Back in 1992, East Palo Alto, CA briefly became the murder capital of America with 42 killings. So an enterprising Stanford professor invented an acoustics listening device for triangulating where gunshots were fired: ShotSpotter.
Ever since, ShotSpotter has been accused of racism since it tends to find that the most gunshots are fired in black neighborhoods, thus leading to black residents being unfairly targeted by excessive policing. Of course, those are precisely the neighborhoods where the most people are murdered by guns each year, but you aren’t supposed to think about Occam’s Razor explanations like that these days.
What are you? A Razorist?
Thus from Wired:
US Justice Department Urged to Investigate Gunshot Detector Purchases
BY DELL CAMERON AND DHRUV MEHROTRA
SEP 28, 2023 12:15 PM
A civil liberties group has asked the DOJ to investigate deployment of the ShotSpotter gunfire-detection system, which research shows is often installed in predominantly Black neighborhoods.
THE UNITED STATES Justice Department (DOJ) is being asked to investigate whether a gunshot-detection system widely in use across the US is being selectively deployed to justify the over-policing of mainly Black neighborhoods, as critics of the technology claim.
Attorneys for the nonprofit Electronic Privacy Information Center—a leading US-based civil liberties group—argue that “substantial evidence” suggests American cities are disproportionately deploying an acoustic tool known as ShotSpotter in majority-minority neighborhoods. Citing past studies, EPIC alleges that data derived from these sensors has encouraged some police departments to spend more and more time patrolling areas where the fewest number of white residents live—an allegation disputed by SoundThinking, the system’s manufacturer.
In a letter today to Merrick Garland, the US attorney general, attorneys for EPIC call for an investigation into whether cities using ShotSpotter are running afoul of the Civil Rights Act—namely, Title VI, which forbids racial discrimination by anyone who receives federal funds.
“State and local police departments around the country have used federal financial assistance to facilitate the purchase of a slew of surveillance and automated decision-making technologies, including ShotSpotter,” EPIC says. Despite mounting evidence of ShotSpotter’s discriminatory impact, there is no indication that its Title VI compliance has ever been seriously assessed.
The attorney general should take additional steps, EPIC says, to ensure agencies dispersing federal funds are careful to assess whether tech companies meet “minimum standards of nondiscrimination” and that new police technologies are not only justified but necessary to achieve a “defined goal.”
… WIRED reported yesterday that SoundThinking has been quietly acquiring parts of Geolitica—formerly known as PredPol—the maker of an eponymous “predictive policing” tool. Researchers and critics have accused PredPol of perpetuating racial biases in policing by recycling historic crime data that was built on discriminatory police practices.
The danger, critics say, is that data- and AI-driven policing may prove an effective tool for “laundering” racist police conduct, granting it a veneer of scientific authority.
In 2021, Gizmodo and The Markup coauthored an investigation into PredPol and found that in many cases PredPol’s predictions predominantly targeted Black and Latinx residents. In a majority of the jurisdictions where the tool was being used, PredPol had urged police to mainly patrol neighborhoods in which the cities’ poorest people reside.
Now, you know and I know that the reason ShotSpotter hears more gunshots being fired in black neighborhoods than white neighborhoods is because that’s where the murdered bodies are. (Note: Bank robber Willie Sutton denied he said that he answered the question “Why do you rob banks?” with “Because that’s where the money is.” He said a reporter just made that line up.)
But you aren’t supposed to tell the truth, and the more obvious the truth the less you are supposed to mention it. So nobody does in this article. You might hope that everybody knows the truth, but as far as I can tell, what goes unspoken eventually becomes inconceivable. Politeness eventually encourages insane racist anti-white conspiracy thinking about how whites must be getting away with thousands of murders annually, because it would be racist to think they aren’t.
