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- [00:02]
Megan
Hi, I'm Megan and I've got a new podcast I think you're going to love. It's called Confessions of a Female Founder, a show where I chat with female entrepreneurs and friends about the sleepless nights, the lessons learned, and the laser focus that got them to where they are today. And through it all, I'm building a business of my own and getting all sorts of practical advice along the way that I'm so excited to share with you. Confessions of a Female Founder is out now. Listen wherever you get your podcast.
- [00:37]
David Duchovny
Hi everyone, I'm David Duchovny. Join me on my podcast Fail Better, where we use failure as a lens to reflect on the past and analyze the current moment. I speak with makers and performers like Rob Lowe, Rosie o' Donnell, and Kenya Barris, as well as thinkers like Kara Swisher and Nate Silver to understand how both personal setbacks and larger forces impact our world. Listen to Fail Better wherever you get your podcasts. Lemonada this episode contains sensitive content including depictions of gun violence and gunshots. Please be Advised it was April 1, 2016, a Friday, just past 9pm in Rochester, New York and 34 year old Sylvon Simmons and his neighbor were driving back to Silvan's house from the store with beer and cigarettes. They got to Silvan's place and he stepped out onto his driveway from the passenger side of his neighbor's Chevy Impala. And that's when everything went wrong. Standing on his driveway, Silvan saw a bright white spotlight and in front of him was a figure rapidly approaching with a gun. Silvan took off running and he had nearly reached his door when he felt three shots hit him from behind. The figure approached Silvan, who was black, and put him in handcuffs. It was a white police officer from Rochester PD named Officer Joseph Ferrigno. He'd been out that night pursuing an armed suspect. Silvan didn't know it yet, but the fight for his freedom was just beginning because the way Officer Ferrigno will later tell it, Silvan fired the first shot. He was charged with attempted murder. The key piece of evidence Against Silvan? An 8 second audio file from a private sector company called ShotSpotter. A judge would later deem that audio evidence, quote, troubling and unconvincing. But until then, it would be a long road for Sylvain to clear his name. This is the untold story and I'm Trayvon Free this season. The injustice happening in your own backyard. Let me tell you a story about injustice in my backyard. Back when I lived in Inglewood California. Ten years ago, I was awakened by a loud pounding on my front door. And what was awaiting me on the other side were six police officers serving a warrant for my arrest. The only problem was I hadn't committed a crime. And after the police barged in and made me kneel on the floor with my hands behind my head and in my underwear, I asked what they were there for. They said they were serving a warrant for a failure to appear for a dui. Thing was, I never gotten a dui. After a few minutes of conferring amongst themselves, they realized they were in the wrong apartment. It was all a misunderstanding, but they still took me to the station to, quote, clear things up. I spent an hour in a jail cell waiting for my mom to come pick me up, and every minute felt like an hour. My story is not unfamiliar to so many people, especially when you think about people like Breonna Taylor, where the experience ends very differently. And I often think about false accusations and how often the police get it wrong, which is why sending more police into our neighborhoods is so scary. So how would you feel if you found out police had ears on your neighborhood listening with microphones? Microphones making recordings that could be used against you in a court of law? That technology already exists. It's called acoustic gunshot detection. In plain speak, it means there are microphones posted in secret locations in cities all across the country. They listen for loud sounds, and if they hear something that sounds like gunshots, the police are alerted to the crime scene. If you live in Chicago, Illinois, Cambridge, Massachusetts, or even Glendale, Arizona, you might have already seen them. They're on top of lampposts and buildings, but you're probably not going to spot them in the affluent white parts of town. The mics are typically deployed in black and brown neighborhoods that have a history of gun violence and over policing. The goal? Ostensibly to increase community safety by making it easier for police to make arrests and save lives. But is the technology actually saving lives? Critics of the ShotSpotter technology say that its usefulness is exaggerated, but it's also.
- [05:19]
Megan
Been the genesis for some dangerous, even tragic, encounters.
- [05:23]
Trayvon Free
A Chicago man exposing what he calls flaws with ShotSpotter.
- [05:28]
David Duchovny
He says he was charged with murder.
- [05:29]
Megan
And thrown in jail because of the gunshot detection technology.
