[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.