Hello all, occasionally I write what I consider "Albuquerque content" and I do not expect it to become broadly popular. This article is something I put together very quickly and it probably assumes a certain degree of familiarity with the political context around policing in Albuquerque (which either side will tell you is very contentious) and, more broadly, policing and civil justice. Even without the currently evolving bribery scandal, the level of public trust in APD (and even the city council's confidence in APD) is very low. APD's transparency and accountability, or lack thereof, has been a common locus of the debate. On the other hand, another major issue has been APD's chronic understaffing, and APD contends that ShotSpotter and other elements of their real-time program help to close the gap that results from their limited personnel. With gun crime as one of the foremost issues in the city, whether you view APD positively or negatively, ShotSpotter is a big part of the discussion right now.
Historically, APD's use of pervasive surveillance technology has been a flashpoint in the debate. APD has live access to perhaps 3-4 thousand cameras across the city (they aren't very transparent about this and it depends on how far along the APS integration project is), they have used facial recognition against driver's license photos and other sources since 2014, they have installed ALPR throughout the city and recently expanded retention to one year, etc. This is all fed into the Real-Time Crime Center, which uses a data fusion product from a vendor called Genetec to provide sort of a futuristic point-and-click data system that combines ShotSpotter detections with video feeds with service call records etc. to produce sort of a dossier on any given person or location.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of things going on in city politics, especially with regard to crime and policing, and so the topic of surveillance has mostly fallen out of public attention.
Still, APD's refusal to say in any detail what parts of the city were covered by ShotSpotter has been one of the big ongoing frustrations, particularly among those who favor police reform. I mostly wrote this article to highlight that there is finally information on the matter available. The concerns about how distribution of sensors and, more broadly, use of surveillance technology impacts civil rights and quality of life in the city are mentioned mainly as an aside and I do not attempt to articulate the pros and cons. That would require a rather lengthy piece as the topic is complex, and currently the greater part of the controversy isn't even about the wisdom of deploying ShotSpotter, but rather over whether or not ShotSpotter even works (and, consequently, whether or not it's simply a waste of city money, at a rate of around $5 million).
Let me follow up, and maybe I should write this up on CAB but I don't really want to get too much into police reform there, what I know factually about the ShotSpotter system. Most of this comes from discussions with APD leadership and officers in the context of the police oversight role I used to hold, and they are very much limited in what they can say. Some of this is specific to APD SOP and other police departments may vary in their approach.
Some sort of software analysis performed by SoundThinking identifies a possible gunshot. The audio recordings are sent to a human analyst, a SoundThinking employee, who reviews the recording and enters an assessment of what it contains (e.g. if it is gunfire, and how many rounds). If the analyst confirms the report, an alert is sent as a text message (I believe in an app they furnish) to staff in APD's dispatch center, called the Emergency Communications Center (ECC). The contract includes an SLA on this process of I think 1 or 2 minutes, but I was told that they routinely performed as well as 30 seconds. Some APD personnel, I think usually area commanders but it may have been all field division sergeants, also receive the alerts on their phones.
The ECC dispatches the call as a priority 2. P2 is high enough that a ShotSpotter report will "bump" most calls for service except for a caller on the line violent crime in progress. When the officers arrive at the reported location, they make a brief assessment and search the area for suspects or victims. If no suspects or victims are found, a Crime Scene Technician is dispatched (often later as they will wait for daylight) to search the area for evidence such as spent shell casings.
My recollection is that I was told they were able to find definitive evidence of actual shots fired in less than five percent of cases, but take that with a grain of salt as I do not believe it was ever put in writing (I don't think they're allowed to by their contract) and I could be remembering wrong. However, it's believable that the accuracy of the system is higher than that suggests, as Albuquerque has a lot of wide open spaces that are difficult to search thoroughly if the ShotSpotter location estimate is at all inaccurate.
I was told that, when the system was tested by firing blanks, it was not completely effective but that they were satisfied with how effective it was. I was never given a number and I think they had been very specifically prohibited from discussing the testing in detail when they coordinated it with SoundThinking.
One of the major criticisms of the ShotSpotter system in Albuquerque is that it results in a relatively large volume of P2 calls that delay police response to most other calls for service. During the worst of the understaffing, I was told that some officers in high-crime areas like the International District spent a large portion of their total shift following up on ShotSpotter activations while there were multiple P3 calls queued. This has probably improved as staffing levels have increased, but in my mind it is the greatest single concern about the system.
SoundThinking's evasiveness, refusal of independent research, and clear motive to sell their product creates an alarming possibility that they are deceiving police leadership and elected officials into overprioritizing ShotSpotter. It may be a waste of money, which is already a problem, but the much greater concern is that police departments are putting off responding to nonviolent crimes in progress to go to ShotSpotter reports instead, because they have been told by SoundThinking that the accuracy rate of the system is very high.
Why didn't you mention that the only "conversation" recorded by ShotSpotter admitted in court was a guy saying "[shooter's name], why did you shoot me!" two seconds after the sound of gunfire?
It seems an important piece of context if you are concerned about surveillance.
The tone of your article makes me honestly, really angry. You know damn well that the reason the sensors are in those neighborhoods are because that's where people are getting shot.
You even talk about how a school where some little kid got shot has a sensor, as if it's some sort of punishment for the lower income people there. Perhaps it's because the police and the city government want to deter or solve murders that happen. The way your article is framed, the main concern is that low income or minority perpetrators of shootings might get caught and put in jail. The fact that minority or low income victims of major violent crime might have their assailants deterred or at least brought to justice does not even factor into your calculus.
Here in Minneapolis we seem to have an officer or someone associated with the MPD that posts screen recordings of their Shotspotter/Soundthinking app on twitter: https://twitter.com/mplsspots
> Many assumed that ShotSpotter coverage was concentrated in disadvantaged parts of the city, an unsurprising outcome but one that could contribute to systemic overpolicing.
Are these areas also the ones where the majority of crime takes place or not? If there exists such correlation then why bring it up? If the gun crime is the foremost issue then are you arguing that the "disadvantaged parts" should be left on their own to deal with the issue?
> It's not perfect, but the distance from your house to a ShotSpotter sensor correlates fairly well with your household income. The wealthier you are, the less surveilled you are.