- [05:32]
David Duchovny
It was shot spotter technology that brought police to the area of 24th and Sawyer, which led to CPD officer Eric Stillman chasing Adam Toledo and fatally shooting him a split second after it appears, the 13 year old drops or tosses a gun. In this episode, we're going to zero in on shotspotter. It's a private sector company with the most well known gunshot detection system on the market. They say they've got microphones in over 135 cities across the country, and they are in demand with law enforcement. In 2021, profits hit $32.5 million. That's a 21% jump from 2020. So I want to know, does the technology actually curb crime and what are the collateral harms of increasing high intensity interactions between police and civilians? To answer that, let's get back to Silvon's story.
- [06:29]
Dennis Mares
Shots were exchanged between the officer and a suspect.
- [06:34]
David Duchovny
The suspect was struck.
- [06:35]
Dennis Mares
He's in serious condition, but he's alert. Our investigation is still preliminary at this time.
- [06:41]
David Duchovny
Officer was unhurt? Yes.
- [06:44]
Dennis Mares
No officers are hurt.
- [06:46]
Trayvon Free
We first heard about it on the news because it was certainly something that was getting a lot of media attention. So we heard little bits and pieces of it on the news. And being in the business we're in, whenever something big like that happens, you're paying attention because, you know, it might come across your desk or a colleague's desk.
- [07:03]
David Duchovny
In 2016, Liz Riley was public defender at the Monroe County Public Defender's office. That's in Rochester, New York. She didn't know it at the time, but the case she heard about on the news would only become a big media sensation. And, yeah, it would soon come across her desk. But she wouldn't get any concrete details on her new assignment until she and a few other lawyers met with their new client in the hospital where he was in custody of Rochester pd.
- [07:31]
Trayvon Free
Sylvain was in his hospital bed on the inside of the room, and he had been there for several days. So at that point, he was very receptive to seeing people that he recognized were there to assist him. He was very well aware that we were there as part of his team and not there to interrogate him more or to do him any harm.
- [07:53]
David Duchovny
Katie Higgins was also at that first meeting in Sylvan's hospital room as another public defender on Silvon's team. Right from the start, Katie said something felt off about this case.
- [08:04]
Katie Higgins
Our best guess was that the police department was expecting, perhaps hoping, that if he died, this would kind of all just be swept under the rug and they wouldn't have to do anything. You know, it seemed like once they realized he was going to make it, that's when they decided to press charges.
- [08:23]
David Duchovny
This information just into our newsroom within the last several hours. Following a grand jury investigation, it was determined Officer Joseph Ferrigno will not face criminal charges from the April 1 incident, but a grand jury has indicted Sylvan Simmons of Rochester for attempted aggravated murder and attempted aggravated assault. He also faces weapons charges. That's right. No charges for Officer Ferrigno, but a heap of legal trouble for Silvon, the biggest being attempted murder. Back at the crime scene, Rochester PD recovered a handgun. The way the police saw it, the handgun belonged to Silvan. That's what they say. He used to fire the first shot, prompting Ferrigno to fire back. But there was no evidence Silvon had ever owned a handgun. And it wasn't even clear that the handgun had been fired that night. Besides, there were other details Liz and Katie had to contend with as they built the defense.
- [09:19]
Trayvon Free
We knew that the allegation was that he fired at the officer, and we knew that he had been hit three times. And so this eyewitness comes in maybe a day or two after we first met Silvon, and she said, four shots. I heard four shots. I know there were four shots. And we said, are you sure? And to be honest, we were like, oh, this is not good, because he was shot three times. This is really, really bad.
- [09:43]
David Duchovny
That meant Silvon could have fired the first one at Ferrigno. But is that what really happened?
- [09:50]
Trayvon Free
And then we ended up finding out that Ferrigno fired four shots.
- [09:54]
David Duchovny
This new insight from Ferrigno's gun was great news for Silvan's case because it indicated Ferrigno had fired all of the bullets that night. Plus, it lined right up with the eyewitness account. But the eyewitness wasn't the only one with evidence from that night. ShotSpotter was listening, too. How many shots do you hear? That's the recording that ShotSpotter sent to the defense team before the trial. But here's another discrepancy in the case.
