Police Are Telling ShotSpotter To Alter Evidence From Gunshot-Detecting AI (vice.com) 147
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: On May 31 last year, 25-year-old Safarain Herring was shot in the head and dropped off at St. Bernard Hospital in Chicago by a man named Michael Williams. He died two days later. Chicago police eventually arrested the 64-year-old Williams and charged him with murder (Williams maintains that Herring was hit in a drive-by shooting). A key piece of evidence in the case is video surveillance footage showing Williams' car stopped on the 6300 block of South Stony Island Avenue at 11:46 p.m. - the time and location where police say they know Herring was shot. How did they know that's where the shooting happened? Police said ShotSpotter, a surveillance system that uses hidden microphone sensors to detect the sound and location of gunshots, generated an alert for that time and place. Except that's not entirely true, according to recent court filings.
That night, 19 ShotSpotter sensors detected a percussive sound at 11:46 p.m. and determined the location to be 5700 South Lake Shore Drive - a mile away from the site where prosecutors say Williams committed the murder, according to a motion filed by Williams' public defender. The company's algorithms initially classified the sound as a firework. That weekend had seen widespread protests in Chicago in response to George Floyd's murder, and some of those protesting lit fireworks. But after the 11:46 p.m. alert came in, a ShotSpotter analyst manually overrode the algorithms and "reclassified" the sound as a gunshot. Then, months later and after "post-processing," another ShotSpotter analyst changed the alert's coordinates to a location on South Stony Island Drive near where Williams' car was seen on camera. "Through this human-involved method, the ShotSpotter output in this case was dramatically transformed from data that did not support criminal charges of any kind to data that now forms the centerpiece of the prosecution's murder case against Mr. Williams," the public defender wrote in the motion.
The document is what's known as a Frye motion - a request for a judge to examine and rule on whether a particular forensic method is scientifically valid enough to be entered as evidence. Rather than defend ShotSpotter's technology and its employees' actions in a Frye hearing, the prosecutors withdrew all ShotSpotter evidence against Williams. The case isn't an anomaly, and the pattern it represents could have huge ramifications for ShotSpotter in Chicago, where the technology generates an average of 21,000 alerts each year. The technology is also currently in use in more than 100 cities. Motherboard's review of court documents from the Williams case and other trials in Chicago and New York State, including testimony from ShotSpotter's favored expert witness, suggests that the company's analysts frequently modify alerts at the request of police departments - some of which appear to be grasping for evidence that supports their narrative of events.
That night, 19 ShotSpotter sensors detected a percussive sound at 11:46 p.m. and determined the location to be 5700 South Lake Shore Drive - a mile away from the site where prosecutors say Williams committed the murder, according to a motion filed by Williams' public defender. The company's algorithms initially classified the sound as a firework. That weekend had seen widespread protests in Chicago in response to George Floyd's murder, and some of those protesting lit fireworks. But after the 11:46 p.m. alert came in, a ShotSpotter analyst manually overrode the algorithms and "reclassified" the sound as a gunshot. Then, months later and after "post-processing," another ShotSpotter analyst changed the alert's coordinates to a location on South Stony Island Drive near where Williams' car was seen on camera. "Through this human-involved method, the ShotSpotter output in this case was dramatically transformed from data that did not support criminal charges of any kind to data that now forms the centerpiece of the prosecution's murder case against Mr. Williams," the public defender wrote in the motion.
The document is what's known as a Frye motion - a request for a judge to examine and rule on whether a particular forensic method is scientifically valid enough to be entered as evidence. Rather than defend ShotSpotter's technology and its employees' actions in a Frye hearing, the prosecutors withdrew all ShotSpotter evidence against Williams. The case isn't an anomaly, and the pattern it represents could have huge ramifications for ShotSpotter in Chicago, where the technology generates an average of 21,000 alerts each year. The technology is also currently in use in more than 100 cities. Motherboard's review of court documents from the Williams case and other trials in Chicago and New York State, including testimony from ShotSpotter's favored expert witness, suggests that the company's analysts frequently modify alerts at the request of police departments - some of which appear to be grasping for evidence that supports their narrative of events.
glad for journalism (Score:5, Interesting)
This what I call actual journalism.
Can you imagine living in a world where these kind of things happen but nobody says anything publicly about it?
Not just a journalist (Score:5, Insightful)
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... and the government is good, right?
