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).
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.
https://medium.com/@kim_94237/tdoa-sound-localization-with-t...
and with manual input you can greatly improve the accuracy from what an automatic system could do due to noise and signal degradation. However it’s very time consuming. The service level response would not be met if doing this on many cases I’m sure. Meaning the default accuracy of localization is likely to be a bunch less accurate than what it could be in theory.
What is absolutely needed is to start a validation process. Start legal proceedings to force the disclosure of co-ordinates and exact event time information as recorded by each recorder so the math can be checked. My software will provide that side.
Less than five percent seems unlikely, but I wouldn't be surprised to hear "less than half the time".
Wow that's even worse than what I had read from reports about the deployment in Chicago (which I read up on when Seattle was considering it). I think the value was like 10%.
Chicago also ditched it recently I think.
Would it report if you were playing Counterstrike outside with speakers on? What if you were listening to some gangster rap with shots in it? Or just a Raspberry Pi with a speaker on with gunshot? It seems to me something like this can in theory DoS the ECC.
It seems an important piece of context if you are concerned about surveillance.
Further, the concern is unequal policing biases statistics resulting in more uneven policing. A grid of microphones covering a full city is unbiased, placement based on past data isn't.
Drug crime is known to be fairly evenly distributed across different incomes, arrests are extremely biased.
The detection of gunshots is based on an algorithm. When triggered, it saves a few seconds before the sound and several seconds afterward.
It is different than police just being able to pull up the recordings for a certain street corner from 2 weeks ago or even a day ago and listen in on people's conversations. The case in question came from a shotspotter recording gunshots, and the short clip also happened to include speech within it since it directly followed the sound of shots.
I actually strongly disagree with you — the context doesn’t matter. We have a private quasi-law enforcement entity installing thousands of surveillance devices in American cities without any external oversight or knowledge of where they are installed. These surveillance devices that were pitched as tools to locate gun crimes all of a sudden record audio? And this quasi-law enforcement company with no oversight is storing that data and then furnishing it to the police?
We have no idea what’s recorded, we have no idea where these devices are, we have no idea who is listening to the recordings, we have no idea what access LEOs have to these recordings, we don’t know how they are stored, and we don’t know how long they are stored for. You’re seriously okay with a non-government entity operating like this?
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.
I caught it at the Omaha Film Festival and it has caused me to take a second look at the way our cities are organized in to "good" and "bad" parts.
Unless you're the police then you just do whatever you feel -- I'm scared! Should we get another tank?
Does ShotSpotter prevent shootings? Does it suppress would-be shooters? $5M can go a long way to do good in a community. Effectiveness of systems that taxpayer dollars purchased should be transparent. If there isn't transparency in these systems then they should have to be paid for out of pocket. And that means that since law enforcement doesn't sell services they would have to raise the money publicly and sell citizens on the improvements that the system would bring to those residents.
The fact that you had to post what you did with a throwaway speaks volumes about your self-awareness of your position and how it would resonate. Feels good to be able to choose privacy, right?
In the country with 21,000 homicides a year, it's hard to ignore the connection to attachment disorders while watching people wring their hands and make up exotic concerns that would be more fit for a Ray Bradbury novel over anything designed to address the world leading rates of violent gun crime, up to and including the literal concept of laws and the enforcement of those laws.
I don't know what the solution here is, because I don't know how you send an entire country to therapy and/or Al-Anon, but not continuously enabling the people that are hurting us is a great start, and that necessarily requires shifting empathy from the people that don't deserve it (violent criminals) to the people that do (their traumatized victims).
Apologies for the throwaway account but a lot of people get ridiculously emotional over this topic, and that's when I'm not accusing them of being societally co-dependent.
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?
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.
If you pull up a map of crime in most cities the inverse correlation with home prices is obvious. If nothing else, high crime rates rapidly crush property values as everyone wants to leave those areas.
The way this is phrased sounds like “the poorer you are, the more likely you would want to be where the shots are”. Which is obviously false.
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
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/chicago-watchdog-harshly...
https://twitter.com/greg_doucette/status/1512138327205589004 (criminal defense attorney)
https://boingboing.net/2022/04/12/shotspotter-wastes-million...
I supported units with them while I was a contractor to the US Army, and the soldiers I talked to didn't think much of it either.
This is probably false. There have been two convictions as a result of recordings of conversations that happened through the devices.
I, for one, do not want microphones capable of recording my conversations placed near me by the government. Not because I'm paranoid the government is conspiring against me, but rather because I have zero confidence they're storing those recordings securely, being handled by only authorized persons, and being deleted within a timely manner.
as a community we really ought to be suspicious of claims like this. There's another word for "acoustic sensor" and it's "microphone". When a corporation says "trust us, we only use the data for good", we should collectively raise our eyebrows, knowing that when data is collected for one stated purpose and stored, that the data at rest will always be used for additional purposes. Once data is collected, the number of things it may be used for is always unbounded; any claims to the contrary should not be taken at face value.
> Conversations recorded by ShotSpotter sensors have twice been introduced as evidence in criminal trials. In one case the court allowed it, in another the court did not. The possibility clearly exists, and depending on interpretation of state law, it may be permissible for ShotSpotter to record conversations on the street for future use as evidence.
“The "pocket of poverty" south of Downtown where I live, the historically Spanish Barelas and historically Black South Broadway, are predictably well covered.”
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.
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...
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".
Would you patrol a desert in the same way you patrol a busy road intersection if you're trying to prevent car accidents?