- [10:26]
Trayvon Free
When you listen to the audio, there are five acoustical impulses. And I think it's important to use that term because the government's the one that said the shots. I don't think ShotSpotter knows they'll call it whatever their paying customer wants you to call it. But they're technically called acoustical impulses. Four of them sound exactly the same. One of them sounds different.
- [10:50]
David Duchovny
Let's listen again with this new audio from ShotSpotter. We hear five acoustical impulses. And if those five sounds on the recording were indeed gunshots, then prosecutors could argue Silvan did fire at Ferrigno. So suddenly, the defense team was scrambling to figure out what this new Evidence meant. But the big question was, why did the first acoustical impulse on the recording sound different than the rest? Was it even a gunshot? For Katie, the information from ShotSpotter raised red flags.
- [11:30]
Katie Higgins
When you looked more closely at the report, I started noticing there was strange discrepancies.
- [11:35]
David Duchovny
Katie says the number of gunshots had been changed several times. It turns out Rochester PD had been in contact with ShotSpotter the night of the shooting.
- [11:45]
Katie Higgins
Rochester Police Department. Within about an hour or two of Officer Frigno shooting Silvon, they had contacted ShotSpotter. There had been no ShotSpotter alert, meaning that the system had not automatically notified Rochester Dispatch that there were potentially shots at a location.
- [12:06]
David Duchovny
ShotSpotter's algorithm had initially classified the gunfire as a helicopter. Essentially, it was a false negative. So they didn't send an alert to RPD that a gun had gone off. But now, after RPD told ShotSpotter about the incident, Katie says the record changed from helicopter to three gunshots. All of these changes she's talking about were written on a report about the incident from ShotSpotter.
- [12:32]
Katie Higgins
And then there was more communication from RPD. Well, we think there was at least four, maybe five, which was interesting because they would have known at that point exactly how many shots Ferrigno had fired.
- [12:43]
David Duchovny
Katie says ShotSpotter eventually found five shots from that night. Just like you heard earlier in the recording.
- [12:50]
Katie Higgins
They were now starting to use it at this point when Silvan was charged, as direct evidence of. Here's this, you know, here's an audio recording. Here's the report. It's clear. This is what happened. And then it's still not. It's not. It's a mirage.
- [13:10]
David Duchovny
What made it seem like a mirage to her is this. Each shot in that eight second recording is a separate thing, a compilation of sounds. So imagine you're watching a video. It's pretty easy to see the cuts. You can tell when you've gone to another angle or you're in a whole new scene. It's a little different with audio. I mean, I'm speaking to you right now, and it sounds natural, right? But what you can't hear are the bits before and after. I narrate, like when I'm taking a sip of water or chatting with my producers. Where'd my script go? Sorry, there's Dog Mania outside my office door. Dammit. Now I got something in my throat. Here we go. Katie says she would have liked to have had that context around the ShotSpotter audio.
- [13:53]
Katie Higgins
They splice out the acoustical impulses and send them to the cloud. And then in the cloud, they give it a marker. So now we can say, oh, no one's ever edited it or done anything. Now this is, you know, perfectly, you know, chain of custody in terms of evidence is, is protected now and nobody's able to alter it or change it. But we don't have the context, we don't have the original audio from which those acoustical impulses were spliced and sent to the cloud.
- [14:26]
David Duchovny
Without any other audio to listen to from that night or an explanation for why it seemed like ShotSpotter changed the number of shots so many times, the defense team issued a subpoena. The goal? To get insight into how ShotSpotter classifies sounds.
- [14:41]
Katie Higgins
We didn't get any of that. We asked for a hearing to determine if this was scientifically reliable. We were denied that. So we essentially walked in on the day of trial a year and a half later with very little information. I mean, we had worked with other sources who had previously challenged ShotSpot and all of that, but we really didn't know even walking into trial exactly how all of this, how the system works. And that was very problematic because you're kind of hearing about it and trying to understand it. For the first time in front of.
