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Comment by PuppyTailWags | Hacker News Reader

I don't think anyone truly intends ill. However, someone who chooses a technology that doesn't have real evidence of working as well as it's advertised, and then uses applications of that technology on primarily minority populations, the result can only be concluded as illness on the people.

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I'm hard pressed to believe that there aren't some folks who have ill intent. The problem is weeding them out from people who are just using crappy metrics and people who just barely know what's going on.

I mean, I genuinely think most people don't intend ill. The most nasty, abusive people I know simply believe that they are in the moral right. In fact, believing that being morally right justifies their behavior is the biggest sign to me of a dangerous person, not a person who knowingly thinks evil things.

The only question then is whether the police biased these installations in minority neighborhoods without connecting it to high amounts of shootings, which could easily be proven with data.

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)

You seem to imply that intent is all that matters. But the law and history regarding discrimination in the US is more nuanced.

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.

So basically even if we assume the data shows they were only deployed to the highest crime areas (and for sake of discussion we're not debating the legitimacy of that data like you could with biased Jim Crow literacy tests AND feigning that shotspotter actually provides some IRL value), it would still be discrimination because in a wider context it's just another tool that contributes to the oppression of minorities?

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).

Yeah I guess I was thinking of "ill intent" through a certain societal lens of their intent not their own personal lens. Which is admittedly a pretty subjective view. But, I would still argue someone doing something like a politician acting against the interests of their constituency for monetary gain to be ill intent regardless of their own moral justification. And that exact example seems to happen a lot.

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.

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