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Welcome dick it app and here a podcast sometimes occasion, not even that occasionally, that's about a bunch of not very functional mass surveillance technology that's being deployed against all of us. I'm your host, Miah Wong, also with me as Garrison Davis.
Yeah, and so today.
We're gonna be talking more about something we've talked about on the show I think a couple of times, but that is the shot Spotter program, and there was recently a leak of the locations of all of shot spotters like gunfire sensors, and with us to talk about it are the people who got the leak and wrote the article about about where the shotspatter sensors are, and that is Drew Mei Rotra who's a staff writer at Wired, and Joey Scott, who's a freelance investigative journalist and photographer.
And both of you two, welcome to the show.
Thanks for having us.
Yes, thank you.
Yeah, I'm glad to be talking to you about this. So, I guess for the people who don't remember or like have not listened to other episodes we've done about this, or have read this article which you should go read at Wired it's great. Can you describe what ShotSpotter is and what it's supposed to do versus what it actually does?
Sure, Joey, you want me to take this or do you want to do it?
Yeah? Go ahead, sure well.
ShotSpotter is a sort of controversial gunshot detection system built by the company Sound Thinking. On the face of it, the tech is sort of straightforward. The company will basically install little sensors on street lights and traffic signs and a jurisdiction, and these sensors are sort of like algorithmically
tuned to detect gunshots. So when one of these sensors here's something, it basically will send an alert to an incident review center will then like vet the sound make sure it was actually a gunshot before we're then forwarding it to dispatchers who send a cop to investigate the sound.
You know, activists and academics have been basically saying for years that this tech is inaccurate and primes police basically to go to low income community communities of color expecting gunshots when likely they won't find any.
Yeah, and I think I think the specifically low income communities of color thing is a big part of this because so you all created a map of where the shot spotter sensors are from the data you got, and I looked at Chicago one and immediately I was like, I recognized that map. That is the map of where the not white people are in the City's.
Yeah, yeah, it's it's it's it's stark. I think a lot a lot of the responses that I've seen on Twitter and you know, in my email inboxer essentially that like, look, this is just a map of where all the not white people are and whatever city that it's deployed in.
Yeah, and y'all did some analysis of what you found sort of statistically about where these centers ended up and like the sort of the the I guess like class and racial composition of those places. Can you talk about that a little bit?
Sure, I'll take this one just because I worked on the analysis. So yeah, I mean, what we found is that more than twelve million Americans live in a neighborhood with at least one shot Spotter sensor. We basically joined census data onto the locations of every single SHOTSPO microphone
and looked at the demographic composition of those neighborhoods. And you know what, we found is that an aggregate, nearly seventy percent of the people who live in a neighborhood with one set with at least one sensor identify as either black or Latine. Nearly three quarters of those neighborhoods are a majority not white, and the average household income in a neighborhood with at least one sensor is fifty dollars a year, So these are low income communities of color.
It's kind of hard to describe it in any other way.
Yeah, And you know, one of the things, and this has been a thing for so I'm in Chicago. There's been a huge series of fights over getting rid Ofshotspotter here. And one of the things you hear all the time that shot is the shots are People will go, no, well, we don't use race as a factor for yeah, But like ShotSpotter insists that they don't use race at all in in determining where where they put these sensors. But kabba,
they've still managed to somehow create this map. And I don't know, I I'm wondering what you think about like their response and whether you and I guess this is more of a subjective think, like how much do you actually believe them when they when they say.
This, Well, I think when you know, we are investigating this, we found that the police don't even know where these locations are, and so they're just given ShotSpot data of where to put this stuff. So the police can kind of wipe their hands of like, oh, we insisted that they put it in this place or anything like that. And I think, you know, Drove can probably speak to this, but you know, the argument is this is where all
the shootings are, and so that's where they are. But you know, when you investigate that, it doesn't call into effect like in other parts of the country outside of like Chicago or something. You look at gun violence and where these alerts are, you know, they aren't just where the alerts are. And you know, Pasadena is an example. You know, shootings happen outside of where the alerts are, but they're specifically in a very specific part of Pasadena that is poor and non white.