Fascinating, we just completed a presidential term where this level of "take the government's word on it!" was actually expected from the US populace AND the media. What happened in the last 6 months to suddenly motivate you to start showing skepticism in the promises of our political figures?
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Who is this 'we' you keep referring to? The dominant media easily sell whatever they want to their sycophant audiences, easing their consciences, and life goes on.
Uncomfortable may be true, but it is a hard sell. And since so much of the dominant media is in collusion with the government, what else should we expect?
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Yes, you're absolutely correct. Public healthcare, public schools, and public defenders are all very clearly vastly underfunded. and there needs to be a great deal more of them.
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The US spends more per student than just about any other country in the world.
It isn't that we're not spending enough on education, its just that the money goes too much for administration and teachers unions rules that all strangle the money and possible cost savings so that it cannot reach the students....
Re: Not just a journalist (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: Not just a journalist (Score:5, Insightful)
And fix the criminal prosecution system.
The big problem are DAs who are so egotistical that they want a high conviction percentage. Some even manage 100%.
On the surface, it seems like a good thing, but then you really end up with a "the end justifies the means" situation where as long as someone is convicted, it's a win.
It's why many DAs often reject calls for DNA testing - the fact that it might actually exonerate someone is scary. (This happens often in cases that happened prior to modern DNA testing). End result is innocent people get jailed, and often released decades later because it was discovered through DNA evidence that the person was never a match.
Sometimes the prosecution withholds the evidence from the defense, knowing the public defenders will never notice missing evidence (evidence is serialized, so if you get document #153 and #155, you know there should be a #154 as well). Other times it's a "convict him because I need the win" attitude.
That's the real problem - the prosecution needs to win and will cheat to do so.
Don't fund public defenders at all (Score:5, Interesting)
Instead, focus on saving money.
It costs a lot to keep an innocent man in prison. So when the prosecution lay charges and a proposed (plea bargaining) sentence, they should have to cost that. If the defense can get the accused off, or a reduced sentence, then they get 10% of the money saved, say.
Let the free market work the way it is meant to work.
And the jails will empty somewhat because of it.
(I was in California last year and had my stuff stolen out of a locked car. They do not prosecute non-violent crime there at all because the jails are full, often with people that are innocent. Getting those out of jail would be good for law and order.)
I don't think this is something you can solve (Score:3)
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Let the free market work the way it is meant to work.
No. When you reduce justice to a function of the market then you wind up promoting whatever is profitable, while we need to promote whatever is just. Anything else is not justice by definition. Your way leads directly to mass slavery, which by the way is already legal in America; convicts are the only people it's still legal to subject to forced labor, and we are actually doing that in some states.
Please don't support slavery, which is what you are doing here.
They're not egotistical (Score:4, Insightful)
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It also solves the crime problem.
Outside of places like Honduras, Colombia and Brazil you still have some of the highest levels of gun violence in the world despite having the largest number of people in prison of any nation. At 2.12 million you have even more in prison than China and Russia do. So clearly it's not working.
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> The big problem are DAs who are so egotistical that they want a high conviction percentage.
Well, that, and they need the high conviction rate to get re-elected.
Re: Not just a journalist (Score:2)
Even for the positions you can get elected to, it isn't the electorate a careerist needs to court. It's more important to get a reputation as "reliable" with the people who can really advance your career. If you're their favorite, you can always scrape together resources to win an AG election almost no one votes in.
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Why would a position as important as prosecutor be an elected position instead of a public servant?
Start Kickstarters for good causes (Score:2)
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Properly fund public defenders.
Purely anecdotal, but apparently in my current county, you'd be an idiot for hiring a private attorney instead of a public defender unless you're hiring someone in the range of Johnnie Cochran. Apparently the public defenders here take home more than the average divorce attorney in the area...
Anecdote to follow:
Buddy of mine got called for jury duty. He had nothing going on and didn't really mind taking it on, so didn't try to find any way out. Gets to the court, goes through questioning, gets chosen as
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I feel like the summary is a bit misleading, Vice doesn't seem to have a (ahem) smoking gun that the company is altering records to the demands of the police, or simply whether the automatic classification system isn't good enough requiring a human to be the arbiter.
It does raise some other questions about how the company treats these reviews. If the reviewer knows the manual process was triggered by a request (or by a known incident) then they may have bias in determining the shots.
