonable).
| That way we don't have recordings of people's private
| residences living in storage indefinitely.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > for example, in jurisdictions where body-cam data is a
| matter of public record, should officers be recording while
| inside someone's house where that person has a reasonable
| expectation of privacy?
|
| Public records laws already generally anticipate that
| public records will frequently contain sensitive, protected
| data and have general processes (involving redaction or
| denial of unprivileged general public access, depending on
| the circumstances) for handling public records to which
| that applies (source: spent a couple decades in government
| dealing with public records containing PHI, other PII, and
| other legally restricted-access information.)
| tomohawk wrote:
| That hasn't stopped government officials from unmasking
| the identities of people in intercepts for political
| purposes.
|
| For example, Tucker Carlson, Gen. Flynn, and others.
|
| It's better not to have the record around where politicos
| can be tempted to abuse it.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| The government doesn't need bodycams to spy on you.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| No, there are no "privacy considerations" to body camera
| footage. Those only into play when the footage is made
| public. When you cite "privacy," you're letting the police
| dictate the terms of the discussion.
|
| The footage _must_ be recorded and retained, with the
| decision to edit and /or release it left up to courts or
| other independent authorities.
|
| As for two-party laws, those have to go. They don't have a
| place in a society where the people need the ability to
| hold police and other officials accountable. If the police
| are doing nothing wrong, they have nothing to fear, right?
| Isn't that what they tell us?
| apendleton wrote:
| The party in question that might object is the person
| being recorded, not the officer.
| ISO-morphism wrote:
| Nit: a queue is a line waiting for something (stuck in the
| queue), a cue is a signal to perform some action (that's my
| cue)
| Vaslo wrote:
| Eh not a nit - I didn't understand it until your context was
| added
| jaywalk wrote:
| It's no wonder why the cops love it. Although the actual
| usefulness is questionable at best (much like the dogs)
| ShotSpotter will cook up "evidence" on command to help with the
| investigation (much like the dogs).
| slumdev wrote:
| Any lawyers in the house who could comment on their refusal to
| test his hands?
|
| Can they refuse to run a test because they're afraid it might
| produce exculpatory evidence?
| giantg2 wrote:
| Not a lawyer, but in my experience they don't need to do any
| tests. They usually have a policy that requires them to make
| a "thorough" investigation. Nobody holds them to that. For
| example, a trooper knew there were third party witnesses to a
| crime and did not seek them out. Granted, that trooper also
| withheld actual exculpatory evidence. Either way, nothing
| happened, because who watches the watchers?
| tjfl wrote:
| IANAL, but curious and searched.
|
| > A number of techniques designed to detect gunshot residues
| (GSR) on the hands of a suspect or victim have been
| developed. These techniques range from the now-discredited
| paraffin test to the more modern techniques which use
| instrumental analysis or scanning electron microscopy. The
| limitations of all GSR techniques are that the residues can
| be removed by rubbing or washing the hands and usually must
| be collected soon after the firearm is fired, yet even valid
| GSR tests are not conclusive.
|
| https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-
| library/abstracts/forensic...
| giantg2 wrote:
| Very few forensic techniques are conclusive for a case.
| They are usually conclusive as in _the test_ was either
| positive or negative. Then the forensic expert has to give
| testimony as to what it means. Just look at the medical
| experts in the Chauvin trial. It 's just like many news
| articles today - the facts don't lie, but people can
| misapply them to say different things.
| jonhohle wrote:
| Not being in or having interactions with the criminal justice
| system, but having been involved in _many_ technology post-
| mortems, why wouldn't you want to collect exculpatory
| evidence? Without it, and in the best case an innocent
| individual goes free, but with a cloud of uncertainty. In the
| worst case an innocent individual is convicted of a crime and
| the perpetrator goes without consequence.
|
| If LEOs and prosecutors are incentivized based on raw arrest
| or conviction counts, then the consequence for being wrong
| should be astronomical (say, the sentence of the wrongfully
| convicted times a >= 1x multiplier).
| sokoloff wrote:
| If you start from a premise that law enforcement is
| searching for the truth above all else, your conclusions
| make sense.
| giantg2 wrote:
| "... why wouldn't you want to collect exculpatory
| evidence?"
|
| In my experience, it's mostly that they are lazy,
| incompetent, and/or have their mind made up. In some cases,
| it has to do with costs (eg they aren't going to DNA test a
| petty theft crime scene).
|
| Contrary to TV, forensics are actually used very rarely in
| the criminal justice system. Most of the ones that are used
| are fingerprints and drug tests.
| robbedpeter wrote:
| The Supreme Court ruled that 5th amendment protects you from
| incriminating yourself even if you're innocent, and in some
| states that extends to investigations of your body.
|
| Never talking to or cooperating with police, unless legally
| required as advised by your lawyer, is what's known in legal
| circles as "smart."
| anigbrowl wrote:
| That's not applicable here, because the defendant was
| asking police to timely collect additional evidence for its
| exculpatory potential.
| p_j_w wrote:
| The fact that they can get away with refusing to collect
| evidence like that is absolutely infuriating.
| squarefoot wrote:
| > No technology will work if the people using it is corrupt.
|
| Not if the people above them are not. Sadly, the people above
| them _need_ corrupt police because corrupt police is easier to
| control than the good one, and their members can also turn
| themselves into private police serving the same politicians who
| saved their asses. It 's a "do ut des" scenario in which
| everyone has something to gain, except common people.
| dilap wrote:
| Yeah, I had my (completely clean) car searched because "the dog
| signaled". OK, sure.
|
| It would be more honest and to just say cops have the right to
| search you at will.
| tehwebguy wrote:
| It's true, but it's also true that it's important for people
| to say "no" and assert their rights. Granting permission to
| search or willingly waiting for the K9 (assuming it's not
| already on the scene) eliminates a lot of recourse that
| people would otherwise have access to in the courts.
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| What they should be required to do is keep records on a dog's
| record of false positives.
|
| If a dog fails to perform better than 95% I see no reason to
| use that as probable cause.
|
| Better yet, let's just get rid of pretext stops. Almost all
| traffic stops could be dealt with by the officer mailing a
| ticket. Safer for cops, safer for the public, but a lot
| harder to go fishing for felonies
| giantg2 wrote:
| They treat K9s almost like officers (eg if you injure or
| kill one it will be a felony, likely similar to assaulting
| an officer, but varies by state). They should also then
| treat them like officers and keep Giglio records (not that
| they are good at that for human officers...).