So yeah, yeah, and I think you know, when we spoke to sound Thinking, you know, I think it's important to point out here that they did not dispute or findings or the sort of authenticity of the dock. But you know, they said what you would expect that the sensor deployment is not really informed by race, and you know, the way it works, as Joey says, is that the company basically asks police department who purchased the systems for data about gun violence, which Sound Thinking says is objective.
But we have no idea what that data actually looks like, right. We don't know if it's all crime data, which might be you know, a subject to enforcement bias, right if they include things like drug crimes on their drug arrests. So we just don't really know why Sound Thinking, you know,
makes a recommended plan for their sensor deployment. The other thing that Sound Thinking had told me is that, you know, sometimes they'll ask for data and they'll do it this sort of data informed way, but other times cops will just say, like, look, we want the we want the deployment in this area, and that might include like a stadium or a school or places where people gather.
So you know, it's kind of we don't really know.
Why exactly Sound Thinking is deploying its censors in any given location.
Yeah, and having them be deployed by cops is like he is a spectacular way to have cop brain in terms in terms of locations, which not not not not I don't know, not an especially good way to get a statistically unbiased sampling of where you would potentially want these things. So I guess I guess the a thing we should talk about in terms of what the issues with the system is are. Okay, So shot spotter claims that it and this is something I've seen over and
over and over again. It claims it is a ninety seven percent accuracy rate of detecting gunshots. There's just I I don't believe it. None of the research I've ever seen backs that up. You talk a bit about a bit about like what it what it's actually detecting, versus what what they sort of claim it is.
Yeah, I think, well, I guess the overreaching kind of theme here is we just don't know. ShotSpotter is very not transparent about their data. There have been really no
peer reviewed, independent studies of the technology. So when we make when we talk about, you know, how effective it is, that that is a claim that ShotSpotter makes based off of, you know, very little information given to the public about it, you know, And that's kind of the big issue is when you start getting down into the nitty gritty of
like what's actually going on. You notice that a lot of the times what they consider a gunshot, police will investigate and find out it was a firework, which if you live in you know, I use Pasadena because it's next to me. Out here in La you know, fireworks are kind of how we celebrate and it's a different kind of language out here.
You know, fireworks happen all the time.
So once you start getting into looking at some of the data that I have been able to get, you start seeing that, you know, maybe they claim it was a gunshot, but when police show up, they don't find any evidence of a gun crime, and sometimes they find out it was a car backfiring or construction equipment and all of that. And that just kind of shows, you know, their claim that it's effective at identifying gunshots as you know, very questionable to make that claim.
Yeah, and you know their ninety seven like the ninety seven percent figure that they cite in their marketing material is based on police reporting back to ShotSpotter that there was a mistake, right like for Shotswatter to count a the to count like a gunshot or to count of sound as an error, the police have to report it back to ShotSpotter, right, So it's almost like by default, if they hear nothing, they have one hundred percent accuracy rate.
But it's that you know, they're informed of this, they you know, will adjust that rate well.
And also I mean that that's a metric that relies on the cops telling them. It relies on the cops taking an extra step in an investigation. And these are like, you are dealing with one of the most notoriously lazy group of people, like in the entire country. Like I have I have watched these people on duty in Chicago. They spend like eighty percent of their time standing around on their phones playing candy Crush, right, Like this this
entire statistics thing requires them to do another step. It's like, like, what percentage of the time is a cop going to admit that they ran out to this thing and like drew their guns and we're doing their like whole oh there's been gunshots thing, and then there's just nothing there, Like I don't know, it seems like cast a pall over even this, even even the sort of potential that their data can be right, right, I mean we all know that cops lie, Yeah, but we've seen them kind
of you shot spot or alerts.
You know, Chicago was one of the examples where they were using it as cover to make illegal stops.
And you know, yeah that sort of thing.
So, you know, if there's room for that, it's hard to then take what data police are giving them in this way as accurate. And then again it goes back to, well, we don't the public doesn't get to see any of that information, so we don't get to make that I guess distinction between the two and you know, know what's best for people's communities because of that.
That's one of the things about this program that is really alarming is that you have this massive aillance technology and the people in charge of it were like the people people who'd be in charge of sort of like deciding whether or not you want it. It's like like both both the general public and like city mayors et cetera, et cetera, seem to have of so little information about whether about what it's even doing that it's incredibly difficult to make any kind of like any kind of sort
of data based choice. All you have is sort of this combination of like the company going oh yeah, well, obviously their stuff works, and then this sort of well, this is the thing that's been happening in Chicago, is this sort of like crime panic stuff they just that people just fall back on, and they combine this sort of crime panic with just the assumption that it works because that's what it says in the box. And that's a I think a really alarming combination to me.