Re:glad for journalism (Score:5, Informative)
I feel like the summary is a bit misleading, Vice doesn't seem to have a (ahem) smoking gun that the company is altering records to the demands of the police, or simply whether the automatic classification system isn't good enough requiring a human to be the arbiter.
Seems pretty damning to me. In the case discussed, the software gave one answer, and then humans at SpotShot changed that answer. Twice. (from page 29 and 30 of the court filing, https://pdfhost.io/v/RmCGSdFdT... [pdfhost.io] )
In another case mentioned in the article: [vice.com]
In 2016, Rochester, New York, police looking for a suspicious vehicle stopped the wrong car and shot the passenger, Silvon Simmons, in the back three times. They charged him with firing first at officers. The only evidence against Simmons came from ShotSpotter. Initially, the company’s sensors didn’t detect any gunshots, and the algorithms ruled that the sounds came from helicopter rotors. After Rochester police contacted ShotSpotter, an analyst ruled that there had been four gunshots—the number of times police fired at Simmons, missing once.
Paul Greene, ShotSpotter’s expert witness and an employee of the company, testified at Simmons’ trial that “subsequently he was asked by the Rochester Police Department to essentially search and see if there were more shots fired than ShotSpotter picked up,” according to a civil lawsuit Simmons has filed against the city and the company. Greene found a fifth shot, despite there being no physical evidence at the scene that Simmons had fired. Rochester police had also refused his multiple requests for them to test his hands and clothing for gunshot residue."
And then: they lost the original files.
"Both the company and the Rochester Police Department “lost, deleted and/or destroyed the spool and/or other information containing sounds pertaining to the officer-involved shooting,” according to Simmons’ civil suit. “Greene acknowledged at plaintiff’s criminal trial that employees of ShotSpotter and law enforcement customers with an audio editor can alter any audio file that’s not been locked or encrypted".”
If that isn't damning testimony to you, I'm not sure what I can say to convince you.
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In a way WORM [wikipedia.org] would be great for forensic evidence in ensuring its permanence (beyond physical destruction).
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They can still be lost or "accidentally damaged".
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Automated detection is normally considered just a screener. Consider if this were face detection - if you watch video and see somebody doing something and recognize their face, does it bother you if the automated face recognition algorithm did not identify the suspect in the same video? Would you consider it damning to have a person even watch the video, since if the suspect were there, the algorithm should have noticed everything? Not at all.
Sure, but ever heard of double-blind testing? It's how experimenters try to ensure they don't subconsciously influence the results, it's basically a per-requisite for a scientific study since the bias for the experimenter to misinterpret data in favour of a positive result is so strong.
So imagine a recording where there are four clear shots and a fifth blip that might be a shot (partially muffled by a car), or might be something else entirely like a reflection.
Say the algorithm says says "there's four shots
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I do think the process came to the right conclusion by throwing out the auditory evidence entirely in this case.
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Nothing is going to change until we start sending these dirty cops and lab technicians to prison for framing people.
The system needs to change. There should be NO channel of communication between the technicians and cops. There should be no mechanism for requesting a "review"
Technical evidence like gunshot triangulators, DNA analysis, etc. should never stand alone to convict anyone. It should only be used to support prosecutions when there is other evidence linking the accused to the crime.
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It seems pretty reasonable to me that someone trained can go over reports (listen to audio) and make a better determination of gun vs firework than AI. I'm not saying that's the case, but it definitely seems quite possible.
I'm extremely skeptical of the very large distance the incident was moved though. Maybe the AI really is terrible, but how is a person supposed to do better? It seems like you'd need to do some really extreme analysis and build a detailed model of the city (which I assume the AI already h
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The location determination is probably not using AI. It's a trivial set of simultaneous equations to compute a location of a signal when you have the time it was received by multiple receivers. Real world issues mean you need to account for multipath and clock jitter, but those are very solved problems and the uncertainty will be small for audio.
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I guess I supposed there'd be enough variation in the layout of a city over time that there's be a little bit of magic to get predictions.
I'd expect glass vs boards vs metal window covers vs open counters for open business to have a notable effect on ground level sounds for example.
Things like the number of cars on the street and delivery trucks and construction sites and scaffolding.
I (obviously) don't know much about how well the environment needs to be modeled to locate sound, but to my intuition the fac
Something wrong... all the links return here (Score:5, Informative)
First link should go here https://www.vice.com/en/articl... [vice.com]
And the second link here: https://pdfhost.io/v/RmCGSdFdT... [pdfhost.io]
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This what I call actual journalism.