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Unless you're a cop, in which it's usually just a minor
| disciplinary infraction.
| p_j_w wrote:
| The Supreme Court ruled, unanimously, that this sort of
| thing isn't required:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida_v._Harris
|
| It's going to take actual legislation to get this fixed,
| which is not something I think we have any reason to be
| optimistic about.
| brianwawok wrote:
| > It would be more honest and to just say cops have the right
| to search you at will.
|
| Except they explicitly do NOT have that power. They found a
| "trick" to pretend like they are staying within the law,
| while really not.
| lovegoblin wrote:
| Exactly. Hence
|
| > It would be more honest
| RHSeeger wrote:
| They don't have the "right" to, they have the "ability to
| do so without repercussions".
| mplewis wrote:
| Why is ShotSpotter using "AI" to analyze this? It's time-based
| triangulation of a loud noise.
|
| It must be nice to make a living on a grift like this.
| gmueckl wrote:
| I m not convinced that simple triangulation works in a city
| environment. Sound reflected off of buildings can mess things
| up good. I can think of several ways in which a later
| reflection can be louder than the initial sound.
| bob1029 wrote:
| Triangluation works in these cases if you apply some DSP
| tricks (marketed in this case as AI).
|
| Multipath interference can be mitigated to a large extent
| with multiple listening devices calibrated against a known
| acoustic impulse - i.e. intentionally firing something like a
| gun at a precise time & location known to the system
| beforehand.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| Because gunshots are rare and if you're just triangulating loud
| noise you're gonna be overwhelmed by false positives. Even if
| you do basic filtration to try and tease out the sound of a
| gunshot vs everything else you're still gonna get overwhelmed
| by false positives.
| dylan604 wrote:
| I don't know enough about the procedures, but would citizens
| calling 911 to report gun shots help coroborate and help weed
| out false positives?
| tdeck wrote:
| Many citizens can't tell the difference between gunshots
| and other explosive sounds like fireworks.
| [deleted]
| tolbish wrote:
| If ShotSpotter can't either then it effectively useless.
| sneak wrote:
| It's not useless, sometimes it can be used to fuel a
| prosecution against an innocent person who happens to be
| a racial minority.
|
| Police locking up black people in America is the reason
| police in America were created.
| gunapologist99 wrote:
| > Police locking up black people in America is the reason
| police in America were created.
|
| Formal policing in America has a long and sometimes
| infamous history, but it definitely did not begin with
| "locking up black people"; it varied based on the locale.
|
| For example, in NYC, it goes back to the Tammany Hall
| days and was notoriously corrupt.
|
| In the west (where there were very few black people, and
| those that were there were free), police forces began
| with various marshals and sheriffs who were hired,
| typically by the merchants, to tame the wild western
| towns.
|
| According to Time, "The first publicly funded, organized
| police force with officers on duty full-time was created
| in Boston in 1838."
|
| https://time.com/4779112/police-history-origins/
| mplewis wrote:
| The Boston police were started to defend the rights of
| property owners, not citizens.
|
| In the South, post-Civil War, police used gold star
| badges because they were adapted from the gold star
| badges used by slave patrols.
|
| You should learn more about the history of policing in
| America: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-
| history-of-america...
| dylan604 wrote:
| Maybe it gets harder around june/july/new years, but the
| rest of the year has very little firework activity.
| timbargo wrote:
| I live in Chicago. We have fireworks year round, some
| neighborhoods more often than others. Usually you will
| hear fireworks far more frequently than you hear
| gunshots.
| panopticon wrote:
| I think that depends on the city/neighborhood. We heard
| fireworks pretty regularly throughout the year when we
| lived in San Jose. And they became more frequent after
| the Flyod protests.
|
| On the flip side, we heard far more gunshots than
| fireworks when we lived in Kansas City.
| [deleted]
| Anechoic wrote:
| It's presumably some sort of machine learning to distinguish
| gunshots from firecrackers, backfires and other kinds of
| impulsive sounds one would find in a city. It just does not
| appear to work well.
| imroot wrote:
| Cincy PD disables alerts for ShotSpotter on the 4th of July
| and disables it during baseball/football games downtown
| because the pyro from the games causes false alarms.
| zozin wrote:
| It's just marketing speak. If your tech product doesn't use AI,
| machine learning or have an algorithm then it won't look as
| bright and shiny to customers.
| steve76 wrote:
| Correction:
|
| The lawful arrest of George Floyd. Jury was biased. Arsonists and
| a criminal mob influenced the judge.
|
| The lawful encounter with Adam Toledo.
|
| Criminals everywhere: change your ways or be destroyed.
| garyfirestorm wrote:
| I don't understand how they get to just walk away without any
| consequences.
|
| prosecutor1: sir we got evidence that defendant1 was behind the
| shooting
|
| defendant1: sir I was miles away from this area - let's verify
| the evidence
|
| prosecutor1: you know what, never mind - poker face
|
| Court: poker face
|
| Defendant1: poker face
|
| >"Rather than defend the evidence, [prosecutors] just ran away
| from it," he said.
| LatteLazy wrote:
| Worse: this is one of the most discriminatory issues in the
| criminal justice system. The prosecutor can and will use that
| "evidence" unless and until the defence challenges it. But poor
| people with overworked lawyers don't have the time to challenge
| anything so they go down based on BS.
|
| The same thing happens with Stingrays apparently: as soon as
| someone asks where the lead came from for the arrest, its case
| dropped. But if you can't afford a lawyer with time to chase
| down every detail you go to jail on illegal evidence.
| dlgeek wrote:
| Ouch:
|
| > Over the years, ShotSpotter's claims about its accuracy have
| increased, from 80 percent accurate to 90 percent accurate to 97
| percent accurate. According to Greene, those numbers aren't
| actually calculated by engineers, though.
