[throwaway9917]

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.

[mcmcmc]

Did we read the same article? The main concern is that millions are being pumped into a surveillance program of dubious efficacy with zero accountability and clear biases. Budget that could be allocated to social programs that have a dollar for dollar higher impact on reducing violent crime is instead going into the police industrial complex, increasing surveillance on underprivileged communities instead of actually trying to do anything to address the root causes of gun violence. Shouldn’t that make you mad?

[bko]

If I were in one of these high crime neighborhoods where people are getting shot, I would want more surveillance and police. This position that they're being exploited by surveillance is mostly a rich white cosmopolitan belief rooted in fantasy

> In fact, large majorities of residents in low-income “fragile communities” — including in both urban and rural areas — want more police presence, not less. In the more than a dozen low-income urban areas surveyed, 53% of residents want more police presence while 41% want the same — only 6% want less.

Not being shot is pretty low on the hierarchy of needs. And let's be real, it's a tiny percentage of people that are committing violent crime. Increasing the odds of correctly putting one person in jail prob reduces future crime greatly.

The criminal element is real and I'm doubtful that you can give someone who's killing people access to a food bank or job training and they'll just become a productive member of society. Being a violent criminal is almost certainly the least economical thing you can do. You end up killed or in jail in a short time span so to think someone rationally picks this as a career opposed to a minimum wage job is not realistic.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2020/08/26/why-americ...

[Greed]

> If I were in one of these high crime neighborhoods where people are getting shot, I would want more surveillance and police. This position that they're being exploited by surveillance is mostly a rich white cosmopolitan belief rooted in fantasy

But ARE you though? I'm in Chicago where we're in the tail end of phasing this system out specifically because it did not address the problems it claimed to. All it did was aggravate and harass locals _after_ the fact that had nothing to do with the initial crime.

The deterrence factor was not insignificant, but it definitely wasn't worth the far greater instances where it was not only creating false positives but also proactively CREATING crime in accordance with other "high tech" solutions like predictive crime algorithms which only really served to reinforce existing biased patrolling practices (which were driven by data generated by shot spotter, in part).

See: https://www.theverge.com/c/22444020/chicago-pd-predictive-po...

[mcmcmc]

Wow you did a great job cherry-picking from that article. Notice how the survey mentioned “police”, not covert surveillance.

People want more, better-trained police, not a third party listening in and directing police resources based on biased data, proprietary algorithms, and human analysts with dubious training and no public accountability.

All you’re telling me is that you lack human empathy and aren't interested in understanding the systemic causes of violence.

[bko]

So people want more police presence but they draw the line of microphones to listen to gunfire to triangulate crime and arrest murderers? Seems like the second one is a lot less egregious but I guess since I don't have "source" you win the argument.

I'm pretty sure we should start arresting people who kill other people and remove them from society. Pretty high on priority

[Talanes]

You're taking the key crux of the argument, whether ShotSpotter works, as just a given. Just straight up begging the question.

[dash2]

Could you give some statistics that back up the claim that social programs have a higher impact on crime than Shotspotter?

[mcmcmc]

Johns Hopkins has plenty of great research:

“Funding for programs that clean and rehabilitate blighted and abandoned property are associated with both decreases in gun violence of up to 39% over one year and improved community health.” https://publichealth.jhu.edu/center-for-gun-violence-solutio...

To be fair after checking SoundThinking’s website they do have some research showing similar levels of violence reduction, so I don’t think it’s fair to outright claim one is more effective on a per-dollar basis without knowing all the associated costs. However surveillance is a reactive solution (or a deterrent if you’re really on board with a police state), whereas community-based programs are preventative.

I can see there being room for both but any public surveillance on that level has to have serious public accountability.

[ltbarcly3]

This sounds an awful like it is saying the solution to crime is to gentrify? What happened to the communities in the study? If you suddenly increase property values in a community where almost everyone rents, guess how many can afford to stay?

[tristor]

On a macro level, evidence does strongly support that gentrification is a good thing. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t have downsides, including displacing low income residents in areas being gentrified. The fact this also creates huge reductions in crime is not coincidental though.

There’s a bit of a chicken and egg problem here nobody wants to wrestle with: 1. Poor people commit the vast majority of violent crime. 2. People with records of convictions of violent crime cannot get stable employment. 3. There is a measurable intelligence and emotional regulation gap at the average between violent criminals and productive members of society. 4. There is a measurable intelligence gap associated with income in our modern knowledge-based society. 5. Inability to get stable employment and low impulse control both are major contributing factors to recidivism.

It’s a heavily intractable problem, it’s clear retributive justice is not as effective as rehabilitative justice, but creating a feeling of duty of care in the communities harmed by crime is a nearly impossible ask. Gentrification at least provides a way out to improve communities for those residents who can afford to stay.

[mcmcmc]

If that's what it sounds like, I'll hazard a guess that you never made it to the research.

[ltbarcly3]

If you have a neighborhood with abandoned buildings, some of which are burned out or boarded up or just have all the windows smashed out, and you then clean up the abandoned buildings, then property values will go up. When property values go up, rent goes up. Which part of what I said disagrees with 'the research'?

[JKCalhoun]

You might be interested in the documentary Divisible (2023)[1] that talks about redlining [2].

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.

[1] https://www.divisibledoc.com

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining

[lo0dot0]

Is wiretapping public spaces on the scale of a city even constitutional in the USA?

[pwillia7]

You still need oversight and discussion about over policing of communities and how to keep them safe while not violating the constitution, even though obviously those are where the most gun shots are.

Unless you're the police then you just do whatever you feel -- I'm scared! Should we get another tank?

[windexh8er]

I don't think you realize how invasive this technology is on it's own, but if you read the article you'll also realize that it's even worse as other layers of technology have been added in (cameras, LPR, facial recognition, etc).

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?

[throwaway323929]

This sounds a little far fetched, but my current hypothesis is that Americans have developed a co-dependent attachment disorder on a societal level around sociopaths that transcends ideology, whether they are certain presidential candidates or violent criminals. It's an enablement/abuse cycle that you typically see with alcoholic or abusive partners. Books on attachment theory have hinted that this type of disorder can occur on a macro level, which I was initially dismissive of, but when you apply it current events it really helps to explain a lot of irrational behaviors.

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.

[nceqs3]

I wholeheartedly agree.