Can you imagine living in a world where these kind of things happen but nobody says anything publicly about it?
If you're a (recent) Republican politician, that's basically the dream ... /sarcasm
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Can you imagine living in a world where these kind of things happen but nobody says anything publicly about it?
Sure, just imagine living in China, Russia, or any of a list of probably 100+ smaller countries.
Even places like Japan that superficially have a lot of individual freedoms, but that have a 99%+ conviction rate.
And before Cluestick the Great chimes in with the US conviction rate, remember to calculate it based on charges filed, not cases that went to trial, because in the US many cases, like the one in this very story, end up getting dismissed when problems with the evidence come up.
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The conviction rate in Japan is because prosecutors only proceed with cases where they are certain they will win.
Of course there are miscarriages of justice, but more often they are that someone doesn't get prosecuted because the evidence isn't strong enough to ensure a conviction.
The UK has a similar problem with rape, often it never goes to trial due to lack of evidence or because the victim's behaviour is judged to make getting a conviction difficult (e.g. they had consumed alcohol).
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Sure, just imagine living in China, Russia, or any of a list of probably 100+ smaller countries.
The USA has more people in prison than any other country in the world and yes that does include China and Russia.
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I simply cannot imagine living in a culture where gunfire detection systems EXIST at ALL!!
WTF USA??
Can you not SEE and UNDERSTAND how ABERRANT this is compared to a normal 21st century western culture?
What's the basis of the "post-processing"? (Score:5, Interesting)
I can see two potential scenarios here.
First, there's some shortcoming with ShotSpotter's algorithm that occasionally need human correction. Some time sync issue, instrument error, or building reflection that needed to be manually dealt with. In that case, you better give a good solid report on how the post-processing came to that conclusion, and make it auditable by a 3rd party.
The other scenario, the cops said "we think Williams did it and he was parked at X" and then the ShotSpotter analyst fudged the analysis to back that up. In that case someone on the ShotSpotter end should probably be looking at criminal charges.
Re:What's the basis of the "post-processing"? (Score:5, Insightful)
The summary links are broken but this looks like the original [vice.com].
Basically, this seems to be a case of "the customer is always right", and when your customer is the police, and you don't have rigorous safeguards in place, you inevitably end up with a culture of fudging numbers to give cops the evidence they ask for.
Something as simple as shielding analysts from the nature of the officer query would do wonders for the reliability of their product.
Re:What's the basis of the "post-processing"? (Score:5, Insightful)
The summary links are broken but this looks like the original [vice.com].
Basically, this seems to be a case of "the customer is always right", and when your customer is the police, and you don't have rigorous safeguards in place, you inevitably end up with a culture of fudging numbers to give cops the evidence they ask for.
Yeah, or you could maybe, just maybe design a system like this with the fucking integrity it demands so that NO ONE has the ability to placate to any customer, other than providing the factual evidence.
I'm reminded of several companies who refuse to hold your private keys, and purposely do not store data, in order to provide security and integrity. One would think a gunshot-auditing system that will (not maybe, WILL) be used by law enforcement and in the courtroom, would qualify for such treatment.
Corruption demands otherwise, and there is no excuse for this.
Put another way, imagine if a civilian or suspect modified and destroyed evidence like this? They sure as hell wouldn't be charged with the non-crime of "post-processing".
Re: What's the basis of the "post-processing"? (Score:3)
Yeah, or you could maybe, just maybe design a system like this with the fucking integrity it demands so that NO ONE has the ability to placate to any customer, other than providing the factual evidence.
Any kind automated classification system needs the ability for a human to override. Like fraud detection at a bank, if a customer calls in and says a transaction is or isn't fraud, that overrules everything.
I don't see why this company shouldn't be doing the same, if they know X shots were fired at Y location, and it was classified as a lawnmower backfire on the other side of the street, update the incident manually, obviously create an audit trail, and eventually feed that data back into the classificatio
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Yeah, or you could maybe, just maybe design a system like this with the fucking integrity it demands so that NO ONE has the ability to placate to any customer, other than providing the factual evidence.
Any kind automated classification system needs the ability for a human to override. Like fraud detection at a bank, if a customer calls in and says a transaction is or isn't fraud, that overrules everything.
Correcting a classification (gunshot vs. firecracker) is one thing. Purposely manipulating automated results and evidence of location in order to align with a "target of opportunity" (suspect), is another matter entirely.
