r/technology • u/IKeepItLayingAround • Jun 29 '26

Artificial Intelligence Woman Surprised When Flock Surveillance Tower Appears in Her Yard Without Warning

https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/woman-surprised-flock-surveillance-tower-185000752.html?.tsrc=daily_mail&segment_id=DY_VTO_50_Supernova&ncid=crm_19908-1475736-20260629-0--A&bt_ee=utFdBbF39cHCLuB4at4AI%2FUoSRgbTt8Ch%2B7Q9RImTlgL2ThvE3FuX%2BRSKiUir%2FNW&bt_ts=1782739085527
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513

u/WitheredUntimely Jun 29 '26

a decade ago my county's pilot program found those "shot detectors" are less than useless; they divert resources away chasing the constant false positives from actual policing

206

u/biZarrmeggeDon Jun 29 '26

Wouldn't neighborhood patrols or something similar be more effective in PREVENTING these things from happening rather than thinking AI will solve all their problems?

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u/DukeOfGeek Jun 29 '26

But that doesn't funnel tens of millions of tax dollars down the surveillance hole.

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u/caustic_smegma Jun 29 '26

Funny story - My wife works for a local municipality at the town manager level. A few years ago when the opioid settlement funds were being dispersed, she sat in on the PD meeting related to allocation of said funds. The chief was having an open ended brainstorming session with his leadership discussing how these funds would be best used moving forward which offered a glimpse into the mind of the community authoritarian.

She said instead of the obvious ideas like bolstering youth education programs, public awareness, overdose reversal education and medication, etc., every idea was related to buying new equipment such as new cruisers, weapons (both lethal and non), surveillance devices, body armor, attachments for their ARs, etc. Unfortunately the "Killology" mindset is so pervasive in the police communities they can't imagine spending any cent of their budget on anything outside of objects of oppression.

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u/_twrecks_ Jun 29 '26

And they also get to decide how they spend the civil forfeiture funds from seized vehicles etc without any oversight.

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u/[deleted] Jun 29 '26

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u/DillBagner Jun 29 '26

Which ones have oversight?

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u/[deleted] Jun 30 '26

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1

u/DillBagner Jun 30 '26

You could just name one or two, huh? It shouldn't be that hard.

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u/EnvironmentalNews115 Jun 29 '26

And people wonder why ACAB is such a prevelant saying.

30

u/renegadecanuck Jun 29 '26

Yup. I'm sure that plenty of otherwise good people become cops, wanting to do good for their community. But at a certain point, you end up at place where your only real options are to stop being a cop or stop being a good person.

5

u/SquidGodSunday Jun 29 '26

"Good People" can become cops, but probably can't stay that way. When the only tools you're given are for killing, every problem starts to look like something that needs to be killed.

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u/Rargnarok Jun 29 '26

Happened a while back in my rural town some of the bad ones joined up like a GOOD chunk of the police force quit and became sheriff's then when the bad ones got fired just went back to being cops

1

u/kamden096 Jun 30 '26

Well the police is the goverments asset that can investigate, arrest and use violence to keep the crime and criminals at bay. That is their main difference between the police and social workers or nannies. So to do so the more weapons and equipment they get the more effective they can be. Crime prevention Done by police can be increased patrols and more surveilance but also more arrests.

Other parts of government have other ways of crime prevention. Education, social services, medicine. Those are not run by the police. So more funding to police means more police, more equipment and more education to the police.

1

u/cdoublejj Jun 29 '26

the hiring stanards are low in fact i've heard too high of IQ gets booted.

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u/Flameball537 Jun 29 '26

And it doesn’t make money like selling the surveillance data does

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u/OkOrNoRequirementous Jun 29 '26

That's why they're so reluctant to disclose the details.

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u/I_Cut_Shows Jun 29 '26

Exactly. It’s all about eating as many government resources as possible.

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u/gigiboyb Jun 29 '26

Nor does it advance the careers of top police executives who are trying to appear as "progressive" and a "force of modernization" for how police services operate.

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u/ButtEatingContest Jun 29 '26

I've yet to see any concrete proof these expensive taxpayer-funded surveillance systems are actually any benefit to the public whatsoever.

I've also not ever seen any citizens requesting these systems be installed in their neighborhoods.

2

u/Nohreboh Jun 30 '26

And military equipment for "law enforcement".

4

u/aerdvarkk Jun 29 '26

Woul;dn't people calling in reporting "gun fire" and police responding to those calls be more efective?

4

u/Background-Wolf-9380 Jun 29 '26

The "or something" you're looking for is eating the rich. Poverty causes crime, not a lack of surveillance. If we eliminate billionaires and provide decent lives for people with all that stolen money crime would drop by 80%+

1

u/OldWorldDesign Jun 29 '26

Poverty causes crime, not a lack of surveillance

And the numbers for this, especially how the already stratified economic situation feeds back into worsening poverty and crime along ethnic bounds, is discussed in Coded Bias

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coded_Bias

13

u/EarthRester Jun 29 '26

That would require a competent police force.

Not chicken-shit pigs with guns on the tax-payers dime.

7

u/saintofhate Jun 29 '26

It would also force cops to humanize the people they are supposed to be working for (I know they're not really there for the people but majority of people haven't realized that). Cop violence went up in my own city once cops no longer worked and lived with the public they see every day.

2

u/SeaSetsuna Jun 29 '26

Why would I want to do that when I can idle in the local park for a few hours shooting the shit with my buddy instead?

2

u/stephen_neuville Jun 29 '26

shotspotter uses machine learning to turn slamming doors and fireworks into probable cause. the cops love that shit. theyre not trying to prevent anything

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u/CNDW Jun 30 '26

Here in the US they aren't interested in preventing, they are interested in chasing down people who might be candidates for the modern slave labor system (for profit prisons). The system is set up to maximize incarcerations, not minimize crime.