- [15:11]
David Duchovny
A jury after a month long trial and four nail biting days of jury deliberation, the verdict was read. New information this midday on a man charged with trying to kill a Rochester police officer. A jury found Sylvan Simmons not guilty. A jury did, however, find Simmons guilty of a weapons charge after already spending over a year in jail. This was a blow. The jury didn't believe Sylvan fired a shot that night, but they decided he had been carrying a handgun despite any physical evidence. One juror described the verdict as a bargain between letting Silvon walk free and putting him behind bars for a more serious charge. For Siovan's defense team, this decision was frustrating, especially since the origins of the handgun were still unclear. But all they could do was await Silvan sentencing, a mandatory three and a half years behind bars. Or so they thought. This morning, Sylvan Simmons was in court.
- [16:10]
Tom Shittam
For sentencing for a weapons conviction. Instead, the judge overturned that conviction today. The judge said that ShotSpotter technology was.
- [16:19]
David Duchovny
Not reliable enough without other evidence. The ruling shocked the courtroom. In the ruling, the judge deemed the shotspotter evidence as, quote, troubling. To paraphrase, his conclusion was that it's impossible to determine if the impulses were gunshots. Here's Sylvain immediately after hearing the good news. I just thank God. I still love. I still got shot for nothing and I'm innocent during this whole thing. That's why I was so funny looking, because they was covering their tracks. They didn't. It was too fast. But they was wrong. The judge made the right decision. I'm glad he seen through the nonsense. I'm overwhelmed right now. But, you know, I thank God. ShotSpotter wouldn't comment directly on Silvon's case, but their PR firm did send us a statement. Quote, ShotSpotter evidence was found sufficiently reliable and admitted by the court, but the jury ultimately found Mr. Simmons not guilty of those charges and instead found him guilty of a gun possession charge. The conviction was vacated, but not because of shotspotter evidence. It was because the sound of a gunshot alone was not enough to convict Mr. Simmons, end quote. When Katie Higgins reflects back on this case, she still seems frustrated. Even after spending years getting to know the ins and outs of shotspotter to defend Silvon, Katie is lingering questions about the technology, questions for which she was never able to get satisfying answers.
- [17:56]
Katie Higgins
How do you train people? How do you determine what's a gunshot? What isn't? How do you know? How are these reclassifications happening? How often is the system accurate? How often is the analyst accurate? How are these gunshots being recorded?
- [18:10]
David Duchovny
Up next, we're digging for those answers from people with first hand experience with ShotSpotter, including a former 911 operator who.
- [18:18]
Megan
Says it's like a untrustworthy second resource. Like, yes, I have it here if I need to look at it, but I'm not going to take it for its word.
- [18:29]
David Duchovny
That's after the break.
- [18:40]
Megan
Hey, I'm Reshma Sajani, founder of Girls.
- [18:42]
David Duchovny
Who Code and Moms First. I consider myself a pretty successful adult woman. So why is it that in midlife, as I'm about to turn 50, I feel so stuck?
- [18:52]
Reshma Saujani
Join me as I try to find.
- [18:53]
Megan
The answer on my so called Midlife from Lemonada Media.
- [18:56]
David Duchovny
I talk to experts and extraordinary guests.
- [18:59]
Reshma Saujani
About divorce, exercise, menopause, sex, drugs and more to understand what we're going through.
- [19:03]
Megan
And and how to make the most of it.
- [19:05]
David Duchovny
Listen wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Hasan Minhaj and I have been lying to you. I only pretended to be a comedian so I could trick important people into coming on my podcast.
- [19:15]
Megan
Hasan Minhaj doesn't know to ask them.
- [19:18]
David Duchovny
The tough questions that real journalists are way too afraid to ask. People like Senator Elizabeth Warren. Is America too dumb for democracy?
- [19:27]
Megan
Outrageous.
- [19:28]
David Duchovny
Parenting expert Dr. Becky how do you Skip consequences without raising a psychopath. That's a good question.
- [19:34]
Megan
Listen to Hasan Minhaj. Doesn't know from Lemonada Media, wherever you get your podcasts. So imagine you're sitting at a desk, and there's, I want to say, six computer monitors at every desk. One of the windows that we had to have open, we were required to have open was shot Spotter. So it would take up essentially, like an entire window. Looks like a map. And when shots would go off, you would see, like, a little flag pop up, or what they say was shots. You would see a little flag pop up, like, here, here, here, and we'd get, like, a ding.