Let's put it this way; if their actions were integral here, then perhaps you can explain why prosecutors chose to withdraw ALL evidence created by this system, rather than defend their product and "override" actions taken, against a public defender.
The product may work. The implementatio
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The public defender should re-introduce the evidence, as it seems to me it demonstrates that gunshots were not fired at that location at that time.
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Any kind automated classification system needs the ability for a human to override. Like fraud detection at a bank, if a customer calls in and says a transaction is or isn't fraud, that overrules everything.
We have that ability. It is called a court with a judge and a jury.
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Any type of automated system does not require human override, and this is a perfect example. Either your product produces evidence or it doesn't. No human should be fucking with the results of hundreds of sensors and their collection and interpretation of data. If a human has to do that, your product doesn't work. Full stop.
Exactly. We should think of this as a LEM/SIEM system. And we don't go "correcting" syslogs with human intervention so they meet some preconceived notion of what happened after a cyberattack. Same tends to apply here, if you intent is to have integrity in your product.
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Yeah, or you could maybe, just maybe design a system like this with the fucking integrity it demands so that NO ONE has the ability to placate to any customer, other than providing the factual evidence.
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Yeah, or you could maybe, just maybe design a system like this with the fucking integrity it demands so that NO ONE has the ability to placate to any customer, other than providing the factual evidence.
Yeah, and in this case, that highly-specialized expensive software, along with all of the criminal-busting "evidence" it "provided", this was the end result:
"...the prosecutors withdrew all ShotSpotter evidence against Williams."
And now that every lawyer knows just how shitty that solution has become because of what corruption is "demanding", we'll see who goes bankrupt. Wouldn't be surprised if every court case involving this tech gets re-opened and re-examined after this. Seems kind of pointless to pay millions for a solution to not use it. Of course, that's just another e
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And now that every lawyer knows just how shitty that solution has become because of what corruption is "demanding", we'll see who goes bankrupt.
Good luck on that.
First, evidence for prosecution is far from the sole use for this tech. Even if this ceased to be used for that purpose entirely, it's purported use for tracking down gunshots, or even other noises, for purely investigative purposes would likely keep it in use. These uses are difficult to quantify, and once a city government has bought into the marketing hype they'll be real slow to accept, and even slower to admit, they may have made a mistake.
Second, and more important, providing
Re: What's the basis of the "post-processing"? (Score:3)
I worked on time difference of arrival sound localization in school, in my program through hyperboloid positioning like GPS, I dont know what they use. Anyway in what I used there was an 'uncertainty principle' type thing where the more certainty you have to direction, the less you have of distance of the sound. So if the sound was far very away from cluster of sensors it could be that off. Also, you have to solve the correspondence problem between all mic inputs, finding the same origin sound in each which
Nice frameup (Score:4, Interesting)
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I want the source code in court and if there is an (Score:2)
I want the source code in court and if there is an NDA you must acquit
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Frankly, we don't need the source code. Raw audio files with timestamps would be sufficient to re-create using our own math. I would argue that this should be public information regardless of who the vendor is (shot spotter) in this case... since it was produced at the behest and at the expense of a government entity.
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If they release raw audio files with timecodes then the locations of the microphones won't remain secret for long. Reverse triangulation from the locations of the shots will see to that after just a few cases.
Interesting, but pretty one sided framing (Score:2)
Re:Interesting, but pretty one sided framing (Score:4, Insightful)
The fact that the prosecution would rather pull the evidence than try to back it up does not instill confidence.
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We don't know if they can back it up yet as it hasn't gotten to court yet. This whole thing is about the defense trying to get it excluded from the case.
Actually we do know, they won't back it up in court because they chose not to.
It started with the defense trying to get it excluded from the case.
It ended with the prosecution withdrawing the evidence rather than defend it in court.
IANAL but it sounds like the prosecution and/or ShotSpotter doesn't find the evidence defensible or their methods don't stand up to scientific rigour. Sure, they probably have some legitimate worries about their IP entering the court record... but if you want to supply forensic e
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We don't know if they can back it up yet as it hasn't gotten to court yet.
And it won't go to court. When the evidence was challenged, the prosecution removed it from the case.
This whole thing is about the defense trying to get it excluded from the case.
Not the defense. The prosecution.
Because they were afraid that if the evidence got challenged, they would lose this, and other cases.
