By all other accounts, it doesn't work at all and is losing contracts.
> "...a study of Chicago police data found that over a nearly 22-month period ending in mid-April, almost 90% of ShotSpotter alerts didn’t result in officers reporting evidence of shots fired or of any gun crime."[1]
> "In four years, police have made two arrests while responding to a ShotSpotter activation. Lt. Shawn Takeuchi, an SDPD spokesman, could only confirm that one of those arrests was directly related to the activation, but declined to give more information on both."[2]
1. https://apnews.com/article/chicago-police-crime-shootings-be...
2. https://www.voiceofsandiego.org/topics/public-safety/shotspo...
I think this part is pretty key, and has always been a big open question in my mind:
"The court further recognized a potential problem in assessing reliability related to handler cuing, as even well-trained dogs could respond to subconscious cues from their handlers. For this reason, the court determined that a critical factor in determining reliability is the record of false positive alerts made by the dog."
The subconscious cues, or even deliberate cues that only the handler and dog know, could allow an officer with ill intentions to make some kind of signal only known to him and the dog, which causes the dog to make an "alert", giving the cop probable cause.
If judges continue to allow this quality of evidence, the police will continue to abuse the legal environment that creates.
Your average lunch near the courthouse.
I'm assuming that's an unfortunate Freudian slip of a typo.
not how the system should work, even though it is now how it seems to work.
If anything, I think the expense of defense and the poor quality of public defenders probably accounts for bias.
My impression is that if they do recognize it, they don't care. I also think many dont recognize it. After all, are they going to side with a layman citizen or the police and prosecutor? Even with a defense attorney, it often comes down to the police officer's word vs the accused. Who are they going to believe?
These are not just traffic violations and minor issues. And even if they were, that doesn't mean that people's rights stop mattering, nor is that a valid excuse for gross incompetence.
Backs up the GP claim but I can’t find any evidence of this being replicated in another independent experiment. It’s at least a little bit strange that no one tried to replicate these rather concerning findings in the past 10 years since publication.
https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-2011-01-06-ct-met...
Maybe it will stop this system from being used in court, but new ones will take its place. It would be great if we could change the structure of the justice system to prevent these types of issues from popping up again. I have no idea what a solution would look like.
I don't see any incentive here. The only consequence suffered by the prosecution was having to drop that evidence. That's it. Maybe there's a civil case later, but that will be separated by a large time gap, etc.
I agree that it is disturbing they tried to use this as evidence.
Serious question, what part of this technology is amazing? Its just sounds trained against audio labeled as gun shots. How is this any different then detecting faces in images or whatever?
Hopefully cases like this will eventually stop the system being used in court.