What a wonderful use of tax dollars. Protecting and serving the path to a better society.
Also
> Conversations recorded by ShotSpotter sensors have twice been introduced as evidence in criminal trials.
More importantly, how many times were collected conversations used and acted upon in an investigation and not been introduced as evidence?
Not just could -- without more information, it's the far more likely and economical explanation. The phrasing in the article imo is intentionally inflammatory.
Of course the public surveillance is located in the areas where crime is most likely to occur! But an important side effect is that innocent people in those areas now are more surveilled than other people. So it becomes yet another injustice inflicted on people who already tend to suffer more greatly from injustice than others.
Maybe there are offsetting factors. If the surveillance makes neighborhoods significantly safer, then maybe local residents will be happy to be surveilled in exchange.
The article is stating a fact of correlation, not causality. But the particular outcome of "greater surveillance" clearly happens, regardless of why it occurs, and regardless of other offsetting considerations.
* 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.
"There's just as much gun crime in rich areas as poor ones, but the police focus on the poor areas because of historical racism" is an extraordinary claim that should require extraordinary evidence, and the kind of thing that holds back improvements in police work.
You can control for this by just looking at homicides. Dead bodies are pretty objective. And the homicides also follow the same trend as the general crime rate.
No reasonable person could look at any meaningful measure of violent crime rates and come to your conclusions.
Which means you can extract it with my https://shot-scraper.datasette.io/ tool like this:
shot-scraper javascript \
'https://flo.uri.sh/visualisation/16818696/embed' _Flourish_data \
> /tmp/data.json
I loaded it into SQLite like this:
cat /tmp/data.json | jq .events | \
sqlite-utils insert /tmp/shots.db locations -
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.
https://chicago.suntimes.com/crime/2024/02/27/chicago-police...
We're a nation of laws, not of your awareness. It's just the words on the page. Was there a law being broken or not. In this case the answer was no. The police then proceeded to write up multiple claims of illegal activity that were all demonstrable falsehoods, and your defense of the illegal activity on the part of the police is that you aren't aware of a holiday?
This is just the sort of thing we need to stamp out before these thugs kill either some other innocent kid, or cause a real police officer to be hurt or killed while trying to control the inevitable community reaction to their bird brained behavior.
These cops need to be off the force yesterday. Yes they are liabilities waiting to happen. Yes they are dishonest. But the real reason we need to get rid of them is because they are unpredictable. We have no idea what anyone who will shoot at innocent kids and lie about it today will do tomorrow.
Honest cops are predictable. Dishonest cops are just loose cannons and we need to cut them out at every opportunity.
Then they could go to court and say “this system showed the gunshots came from the suspect’s location”. But “the system” didn't show that, until ShotSpotter employees manually changed the data.
They spent a lot of effort hiding that as well.
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.
Combine that with the racially-charged patterns of policing in this country[1][2], where certain populations are disproportionately profiled and experience use-of-force incidents.
It's extremely timely in the sense that at present, we have systemic problems with where police force is being directed, and ShotSpotter is likely helping tip those scales — but not in the right direction.
[1] https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/racial-profiling-texas-r...
[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/opinions/system...
> 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 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).
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.
https://www.wtol.com/article/news/local/false-shotspotter-al...
Slamming doors:
https://www.axios.com/2022/04/07/campaign-zero-against-shots...
This list can go on. Jackhammer, nail gun, normal hammers.
https://voiceofsandiego.org/2020/09/22/shotspotter-sensors-s...
(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...
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.
Turn the coin over to the other side - you're catching criminals victimizing minorities. Nothing is simple, is it.
BINGO!
* 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.
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.
https://opendata.dc.gov/datasets/DCGIS::shot-spotter-gun-sho...
Something like shotspotter wouldn’t work for this because by the time you get the info and call it in the people doing the shooting are miles away and there isn’t a crime scene per se to investigate.
But those thoughts go hand in hand with a vague but distinct discomfort.
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.
Yes and no. Intelligence (in the data sense of the word) can accrue usage patterns. You might not catch them that time, but you know where they'll be next time. What routes they travel. Where to focus.
If it's a live event, the police officer is not having to stand there fruitlessly questioning a witness about which direction the offender hooned off in 5 minutes ago - the system is already telling them, by tracking the relevant data.
It's a form of telemetry.
And it's also quite a disturbing (to use an overused phrase!, but which I hope is justified here) slippery slope.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
Without this tech, some would be left to a slow death in an alley where no one would find them until morning.
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 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.
It’s not the “heat of the crisis”, this has been going on for years now here. See this WaPo article from 2013, from when Michelle Obama attended the funeral of a 15 year-old girl: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/michelle-obama-heads...
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.
For 20Hz noise, are there too many reflections to use an oscilloscope with 3 mics on a 25ft baseline to triangulate it (you'd have to elevate the mics)?
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...
Automatic localization. The techniques of training the model would likely be the same or similar for other similar sounds.
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?
Seems like societally we would want audio to be recorded after shootings?
https://www.yahoo.com/news/chicago-not-renew-shotspotter-con...
Is there faster response? higher arrest rate? decrease in crime?
It isn't supposed to govern the city, it's only supposed to spot the gun shots.
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).
Calling 911 for anything else there is a long delay unfortunately. Last time I called for a car jacking right outside my home I was on hold for ten mins. Cops didn't arrive for another 20.
> 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.
It’s amazing lime 500 years later, there’s still a developed country on earth that hasn’t figured the externalities of gunpowder
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?
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.