The real value of ShotSpotter is in giving some sense of where and when gun discharges tend to happen, allowing for improvements in predictive policing.

@2 exactly.

The two-facedness of this reporting. This is about gun violence. Not fucking privacy. Murders and gun toting nuts terrorizing their neighborhoods do not have the right to privacy. If given enough time to gather enough data it could theoretically help identify where violence happens. This could save lives. Black lives.

It's astonishing to me how suddenly the Stranger and Ansel are all privacy purists when, somehow, if you squint you eyes just right and take the most uncharitable read possible, gun violence might have something to with black people and therefor it has to be racist. or something.

Black communities are trapped between the self righteous Scylla of white liberals who refuse to admit black people are killing one another and the Charybdis of white racist conservatives who are delighted to see black people kill each other.

@2 It's not about not admitting that black on black violence does exist. It's the realization that we have a seriously broken system of institutional racism, racial prejudice and profiling by the police forces, and a huge for-profit-prison-system that wants to have as many prisoners fed to it as possible. Look at our prisons, they're filled with minority and poor people who are there for years, sometimes over ridiculously minor crimes like shoplifting a sandwich! There's a real danger here for the people in these neighborhoods.

Oops, sorry, I meant @3, not @2

Is the privacy issue that people are concerned that the system keeps recordings, or communicates with the FBI, or similar? Because that would leave a clear footprint in storage or networking; it's not hard for three software engineers from Rainier Valley to audit under NDA.

Whether this is good or effective policing I don't know, but the privacy issue seems pretty lightweight.

It's not about not admitting that black on black violence does exist. It's about admitting that spending big buck$ on a whizbang technology that makes a ton of $ for the corporations that profit from it, but fundamentally doesn't work (two convictions in SF--is that all they've got???) is a ridiculous waste of money.

If you want to get serious about reducing crime, you've got to get serious about REDUCING POVERTY. It's as simple as that. One of the leading causes of poverty these day is RENT. When is the City of Seattle going to do something about that exploding problem?

Here is the real truth about poverty and gun violence in poor black neighborhoods. No amount of gun surveillance technology can fix these problems:

https://youtu.be/B72Iiu2bIyo

@9: Well the Space Program and the Polio vaccine didn't reduce crime either, so I guess those were wastes of time and money as well?

Perhaps leave it up to the people in the affected neighborhoods who hear gunshots every night? Let them vote on it.