To give ABQ police the benefit of the doubt, that pattern could also be compatible with more gun crime equaling more surveillance. It would be nice to have enough gun crime and sensor location data to see how true that is. When the sensors are as dense as they are, it's not clear that knowing the sensor locations is an advantage to offenders, at least in the gunshot spotting role.
It sounds like shotspotters are likely to be near where shots are; and that the wealthier you are the more likely you’d NOT want to be where the shots are.
> To give ABQ police the benefit of the doubt, that pattern could also be compatible with more gun crime equaling more surveillance. It would be nice to have enough gun crime and sensor location data to see how true that is.
The very point of the article is that, absent leaks like this one, there could be no way for anybody to independently study or verify the fairness of the sensor distribution, or even the real efficacy of the reports the system produces—which is a troubling situation to be in when the state has an outsized amount of power to prosecute people based on potential junk science that will be hard for defendants to challenge in court.
The answer isn't to give police departments the benefit of the doubt (which they so rarely earn), but to demand better transparency and citizen oversight of the technology poised to be used against us.
> It would be nice to have enough gun crime and sensor location data to see how true that is.
The main thread of the article is that ShotSpotter operate without scrutiny. The problematic aspects of their deployment are the false positives...
> APD received about 14,000 ShotSpotter reports last year. The accuracy of these reports, in terms of their correctly identifying gunfire, is contested. SoundThinking claims impressive statistics, but has actively resisted independent evaluation. A Chicago report found that only 11.3% of ShotSpotter reports could be confirmed as gunfire.
.. and false charges
> This ought to give us pause, as should the fact that ShotSpotter has been compellingly demonstrated to manipulate their "interpretation" of evidence to fit a prosecutor's narrative---even when ShotSpotter's original analysis contradicted it.
I don't think the article is suggesting there is a conspiracy wherein the police decided to target lower income areas because they are poor. It is certainly because incidences of those crimes are higher in those areas.
What I think the article is suggesting is that policies like these, particularly when implemented without sufficient transparency or oversight, can cause dystopian-sounding outcomes, such as poor people's conversations being constantly recorded by the government while wealthier people remain un-surveilled.
But if you're not listening for the guns then you're not going to find the crime that does happen, will you? It's either saying "we don't care about it because it's less frequent" (which is stupid—you still build a fire station in places where buildings burn down less frequently) or "it's easier to keep ourselves busy when we fish in a barrel".
There is a ShotSpotter on the lightpole outside my door. My household income is about $2400/yr. My hood is a warzone though (South Side Chicago), so not unexpected lol
This is just another example of how American Police budgets have gotten out of hand. A budget that allows for a municipal police force to install 721 "AI powered" recording devices. That are purchased from a publicly traded company, and deployed in areas guaranteed to funnel people into the for profit privatized prison system.
What a wonderful use of tax dollars. Protecting and serving the path to a better society.
> Many assumed that ShotSpotter coverage was concentrated in disadvantaged parts of the city, an unsurprising outcome but one that could contribute to systemic overpolicing.
Also
> Conversations recorded by ShotSpotter sensors have twice been introduced as evidence in criminal trials.
> that could also be compatible with more gun crime equaling more surveillance
Not just could -- without more information, it's the far more likely and economical explanation. The phrasing in the article imo is intentionally inflammatory.
There's an interesting control system feedback complaint with a lot to it;
* historically there's been a lot of "black crime" in the US due to the US police watching black neighbourhoods excessively and being absent elsewhere .. take this all the way back in time to Tulsa and before.
* Subsequently there's been a lot of "black crime" as neighbourhoods have been destroyed by occasional mobs (Tulsa), frequent division by freeways and toxic waste dumps, and the removal of many adult males to the prison system as a result of all the "observed crime" leading to an excess of young males with few prospects.
* Based on that data the modern survellience goes to where all the crime has been created^H observed.
Meanwhile entire areas of US cities get on by considerably less police present and oversight and a great deal less observed crime.
Thanks! And alternatively you can create an anchor element in the console with `href` set as a JSON stringified representation of `window._Flourish_data`. Then set a download attribute with the filename you'd like, and simulate a click to download it.
To use it in leaflet, you'll need to iterate over the `events` array and change `lon` to `lng` before adding each point to the leaflet map.
It accurately reported the location of a noise that sounded like gunfire.
What is timely about this?
Do you want the police to not investigate gunshots? I don't care about how they approached the scene, their training has nothing to do with ShotSpotter which is the discussion at hand.
Also fireworks are illegal to set off in Chicago so no legitimate activity was interrupted.
What are the potential downsides to police oversight?
> But, if asked, they provide a form letter written by ShotSpotter. Their contract prohibits the disclosure of any actual data.
A potentially dystopian surveillance apparatus is installed citywide, and the police can't discuss about it's efficiency because the company that sold it to them won't let them?
The police know what’s good for them. They have extraordinary powers and the more they can keep the public in the dark about what they do, the more freedom they have to act with impunity.
Some bumbling police chief might say something stupid that would draw media attention to ShotSpotter and their massive data collection operation. You definitely wouldn't want that to happen.
I would request that a crowd as technically sophisticated as HN move past marketing claims when discussing this system. "Gunshot detection" is pure marketing.
The devices are hot mics — public audio surveillance. The software layer triggers alerts on loud noises, which are sent off to a facility that is little more than a call center, for characterization by a human worker there. This system detects door slams and popped volleyballs just as well as it detects gun fire (which is to say, imperfectly on all counts).
> This system detects door slams and popped volleyballs just as well as it detects gun fire (which is to say, imperfectly on all counts).
Sound classification moved far beyond what you’re claiming years ago.
If you set the threshold at “imperfectly” then no system will ever meet your bar, because perfect is an unreasonable threshold. However, the claim that we’re unable to differentiate between gunshots and car doors is extremely incorrect.
