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Comment by randyrand | Hacker News Reader

> selectively deployed in minority areas

God this phrasing gets so annoying. If white neighborhood residents were being murdered in their streets, you really don’t think they’d put these devices there? Residents would be itching for them!

It’s about catching murders - putting these devices in places with the most gun violence.

Having police catch murderers is something we all want - rich neighborhoods included - and something that takes resources and effort to do. It’s something that we are privledged to have, compared to many other places in the world that just let poor people kill each other without legal recourse.

Good people in these neighborhoods want policing. I have a friend in Humbolt park, and he practically has PTSD from constant gunfire. You think he doesn’t want these devices?

Bad correlations ad nauseam.

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That's predicated on their ability to help catch murderers as well as their inability to allow police to enforce other kinds of crime.

It's also possible for good-faith efforts to play into a feedback system that ends up resulting in racial injustices. They can even do that while doing other good things too.

Then you have the uncomfortable and terrifically subjective question on your hands of weighing the costs and the benefits - both now and into the future.

I don't think you can dismiss this as being largely about race, nor dismiss it as irrelevant to race.

In some ways, it'd be easiest if it doesn't work. That way the questions get real simple.

> God this phrasing gets so annoying. If white neighborhood residents were being murdered in their streets, you really don’t think they’d put these devices there? Residents would be itching for them!

If there were similar amounts of homicide in white areas, white residents would be using their political clout to demand solutions, not pretextual pseudoscience. And this is, in fact, what we see: white neighborhoods get beat cops who live nearby, while black neighborhoods get surveillance and patrol cars with humps from the next county over.

Portland, OR is moving towards potentially implementing ShotSpotter.

The population is 6% Black. The homicide victims are 50% Black. We have twice the homicide count of Seattle, or more homicides than Seattle and SF combined. Portland is smaller than both cities, so it is very concerning.

Unfortunately the licensing model for ShotSpotter is such that it is only deployed in the high homicide neighborhoods due to cost. I have to imagine the marginal cost of an extra sq mile is low.

I’d like to see a diversity discount or something so that it would be economical to put the system everywhere and dispel the racial bias issue. Or maybe charge per homicide or gun recovered instead.

You're answering a point no one made. No one is saying crime is good, yet your comment is mostly trying to sell how bad gun violence is?

During the "war on drugs" black men were getting snatched left and right, destroying communities. Now the fruits of that come back to create violence, and your answer is to push an expensive heavily flawed automated police lead generator?

Shotspotter is broken. It constantly results in false alarms and false stops to go with them, it's not effective enough to be reproducible, they openly admit to letting police override their classifications...

It's an expensive farce that isn't helping anyone.

“I have a friend in Humbolt park” reads like “I have a [black/brown/asian/etc.] friend”.

Have a little self-awareness.

Having spent a decade plus in chicago, I would suggest you go visit HP one hot summer night. It may make you reconsider that twitter cliche you wrote.

Lots of white people living in Humboldt Park. Are you at all familiar with Chicago?

Sure am, and that response is proof of the point.

> You think he doesn’t want these devices?

Don't Chinese people want the social credit system too?

You clearly glossed over the more important factor "is used by police to selectively enforce crimes, sometimes also altering the evidence". So, no, your "buddy in Humbolt park" doesn't want this when he gets accused of a crime he didn't commit. He wants actual systematic changes to an impoverished areas - black or white.

> If white neighborhood residents were being murdered in their streets

Hilarious, because this statement displays your inherent bias, which is that you automatically presume white neighborhoods are rich and therefore don't have problems with residents shooting each other!

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