Yeah, I mean, I think the fact that city council members are kept in the dark about the locations of these things, as are you know, the police departments to pay for the cities to pay for it. I think it's you know, something that's really been quite interesting as after we published is that, you know, I've gotten a bunch of emails from city council members asking, you know, asking me if I can provide them data about the
locations because they can't even get them from the company, right. So, yeah, there's a lot of transparency issues here.
Yeah, and you know, this is a public this is a tool being paid with public money. You know. Another thing we found in the data was that there are a list of sensors that are broken or out of service or anything like that. In talking to various police departments, ShotSpotter doesn't let them know when that happens, and you know,
referred us to talk as the ShotSpot about that. So you know, not even the functionality of like how many sensors are down are really communicated and that's a huge problem. But like again this data, as a journalist to investigate it, to request documents, I can count at least three separate cities where shot spot are intervened and said the release
of the data would be a trade secret. And so therefore, yeah, so like even any data that shows transparency of like anything more detailed than just an alert that many cities have, ShotSpotter won't release because it is quote unquote a trade secret. Mind you, I have gotten documents from other cities that are more detailed, and then when I request those from other cities, shot Spotter intervenes and goes, no, that's a trade secret.
So it's this kind of.
Trying to hide the transparency that then adds more skepticism to the effectiveness and usefulness of the product, which the public I believe everyone would agree deserves a right to know, especially if it's taxpayer money.
Yeah, and so it's a lot of money too, So speaking of a lot of money, Unfortunately we have to take an ad break, so we will be back in a second.
Okay, we are back.
Something I wanted to talk about with the way that these sensors are used, so about actually, okay, sorry, I should have actually figured out the exact date after which the story originally came out, but maybe like four or
five days after your story came out. There was a story that came out of Chicago about a sort of effectively the cover up of a case where CPD was responding to a shot spotter ping and it was just like a thirteen year old kid shooting off fireworks and the cop showed up and immediately started shooting, and like, thankfully cops can't set of a barn, so the kid didn't get shot, but like, this child had a cop shoot at him while the kid was running towards the cop going.
No, it was fireworks. Yeah.
So I was wondering what kind, like, you know, how many of those kinds of stories did you run into when you were sort of like doing this, running into the story, and yeah, what is the impact of that stuff sort of been?
You know, I.
Think that that example that you bring up is particularly egregious. But what happens more often, I think, are these there's sort of like less dramatic events where you know, sound thinking or ShotSpotter will detect two shots and deploy cops to a corner, and you know, they'll detain someone on the scene, run their name through their you know, their databases and find that this guy's got a bench warrant,
or you know, pick someone up on a misdemeanor. Right. So, like I think, you know, while there are some really egregious examples, the thing that that I think about a lot here is that is just how much unnecessary, how many unnecessary arrests are happening because of ShotSpotter, right, how many people are being picked up on bullshit essentially?
Yeah, and you know that that recent case in Chicago with the kid with the firework, and you know, it wasn't too long ago that you know, Adam Toledo was shot. Yeah, you know, a thirteen year old kid for the same reason. Cops were responding to a shot spotter alert. And the Chicago o i G and their report about it kind of highlighted one of the things, which is cops are just primed to be you know, expecting you know, gunfire somebody shooting at them and everything, and you know, I
think that's that is a danger. You know, but again to what Dreve's saying is like it also leads to a lot of unnecessary stops. It opens up people to be profiled and padded down, and you know, so both options are not great, you know, when you consider the harm that this causes. It's just we all know that, Like, cops are very jumpy to begin with, So you know, they hear a firework or you know, an acorn hits
their cop car or something. We all know that, Like, that's probably not what we need police to be expecting on a call. And so you're just telling people, oh, gunshots and then they're going to run in expecting to be fired upon. And I don't think that's great for society.
Garrison, you were talking a bit about that, So.
I don't know if there's much more to say.
I think that's true. We do a lot of acord cop.