I had no idea ShotSpotter was recording conversations, always assumed the nature of analyzing for a sound signature would be throwing much of the data away immediately
> assumed the nature of analyzing for a sound signature would be throwing much of the data away immediately
(INACCURATE, SEE EDIT) It does. The "conversations recorded by ShotSpotter sensors" were a few seconds before/after the shooting, and consisted of people saying things like "[shooter's name] Why are you going to [shoot] me like that, [shooter's name]"? [1]
[1] 'The recording of the second shot also captured the voice of Tyrone Lyles, apparently addressing the person who shot him: "Ar, Ar, why are you going to do me like that, Ar."' https://casetext.com/case/people-v-johnson-5116
i broadly agree with the sentiment in this article, especially the "no public oversight" part.
but this:
> The reader can probably infer how this coverage pattern relates to race and class in Albuquerque. It's not perfect, but the distance from your house to a ShotSpotter sensor correlates fairly well with your household income.
is facetious and is almost certainly argued in bad faith. well, duh. the distance to the nearest "shot spotter" box also correlates with the incidence of crime and gunfire in the area. to bring up racism or classism is unhelpful. that correlation is unfortunate, likely true, and also not the problem at hand.
Actually this is a direct example of how systemic racism works. The goal isn’t to surveil minorities more, it’s just that the system watches places where crimes occur. Consider that, when an area has more surveillance, more people who commit crimes are caught. All of a sudden, you’re disproportionately catching minority criminals. Better put in more surveillance to cover the higher crime rates in those minority communities.
I get they can’t necessarily do anything about this, since they’re gonna put microphones where it’s most efficient, but maybe it’s yet another argument against mass surveillance.
The vast number of reports are false, which if you read the rest of the article as serious consequences. It:
* results in many high-priority calls tying up the patrols in that area so residents who have serious issues, but not "active shooting" serious, get poorer service than people in predominantly white/wealthy neighborhoods. I think you'd be pretty annoyed if something of yours was stolen and police never show because a huge backlog of calls develops while they chase down shotspotter reports, but someone in a wealthier neighborhood reports a suspicious vehicle and police show up in minutes
* results in a lot of aggressive police action with police swarming an area looking for a "shooter." Given how discriminatory and hostile police are toward the poor and minorities, this has serious consequences....ranging from residents feeling like they're constantly being harassed, to death - a boy was shot and killed by police after setting off a firecracker that the shotspotter system reported.
There's a lot of evidence that ShotSpotter detects almost all gunshots and that's been validated by multiple third party groups. ShotSpotter also seems to alert to things that are either false positives (construction sounds, fireworks, etc) or are not useful.
Chicago IG says 9/10 times when officers respond to a ShotSpotter alert they find nothing. 1/10 times it leads to an arrest, but the arrest isn't always strictly related to the ShotSpotter event - e.g. police responding to an event stop a speeding car and discover drug paraphernalia or an unrelated gun.
Some cities, e.g. Atlanta, discontinued ShotSpotter over cost benefit concerns. From their analysis it seemed a better use of money to hire more officers than use ShotSpotter. Still, it's in use in 84 metro areas today.
Ultimately, I think it should be up to the local community. The individual community is the one who will most benefit (if it is beneficial) and suffer from increased police incursions.
In Dallas I hear the pop-pop-pop of gunfire virtually every night in my oakcliff neighborhood. Even when the Cowboys score a touchdown you hear gunfire. The police have basically given up.
I can't help but think how easily such a system - which is hardly sophisticated, in technical principle - could be used to pinpoint things that are 'problematic' in my neighbourhood. Loutish vehicle behaviour of various kinds. The loud Harley Davidson and dirt-bike signatures associated with the comings-and-goings of local gang members. Squealing tyres of deliberate burn-outs on the road. The occasional fool loudly blasting down the road at twice the speed limit. Things which the current system of "wait until someone gets annoyed enough or gets the courage to call the police to complain, and one might arrive 15 minutes later, by which time the coop has been long flown" allow to run mostly unchecked.
But those thoughts go hand in hand with a vague but distinct discomfort.
Some of the illegal things you listed aren't things that benefit much from a hastily dispatched response. If you want to catch people on cars or dirt bikes driving down the street, you kinda have to already be there. Also, a couple of the things you listed are nuisances, but not illegal activity in their own right.
ShotSpotters don't repel crime, let alone prevent it. They're intentionally covert, as shown in the OP, which gives credence to the notion that they aren't intended to deter criminal activity from the surrounding area. If anything, repelling/deterring crime would defeat the purpose of the technology.
At best, ShotSpotter merely detects crime, and its effectiveness in that capacity is kept a secret. The world of police tech is a knee-deep in snake oil. A bit of transparency would go a long way for ShotSpotter.
Indeed, from a playing around perspective it can be a lot of fun. You do need to be able to identify the start time of a particular sound event though on 3 or more microphones (Technically 4x mics, there are two solutions to a 3 mic localization).
>Many assumed that ShotSpotter coverage was concentrated in disadvantaged parts of the city, an unsurprising outcome but one that could contribute to systemic overpolicing.
The author presents this as a negative but it is obviously a good thing. If there was an increase in gunfire in my neighbourhood I would hope that police increases their presence, lest the "disadvantages" begin to accumulate.
Your argument assumes that the devices are only used as marketed. My understanding is that this assumption doesn’t hold, and that police regularly use these systems as an excuse to harass people in poor neighborhoods. The reports I have read suggest that police will enter a neighborhood they want to patrol, and if they see someone they don’t like they can claim they were called in by shotspotter, then shake down the person and if they find something, arrest them for that. This is textbook over-policing, which I assure you would not want to have done to you, and that is the precise concern mentioned in the quote.
It just makes sense to put the sensors near the phenomena being sensed, and if people know where they are they could be manipulated. If guns are going off and people are getting caught, that seems like effective policing, not over or under policing.
Several of us are noting the less than 5% success rate in finding definitive evidence of shots fired, and calling the tech a failure.
I disagree, because of the importance of preventing active shooters. With this kind of system you are going to want to lean toward false positives vs false negatives.
There is definitely a lot of room for improvement though. Improvement could come through better ML use/training, better sensors, and better human in the loop analysts.
I am firmly with Benjamin Franklin, in that "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.". But Franklin himself was in favor of collective security, and Franklin said this in support of the state's authority to provide collective security ( https://www.npr.org/2015/03/02/390245038/ben-franklins-famou... ). Also, these sensors monitor public spaces, where no expectation of privacy exists.
So I am for more sensors, video cameras on the sensors, more ML on the sensor data, and better training for analysts, but I am also for complete transparency on where sensors are and how they are used, with a publicly released report from annual external party review of police conduct in the use or abuse of sensor data.
