My last fear mongering thought and then I'm done on this:
Politics and privilege aside, if you help send somebody to prison, they may remember that and their friends may remember that.
This idea is dangerous as hell.
Gabby
I have several thoughts.
1. There is a real question about whether a "people's shotspotter" constitutes "snitching". Just as importantly is the question of whether it would be perceived of as snitching or collaborating with the police and what that could mean organizationally and for individuals.
I think these are murky dangerous waters. I have seen truly horrible infighting and messy nasty cointelpro type incidents break out over less.
2. I do recognize that guns hurt people and ruin lives. Jake, you asked what my alternative solution is and I would say prevention and recourses pending revolution. Ok?
3- If someone's been shot the priority should be an ambulence.
4- Certainly making information open and public and never feeding directly to cops is less controversial, but there is no getting around the reality that a shotspotter system (alerting to gunshots, fireworks, random street noise, maybe loud parties?- Am i totally crazy here?) would be used almost exclusively by the police.
5- If you have never been on the receiving end of violence, harassment, or curruption at the hands of OPD, there's a good chance you are a white person or that you can pass as middle class.
6- I hope my comments are understood as coming from a place of respect and concern.
7- I don't want to tell other people what to do and what to build.
I think its a bad idea but I hope that if this does move forward in some form that the people who are working on it are doing so consciously and thoughtfully, recognizing that it's going to be controversial.
Gabby
On Mar 15, 2014 7:18 PM, "Jake" <jake@spaz.org> wrote:i never suggested video cameras.
and the city would never sign a contract like that.
i think providing the sound itself along with the location data is the best way to differentiate the sounds. but there are too many objections to that for privacy reasons, and i don't think it could be workable without the recording.
maybe gunshots aren't as big a problem as i thought.
On Fri, 14 Mar 2014, GtwoG PublicOhOne wrote:
Anything that can pick up a gunshot will also pick up false positives such as: fireworks going off, automobiles backfiring, loud
motorcycles starting, and sometimes, basketballs bounced hard on the street and baseballs hit with bats. That's why audio
recording & monitoring is useful during possible gunshot events.
If all the event-datapoints are logged to a public map that anyone can click to examine the data more closely, the risk of abuse
of any audio or video transmission or recording function is minimal, because any abuse or non-essential use of audio/video will
be found and exposed quickly.
With appropriate safeguards, audio & video will help catch shooters. Safeguards would include a rolling record/erase that stores
a maximum of e.g. 15 minutes of recording, centered on the event. With this you can see e.g. the car drive up before the
passenger shoots the pedestrian, or the souped-up motorcycle start up with loud pops and a roar. The same actions that trigger
saving a recording for evidence, would also put information to that effect on the datapoint on the map.
The contract terms with the city (which should also be public) should specify usage for evidence of violent crimes only, and that
any abuse of the recording capability (such as to pull over that motorcycle driver for a loud exhaust system) would trigger a
large financial penalty. If the city gov is serious about stopping crime rather than e.g. catching loud motorcycles and illegal
fireworks, the city should have no trouble signing a contract with those terms & conditions.
-G.
=====
On 14-03-14-Fri 5:46 PM, Steve Berl wrote:
It is a DSP problem that should already be solved. I suspect google can turn up a lot of info. I suspect It can
likely be implemented on a little Linux board computer like a RaspberryPI or similar. Add the cost of a microphone,
GPS, and mesh networking HW.
Steve
On Friday, March 14, 2014, Jake <jake@spaz.org> wrote:
I'm glad somebody knows about this! however i would suggest that it's not quite as simple to decide "when the
big impulse of sound starts" without waiting for it to end and then choosing a peak event.
the best i know how to do is a peak detector where you wait for the slope of the amplitude to head downward
after a threshold is achieved, but i think we can do better, and i think we would need to if we were going to
achieve good results. and the more versatile the analysis is better, to reduce false alarms (!) and increase
detection of events at lower amplitudes.
On Fri, 14 Mar 2014, Steve Berl wrote:
You don't need to record and transmit the audio at all. You just need the time of when the big
impulse of sound starts, which you can do locally. Just transmit the
time stamp.
NTP has a lot of the logic built in to discipline a computer clock to a few microseconds of UTC
time. It works best attached directly to a serial port.
Steve
On Friday, March 14, 2014, Jake <jake@spaz.org> wrote:
I think it would be a positive move. When you hear a gunshot outside you want to believe
it's far away, somebody else's problem.
when you can look at a website and see where the gunshots have been over time, you can figure
out if it is your neighborhood, and decide to talk with your
neighbors about it. Maybe everybody knows who it is and nobody knows what to do about it.
You can have subtle, problem-solving conversations with people
that the police obviously are not capable of.
as for the timing data, i think GPS clock is necessary to remain synchronized with all the
other nodes (plus it serves as a handy location resolver) but
i'm not sure yet what is the right way to stamp the audio data. My best guess would be to
put the timestamp into the audio stream as a second audio
channel, so that the central processing computer can sort it all out and pinpoint the source.
I do think this would be a good opportunity to grow the mesh network but i don't know if the
mesh group would be excited to do it this way.
-jake
On Sat, 15 Mar 2014, Hol Gaskill wrote:
setting up a system like this would have a powerful effect on the public safety
narrative - if the public is able to self-organize a better
solution at a low cost and
share the data directly with everyone, it makes alot less sense for public officials to
propose alternatives wherein our freedoms are demanded
in exchange for
whatever degree of security is theoretically offered. who's saying it has to be the
police that respond? if the data is made public people
could show up and
videotape or whatever, or reconsider going to that area within the next hour, generally
use that info however they see fit.
i think using gps clock signal or a realtime clock IC such as a ds1307 we could get
pretty good time data. a condenser mic doing amplitude
and spectral (audio range)
analysis would be enough to check for gunshots, maybe car crashes, sirens, etc, without
storing or transmitting the actual audio. could this
be a potential optional
addon module to the mesh nodes?
on Mar 14, 2014, Patrik D'haeseleer <patrikd@gmail.com> wrote:
Very interesting! That $264,000/yr fee does seem outrageous - once the system is
installed, there should be relatively little
maintenance to keep it
running.
I wonder if the company will be disabling or retrieving the microphones when the
contract ends. It's possible the city is only "leasing" the
equipment. Or that
the company has build in some sort of self-destruct to prevent cities taking over the
network without them...
FWIW, I do think ShotSpotter is a useful technology, but it needs to be designed with
some ethical issues in mind (e.g. not collecting and
transmitting more
information than is required for its stated purpose). I think that Sudo Room taking
over and overhauling the existing network in a completely
open-source
fashion would be a great thing to do. That way people could satisfy themselves that the
technology only does what it claims to do.
Patrik
On Fri, Mar 14, 2014 at 3:23 PM, Jake <jake@spaz.org> wrote:
what do people think of the shotspotter system installed in oakland?
it's a network of microphones on telephone poles, each with a GPS (for a precise
clock) and a network connection. When a gunshot-like
sound is
detected, they send the sound and its precise timing to a central server that
determines the location of the shot, and tells the police
to go there.
some people have expressed concern that the microphones are used to spy on
people, but it would be impossible to hear a conversation
from the top of
a telephone pole that wasnt already loud enough to be heard inside nearby houses
(or the phone in your pocket).
--
-steve
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