I think the A Corn incident stands on itself. I don't think it needs to even be talked about. I think it I think one sentences uh speaks speaks a whole a whole book's worth of possible analysis of police behavior and no being the notion of police rushing into every situation thinking that there's there was there was a gunshot obviously has its inherent problems.
Now, like mind you, a lot of the times, you know, and at least in in other cities, it's sixty to eighty percent of the time they don't find anything, you know, which I think is good in the sense that nobody's being harmed or stopped, but it's also bad when you consider the effectiveness and utility of the device, you know, which Shaw Spotter has kind of distanced themselves from, you know, this idea of preventing gun crime or lowering croun crime and more in terms of like safety and arriving to
a scene quicker to render aid and help police find shell case scenes. You know, you've seen over the years the kind of switch of focus on what the technology does, and that most certainly happened around the time they changed their name to Sound thinking, yeah, I.
Think you know. The other thing I wanted to mention here is that you know, from a different leaked internal report from the State's Attorney's Office in Illinois, in Cook County, Illinois, it found that like a third of arrests stemming from a shot spotter alert actually had nothing to do with the gun in the first place. So it's not even like, you know, there eighty nine percent of alerts, don't you know,
result in finding a shell casing. It's that even when there are arrests that occur from a ShotSpotter alert, thirty percent of them have nothing to do with a gun, right, And that just shows you sort of the criminalization of what happened are of people in areas that have these microphones.
Yeah, and I think I think the combination of those two things gets you to this point about Shotspotter's effectiveness, which is that like, okay, so we've had ShotSpotter for.
A while in Chicago, right, Chicago.
Police do not solve murders like it's sub it's their murder clearance rate. And you have to keep in mind that murder clearance doesn't actually mean they solved a murder. But like, even that jacked up murder clearance rate I don't think has had like I think they may have had one year in my entire life, over fifty percent, and that was because murder clearance. If two people both shoot each other and they both die, that counts as a clearance or they find us their suspect dies in
like another way. So it's it's pretty clear that it's not actually substantively contributing to Chicago Police Department solving murders. Like you have a better than coin flip odds if you kill someone in Chicago that like the police aren't even gonna like really try to figure out what happened.
And so yeah, I think I think it makes a lot of sense that they've been pivoting away from even like even claiming that this can do anything to solve gun violence, because it just clearly hasn't at all, and it's instead it seems to be doing a bunch of other stuff, which is like either throwing cops around doing is like throwing cops around chasing like shadows, which either results in them arresting just random people or like having these really sort of terrifying incidents, or it just results
in straight up nothing.
Yeah, we're gonna go to ads. We'll be back in however long capitalism dictates, So see you then we're back.
And I think, like looking at the effectiveness, like two cities that have continued to deny shot spot or contracts are Atlanta and Portland, two cities that spend a lot of time thinking about how they equip their police, spend a lot of time like making sure that their police are able to serve the largest amount of the community possible.
And the fact that, like specifically Atlanta, with their massive like flock program of and integrated camera network across the whole city, like it is one of the most surveilled
cities in the country, if not most. The fact that they are turning down this equipment for not being effective enough and it being too costly is a sign for like, beyond it just being a sign, it's also like a look at what why other police departments are interested in this and like what it allows them to do and being deployed to these various communities that have the what like twenty five thousand sensors. But no, I mean like they've constantly tried to send this stuff to Atlanta and
it's like and it's just it's simply not happening. And even after twenty twenty that Portland's like, no, it's it's it's it's two super super useful examples to measure how much this technology actually is going to get used for what they say it's being used for versus just having an excuse to act like there's gunfire all across the city.
Yeah, and you know, I think when we start more police departments are going to start relying more on technology, sure, largely because many departments cannot hire more cops. Now this isn't advocating me. You know, I don't want police departments to hire more cops. You know, they've slowly defunded themselves in that way. But like you know, cities like Los Angeles are trying to grow their surveillance capabilities for that reason.
They just do not have enough. They say, they do not have enough cops.
And so this is where kind of this surveillance capitalism is going to really thrive, is police departments are going to get desperate and they're going to start reaching out and getting more invasive surveillance technology.
And you know, I.