Several people are misinterpreting a Chicago Inspector General report that examined call disposition records on ShotSpotter alerts and found approximately 10% were coded with dispositions indicating a firearms offense. The misinterpretation is conflating this with a false positive rate of 90%, never mind that the police are disincentivized to thoroughly search for shell casings rather than just moving on to the next call if there are no victims, shooters, witnesses, or any other obvious evidence of a shooting on scene. It implies, at best, a rough lower bound on the false positive rate.
Additionally, the author of this article is claiming the police in Albuquerque have suggested to him that when they send forensics teams to the site of detected shootings, they "find definitive evidence of actual shots fired in less than five percent of cases." This would be at least twice as bad as the rough lower bound suggested by the Chicago Inspector General report and seems way out of line with other experiences I've heard.
Interesting how takes on ShotSpotter vary depending on the context and situation. In San Jose it was used to help enforce rules against firing guns in the air. In these cases there would usually be reports to police, but finding the shooter was extremely difficult. With ShotSpotter it became possible to identify locations on individual lots. Using this information enforcement became much more effective and there was a huge reduction in celebratory gunfire. In a large number of these cases no charges needed to be filed as gun owners were often uninformed, apologetic, and compliant. From the start of this program it was explicitly stated that ShotSpotter information would only be used by constables on patrol and would not be admitted as evidence in court. System coverage was based on where crimes were being reported. That such criteria overlap with race and class makes sense without necessarily being connected.
It would be interesting to know if there might be some reasonable bounds that could be used to enable ShotSpotter to be used without being considered intrusive surveillance. Having information about gunshots or possible gunshots can be extremely useful for responders who need to understand where events are happening. This does not necessarily mean that the system has to be open to other uses, especially recording and replay of audio.
I have a project for the Raspberry Pi that provides for sound localization via time difference of arrival (TDOA). In a similar manner I suppose as shotspotter.
There was a case recently in America where a grandfather was jailed for a significant part of a year based on a shotspotter localization and no other physical evidence such as gunshot residue.
If citizens in such areas run their own systems they would have a means to provide counter evidence to that provided by shotspotter. Currently they have no means to do that. Even the times of the shots they have to take shot spotters word for it.
Recordings by citizens themselves is an inherently safer approach because their sphere of influence is considerably smaller. Recordings are written to a separate partition on an SD card, it’s pretty simple to encrypt this partition as well if you like, I’ve done that.
For those who are interested each node can be made very cheaply. It will run on a Raspberry Pi zero with a 7 euro GPS. It can also run portably on batteries.
This is fantastic! I have been thinking about building something like this myself. I'm definitely going to deploy this in my area. I hear gunshots almost every weekend. Heard 2 sets of gunfire about an hour ago.
Hard to imagine this can discern between things like engine backfires, fireworks and garbage trucks effectively enough to be anything more than a really expensive checkmark on some captains yearly performance review.
One thing missed in this writing is that shotspotter also saves lives. In my city, people shot in the alley and left for dead are found shortly after they are shot because of the detection.
Without this tech, some would be left to a slow death in an alley where no one would find them until morning.
It may incidentally do that? But if it reliably saved lives you would be selling it to ambulance dispatchers.
In reality, ambulance dispatchers would look at the high rate of Shotspotter dispatching a car and finding absolutely nothing and immediately recognize this proposal would harm people by sending emergency services on wild goose chases while real emergencies suffer longer wait times.
If you’re passionate about this subject and have lots of time go and volunteer at high crime communities (if you dare), for example in high schools.
I did the latter for three years, volunteering to help the Ace Tech High School (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACE_Amandla_Charter_High_Sch...) more than 10 years ago, as part of their Robotics Team. The problems I saw were myriad but it was common to see lockers decorated with flowers, for kids who died recently.
I totally understand and agree with the educated person’s poverty, bias, etc. arguments. But when a problem gets this bad first you need to stop it, and then work on long term goals.
Just answer this question: if your child had 10% chance of getting shot and killed walking to/from from school, what would your position be on any technology that can reduce that by even 1%.
> Just answer this question: your child had 10% chance of getting shot and killed walking to/fro from school, what would your position be on any technology that can reduce that by even 1%.
Just to put some actual perspective on the numbers: about 40 kids are killed in all of New Mexico each year and about 20 of those are suicides (still tragic but not the walking-home-from-school kind). That's still too many, but is nowhere near 10%. You're inflating the numbers to trigger emotions.
Making wide scale policy decisions based on your emotions surrounding anecdotal incidents is not a good policy. I feel for the families that lose their children, but I don't believe that acting for the sake of acting is safe.
Acting in the heat of a crisis is how we got the TSA and the NSA, which we still haven't managed to get rid of. The risk of creating an enormous and impossible to get rid of surveillance state to save 1% of 20 kids per year (2 kids every 10 years) frankly isn't worth it.
I have some noisy neighbours and I've thought of the same idea for controlling noise in neighbourhoods. You could have a microphone on every lamp post and send people fines for violating the rules.
I've been having a nightmarish time trying to track down intermittent low frequency industrial noise.
It's over the EPA regulations, it's neighborhood wide, and it is on for 2 hours between 11pm and 1am on random days. The EPA did monitoring of the house and site but couldn't pinpoint where it was coming from because of how low frequency it was.
This isn't surveillance, this is the equivalent of finding who is dumping raw sewage in your drinking water.
This is a strange conversation, because surely people realise that
all CCTV cameras made in the past 10 years have microphones and
record audio? Audio street surveillance is ubiquitous.
I think it's lame to limit the detection to just gun shots. Like the web has analytics, I think real life could have audiolytics. One example: I can collect all the data I want from my backyard and give a report to my neighbor about exactly how long and how loudly their dog has been barking.
I can hear which birds have been in my backyard.
I can... hear what a customer says about my product in-store and offer them coupons at checkout or later or get feedback about my product...
I would actually really love to live in a world where I can have a reasonable expectation of privacy when going about my day. A personal bird recorder is fine, but I absolutely would not want a networked system of sensitive microphones available for unlimited data gathering spread across my town. The prevalence of Ring cameras already makes some neighborhoods havens of surveillance, I’d rather we not expand things like that.
They are probably solar powered running on something with low power so they don't have to restrict the locations of hiding these devices to areas directly connected to the electrical grid.