|
| > "Our guarantee was put together by our sales and marketing
| department, not our engineers," Greene told a San Francisco court
| in 2017. "We need to give them [customers] a number ... We have
| to tell them something. ... It's not perfect. The dot on the map
| is simply a starting point."
| cryptonector wrote:
| This is all devastating. These kinds of devices should use a a
| cryptographic tramper-evident log, and those logs should be
| available to the public in real time for archival purposes.
| That's the only way to avoid tampering. The same should be used
| for things like, e.g., rolls of who voted at every precinct.
| ghostly_s wrote:
| In fact, 89% of ShotSpotter deployments turn up no evidence of
| gun-related crime: [1]
|
| 1. https://endpolicesurveillance.com/
| adolph wrote:
| > 89% of ShotSpotter deployments turn up no evidence of gun-
| related crime
|
| If ShotSpotter is limited to registering the the sound of
| gunshots, then it is limited to firearm-discharge-related
| crime which is a subset of gun-related crime.
| meowface wrote:
| That site says 14% of alerts result in a case report being
| filed and 10% result in a gun-related case report. But even a
| 10% alert -> case report rate is better than I would've
| expected for a big city. That still seems like it'd be
| extremely useful, even if it means some wasted man hours.
|
| And that's case reports - not necessarily detection true
| positives. If someone fires a gun at the sky and picks up the
| shell casings and drives away, with no witnesses or cameras
| and an inconclusive/indiscernible audio recording, police
| likely won't be able to file a report.
|
| Also, I'm guessing there are some confidence indicators for
| each alert: those case report rates probably don't capture
| the full story even when accounting for hypothetical
| inconclusive true positives. Police are likely (and should
| be) obligated to investigate every detection, including every
| detection rated as low-confidence.
|
| Plus that's just for Chicago. I doubt they actually achieve
| their claimed 97% accuracy anywhere, but it could be higher
| in other areas. Especially areas where loud noises are less
| common.
|
| The main issue seems to be when it's used as evidence. I
| think it shouldn't ever be admissible as evidence of
| anything. And to mitigate some of the other issues that site
| raises, it'd be nice if there were some kind of "no fishing
| expeditions" law, where police responding to a gunfire alert
| must exclusively look for evidence of a fired gun in that
| vicinity and not use it as an excuse to scavenge for low-
| hanging fruit by harassing / arresting people in the area for
| unrelated matters.
| giantg2 wrote:
| "That still seems like it'd be extremely useful, even if it
| means some wasted man hours."
|
| I think the least wasteful approach would be to build
| rapport with the community and rely on their reports.
| Probably not an easy thing, but the most valuable things
| rarely are.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Still doesn't stop the phenomena of everyone thinking
| "oh, someone else will call."
|
| Shotspotter is a very useful tool IMO.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > the phenomena of everyone thinking "oh, someone else
| will call."
|
| This generally doesn't happen. It originated as a slander
| against the people who lived around where Kitty Genovese
| was killed, as an after-the-fact excuse for the lack of
| police response.
|
| > While there was no question that the attack occurred,
| and that some neighbors ignored cries for help, the
| portrayal of 38 witnesses as fully aware and unresponsive
| was erroneous. The article grossly exaggerated the number
| of witnesses and what they had perceived. None saw the
| attack in its entirety. Only a few had glimpsed parts of
| it, or recognized the cries for help. Many thought they
| had heard lovers or drunks quarreling. There were two
| attacks, not three. And afterward, two people did call
| the police. A 70-year-old woman ventured out and cradled
| the dying victim in her arms until they arrived. Ms.
| Genovese died on the way to a hospital.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Kitty_Genovese#Ac
| cur...
| whimsicalism wrote:
| There's evidence around how the majority of gunshots in
| most cities are not followed by 911 calls.
|
| For instance, the murder of Seth Rich in my home city
| (ignore the stupid conspiracy theories) was not followed
| by a call but was found by shotspotter which is how it
| was responded to.
| bpodgursky wrote:
| I'm not sure why this is an important stat. Isn't it good if
| there aren't gun crimes happening in a lot of places?
| Cycl0ps wrote:
| Check the link. What it's saying is that most times the
| police receive a notice of a gunshot, it's a false
| positive. In Chicago this leads to 60 dead-end responses
| each day. Very few systems are worth that trouble
| handmodel wrote:
| I 100% dont think it should be used as evidence but this
| seems like a decent rate for responding. There's 12,000
| total officers in Chicago. Even if only 3,000 are on duty
| at any time that's not a huge inconvenience if there are
| still even dozens of cases a year you get to the scene 5
| minutes before you would otherwise.
|
| If you track the number of calls to 911 that are "dead-
| ends" because there are no arrests I'm sure it would be
| high too.
|
| It also doesnt say the error rate for when the police
| aren't called. If criminals know that if they shoot a gun
| there is a 50% chance a police car will drive through 5
| minutes later - wouldn't that deter you?
| sodality2 wrote:
| Deployments I assume means police response, not deploying
| the system.
| GhostVII wrote:
| Having an 11% success rate seems pretty impressive to me.
| Much better than the rate of false panic alarms, for example.
| And I'm sure a lot of those ShotSpotter alerts were accurate,
| but the police didn't get there soon enough.
| giantg2 wrote:
| It shouldn't have anything to do with getting there soon
| enough. If they find shell casings, victims, or other
| evidence that a crime occurred (usually even discharging a
| firearm in a major city is considered a crime with very
| limited defenses), then they should still be collecting
| evidence and logging a report. Now, they may not be doing
| that because they don't want to have high crime numbers
| that are unsolved, or even dragging down the reputation of
| the safer areas (I've heard of officers doing this).
| GhostVII wrote:
| I was thinking of cases where someone fires a few shots
| and then everyone runs off - odds are the shell casings
| aren't going to be seen unless they do a careful sweep of
| the area, and the victims all left pretty quickly. No
| idea how often that actually happens though.
| handmodel wrote:
| I think for the purposes of sending a car over to drive
| through a street its pretty good.
|
| The article discusses instances where it is used in trial
| and for that it is obviously pretty weak - surprised it can
| be used at all.
| BoorishBears wrote:
| That's the ouch? Not literally rewriting history to create
| evidence for a murder trial?
