Police are telling ShotSpotter to alter evidence from gunshot-detecting AI

# · 🔥 514 · 💬 332 · 2 years ago · www.vice.com · danso · 📷
Rather than defend ShotSpotter's technology and its employees' actions in a Frye hearing, the prosecutors withdrew all ShotSpotter evidence against Williams. "Whether ShotSpotter evidence is relevant to a case is a matter left to the discretion of a prosecutor and counsel for a defendant ShotSpotter has no reason to believe that these decisions are based on a judgment about the ShotSpotter technology," he said. After Rochester police contacted ShotSpotter, an analyst ruled that there had been four gunshots-the number of times police fired at Simmons, missing once. Paul Greene, ShotSpotter's expert witness and an employee of the company, testified at Simmons' trial that "Subsequently he was asked by the Rochester Police Department to essentially search and see if there were more shots fired than ShotSpotter picked up," according to a civil lawsuit Simmons has filed against the city and the company. In May, the MacArthur Justice Center analyzed ShotSpotter data and found that over a 21-month period 89 percent of the alerts the technology generated in Chicago led to no evidence of a gun crime and 86 percent of the alerts led to no evidence a crime had been committed at all. One recent study of ShotSpotter in St. Louis found that ShotSpotter "Has little deterrent impact on gun-related violent crime in St. Louis. also do not provide consistent reductions in police response time, nor aid substantially in producing actionable results." The study authors disclosed that ShotSpotter has been providing the Policing Project unrestricted funding since 2018, that ShotSpotter's CEO sits on the Policing Project's advisory board, and that ShotSpotter has previously compensated Policing Project researchers.
Police are telling ShotSpotter to alter evidence from gunshot-detecting AI



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