[BryantD]

ShotSpotter’s results are iffy, which appears to be a combination of a) ShotSpotter employees overriding the AI and b) weaknesses in the tech. There’s also some potential for reinforcing bias if you only put the sensors in neighborhoods you’re already worried about.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28264686 has previous discussion on this from a number of viewpoints.

[googlryas]

The goal of police is public safety, and nothing to do with preventing reinforcing biases.

If you designed a polar bear detector to help prevent people from being eaten by polar bears, would you also deploy them in Florida for the sake of fairness, even though there are no polar bear attacks there?

[alasdair_]

The problem is that ShotSpotter doesn’t actually work very well at all.

I mean, if I make a magic box that has a 1% chance per day of calling the police and telling them a crime happened nearby and then only stick that box in areas where poor people live, you could see how that would lead to a whole lot of calls for police in those areas. You can also see how, by having a vastly higher police presence in those areas, more crimes will be detected in those areas, even if the base crime rate is the same as in a different area.

In the past, ShotSpotter employees have gone into the system and changed things after the fact to claim that their system detected shots in a specific area that it never detected. They did this while working with the police to come up with probable cause for an arrest after the arrest happened.

This kind of thing makes it easy for the cops to arrest people they want to arrest without any actual evidence of a crime. This is generally considered a bad thing in the USA.

[Kye]

I still encounter people who think a map of crime is an actual map of crime, like SimCity, and not a map of policing. They really do believe it reflects reality. Most times they snap out of it when you point out it's impossible to map crime without collected data, and then it's a short hop to realize policing is how you get that data. And any intellectually honest person will recognize the biases inherent to that data.

[subradios]

These biases are also present in murder convictions, widely used to benchmark crime rates over time and geography due to the inability of police to ignore dead bodies selectively.

It could be possible that police and police chiefs are in fact, putting this equipment in poorer neighborhoods because that is where the most gunfire already is.

Concerns about the relationship between employees and prosecutors are real, but "reinforcing biases" is the least of our worries in regards to marginalized communities when they are murdered at 5 to 20x the rate of the nonmarginalized communities.

Black communities are majority-support of the same or more police per Gallup https://news.gallup.com/poll/316571/black-americans-police-r...

Removing police from poorer areas hurts poor people more than edge case concerns about individual prosecutors playing fast and loose.

[BryantD]

I’d like the public to be safe from the public servants who carry guns as part of their day to day work. If those public servants are biased to believe that my neighborhood is less safe than it is, they’re more likely to use force when it isn’t warranted. Thus, I’m not as safe.

I conclude that it is a matter of public safety to avoid reinforcing biases.

Since the article this thread is about shows that some portion of police are willing to believe any damn thing, I think my concerns are reasonable.

[AlbertCory]

> If those public servants are biased to believe that my neighborhood is less safe than it is

Could it be "bias" to look at crime statistics? Maybe it's less safe than you think it is.

[BryantD]

Indeed! Seems like the simple answer is "if you're going to install sensors, better to just install them everywhere to avoid bias in any direction."

[LawTalkingGuy]

In a city you'd deploy them on the corner of every street and alley. Do you deploy them in the same density through rural and country areas?

Do you plan to also change fire regulations to call for an even distribution of sprinklers? Presumably you don't want to die from fire-bias either...

[BryantD]

Yeah, I think it would be good to deploy them evenly throughout a city. Unfortunately that doesn’t actually happen.

[AlbertCory]

So you think that putting them in high crime areas is "bias?"

[8note]

The bias is assuming that there's no crime because the sensors weren't there to pick it up.

A low crime statistic can either mean crime didn't happen, or the statistic didn't count the crimes that did

[cratermoon]

> If you designed a polar bear detector to help prevent people from being eaten by polar bears, would you also deploy them in Florida for the sake of fairness

This is already reinforcing bias, because your question presumes that the places law enforcement deploys this tech are where it needs to be. To use your analogy, cops like deploying polar bear detectors based on how much snow falls in a place, because "everyone" knows that polar bears live in snowy places.

[fallingknife]

This system is not designed to find out where shootings happen. We know that already. It's just designed to detect them faster.

[20after4]

No it's designed to manufacture evidence that they can use to help them get arrest warrants and eventually convictions.

[cratermoon]

> We know that already

No, we don't. We know where law enforcement, which we already know is biased, reports shootings happening.Those are two completely different things.

[fallingknife]

There is no organized conspiracy among law enforcement to hide the location of shootings.

[8note]

There doesn't have to be. That's why it's bias.

For a really contrived example, in a police department of one for the whole world, put the only officer in Antarctica. You'll find there's only officially shootings in Antarctica

[RHSeeger]

> The goal of police is public safety

To be clear... the goal of the police _force_ is to enforce the law. The goal of (some) individual police officers is public safety, but certainly not all of them (and some days, it seems like not many of them... but you generally only hear about the bad stuff in the news, so take that with a grain of salt).

[Quinner]

The goal of the police is to have secure jobs with a decent salary and benefits, and ideally be meaningful in some way (could be promoting public safety... could be exerting power over others).

Often enforcing the law helps secure budgets (especially when it comes to enforcing drug laws with lucrative civil forfeiture seizures), but more recently many police departments have tried a different tactic when budgets have been threatened: actively refusing to enforce the law, in order to increase crime and prompt political change.

[dinkumthinkum]

The police increase crime?

[nisegami]

The goal of the police is to maintain the status quo.