|
| > But after the 11:46 p.m. alert came in, a ShotSpotter analyst
| manually overrode the algorithms and "reclassified" the sound
| as a gunshot. Then, months later and after "post-processing,"
| another ShotSpotter analyst changed the alert's coordinates to
| a location on South Stony Island Drive near where Williams' car
| was seen on camera.
|
| > Motherboard's review of court documents from the Williams
| case and other trials in Chicago and New York State, including
| testimony from ShotSpotter's favored expert witness, suggests
| that the company's analysts frequently modify alerts at the
| request of police departments--some of which appear to be
| grasping for evidence that supports their narrative of events.
|
| Marketing games are absolutely nothing compared to this.
| klyrs wrote:
| This sounds suspiciously like evidence tampering. If only the
| legal system would be so dogged in pursuit of justice for the
| cops & analysts involved in this conspiracy.
| pjungwir wrote:
| Any time I see "accuracy" reported as a single number, I assume
| it's B.S. and "for marketing purposes only". If you're serious,
| give me the precision and recall.
| the_snooze wrote:
| >If you're serious, give me the precision and recall.
|
| The thing is decision-makers have no idea (and no care to
| know) what those are.
| wcerfgba wrote:
| Maybe these people shouldn't be decision-makers then. We
| need both greater transparency in decision-making
| processes, and greater education amongst the population
| about statistics, causal inference, and the scientific
| method. In order for the citizenry to hold decision-makers
| to account and obtain a higher standard we need:
|
| 1. Citizens to have the time and motivation to seek out and
| examine primary evidence.
|
| 2. Citizens to have the skills to understand and critique
| that evidence.
|
| 3. Robust mechanisms to allow citizens to replace people in
| power.
| kube-system wrote:
| This is an inherent problem with the specialization of
| labor. Those who run police departments have more
| relevant specializations to their job role than
| information science. This isn't a problem with statistics
| or science in particular -- it's an issue with every
| specialization. This is only going to get worse as
| popular opinion of the role of higher education is
| starting to shift from a more liberal-arts focus to a
| job-placement focus.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Correct and that's unlikely to change, but it should be
| grounds to throw out the prosecution. Yes, this will make
| it harder to convict real criminals. Too bad.
| abstrakraft wrote:
| I've never understood why ML folks insist on using precision,
| which depends on the base rate. Why do they not use
| probability of false alarm as in traditional detection
| theory?
| alexilliamson wrote:
| It doesn't really depend on the base rate though. The idea
| is that a high precision model will have all the targets at
| one end of the distribution, regardless of base rate.
| [deleted]
| drc500free wrote:
| Precision is an attribute of the deployed system. The same
| tech in an affluent suburb will have different precision
| deployed in an inner city. Ran into this exact problem in
| biometrics, where NIST publishes tech error rates like FNMR
| and FMR, and system owners don't even know precision is a
| thing. They expect the vendor to tell them if it will work,
| when it depends how many true and false events you throw at
| the system.
| hartator wrote:
| > Police said ShotSpotter, a surveillance system that uses hidden
| microphone sensors to detect the sound and location of gunshots.
|
| Wait, what?
| oehpr wrote:
| This is tough. Pretty clearly what's happening here is shot
| spotter is producing a probability distribution about the places
| where a shot may have been fired, but they're not showing that
| information, they're showing a point. That's broken.
|
| It's a shame because setting up some microphones around the city
| to detect a firearm discharge seems like a great idea. The
| problem is people are overselling what it is doing.
|
| Something that jumps out at me in the article is this:
| Paul Greene, ShotSpotter's expert witness and an employee of the
| company, testified at Simmons' trial that "subsequently he was
| asked by the Rochester Police Department to essentially
| search and see if there were more shots fired than
| ShotSpotter picked up," according to a civil lawsuit
| Simmons has filed against the city and the company. Greene found
| a fifth shot, despite there being no physical evidence at the
| scene that Simmons had fired. ...
|
| Like, what shotspotter is doing is attempting to resolve the
| origin of a sound wave in a city. The shockwave from a gun blast
| must reverberate across buildings all over the place, more than
| likely you're getting reflected waves rather than waves from the
| source. You're going to get echos and reverb and it's going to be
| messy and you're going to be imprecise.
|
| Would shotspotter's AI misclassify noises? Yah. Of course. If
| it's like any other classifier it's likely listing out a list of
| probabilities of what something is and, for the sake of
| simplicity, just saying it's the highest probability output. It's
| just a filtering step. If you know a gunshot occurred, you update
| your priors.
|
| Should shotspotter be able to detect the number of gunshots
| exactly? Maybe? How to differentiate between echos and original?
| I'm not shocked it can detect the wrong number of shots.
|
| Since it misclassifies noises, isn't exactly sure of the origin,
| and can read echos as additional shots, is it useless? No.
| slumdev wrote:
| This is an unreliable system which police and prosecutors
| misrepresent as reliable.
|
| It might not be useless in the strictest sense of the word, but
| it ought to be taken away from them.
| Frondo wrote:
| This is the issue: it's unreliable, and its results presented
| as a matter of fact.
|
| This is also the latest I've heard of, in a long line of the
| criminal justice system presenting what's often closer to
| fiction as an indisputable fact of someone's guilt. One of
| the cases that made me incredibly angry was the junk arson
| science surrounding the conviction and execution of Cameron
| Todd Willingham in Texas in 2004:
|
| https://innocenceproject.org/cameron-todd-willingham-
| wrongfu...
|
| But I also think of how unreliable eyewitness testimony is,
| and yet people's recollections of events (when we know, and
| have known for so long, that memory is plastic!), sometimes
| years later, are treated as fact:
|
| https://www.ncsc.org/trends/monthly-trends-
| articles/2017/the....
|
| I don't know how to solve this, since the "proven" part of
| "innocent until proven guilty" seems like it's built on a
| house of cards, and the only people with a direct incentive
| to change it are suspects (i.e. the people that the criminal
| justice system has already decided could've done it, and how
| can you trust a criminal's motivations? _eye roll_ )
| meowface wrote:
| Restrict its use to the original intention: detecting
| potential events police might want to immediately respond to.
| It (and any other gunfire locator) seems like it'd probably
| be an extremely useful and publicly beneficial technology
| even if it had a low true positive rate.
