Police Are Telling ShotSpotter to Alter Evidence From Gunshot-Detecting AI

[WhiskeyGrinder]

https://www.vice.com/en/article/qj8xbq/police-are-telling-shotspotter-to-alter-evidence-from-gunshot-detecting-ai

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.

ShotSpotter's technology has never been audited; it's just accepted because cops want it. And now it appears that cops can ask ShotSpotter to override its reports to conform to what cops think happened.

Cops lie.

[Hoyt]

1. Looks like Williams has a good bit of evidence against him such as the video of his car.

We'll have to see.

https://chicago.suntimes.com/crime/2020/8/31/21409195/michael-williams-murder-charge-safarain-herring-looting

Seems the way to prevent any evidence shenanigans with shotspotter is to make sure the technology readouts are maintained from initial to the final conclusion.

[WhiskeyGrinder]

2. Evidence that the tech does what it claims to would be helpful, especially for those who claim

they want to reduce gun violence.

At the core of the opposition to ShotSpotter is the lack of empirical evidence that it works—in terms of both its sensor accuracy and the system’s overall effect on gun crime.

The company has not allowed any independent testing of its algorithms, and there’s evidence that the claims it makes in marketing materials about accuracy may not be entirely scientific.

Over the years, ShotSpotter’s claims about its accuracy have increased, from 80 percent accurate to 90 percent accurate to 97 percent accurate. According to Greene, those numbers aren’t actually calculated by engineers, though.

And the sensors, in Chicago anyway, are deployed unequally:

It was a ShotSpotter alert in the early-morning hours of March 29 that dispatched police to a street in Little Village where they eventually shot and killed 13-year-old Adam Toledo, who was unarmed at the time.

That and other recent events have sparked a new campaign by community and civil rights groups in Chicago calling on city officials to drop ShotSpotter.

“These tools are sending more police into Black and Latinx neighborhoods,” Alyx Goodwin, a Chicago organizer with the Action Center on Race and the Economy, one of the groups leading the campaign, told Motherboard. “Every ShotSpotter alert is putting Black and Latinx people at risk of interactions with police. That’s what happened to Adam Toledo.”’

Motherboard recently obtained data demonstrating the stark racial disparity in how Chicago has deployed ShotSpotter. The sensors have been placed almost exclusively in predominantly Black and brown communities, while the white enclaves in the north and northwest of the city have no sensors at all, despite Chicago police data that shows gun crime is spread throughout the city.