The link in the article is broken, but the objections to the SpotShot results are here: https://pdfhost.io/v/RmCGSdFdT... [pdfhost.io]
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Not the defense. The prosecution.
Because they were afraid that if the evidence got challenged, they would lose this, and other cases.
No, the defense filed a motion to get the evidence excluded, and rather than defend against the motion, the prosecution withdrew the evidence. It very much *did* get challenged, that is what started this.
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As I understand it, ShotSpotter is not intended to be used for evidence. It's supposed to be an early warning system, alerting police that a shooting has happened that they should investigate.
Taken in that light, what happens makes perfect sense: ShotSpotter heard a sound, identified it as a firecracker, and determined its likely location based on that. A small firecracker is a good bit softer than a gun, so it likely decided it was closer based on that. (This highly depends on the exact firecracker and exa
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That's bull. If the intent is to improve the algorithm, you would not update the records in place. Instead, you would have other fields in the database for actual locations, leaving the predicted locations unchanged.
Unless that's what happened and the police are misrepresenting the data.
In reality, there should b
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That's EXACTLY what the defense requested, but the prosecution pulled the data from the case before the defense could look at it. It's no longer evidence in the trial because the prosecution didn't want an expert to look at it.
Sometimes the best defense is a good offense (Score:2)
Maybe it's time to start muddying the waters a little. I wonder if nasty, evil people with decent sound systems could play recordings of gunshots throughout the city at random times, and maybe muddy the data pool a bit.
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How's that going to help? The company is willing to fabricate evidence upon police request.
So any evidence is now tainted (Score:2)
If that is what can happen, then basically nothing from that company can be trusted. Ever.
In a City Near You? (Score:2)
Bad links in article (Score:2)
we always get our man (Score:2)
even if he didn't do it.
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at least 10 dead, 62 wounded in shootings JUST THIS WEEKEND https://www.nbcchicago.com/new... [nbcchicago.com]
780 murders in 2020.
If they arrest anyone in Chicago, they probably didn't commit THAT crime, but they've probably shot someone, somewhere.
That is utter nonsense. Chicago has a population of over 2.5 million, 70 shootings even if they were all by different people gives a miniscule chance that any random person is guilty of that or anything else. This sounds like perjury and entering false evidence. The prosecutors should be disbarred.
Chicago has 2.71 million residents (Score:5, Insightful)
For some perspective Little Rock Arkansas has 200,000 people and 79 murders in 2020. That puts them right in line with Chicago's murder rate but you don't constantly see people talking about the high rate of murder in Little Rock. I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to figure out who is constantly emphasizing Chicago's murder rate and why...
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Sure you can (Score:2)
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communism is where children are left at a government crèche all day while parent(s) work to build their nation's prosperity.
socialism is where parent(s) are provided the resources they need to raise their own children, possibly even several months of paid time off for maternity/paternity leave. a slice of everyone's income is used to pay for the costs, with the expectation that even rich childless people benefit indirectly by having a stable community around them.
capitalism is like socialism except onl
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you probably shouldn't take snarky examples on some random forum as a serious definitions. open a book if you care, most people don't seem to care and would rather parrot their idiotic ideas about China and "communism"
Where did you guys go to school?
mandatory public education. paid for by tax dollars. sounds very communist, but we did pledge allegiance every day and the vice principal lead students in prayers for jeebus.
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Ah, the tinfoil-hat implication theory. That's always sound. IS IT RACISM? IS IT THOSE DIRTY REPUBLICANS CAUSING TROUBLE?
(can't link to wiki cities by crime rate, /. thinks any link looks like ascii)
Or is it maybe more prosaic than that?
The reason that Chicago is the one that's /always/ at issue is because it's 10th in the top 100 most populous cities, and between it and Philly (13th)
they're the B?only >1 mill pop cities IN THE TOP 34. (Dallas is 35th)
And oh, lookythere, they're also the highest-ranke
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I agree with some of the points you made-- large parts of Chicago have no viable businesses to support jobs, it's true. But as a footnote to what you've written: the biggest illicit drug in Chicago (cannabis) became legal in January 2020. This might have been a good thing for other reasons, but it certainly didn't make a dent in the violent crime rate. That went up sharply in 2020, part of a nationwide trend.
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"This might have been a good thing for other reasons, but it certainly didn't make a dent in the violent crime rate"
yeah, but one variable change in a systemic very multi variable problem can't be expected to show up in stats in barely a year
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After Prohibition of alchohol basically lead directly to the rise of organized crime in America (famously Chicago among other cities), Prohibition was eventually repealed. That did not make the the organized crime problem instantly vanish.