|
| The problem is allowing it to be used as evidence in criminal
| cases. That's the part that should be taken away.
| tomschlick wrote:
| This exactly. I see Shotspotter and tech like facial
| recognition / license plate readers as the same. Its a
| lead, a clue for detectives to follow up on and validate /
| verify. It shouldn't be evidence on its own. Just a source
| that's slightly more reliable than a human witness.
| meowface wrote:
| The arguments for facial recognition and license plate
| readers are much more complex. In the case of a gunfire
| detector, you're specifically looking for (supposed)
| activity that indicates the most serious possible crime
| might have occurred seconds ago.
|
| Facial recognition and license plate readers are used to
| automatically track individual humans wherever they go so
| that they can be quickly arrested if they're on a to-
| arrest list. I'm not entirely sure how I feel about that,
| even if it's all taking place in public, open areas, but
| it's a totally different category from just knowing when
| and where a gun may have been fired. It's real-time crime
| detection vs. alleged criminal detection.
| tomschlick wrote:
| Thats very true. I also have reservations around facial
| recognition / ALPR systems if they are saving data of
| people who are not currently "flagged" related to a
| crime. I can see the usefulness to find stolen cars, or
| track down murder suspects but only after they are
| entered as a suspect. There shouldn't be a historical
| database of previous movements. There should also be
| states/federal guidelines around who can be entered.
| avs733 wrote:
| > shot spotter is producing a probability distribution about
| the places where a shot may have been fired, but they're not
| showing that information, they're showing a point. That's
| broken.
|
| >This is an unreliable system which police and prosecutors
| misrepresent as reliable.
|
| I would argue in american policing, that broken is the point.
| People (cops, judges, juries, the public) don't engage with
| anything criminal justice related as probabilistic. If they
| showed the probabilities, they wouldn't have a product
| specifically because it would not be able presented as
| reliable.
|
| It's product market fit, like the parallel citizen thread,
| that serves malicious and anti-social goals. But it is
| profitable.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| It's the same deal with breathalyzers, which don't measure
| blood alcohol and cannot estimate it to the levels of
| precision the manufacturers want everyone to believe.
| giantg2 wrote:
| The "evidence" can't be reexamined either. The good
| states require a blood test. At least it's more accurate
| and can be examined by the defense.
| avs733 wrote:
| and a pattern of withdrawing the evidence when the
| results are challenged so as to avoid setting precedent.
| formerly_proven wrote:
| This seems to be intentional:
|
| > Rather than defend ShotSpotter's technology and its
| employees' actions in a Frye hearing, the prosecutors
| withdrew all ShotSpotter evidence against Williams.
|
| Ducking the test and withdrawing the evidence means
| prosecutors can continue to claim that this stuff hasn't been
| deemed unreliable by experts.
| slumdev wrote:
| A quirk of our legal system that allows dishonest people to
| continue with impunity.
| avs733 wrote:
| which courts could easily fix...but don't.
| modriano wrote:
| Yeah, it's a really useful tool. There are a lot of gunshots in
| Chicago (last year there were over 4000 incidents (in Chicago)
| where someone was shot, and there are far more gunshots where
| no one is hit), and in many of those shootings, no one calls
| 911. If someone is hit and rendered unable to call 911 or get
| help, if no one calls 911, that shooting victims is likely to
| become a homicide victim. ShotSpotter gets someone to check the
| area out, and it has saved a number of people from bleeding
| out.
|
| I don't think it should be used as evidence of the location of
| a shooting (often shootings are only discovered when the victim
| shows up at a hospital), as locations are triangulated based on
| the time different sensors detect a gunshot and the distance
| sound travels is impacted by building geometry and materials.
| But it's a very useful tool that saves lives.
|
| Regarding the locations of ShotSpotter coverage, as the pricing
| model is proportional to area covered (there's a physical
| network that needs to be maintained and contacts with owners of
| buildings with sensors that need to be paid), so sensors are
| put in the areas with lots of shootings. If you want to know
| why there is such extreme racial homogeneity in the most
| violent, least well resourced parts of Chicago, I highly
| recommend the book "The Color of Law" [0] on redlining.
|
| [0] https://www.epi.org/publication/the-color-of-law-a-
| forgotten...
| _trampeltier wrote:
| Maybe the US should try to sell less weapons ..
| sneak wrote:
| Being unarmed in the current environment is not advisable.
| giantg2 wrote:
| "... and in many of those shootings, no one calls 911."
|
| It's sad that our society (can we really call it that?) has
| come to this - relying more on a piece of technology because
| you can't depend on your fellow citizens.
| mrkurt wrote:
| There's no point in calling the police when you hear a
| gunshot anywhere near Chicago. For one, you probably heard
| fireworks. For another, calling them doesn't accomplish
| anything. What are they even supposed to do about random
| gun shots?
| giantg2 wrote:
| I'm not asking about shots off in the distance. With the
| population densities of cities, people should be close
| enough to know.
|
| Discharging a firearm is a crime in most cities, with
| limited defenses. They should be collecting evidence like
| shell casings and investigating if another crime was
| committed (check for victims). If you have people
| illegally shooting firearms, there's a decent chance they
| arent legally allowed to own them either. Catching these
| people for this crime, could prevent others.
| loteck wrote:
| Do you have any citations for your claims about the Chicago
| system being responsible for saving a number of people? I'm
| looking for reading on that topic. Thanks ahead of time.
| modriano wrote:
| None that are public (that I'm aware of), but it's just a
| matter of time. We just got ShotSpotter alerts put up on
| the Chicago data portal.
|
| But to make it less difficult to believe, I'll point you
| too LEMART training [1], an emergency first aid course that
| many patrol officers elect to take, and that many officers
| carry a first aid kit [2]. Considering ShotSpotter alerts
| officers (many of which are capable of administering
| emergency first aid) to shootings (many of which have no
| corresponding 911 call for service), it's not too hard to
| accept the weak claim that a nonzero number of lives have
| been saved. I won't speculate on the number as I haven't
| done a rigorous analysis, but I know of a lot of shootings
| where the responding officer was notified by ShotSpotter,
| administered first aid (normally a tourniquet), and the
| victim survived.