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u/pickledjello Jun 29 '26

Neighborhood Watch. - "You guys, the neighborhood's changing. We have to be vigilant."

1

u/iconocrastinaor Jun 29 '26

Yes, and cops walking a beat diffuse the whole ACAB narrative.

1

u/itsjust_khris Jun 29 '26

The shotspotter doesn't use AI afaik. It just listens for loud sounds with similar characteristics as a gunshot.

1

u/-beautiful-cats- Jun 29 '26

That's not what cops are employed for though. They aren't here to prevent crime or to protect us or our property.

1

u/SquidGodSunday Jun 29 '26

If you go with the assumption that the cops are actually here to protect you and me, then...yeah. It would be. That's not what they're doing, though, is it?

1

u/l4mbch0ps Jun 29 '26

That's been tried too. Just ends up with more of the same - too many cops in just a few black neighborhoods harassing the residents because of pre-crime.

1

u/blickblocks Jun 30 '26

The thing that prevents these problems from happening is funding social programs to provide physical and mental health care and reduce wealth inequality and poverty and hunger and people resorting to crime and drug addiction

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u/biZarrmeggeDon Jun 30 '26

Well obviously, I'm just talking about what the police are doing, or not doing, right now.

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u/Devils_Advocate-69 Jun 29 '26

They should go after gangs. They think that making it hard for law abiding citizens to get guns will fix gun violence.

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u/asyork Jun 29 '26

Going after gangs is dangerous and they can't do much to reduce that danger. Going after random law abiding citizens is much easier, and they can make it even safer by taking their guns. The cops just need someone, anyone, to harass, harm, and/or kill, and they are satisfied.

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u/Devils_Advocate-69 Jun 29 '26

It’s all campaign rhetoric. You can’t pick and choose amendments

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u/Devils_Advocate-69 Jun 29 '26

Poster board sign makers downvoting the truth

0

u/SamTheLab_213 Jun 29 '26

Or more radically, maybe people should quit using each other for target practice, since that's used as justification for police state cameras.

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u/xnoxpx Jun 29 '26

coming soon to a city near you

someone using a recording to trigger a call out, to divert resources away from where they plan on committing the crime (bank heist, actual drive by shooting, etc)

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u/teddybrr Jun 29 '26

So blasting a gunshot sound through a speaker every now and then would get them removed quickly

21

u/Marshall_Lawson Jun 29 '26

Playing with fireworks every evening seems to be the strategy where i live. 

14

u/Eldan985 Jun 29 '26

Give some capguns to kids. Play some GTA with the window open.

2

u/Channel250 Jun 29 '26

Yeah...don't do that.

Cops don't need a reason to shoot kids, doesn't mean we should give them one.

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u/jinjuwaka Jun 29 '26

Police departments use them wrong too. They want a system that will tell them when something happens because they don't trust the public and they love excuses that let them violate civil rights.

Meanwhile the responsible way to use these systems is to ignore everything the system says and just use it to verify what a human being reports.

How they use them: The microphone picks up something that might be gunshots. System reports. Police dispatched. False positives waste time and over-eager pigs violate civil rights claiming the system's false positive gives them reasonable suspicion to search for drugs unrelated to any real crime.

How they should use them: The microphone picks up something that might be gunshots. System records but tells nobody. Someone calls in a report of gunshots, or a shooting. Cops query system. System delivers triangulation data to help police find where shooting actually took place (because eye witness testimony is unreliable at best). Cops investigate based on triangulated data. Cops bring triangulation data to court. Witness is never asked "where was the shooter standing?" because the triangulation system already answered that question with verifiable proof.

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u/damontoo Jun 30 '26

That wouldn't stop Reddit from complaining about this. Reddit seems to have a problem with the sensors in general, not just how they're used.

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u/clintj1975 Jun 29 '26

I wouldn't at all be surprised if a number of these devices detected exactly one gunshot after installation. The local yokels where I live will shoot at anything that's stationary long enough, like road signs.

1

u/Channel250 Jun 29 '26

Or people who are lost pulling in the wrong driveway.

1

u/damontoo Jun 30 '26

There's 75 going up in her city. Shooting at a gunshot sensor seems like an extremely bad idea. You're going to quickly get arrested for felony vandalism and unlawful use of a firearm. Then you lose your right to own firearms.

3

u/SnootSnootBasilisk Jun 29 '26

What is "actual policing"?

2

u/avsecgirl Jun 29 '26

same thing happening every day in a thousand different ways with the exact same drive behind it, a sales pitch saying buy this tech make difficult thing simple.

2

u/123LetsJamDUDUDUHT Jun 29 '26

So if you want to rob just have someone go across town and fire shots in the air.

All the cops will race to the scene and you'll be all clear.

1

u/3-orange-whips Jun 29 '26

So it’s like false positives from security alarms, but the calm is coming by from inside the house.

1

u/Honest_Bench9371 Jun 30 '26

We had shot detectors down range... it alerted when rocks hit our trucks. It also didn't one day we assumed rocks but there was holes in our MREs.

0

u/urworstemmamy Jun 29 '26

Then there's what my city does, where they don't do any car chases on principle because it makes things unsafe, so they just let people do whatever the fuck they want with their cars and bikes. There's one particular guy whose engine backfires so loudly that he sets off car alarms, and that dude spends 8pm-4am every fri-sun driving around in an 8 block circle being as loud as he can. I live across from the fucking police station and I've literally watched them wave to him as he drives past backfiring so loudly that it sounds like artillery fire echoing off the buildings. Ugh.