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Not only did 2020 have a pandemic that caused mass unemployment, but it also was quite notable that law enforcement made the news when one member slowly murdered someone over nine minutes.
It will probably take having the data from 2022 to see how much of the crime spike was due to unemployment, and how much of the crime spike is due to increased distrust of the police. (Somewhere, Robert Peele is spinning in his grave.)
Marijuana legalization doe
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Chicago's murder rate gets talked about a lot because it's a fuckin' dangerous place to live in, you twit. If you disagree, I cordially invite you to take a walk through West Englewood on a Friday night.
Actually when you give it some thought...it's dangerous for people in gangs and those that live the gang life and their families yes...yes it is. Do you hear about your typical suburbanite getting caught up in most of those shootings?? I would say not. So it's mainly dangerous if you live a certain lifestyle or related to people who live the gang life.
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Actually when you give it some thought...it's dangerous for people in gangs and those that live the gang life and their families yes...yes it is. Do you hear about your typical suburbanite getting caught up in most of those shootings?? I would say not. So it's mainly dangerous if you live a certain lifestyle or related to people who live the gang life.
Yes, but you can't choose your relatives, and you can't always choose where you want to live. If you're in a poor neighborhood-- and there are lot of them here-- you're going to be at risk regardless of your "lifestyle". (52 of the shooting victims this year were children.) Even the well-off neighborhoods are at some risk due to their proximity to gang territory. That's why Hyde Park has its own private police force.
The suburbs are a different story, obviously.
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Chicago's murder rate gets talked about a lot because it's a fuckin' dangerous place to live in, you twit. If you disagree, I cordially invite you to take a walk through West Englewood on a Friday night.
I've actually done that, it's... interesting. Get really weird looks from the occasional cop driving by. Much of what's going on is gang beefs, ever since the Feds split up the GDs into a million little factions that each rule two blocks and hate each other, and a random white guy passing through is sort of a novelty and not in much danger. It'd probably be much more dangerous as a random black person, since the aforementioned balkanization of the gangs has created the attitude that anyone who looks like
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That'll be why he made the direct comparison to the murder rate in Little Rock, Arkansas.
Maybe you missed that part? I get the sense you miss a lot.
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The Chicago metro area has like 8 million people [macrotrends.net]. I don't have a good pointer to 2020 arrest counts, but the 2019 statistics [chicagopolice.org] (page 46) indicates 90k arrests. It seems unlikely that 45k of those were people who had previously shot someone, so I'm going to have to question your use of "probably".
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The suburbs don't want that bleeding over.
It's simple. Make sure young mothers have an education and a stable job, a career even. Do that for a generation or two and this social problem goes away.
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. So why don't you ask the people in charge to do that?
I've been pretty consistent on this message.
Democrats control everything in Chicago and Illinois.
Progressives hate those guys.
They control the Presidency and the House and Senate.
Illinois Democrats? I don't think that's true.
We spend $800 BILLION in Public Education.
And yet it doesn't reach the most vulnerable people. We'd rather micromanage the funds than apply our selves to solving problems equitably.
When are you guys going to start "doing something" so that the problem "goes away"?
Maybe I already started, like I said. It will take a generation or two before there are results. Longer if people want to debate things. Take away school breakfast programs. Drug test the working poor before they can receive financial aid. That sort of h
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Therefore it's OK for the police to manufacture evidence against suspects.
Got it.
Yep, that's the problem [Re:This is Chicago...] (Score:2)
If they arrest anyone in Chicago, they probably didn't commit THAT crime, but they've probably shot someone, somewhere.
And that, in a nutshell, is the problem. Police thinking "well, maybe this guy didn't do that crime (the one we're charging him with), but he's probably guilty of something, so we'll prosecute him anyway.
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If they arrest anyone in Chicago, they probably didn't commit THAT crime, but they've probably shot someone, somewhere.
Why not go door to door and arrest anyone that seems suspicious, it would be easier for the police. And why do we have to have trials, they're costly for the taxpayer. The police could just execute suspects in the field and drive the bodies to the local dump.
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Oh come on. Driving the bodies to the local dump takes time and money.
Come back the next day and if the body is still there, the property owner is guilty of improper storage and disposal of human remains. So you can arrest and execute them too.