|
| Edit: just found a public number for the number of officers
| who have received LEMART training. Over 6000 officers as of
| 1/21/2020 [3]. For reference, there are about 13k sworn CPD
| officers.
|
| [0] https://data.cityofchicago.org/Public-Safety/Violence-
| Reduct...
|
| [1] https://www.chicagocopa.org/wp-
| content/uploads/2018/04/Polic...
|
| [2] https://directives.crimeisdown.com/diff/efaff1a7e94a8ad
| 642c7...
|
| [3] https://twitter.com/chicago_police/status/1219747858469
| 00326...
| cryptonector wrote:
| Overselling + altering reports after the fact to fit a
| prosecution's preferred theory of the events.
| BoorishBears wrote:
| How is this tough?!
|
| The system detected a loud noise as fireworks... that should be
| the end of it!
|
| Let the cards fall where they may, if cops go out they go out,
| they go out, otherwise that's that.
|
| You don't get to go back days later and reclassify it as a
| gunshot based on ambiguity inherent to your product, and you
| don't get to go back and move the origin.
|
| This is not tough at all, it literally should work exactly like
| it works today, and no one is allowed to change the initial
| call manually.
|
| After all, who is helped by retroactively marking it as a
| gunshot but a DA?
|
| -
|
| If the concern is building up statistics or something,
| ShotSpotter is still recording that it heard a sound. Nothing
| is stopping an _out of band_ note that says "we believe this
| recording was tied to so and so incident at so and so location"
|
| The key difference though is that ShotSpotter is no long
| claiming to have recorded that incident directly. Which matters
| when people's freedom is at stake.
| loteck wrote:
| _It 's a shame because setting up some microphones around the
| city to detect a firearm discharge seems like a great idea._
|
| It's an idea, yes, but a *great* idea? There are so many
| technical, social and civil rights issues wrapped up in this
| idea on its face, I think its performance history should be
| part of whether it gets to enjoy the label of being a "great
| idea."
|
| _Since it misclassifies noises, isn 't exactly sure of the
| origin, and can read echos as additional shots, is it useless?_
|
| Furthermore, since it can and does record human voices
| speaking, and creates permanent records into the private hands
| of a for-profit company that is allowed to sell that data to
| 3rd parties, does it actually cross a line from being useless
| to being harmful? It might.
| oehpr wrote:
| Right... but I don't classify its performance of "saying 5
| gunshots when their was 4" a failure.
|
| If it can say "I heard a gunshot, sounded like it came from
| around here." and a gunshot occurred somewhere around there,
| with only a few false positives. That's fantastic. In my
| view, that's "great".
|
| It's just not iron clad evidence, prosecutors are overstating
| its statistical power. That needs to be checked.
|
| _Furthermore, since it can and does record human voices
| speaking, and creates permanent records into the private
| hands of a for-profit company that is allowed to sell that
| data to 3rd parties, does it actually cross a line from being
| useless to being harmful? It might._
|
| Yah absolutely. But the thing is gunshots are pretty loud
| noises compared to human speech. There's no reason to think a
| microphone needs to be sensitive enough to capture human
| speech to capture a gunshot, nor placed in a location that is
| well suited for capturing human speech, nor would a place
| that IS well suited for capturing human speech a good
| location for capturing gunshots.
|
| If I was placing a microphone to capture the sound of
| gunshots, I'd be putting it on the tops of streetlights,
| telephone polls, and the corners of buildings. You're not
| going to be hearing people from there.
|
| So if we see that behavior of ShotSpotter sticking
| microphones in inappropriate places for public surveillance
| purposes, then I think they should be taken to task for it.
| [deleted]
| josefx wrote:
| > Right... but I don't classify its performance of "saying
| 5 gunshots when their was 4" a failure.
|
| Where there four? The part of the recording containing the
| fifth shot disappeared, there is no way to reexamine it as
| there where no steps taken to protect the original data
| against tampering. If your method is so bad that no one
| else can reproduce your results and the data you base your
| results on just keeps changing and disappearing to suit the
| expected result then it has the scientific rigor of a
| fortune teller.
| [deleted]
| Imnimo wrote:
| I think the problem isn't the technology or the idea, it's the
| business model and the associated incentives. ShotSpotter's
| customers are the police, and the objective of police is to
| secure convictions, so ShotSpotter is incentivized to help them
| do that, not to produce true and accurate predictions.
| Exonerating a defendant isn't going to win them more business.
| jfrankamp wrote:
| Right. Shotspotter or the generic equiv should be purchased
| by the city, not the police. The data (raw and interpreted)
| should be managed in the public, as its a public interest to
| know about firearms (including the police's) being
| discharged.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Shotspotter or the generic equiv should be purchased by
| the city, not the police.
|
| Generally, the police are part of the city, and the sole
| and deliberately centralized city agency with a mandate
| that makes something like ShotSpotter relevant.
|
| So, of course, if it is bought "by the city", it is through
| and under control of the police department.
| jfrankamp wrote:
| I'm arguing though that due to the conflict of interest,
| it should be at least one level up IRT purchasing, access
| to interpretive/raw data, and decision making on which of
| that data they want to share etc. Remove funding and
| responsibility from the police to run this system/vendor,
| and move it into the "office of public data
| accountability" e.g. which can serve its data equally to
| the public, watchdog groups and the police.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| > the objective of police is to secure convictions
|
| I mean... that's the problem point it would seem
| javajosh wrote:
| Why didn't the judge find the prosecution in contempt of court?
| And why didn't this trigger an internal investigation inside the
| Chicago PD? Modifying evidence to fit a crime is itself a crime,
| withdrawn or not, and heads should be rolling right now.
| sneak wrote:
| The courts and the prosecutors and the police are all on the
| same team.
|
| The adversarial, truth-seeking system you believe that this is
| is a fiction. It's a pipeline for money, nothing more.
| bsanr wrote:
| >Motherboard recently obtained data demonstrating the stark
| racial disparity in how Chicago has deployed ShotSpotter. The
| sensors have been placed almost exclusively in predominantly
| Black and brown communities, while the white enclaves in the
| north and northwest of the city have no sensors at all, despite
| Chicago police data that shows gun crime is spread throughout the
| city.