Something along these same lines — I feel like I’m seeing those “Flock” cameras everywhere now. So between Shotspotter and Flock, you’re pretty much always under surveillance.
I don’t understand the pearl clutching over what parts of town these sensors get concentrated in. Wouldn’t it just be wasteful to put them in areas where people don’t have the habit of shooting each other? Is it really overpolicing when those who do are made to face the consequences?
I've experienced living in a neighborhood covered by shot spotter and hearing gun shots outside, and I think shot spotter is great. I want the cops to actually show up and arrest whoever is terrorizing everybody. Thank you very much
Chicago is letting the ShotSpotter contract expire instead renewing this year after the data revealed that it did not have any positive effect on crime reduction.
Just yesterday the cops apparently showed up at a house 5 doors down from me and shot someone's dog right in front of their family.
Not sure if we have shotspotter, but at least I know the police responded!
(I say apparently because, while I heard the gunshots, and I later saw a heavy police presence and animal control hauling away what appeared to be a dead small animal, I don't ACTUALLY know what happened because I wasn't present at the time. All I know is what a resident of the house told me).
> Conversations recorded by ShotSpotter sensors have twice been introduced as evidence in criminal trials. In one case the court allowed it, in another the court did not.
> ShotSpotter sensor correlates fairly well with your household income. The wealthier you are, the less surveilled you are.
Things like ShotSpotter are only fighting the symptoms. As an european I find it ridiculus to hear that such thing even exists. Why would we not simply ban the guns themselves?
The criminal element largely responsible for gun crime would criminally ignore the ban. They're already shooting people.
The US shares a 3,145 kilometer long border with Mexico, unfortunately there are at best 1,044 km of border 'barriers' in place. People, guns, money and drugs are smuggled across the border daily.
I have nothing in principle against a society that completely bans guns, but are you prepared to strike enough terror into the population that breaking the law and getting guns anyway becomes unthinkable?
This phrase "systemic overpolicing" and ShotSpotter both come from the same mind - the mind of the state.
The state - which like most organizations is concerned mostly with preserving itself - has an interest in the surveillance of the population and in shifting blame from it's failures to deal with poverty and crime to skapegoats: the police, racism, property taxes, etc.
The west is run by priests (professors, advisors, journalists, students, diplomats) with the support of the merchants. Priests always pretend it is flipped, but it's not. One "tell" is that the priests are never the villains in Hollywood movies. The other groups (warriors, merchants, and peasants) all do even villain duty.
Bias shot-spotter placement is a classic case of priests blaming merchants. There might even be something to the substance, but the priests run the show - not SoundThinking Inc.
Hmm - preservers, creators, and destroyers doing their jobs. Is this not what a healthy, functional society looks like, at least in any philosophy grounded in (albeit painful) reality? Or would you rather the preservers stop doing their job and let the others discover the consequences of their self-destructive fantasy? We might learn how pathetically dependent everyone is on each other for the N+1th time in recorded history.
Some comments were deferred for faster rendering.
jcrawfordor|2 years ago
Historically, APD's use of pervasive surveillance technology has been a flashpoint in the debate. APD has live access to perhaps 3-4 thousand cameras across the city (they aren't very transparent about this and it depends on how far along the APS integration project is), they have used facial recognition against driver's license photos and other sources since 2014, they have installed ALPR throughout the city and recently expanded retention to one year, etc. This is all fed into the Real-Time Crime Center, which uses a data fusion product from a vendor called Genetec to provide sort of a futuristic point-and-click data system that combines ShotSpotter detections with video feeds with service call records etc. to produce sort of a dossier on any given person or location.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of things going on in city politics, especially with regard to crime and policing, and so the topic of surveillance has mostly fallen out of public attention.
Still, APD's refusal to say in any detail what parts of the city were covered by ShotSpotter has been one of the big ongoing frustrations, particularly among those who favor police reform. I mostly wrote this article to highlight that there is finally information on the matter available. The concerns about how distribution of sensors and, more broadly, use of surveillance technology impacts civil rights and quality of life in the city are mentioned mainly as an aside and I do not attempt to articulate the pros and cons. That would require a rather lengthy piece as the topic is complex, and currently the greater part of the controversy isn't even about the wisdom of deploying ShotSpotter, but rather over whether or not ShotSpotter even works (and, consequently, whether or not it's simply a waste of city money, at a rate of around $5 million).
jcrawfordor|2 years ago
Some sort of software analysis performed by SoundThinking identifies a possible gunshot. The audio recordings are sent to a human analyst, a SoundThinking employee, who reviews the recording and enters an assessment of what it contains (e.g. if it is gunfire, and how many rounds). If the analyst confirms the report, an alert is sent as a text message (I believe in an app they furnish) to staff in APD's dispatch center, called the Emergency Communications Center (ECC). The contract includes an SLA on this process of I think 1 or 2 minutes, but I was told that they routinely performed as well as 30 seconds. Some APD personnel, I think usually area commanders but it may have been all field division sergeants, also receive the alerts on their phones.
The ECC dispatches the call as a priority 2. P2 is high enough that a ShotSpotter report will "bump" most calls for service except for a caller on the line violent crime in progress. When the officers arrive at the reported location, they make a brief assessment and search the area for suspects or victims. If no suspects or victims are found, a Crime Scene Technician is dispatched (often later as they will wait for daylight) to search the area for evidence such as spent shell casings.
My recollection is that I was told they were able to find definitive evidence of actual shots fired in less than five percent of cases, but take that with a grain of salt as I do not believe it was ever put in writing (I don't think they're allowed to by their contract) and I could be remembering wrong. However, it's believable that the accuracy of the system is higher than that suggests, as Albuquerque has a lot of wide open spaces that are difficult to search thoroughly if the ShotSpotter location estimate is at all inaccurate.
I was told that, when the system was tested by firing blanks, it was not completely effective but that they were satisfied with how effective it was. I was never given a number and I think they had been very specifically prohibited from discussing the testing in detail when they coordinated it with SoundThinking.
One of the major criticisms of the ShotSpotter system in Albuquerque is that it results in a relatively large volume of P2 calls that delay police response to most other calls for service. During the worst of the understaffing, I was told that some officers in high-crime areas like the International District spent a large portion of their total shift following up on ShotSpotter activations while there were multiple P3 calls queued. This has probably improved as staffing levels have increased, but in my mind it is the greatest single concern about the system.