Think in some cities, shot spot is kind of they're a way of quieting the narratives about you know, the growing gun violence and everything in their communities. You know, they're like, oh, look, we've deployed this new toy to kind of help us without really solving anything. Because we all know cops aren't really good at solving crime. Yeah, so it kind of gives them cover of like we're bad at our jobs. So how do we make it
look like we're better. Well, let's you know, invest in some new technology, so it looks like we're trying something. But you know, at the end of the day, it's a waste of money, and then the impacts of that is harm, you know, greater than the good.
Yeah, it's like we're spending an enormous amount of money to hurt people for no reason.
Yeah.
And you know, I think shot Spatter is only one of Sound Thinking's offerings, right, Like they you know, when they change their name to sound Thinking, it's sort of like reflected this pivot in the company where now they were going to start thinking more about like resource management. Right, how do we how do we convince departments that our technology is going to better help them allocate their resources? And you know, surveillance is the way to do that.
We can measure where crime is, we can measure where gunshots is and where gunshots are, and we can.
Deploy police there.
And one of shot spot or recently Sound Thinking had acquired like a notorious predictive policing company called Predpole. That happens I think earlier this year, so you know, they're trying to expand their offerings here to be this kind of resource management solution for departments semia.
Did you have anything else you wanted to bring up here?
Yeah, I guess, I guess there's one more thing I wanted to talk about what you said. So one of the things that I've heard from places that have gotten rid of their contracts is that shot spotters not like taking their censors down even when cities stopped doing contracts. I was wondering what you two sort of know about that.
Yeah.
I reached out to Dayton, Ohio, who recently got rid of their contracts, and I reached out, you know, because I was like asking departments who had it, like are you aware of the status of the censors or do you know the locations?
You know?
Both knows. And then I asked Dayton, you know, well, now that the contract's over, what happens to the sensors? And they basically said, we don't know. That's Shotswater's responsibility, and their responsibility is maintenance and care and removal and installation.
So who knows.
Obviously somebody knows because It's not like some person can just start climbing telephone poles and installing surveillance equipment. So obviously, you know, somebody is issuing permits to install stuff and put stuff up there. But like you know, as we're finding out, city council members don't know, police departments don't know, and so who knows what happens to these devices afterwards?
And then say a city like Chicago, you know, say they cancel their contracts, Well, a new mayor can come in and then just instantly turn them back on, you know, and that way, And so that's kind of the other thing we're solely starting to learn here. It's more cities start canceling their contracts or not renewing them. You know, it is what happens to the technology afterwards, and we don't know.
Which is not a great sign.
Like, I mean, you know, it's not good that there's just a bunch of state surveillance technology around all the time, but it somehow feels even worse that we don't have any idea what happens to even if the state decides it doesn't want to use it. So yeah, I guess on that somewhat disquieting note.
Do you have anything else you wanted to make sure you get to.
Oh nothing for me.
No.
I mean this is you know, thanks to you know, somebody brave enough to send us the info and it's the only way this information has been able to get out. And I think if I implore the public to really research and dig into this technology, if their cities are thinking about extending their contracts or bringing a contract in and really questioning and trying to get shots by are on the record to answer for some of these things. And you know, we know what works and what doesn't work.
And I think most cities are starting to find out that there is a better use of that amount of money to stop these sort of gun crimes, interventions and other more community based solutions rather than just dumping money into surveillance technology. And you know, you can get a lot done with an eight million dollars. Yeah, you know, it's just it's just like there's always money in the Banana Stan sort of thing, and there's like there's always
money for police. So it's just like, why don't we just retransform that money into things that actually work in these communities.
And you know, go behind that.
So yeah, and I think I don't know. Hopefully, hopefully this will encourage more cities to stop paying for this shit. Yeah, So where can people find you choose work? I mean, I know, like obviously this one's on Wired, but I are online places, et cetera, et cetera, social media places, plug yourself, go yayh.
Well, I'm I'm. You can find my stuff on Wired dot com and I'm on X or Twitter or whatever you want to call it at d Marrow and on Blue Sky at d Marrow d M e h r. Oh.
And you can find me on Instagram and Twitter with the user name joey never and Joe And then my writings have been in a local press out here in La La Public Press and Knock La.
Yeah, and thank you to both so much for coming on, Thanks for having.
Us, Thank you so much, appreciate it.
Yeah, and I'm gonna encourage everyone else to go get your city to not use this stuff because it sucks. All right, this has been this has been naked appened here. You can find us in the usual places.
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