- [20:14]
David Duchovny
A few years ago, Abby McArachi was a 911 operator in Denver, Colorado, a city that spent over $9 million on ShotSpotters since 2015. So she has firsthand experience with the technology.
- [20:27]
Megan
So we would see on a map shotspotters going off in these locations. But unless we were getting calls saying, like, someone's firing shots and we don't know where, we're not really using that information because historically, it was inaccurate. I think More than anything, ShotSpotter was there as a form of entertainment.
- [20:50]
David Duchovny
We'll dig into shotspotters accuracy rates in more detail later, but what you need to know now is this. Abby says she simply couldn't rely on Shotspotter to correctly identify gunfire happening in Denver. She says 911 calls from residents were way more reliable than the technology, something her superiors at the 911 call center knew. Well, in fact, Abby says that when she started her job training shotspotter barely came up.
- [21:15]
Megan
It was more just my trainer explaining to me, this is shotspotter. It's kind of like microphones everywhere in your neighborhood, and it tells us when a gunshot goes off, but it's wrong a lot.
- [21:26]
David Duchovny
So Abby didn't rely on ShotSpotter. Instead, it became confirmation of what she was already hearing when residents were calling.
- [21:33]
Megan
In, you know, construction. We're getting noise complaints about construction. We're like, oh, let's just peer over here and see if we're also getting ShotSpotter alerts in the same area. You know, so it was more just like, let's take a look at it when we're bored.
- [21:48]
David Duchovny
And looking at the map, Abby could see a clear pattern of where the ShotSpotter alerts were popping up.
- [21:55]
Megan
The police department in Denver is split up among districts. And downtown uptown area, which is higher crime, is known as District Six. And so ShotSpotter would cover that entire section. We have another district that was District 4, where the top half of the district was lower socioeconomic status communities, the bottom half was wealthier communities. So it's like older homes, a lot of white communities. And even though that's all one district, shotspotter really only covered the top half.
- [22:33]
David Duchovny
We heard these sentiments a lot during Our reporting on ShotSpotter. The sensors are usually deployed in marginalized communities, and the technology is unreliable at best. But before we unpack these valid criticisms, I wanted to hear from ShotSpotter, Inc. About how they see their technology working.
- [22:51]
Tom Shittam
Our overarching goal is to help improve policing, to make them more efficient, to make them more effective, to make them more equitable in the way they do their jobs.
- [23:04]
David Duchovny
Tom Shittam is vice president of analytics and forensic services at Shotspotter. He's got an extensive background in federal law enforcement. 27 years. My producer spoke to him over Zoom, and let me take a moment to set the scene for you here. His office looks like a gun show on the 4th of July. I mean, we're talking two frame flags, three police badges, and at least a dozen books on guns. After decades with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, should have made the move to ShotSpotter in June 2022.
- [23:35]
Tom Shittam
When I came here, a lot of my friends who had left government service and come into private practice said, you're going to see it's all about the bottom line. I do not see that here. This is a company that cares deeply about the work that it's doing. It's part of the reason that I'm so happy here doing what I do.
- [23:55]
David Duchovny
Even though he hasn't been with the company very long, Tom has the ShotSpotter origin story committed to memory. It goes like this. In the 90s, physicist Dr. Robert Schoen was tracking sound waves generated by earthquakes.
- [24:09]
Tom Shittam
And he realized that the science he was using to study earthquakes might be used to locate gunfire.
- [24:18]
David Duchovny
Robert was working in Menlo Park, a region near several fault lines and a leader in per capita murders. In the early 90s, when he was doing his research search, he'd go on to found ShotSpotter, Inc. And since ShotSpotter CEO Ralph Clark took the helm in 2010, the business pitch has gone like this.
- [24:36]
Tom Shittam
We deploy acoustic sensors in areas that our customers, typically police departments, identify using objective historical crime data as suffering from high levels of gunfire and homicides. We deploy acoustic sensors in those areas, microphones that listen for loud, impulsive sounds. Bangs, booms, and pops. Sounds like gunfire. But other sounds are impulsive, too. Jackhammers, helicopters, fireworks, an algorithmic filter then tries to sort out, filter out all of the sounds that are not gunfire. So if the algorithm recognizes something as a helicopter, it will dismiss it. But if the system believes that it is likely gunfire, it goes to our incident Review center, or irc.