SoundThinking's evasiveness, refusal of independent research, and clear motive to sell their product creates an alarming possibility that they are deceiving police leadership and elected officials into overprioritizing ShotSpotter. It may be a waste of money, which is already a problem, but the much greater concern is that police departments are putting off responding to nonviolent crimes in progress to go to ShotSpotter reports instead, because they have been told by SoundThinking that the accuracy rate of the system is very high.
verteu|2 years ago
It seems an important piece of context if you are concerned about surveillance.
throwaway9917|2 years ago
You even talk about how a school where some little kid got shot has a sensor, as if it's some sort of punishment for the lower income people there. Perhaps it's because the police and the city government want to deter or solve murders that happen. The way your article is framed, the main concern is that low income or minority perpetrators of shootings might get caught and put in jail. The fact that minority or low income victims of major violent crime might have their assailants deterred or at least brought to justice does not even factor into your calculus.
solarpunk|2 years ago
genman|2 years ago
Are these areas also the ones where the majority of crime takes place or not? If there exists such correlation then why bring it up? If the gun crime is the foremost issue then are you arguing that the "disadvantaged parts" should be left on their own to deal with the issue?
unknown|2 years ago
[deleted]
delichon|2 years ago
To give ABQ police the benefit of the doubt, that pattern could also be compatible with more gun crime equaling more surveillance. It would be nice to have enough gun crime and sensor location data to see how true that is. When the sensors are as dense as they are, it's not clear that knowing the sensor locations is an advantage to offenders, at least in the gunshot spotting role.
bombcar|2 years ago
fasthands9|2 years ago
I do not own a gun. I currently live in a city and would be happy to learn they were installing shot spotter near me.
It's maybe the least intrusive type of surveillance there is. It just says a signal if there is a loud noise in public.
edit: previous statement not correct but leaving it up as it's been responded to
BHSPitMonkey|2 years ago
The very point of the article is that, absent leaks like this one, there could be no way for anybody to independently study or verify the fairness of the sensor distribution, or even the real efficacy of the reports the system produces—which is a troubling situation to be in when the state has an outsized amount of power to prosecute people based on potential junk science that will be hard for defendants to challenge in court.
The answer isn't to give police departments the benefit of the doubt (which they so rarely earn), but to demand better transparency and citizen oversight of the technology poised to be used against us.
h0l0cube|2 years ago
The main thread of the article is that ShotSpotter operate without scrutiny. The problematic aspects of their deployment are the false positives...
> APD received about 14,000 ShotSpotter reports last year. The accuracy of these reports, in terms of their correctly identifying gunfire, is contested. SoundThinking claims impressive statistics, but has actively resisted independent evaluation. A Chicago report found that only 11.3% of ShotSpotter reports could be confirmed as gunfire.
.. and false charges
> This ought to give us pause, as should the fact that ShotSpotter has been compellingly demonstrated to manipulate their "interpretation" of evidence to fit a prosecutor's narrative---even when ShotSpotter's original analysis contradicted it.
Linked article: https://www.vice.com/en/article/qj8xbq/police-are-telling-sh...
.. and as highlighted in another comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39577403), cops shooting kids playing with fireworks
https://chicago.suntimes.com/crime/2024/02/27/chicago-police...
standardUser|2 years ago
What I think the article is suggesting is that policies like these, particularly when implemented without sufficient transparency or oversight, can cause dystopian-sounding outcomes, such as poor people's conversations being constantly recorded by the government while wealthier people remain un-surveilled.
bastawhiz|2 years ago
But if you're not listening for the guns then you're not going to find the crime that does happen, will you? It's either saying "we don't care about it because it's less frequent" (which is stupid—you still build a fire station in places where buildings burn down less frequently) or "it's easier to keep ourselves busy when we fish in a barrel".
qingcharles|2 years ago
dmamills|2 years ago
What a wonderful use of tax dollars. Protecting and serving the path to a better society.
itishappy|2 years ago
Also
> Conversations recorded by ShotSpotter sensors have twice been introduced as evidence in criminal trials.
jonahx|2 years ago
Not just could -- without more information, it's the far more likely and economical explanation. The phrasing in the article imo is intentionally inflammatory.
defrost|2 years ago
* historically there's been a lot of "black crime" in the US due to the US police watching black neighbourhoods excessively and being absent elsewhere .. take this all the way back in time to Tulsa and before.
* Subsequently there's been a lot of "black crime" as neighbourhoods have been destroyed by occasional mobs (Tulsa), frequent division by freeways and toxic waste dumps, and the removal of many adult males to the prison system as a result of all the "observed crime" leading to an excess of young males with few prospects.
* Based on that data the modern survellience goes to where all the crime has been created^H observed.
Meanwhile entire areas of US cities get on by considerably less police present and oversight and a great deal less observed crime.
simonw|2 years ago
Which means you can extract it with my https://shot-scraper.datasette.io/ tool like this:
That's a 25MB file.I loaded it into SQLite like this:
Then opened it up in Datasette with https://datasette.io/plugins/datasette-cluster-map to see them on a map.prophesi|2 years ago
To use it in leaflet, you'll need to iterate over the `events` array and change `lon` to `lng` before adding each point to the leaflet map.
wferrell|2 years ago
incanus77|2 years ago
https://chicago.suntimes.com/crime/2024/02/27/chicago-police...
sbierwagen|2 years ago
sixothree|2 years ago
aaron695|2 years ago
I see nothing wrong done by ShotSpotter.
It accurately reported the location of a noise that sounded like gunfire.
What is timely about this?
Do you want the police to not investigate gunshots? I don't care about how they approached the scene, their training has nothing to do with ShotSpotter which is the discussion at hand.
Also fireworks are illegal to set off in Chicago so no legitimate activity was interrupted.
fennecbutt|2 years ago
[deleted]
itishappy|2 years ago
> But, if asked, they provide a form letter written by ShotSpotter. Their contract prohibits the disclosure of any actual data.
A potentially dystopian surveillance apparatus is installed citywide, and the police can't discuss about it's efficiency because the company that sold it to them won't let them?
TaylorAlexander|2 years ago
nerdponx|2 years ago
loteck|2 years ago
The devices are hot mics — public audio surveillance. The software layer triggers alerts on loud noises, which are sent off to a facility that is little more than a call center, for characterization by a human worker there. This system detects door slams and popped volleyballs just as well as it detects gun fire (which is to say, imperfectly on all counts).
