> The reader can probably infer how this coverage pattern relates to race and class in Albuquerque. It's not perfect, but the distance from your house to a ShotSpotter sensor correlates fairly well with your household income. The wealthier you are, the less surveilled you are.
This sets off the bs alarms to me. The author knows this is a gross distortion of the rationale and is playing dumb. So what else are they lying about?
1. Cops use enforcement on poor neighborhoods because they like to make their lives difficult and because they hate poor people
2. Cops use enforcement there because that's where the crimes take place
Explanation 2 is so obviously much more likely that I can't take the person that purports reason #1 without acknowledging the other explanation. They're playing dumb.
1) Why is this conversation happening in this subthread? What does this have to do with nonrandomstring's experience in doing similar work for the military?
2) Nothing in the passage you quoted insinuates anything about the reasoning for surveiling poor neighborhoods more than rich. It simply points out that this is a thing that is happening.
Earlier they said this:
> Many assumed that ShotSpotter coverage was concentrated in disadvantaged parts of the city, an unsurprising outcome but one that could contribute to systemic overpolicing.
It's unsurprising because that is where the crime tends to take place, but there's a valid concern raised that this is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I've read some highly political anti-police rants in the past few years, but this isn't one of them. The author barely makes their opinions known at all, and when they do they're very aware of the complexities.
3. Cops use performative enforcement in poor neighborhoods because it yields metrics important to them with minimal effort.
Poor neighborhoods are often demanding and crying out for enforcement of laws. Nobody wants to live next to a crackhouse, and the people forced to lack options to leave. In my city, there's a notorious drug house that has been in operation since I was in college in the 1990s. It has better staying power than Walmart -- it's still there. What poor people in general resent to the point of riot about is systematic bullshit and abuse on the part of ineffective police.
When the powers that be say "clean up that area", they round up stupid kids for bullshit, maybe hit up a few street dealers, etc. The actual hard work, say arresting street gang leadership or investigating property crimes isn't sexy and takes time. The best documented examples are NYPD, where the worship of Excel sheets resulted in sweeps where the cops would issue appearance tickets for such offenses as "obstructing the public sidewalk" (ironically doing so, btw, when they are literally parking their personal vehicles on sidewalks for these big sweeps), than run through and make arrests for failure to appear a few months later.
Shotspotter in particular is stupid - it's just a way to blow Federal grant money. If as you say, the police "know where the crime is", why would they need microphones to tell them where gunshots go off? Presumable they patrol high risk areas and hear it themselves.
Police departments are paramilitary organizations. That means they need a military like level of accountability and discipline to function well, and the nature of modern governance is such that that is lacking. The Army doesn't tolerate drunken soliders runing amok, but police departments do. IMO the best way to address the issues of policing is to consolidate smaller departments into state or regional entities to both professionalize and reduce the chummy nature of what goes on.
I assumed someone was raising a technical objection to my claim that acoustic location of transient sounds is "hard" - myself being the "expert" having published on firearm signatures and machine listening.
But this is about the socio-politics in TFA. Okay.