|
| But I thought there was nothing racially-biased about American
| policing.
| timy2shoes wrote:
| > But after the 11:46 p.m. alert came in, a ShotSpotter analyst
| manually overrode the algorithms and "reclassified" the sound as
| a gunshot. Then, months later and after "post-processing,"
| another ShotSpotter analyst changed the alert's coordinates to a
| location on South Stony Island Drive near where Williams' car was
| seen on camera.
|
| That's falsification of evidence. Will there be any consequences?
| Who watches the watchmen?
| jaywalk wrote:
| You say falsification of evidence, they say manual review by an
| "expert" to correct errors from the automated process.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| > manual review by an "expert"
|
| Sounds like that should be required before the results of
| automated processes can be used as evidence.
| jaywalk wrote:
| I'm sure it is, but the point here is that the manual
| review appears to be "aided" by the police "suggesting"
| where they believe the sound came from. And then, wow,
| wouldn't you know it! The manual review agrees. Case
| closed.
| [deleted]
| bluejekyll wrote:
| Reclassifying the type of sound is possibly reasonable.
| Changing the coordinates seems like falsification of
| evidence. Later in the article it mentions adding a fifth
| shot in a different event.
|
| If shotspotter wants to be relied on for evidence, allowing
| technicians to go back and modify data seems like a recipe to
| quickly eliminate its use in cities and destroy its market
| share. Adding notes about manual review after the fact would
| be the only acceptable thing, but the originals should never
| be modified/deleted.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| Sorry, but I'm an expert shooter. I can reasonably identify
| the round and sometimes the gun on the range next to me - I
| would say I have an excellently tuned ear for these
| things...
|
| And not a chance I could do that based on microphone
| playback between firework and gunshot with some random mic
| in a city. 1/2 the "trick" is knowing the location, at my
| range I know the echo of a 12ga vs a 45ACP, the crack
| difference in a 223 or a 6.5prc, if I went to some random
| place and you shot one random shot, it would be
| ridiculously less accurate.
|
| Shotspotter seems like a ton of bullshit to me after
| reading this article including...
|
| > Both the company and the Rochester Police Department
| "lost, deleted and/or destroyed the spool and/or other
| information containing sounds pertaining to the officer-
| involved shooting,"
| jcims wrote:
| The idea is attractive because it's quite obvious how
| well ShotSpotter would work in a cleanroom environment.
| The part that's less intuitive is how far the standard
| deployment environment is from that standard and what
| margin the product has to accommodate.
| bluejekyll wrote:
| > And not a chance I could do that based on microphone
| playback between firework and gunshot.
|
| I'm happy to agree with you on that point, since I don't
| have the experience there.
|
| My larger point is that I could reasonably say allow for
| shotspotter to review the sound, but the location I'm
| assuming is pretty darn accurate.
|
| And yes, the article completely destroys their
| credibility as a reliable source of evidence.
| jcims wrote:
| Multipath effects, which for sound are huge in an
| environment with large flat surfaces, could create
| phantom origin spots at the fringes of the covered area.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| So if your point is it's too complex and variable for
| automatic processing; how does adding a human arbitrarily
| changing classification and location going to improve
| accuracy? Unless it's the shotspotter tech put there
| shooting people, seems the company is very successful
| bullshit either technically or ethically.
| jcims wrote:
| If there was solid external evidence of when a shooting
| occurred (eg gps timestamped video of the event) I could
| see them doing it purely for calibration purposes.
|
| Clearly those adjustments should not be admitted as
| evidence in a court case. ShotSpotter just needs to take
| the 'L' and they will have to prosecute without (or admit
| whatever was originally recorded as corroborating
| evidence).
| jkestner wrote:
| If the source audio is not reviewable in court, none of it
| should be admissible as evidence. Algorithms are just
| laundering bad opinions like blood splatter analysis, so that
| there's not even a personal reputation at stake.
| tolbish wrote:
| "Liability laundering" does roll off the tongue more easily
| than "machine learning algorithm".
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Journalists, courts, and citizen activists.
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| Careful: the number of people on HN who are now firmly in the
| camp of: "there are no facts, there is no truth, all
| journalism is propoganda" is astonishingly large, and growing
| (it seems to me, anyway).
| minikites wrote:
| There won't be any consequences, because the police never face
| any consequences. There's no way to reform modern policing, the
| evidence shows little progress from decades of trying, which is
| why modern policing must be abolished and something entirely
| different needs to take its place. The police have resisted
| incremental reforms, so the only option now is drastic reforms.
| dolni wrote:
| This reads like a troll message to me, so I'm not sure I
| should even engage. But in the off chance it isn't, then if
| you actually want to convince people of something you should
| try:
|
| * Not using ridiculous hyperbole
|
| * Providing a well-reasoned solution instead of just stating
| what the problem is
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| I mean, I'm not in the "Defund police" camp, personally,
| quite... but OP doesn't read like troll OR hyperbole, and
| I'm not sure why the reaction - this is an increasingly
| mainstream perspective.
|
| Police resisting reforms, limited consequences to police
| misbehaviour, and limited progress in attempts to reform,
| are I think baseline facts by now. The notion that they
| need to be rebuilt from ground up with different
| culture/prerogatives/internal processes/priorities again is
| nowhere near "troll like".
|
| >>Providing a well-reasoned solution instead of just
| stating what the problem is
|
| That's a high bar and an unreasonable threshold to speaking
| out. A lot of times, recognizing / defining a problem is an
| important first step. It should not be suppressed solely
| for lack of immediate solution provided.
| dolni wrote:
| > OP doesn't read like troll OR hyperbole
|
| Really? And how do you figure that? They literally opened
| with "There won't be any consequences, because the police
| never face any consequences." The entire planet can name
| at least one instance of a cop facing consequences for
| their behavior.
|
| "There's no way to reform modern policing" is a strong
| assertion without very much to support it.
|
| > That's a high bar and an unreasonable threshold to
| speaking out.
|
| No, it isn't. _All_ systems are subject to abuse by bad
| actors. _No_ system is perfect. There are only trade-
| offs.