Aurornis|2 years ago
Sound classification moved far beyond what you’re claiming years ago.
If you set the threshold at “imperfectly” then no system will ever meet your bar, because perfect is an unreasonable threshold. However, the claim that we’re unable to differentiate between gunshots and car doors is extremely incorrect.
petee|2 years ago
verteu|2 years ago
(INACCURATE, SEE EDIT) It does. The "conversations recorded by ShotSpotter sensors" were a few seconds before/after the shooting, and consisted of people saying things like "[shooter's name] Why are you going to [shoot] me like that, [shooter's name]"? [1]
[1] 'The recording of the second shot also captured the voice of Tyrone Lyles, apparently addressing the person who shot him: "Ar, Ar, why are you going to do me like that, Ar."' https://casetext.com/case/people-v-johnson-5116
edit: I was wrong. Apparently "the detectors keep hours or days of continuous audio": https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/shotspotter-ceo...
wahnfrieden|2 years ago
hcfman|2 years ago
fargle|2 years ago
but this:
> The reader can probably infer how this coverage pattern relates to race and class in Albuquerque. It's not perfect, but the distance from your house to a ShotSpotter sensor correlates fairly well with your household income.
is facetious and is almost certainly argued in bad faith. well, duh. the distance to the nearest "shot spotter" box also correlates with the incidence of crime and gunfire in the area. to bring up racism or classism is unhelpful. that correlation is unfortunate, likely true, and also not the problem at hand.
BriggyDwiggs42|2 years ago
KennyBlanken|2 years ago
* results in many high-priority calls tying up the patrols in that area so residents who have serious issues, but not "active shooting" serious, get poorer service than people in predominantly white/wealthy neighborhoods. I think you'd be pretty annoyed if something of yours was stolen and police never show because a huge backlog of calls develops while they chase down shotspotter reports, but someone in a wealthier neighborhood reports a suspicious vehicle and police show up in minutes
* results in a lot of aggressive police action with police swarming an area looking for a "shooter." Given how discriminatory and hostile police are toward the poor and minorities, this has serious consequences....ranging from residents feeling like they're constantly being harassed, to death - a boy was shot and killed by police after setting off a firecracker that the shotspotter system reported.
ALittleLight|2 years ago
https://quickthoughts.substack.com/p/shotspotter-good-or-bad
There's a lot of evidence that ShotSpotter detects almost all gunshots and that's been validated by multiple third party groups. ShotSpotter also seems to alert to things that are either false positives (construction sounds, fireworks, etc) or are not useful.
Chicago IG says 9/10 times when officers respond to a ShotSpotter alert they find nothing. 1/10 times it leads to an arrest, but the arrest isn't always strictly related to the ShotSpotter event - e.g. police responding to an event stop a speeding car and discover drug paraphernalia or an unrelated gun.
Some cities, e.g. Atlanta, discontinued ShotSpotter over cost benefit concerns. From their analysis it seemed a better use of money to hire more officers than use ShotSpotter. Still, it's in use in 84 metro areas today.
Ultimately, I think it should be up to the local community. The individual community is the one who will most benefit (if it is beneficial) and suffer from increased police incursions.
hcfman|2 years ago
chasd00|2 years ago
micromacrofoot|2 years ago
tjpnz|2 years ago
grugagag|2 years ago
crtified|2 years ago
But those thoughts go hand in hand with a vague but distinct discomfort.
ryukoposting|2 years ago
ShotSpotters don't repel crime, let alone prevent it. They're intentionally covert, as shown in the OP, which gives credence to the notion that they aren't intended to deter criminal activity from the surrounding area. If anything, repelling/deterring crime would defeat the purpose of the technology.
At best, ShotSpotter merely detects crime, and its effectiveness in that capacity is kept a secret. The world of police tech is a knee-deep in snake oil. A bit of transparency would go a long way for ShotSpotter.
hcfman|2 years ago
xeckr|2 years ago
The author presents this as a negative but it is obviously a good thing. If there was an increase in gunfire in my neighbourhood I would hope that police increases their presence, lest the "disadvantages" begin to accumulate.
TaylorAlexander|2 years ago
goldenshale|2 years ago
Communitivity|2 years ago
I disagree, because of the importance of preventing active shooters. With this kind of system you are going to want to lean toward false positives vs false negatives.
There is definitely a lot of room for improvement though. Improvement could come through better ML use/training, better sensors, and better human in the loop analysts.
I am firmly with Benjamin Franklin, in that "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.". But Franklin himself was in favor of collective security, and Franklin said this in support of the state's authority to provide collective security ( https://www.npr.org/2015/03/02/390245038/ben-franklins-famou... ). Also, these sensors monitor public spaces, where no expectation of privacy exists.
So I am for more sensors, video cameras on the sensors, more ML on the sensor data, and better training for analysts, but I am also for complete transparency on where sensors are and how they are used, with a publicly released report from annual external party review of police conduct in the use or abuse of sensor data.
wl|2 years ago
Additionally, the author of this article is claiming the police in Albuquerque have suggested to him that when they send forensics teams to the site of detected shootings, they "find definitive evidence of actual shots fired in less than five percent of cases." This would be at least twice as bad as the rough lower bound suggested by the Chicago Inspector General report and seems way out of line with other experiences I've heard.
m0llusk|2 years ago
It would be interesting to know if there might be some reasonable bounds that could be used to enable ShotSpotter to be used without being considered intrusive surveillance. Having information about gunshots or possible gunshots can be extremely useful for responders who need to understand where events are happening. This does not necessarily mean that the system has to be open to other uses, especially recording and replay of audio.
hcfman|2 years ago
There was a case recently in America where a grandfather was jailed for a significant part of a year based on a shotspotter localization and no other physical evidence such as gunshot residue.
If citizens in such areas run their own systems they would have a means to provide counter evidence to that provided by shotspotter. Currently they have no means to do that. Even the times of the shots they have to take shot spotters word for it.
Recordings by citizens themselves is an inherently safer approach because their sphere of influence is considerably smaller. Recordings are written to a separate partition on an SD card, it’s pretty simple to encrypt this partition as well if you like, I’ve done that.
