You're telling me that cities are picking minority areas to put these in just for ill intent?
Also, the devices don't "enforce crimes", they only alert approximate areas where a gunshot/firework may have gone off at.
Also, the devices don't "enforce crimes", they only alert approximate areas where a gunshot/firework may have gone off at.
The reason violent crime enforcement disproportionately affects black people in the United States is because black people disproportionately commit violent crime. Black people, for example, commit most of the murders in the United States despite not being most of the population.
It is not racist to notice and react to crime. On the contrary, it is racist to insist that law abiding black people, the vast majority, endure high rates of crime. Reducing and hobbling law enforcement necessitates that citizens who might be protected are not.
That's without getting into the socio-economic factors that lead people to pursue sports as a career rather than playing in school and then going on to be an architect or whatever it is.
The rest of your comments have been dissected and examined to such an extreme over the last like... 80 years... that I don't have anything new to add to the discussion.
The issue is that black people are overrepresented in the NBA. This is a "racist outcome" per the language of an ancestor comment. Is it because the league is prejudiced against white people and keeping them out? Prejudiced against black people and expressing the prejudice, for some reason, by admitting more black players to the league? Or, could it possibly be that black people are just more likely to be good at basketball? Black people are ~15% of the US population and ~75% of the NBA. Must be an awful lot of racism there...
That's the sort of thing that would be useful in court if it's true.
Are local police required to publish where they are deploying ShotSpotters? Shootings and racial demographic data is certainly already public.
I've read the entire Vice court report and don't remember seeing that data. Haven't read the Chicago one.
Edit: reading the original Motherboard source all of the examples were described as small 'pilot programs' so they were usually only a single part of each city, in Cleveland for example :
> the Cleveland Police Foundation—has been deployed in a small section of Southeast Cleveland that city officials have described as a high-crime area.
> Those neighborhoods also happen to be among the least white in the city and those hit hardest by economic recession and the pandemic, according to local community organizers.
> The area the division chose for Shotspotter accounted for 37 percent of all shots fired calls, 37 percent of felonious assaults, and 45% of all homicides within district four, Sergeant Jennifer Ciaccia wrote to Motherboard in an email.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/88nd3z/gunshot-detecting-tec...
(Motherboard didn't provide crime stats in the other 3 example cities cited, only the demographic profile which was consistently non-white)
For example, perhaps literacy tests in order to vote in the Jim Crow south were purely based out of concern that only informed voters should be able to vote. Assuming they were applied evenly to both whites and minorities (they weren't), one could draw the conclusion that even though most of the people prohibited from voting were minorities, the intent wasn't racist.
But that's not how most racism works.
Which, in the sum of everything, ultimately out-ranks the value of attempting to address the homicides and gun violence that plagues their communities through law enforcement. Therefore it's a net negative for society?
(Apologies if I'm being overly literal here, my brain tends to seek the most rational explanations for everything).
Edit: Also to be clear I agree that the vast majority of people aren't these actors. The problem is it is very easy for someone with ill intent to get things moving in the direction they want. Very few systems stand up to real world abuse by a sufficiently motivated bad actor.