|
| If you have no alternative solution it means you haven't
| considered the trade-offs, and if you haven't considered
| the trade-offs, you haven't actually spent time thinking
| about the problem.
|
| It's easy to point fingers at what sucks. Everybody can
| do it, and everybody is doing it. If you're here on
| Hacker News, which is supposed to be a place for
| interesting conversation, I expect that you're going to
| do better than that.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| Fair enough; if the aim is to increase the level of
| discourse on HN, that's a noble cause I'd have to
| support.
|
| (Note, and entirely FWIW, I still think message could've
| been presented clearer / in a more friendly & productive
| fashion - it's usually better to coach and show than to
| yell & chastise).
| bsanr wrote:
| Their post meets both criteria. Their description of the
| issue is not hyperbolic; it is a brief but reasonable and
| accurate description of the failure of American policing.
| Their description of the solution is well-reasoned: it is
| not unreasonable to suggest that we should prefer an
| institution facing intractable flaws be deconstructed and
| replaced with a new one.
|
| I do think it's unreasonable to expect a detailed
| description of this solution off-the-cuff. A simple search
| would have provided you with that, though:
| https://defundthepolice.org/alternatives-to-police-
| services/
| dolni wrote:
| > Their description of the issue is not hyperbolic
|
| Saying that police are never held accountable is, in
| fact, hyperbolic.
|
| > Their description of the solution is well-reasoned
|
| There's no reasoning beyond first order "this thing
| sucks, progress isn't fast enough, it has to go". No
| consideration is given to the second or third order
| effects of such a massive change. So no, it isn't "well-
| reasoned."
|
| > I do think it's unreasonable to expect a detailed
| description of this solution off-the-cuff.
|
| Hacker News is _supposed_ to be a place for curious and
| insightful discussion. Not just issuing complaints about
| the social issues of the day.
|
| I made an attempt to engage in order to try and produce
| something substantive, but that fell flat pretty quickly
| because no effort was made to produce something well-
| reasoned.
|
| > A simple search would have provided you with that,
| though: https://defundthepolice.org/alternatives-to-
| police-services/
|
| A simple search yielding a page that ignorantly proclaims
| "But we have to remember that police do not prevent
| violence." Who responds to mass-shootings in progress?
| Did a cop not prevent someone from being stabbed in the
| Makhia Bryant case? Does solving cases and locking up the
| right people who are violet not prevent them from
| committing further crimes?
|
| Your own link is agenda pushing, not a serious analysis
| of how & why policing has reached its current state, how
| this new system will avoid the same fate, and largely
| avoids talking about the potential problems of this new
| system.
| minikites wrote:
| >Providing a well-reasoned solution instead of just stating
| what the problem is
|
| I did:
|
| >modern policing must be abolished and something entirely
| different needs to take its place
| dolni wrote:
| All you did was state "this thing sucks and it needs to
| go." Oh and by the way, it should be replaced by
| "something."
|
| That's not a well-reasoned solution. That's not a
| solution at all. All you're doing is complaining.
|
| Put your money where your mouth is, and come up with what
| the "something" should be.
| minikites wrote:
| Okay, how about starting with a new department modeled
| after incredibly successful programs like these?
|
| https://www.npr.org/2021/03/08/974941422/6-month-
| experiment-...
|
| https://www.npr.org/2021/07/23/1019704823/police-mental-
| heal...
| dolni wrote:
| Both articles mention specifically that police were
| replaced _for certain calls_.
|
| But that doesn't jive with your proposal to completely
| eliminate police and replace them with something else.
|
| I'm not going to engage you any further since it's become
| clear you're either trolling or not really trying.
| guerrilla wrote:
| You have to start somewhere. They started somewhere. It
| worked.
| guerrilla wrote:
| Abolitionists did that all last year. It should be
| somewhat common knowledge by now for people who read
| news.
| dolni wrote:
| So I should assume that this guy's opinion is the same as
| everyone else's? A+ communication skills.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > The police have resisted incremental reforms,
|
| That's not really the problem. Even where the police have
| embraced incremental reforms they've driven funding and
| responsibility into the police, pushing them into more
| domains for which they are inappropriate, and haven't dealt
| with the underlying problems because those aren't peripheral
| policy problems but fundamental structural problems of having
| a general purpose paramilitary force as a top level local
| government organization unto which almost all law enforcement
| and some peripheral tasks are layered fostering an insular
| warrior culture without any other strong focus. (Note that
| when the US was founded--before standing paramilitary
| domestic security forces were common enough to be a
| particular general concern--avoiding a very similar problem
| with military forces which inevitably would get leaned on for
| domestic security was a major reason for skepticism of
| standing armies in favor of relying on militia + cadre, and
| thus for the second amendment.)
|
| Which also suggests what the "something else" to replace the
| police could be--given that abandoning professional permanent
| law enforcement for reliance on citizen militia/posses is
| probably not viable for modern society, one way to address
| that problem is to have specialized law enforcement entities
| in domain-specific agencies whose individual foci are
| narrower, enabling each to have a cultural focus (and
| substantive competence requirements) that are domain
| specific.
|
| And if you look at US law enforcement _beyond_ the local
| level, that 's what a lot of it looks like already. The
| highly centralized paramilitary law enforcement structure
| where the top uniformed commander is a the head of a top
| level agency of the unit of government (and possibly
| independently elected and effectively unaccountable to the
| civilian government officials) is unique to city/county
| government.
| zozin wrote:
| I think you're jumping to conclusions. We don't know their
| standard process for reclassifying alerts. Maybe an analyst
| reviews every single alert and manual overrides are common.
| Maybe post-processing several months later is also standard
| practice.
|
| I get how suspicious this looks, especially the changed geo-tag
| that occurred months after, perhaps at the behest of or
| influenced by the CPD's investigation, but we should try to be
| as objective as possible before accusing people of committing
| felonies.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| > We don't know their standard process for reclassifying
| alerts.
|
| and we don't because they withdrew evidence, rather than
| allowing outside review of said processes.
| zanderz wrote:
| Related: 11 years ago or so, 3 Tesla executives died when their
| small plane crashed in East Palo Alto, where the shotspotter
| system recorded audio of the crash:
| https://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/2010/02/19/shotspotter-s...
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-07-26 23:01 UTC)