For those who are interested each node can be made very cheaply. It will run on a Raspberry Pi zero with a 7 euro GPS. It can also run portably on batteries.
Here are relevant links:
https://github.com/hcfman/sbts-aru
https://hackaday.com/2023/12/30/localizing-fireworks-launche...
https://medium.com/@kim_94237/tdoa-sound-localization-with-t...
pontifier|2 years ago
nimbius|2 years ago
jacurtis|2 years ago
Vaslo|2 years ago
Without this tech, some would be left to a slow death in an alley where no one would find them until morning.
loteck|2 years ago
In reality, ambulance dispatchers would look at the high rate of Shotspotter dispatching a car and finding absolutely nothing and immediately recognize this proposal would harm people by sending emergency services on wild goose chases while real emergencies suffer longer wait times.
Jun8|2 years ago
If you’re passionate about this subject and have lots of time go and volunteer at high crime communities (if you dare), for example in high schools.
I did the latter for three years, volunteering to help the Ace Tech High School (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACE_Amandla_Charter_High_Sch...) more than 10 years ago, as part of their Robotics Team. The problems I saw were myriad but it was common to see lockers decorated with flowers, for kids who died recently.
I totally understand and agree with the educated person’s poverty, bias, etc. arguments. But when a problem gets this bad first you need to stop it, and then work on long term goals.
Just answer this question: if your child had 10% chance of getting shot and killed walking to/from from school, what would your position be on any technology that can reduce that by even 1%.
lolinder|2 years ago
Just to put some actual perspective on the numbers: about 40 kids are killed in all of New Mexico each year and about 20 of those are suicides (still tragic but not the walking-home-from-school kind). That's still too many, but is nowhere near 10%. You're inflating the numbers to trigger emotions.
Making wide scale policy decisions based on your emotions surrounding anecdotal incidents is not a good policy. I feel for the families that lose their children, but I don't believe that acting for the sake of acting is safe.
Acting in the heat of a crisis is how we got the TSA and the NSA, which we still haven't managed to get rid of. The risk of creating an enormous and impossible to get rid of surveillance state to save 1% of 20 kids per year (2 kids every 10 years) frankly isn't worth it.
holonsphere|2 years ago
brikym|2 years ago
llm_trw|2 years ago
It's over the EPA regulations, it's neighborhood wide, and it is on for 2 hours between 11pm and 1am on random days. The EPA did monitoring of the house and site but couldn't pinpoint where it was coming from because of how low frequency it was.
This isn't surveillance, this is the equivalent of finding who is dumping raw sewage in your drinking water.
nonrandomstring|2 years ago
knicholes|2 years ago
I can hear which birds have been in my backyard.
I can... hear what a customer says about my product in-store and offer them coupons at checkout or later or get feedback about my product...
TaylorAlexander|2 years ago
hcfman|2 years ago
Automatic localization. The techniques of training the model would likely be the same or similar for other similar sounds.
mamaluigie|2 years ago
unknown|2 years ago
[deleted]
heywire|2 years ago
hyperdimension|2 years ago
I've considered filing a FOIA request about them but can't figure out quite what I'd be asking for. Data retention? Frequency of queries? Efficacy?
Moldoteck|2 years ago
unknown|2 years ago
[deleted]
jjallen|2 years ago
Seems like societally we would want audio to be recorded after shootings?
cratermoon|2 years ago
xeckr|2 years ago
unknown|2 years ago
[deleted]
unknown|2 years ago
[deleted]
Tabular-Iceberg|2 years ago
JoeyBananas|2 years ago
larrymyers|2 years ago
https://www.yahoo.com/news/chicago-not-renew-shotspotter-con...
gffrd|2 years ago
Is there faster response? higher arrest rate? decrease in crime?
rconti|2 years ago
Not sure if we have shotspotter, but at least I know the police responded!
(I say apparently because, while I heard the gunshots, and I later saw a heavy police presence and animal control hauling away what appeared to be a dead small animal, I don't ACTUALLY know what happened because I wasn't present at the time. All I know is what a resident of the house told me).
rideontime|2 years ago
unknown|2 years ago
[deleted]
standardUser|2 years ago
> Conversations recorded by ShotSpotter sensors have twice been introduced as evidence in criminal trials. In one case the court allowed it, in another the court did not.
> ShotSpotter sensor correlates fairly well with your household income. The wealthier you are, the less surveilled you are.
unknown|2 years ago
[deleted]
Slava_Propanei|2 years ago
[deleted]
summarity|2 years ago
jacurtis|2 years ago
aspenmayer|2 years ago
unknown|2 years ago
[deleted]
unknown|2 years ago
[deleted]
unknown|2 years ago
[deleted]
throwawaysleep|2 years ago
[deleted]
unknown|2 years ago
[deleted]
gmerc|2 years ago
It’s amazing lime 500 years later, there’s still a developed country on earth that hasn’t figured the externalities of gunpowder
unknown|2 years ago
[deleted]
zzz999|2 years ago
[deleted]
showship|2 years ago
[deleted]
devaiops9001|2 years ago
[deleted]
ryukoposting|2 years ago
[deleted]
unknown|2 years ago
[deleted]
aaron695|2 years ago
[deleted]
chris_wot|2 years ago
leumon|2 years ago
AvocadoPanic|2 years ago
The US shares a 3,145 kilometer long border with Mexico, unfortunately there are at best 1,044 km of border 'barriers' in place. People, guns, money and drugs are smuggled across the border daily.
Tabular-Iceberg|2 years ago
I have nothing in principle against a society that completely bans guns, but are you prepared to strike enough terror into the population that breaking the law and getting guns anyway becomes unthinkable?
dudus|2 years ago
IceHegel|2 years ago
The state - which like most organizations is concerned mostly with preserving itself - has an interest in the surveillance of the population and in shifting blame from it's failures to deal with poverty and crime to skapegoats: the police, racism, property taxes, etc.
The west is run by priests (professors, advisors, journalists, students, diplomats) with the support of the merchants. Priests always pretend it is flipped, but it's not. One "tell" is that the priests are never the villains in Hollywood movies. The other groups (warriors, merchants, and peasants) all do even villain duty.
Bias shot-spotter placement is a classic case of priests blaming merchants. There might even be something to the substance, but the priests run the show - not SoundThinking Inc.
skim_milk|2 years ago