- [25:37]
David Duchovny
This is really what sets shotspotter apart from other gunshot detection systems. Unlike other companies that rely solely on algorithms, ShotSpotter also employs a team of real people putting eyes and ears on the audio files.
- [25:51]
Tom Shittam
We believe that an element of human judgment is important in this process, and there are occasionally people that misunderstand that, that somehow believe that a human reviewer is overriding the system that said it wasn't gunfire so that we can fit some police narrative that simply is not true. We do not change what we have to fit a police narrative.
- [26:17]
David Duchovny
ShotSpotter says employees are ready to review sounds. If they're able to detect gunfire with 99% accuracy or higher, they will listen.
- [26:26]
Tom Shittam
To the audio with their ears from the different participating sensors. They will look at the visual waveform, looking for clues like the sharpness of the sound. They will look at the sensor participation. For instance, an explosion, like a firework, is omnidirectional, but gunfire is very directional. There are also audio clues. Fireworks tend to have some sizzle or maybe some whistle in the background. And they'll look for other situational clues, like if it's 3am, it's not likely to be construction.
- [27:06]
David Duchovny
You'd think that would slow everything down. But a big selling point is that the system works fast, with ShotSpotter contractually promising that alerts will go out within 60 seconds. That means police will get an alert that's been vetted by both a computer and a human being. In theory, law enforcement can then arrive on the scene to make an arrest or help someone who's been shot. Listening to Tom left me wondering if I was capable of identifying a gunshot. I mean, living in a city like LA where fireworks are popping year round, you just can't be too sure what you're hearing. So I wanted to challenge my ears to an admittedly unscientific listening test. And I asked Abby Magarachi to join me because she has first hand experience with ShotSpotter. She's the former 911 call taker you heard earlier. These days, she's a campaign and launch analyst at Campaign Zero, a police reform organization. And together we're going to see if we can tell the difference between gunshots and other loud sounds. Thanks for being here with me, Evie.
- [28:06]
Megan
Thanks for having me. I'm so glad to be Here.
- [28:08]
David Duchovny
So here's how this is going to work. My producer is going to play an assortment of sounds, and you and I are going to guess whether it's a gunshot or some other random sound. And this is going to be my first time hearing these sounds. Your first time hearing these sounds. And so we're both going to go in blind, and let's see how well we do. You ready?
- [28:26]
Megan
Let's do it.
- [28:27]
David Duchovny
All right, let's hear the first sound. All right. That sounded a lot like a gunshot to me.
- [28:36]
Megan
It did sound like a gunshot to me as well. I don't want to go off the bat and jump in and say gunshot with my first guess, but I'm going to have to do it. I'm going to have to go gunshot.
- [28:46]
David Duchovny
And the answer is gunshot. That was a gunshot. Okay, let's hear the next out. I'm gonna go not a gunshot on that one. That sounded a little bit like car backfire to me.
- [29:01]
Megan
I'm gonna go muffled gunshot.
- [29:02]
David Duchovny
But okay, okay. Muffled gunshot. I'm gonna call, I'm gonna go, I'm gonna guess car backfire. It was a car backfiring.
- [29:12]
Megan
Look at you. So far, you are the best candidate to become a shot spotter. This does not pan out.
- [29:20]
David Duchovny
All right, let's hear sound number three. Okay, that's definitely not a gunshot. Right? I don't, I don't think that's a gunshot.
- [29:28]
Megan
Maybe a toy gun.
- [29:30]
David Duchovny
Yeah, like it. To me, that sounded like someone tipped over a shopping cart. I could see that it was a nail gun, a type of gun. All. Not, not the type of gun we want to call the police for, but.
- [29:41]
Megan
Right. Not the one we were looking for.
- [29:44]
David Duchovny
Okay, so we got gunshot, car backfiring, nail gun. Let's hear what sound number four is now that we're getting a little better at this. That's not a gunshot.
- [30:01]
Megan
I'm gonna go not gunshot.
- [30:03]
David Duchovny
You're gonna go not gunshot.
- [30:04]
Megan
I'm going not gunshot.
- [30:06]
David Duchovny
I, I, I'm kind of leaning gunshot on that one. I, I'm going to go gunshot. Only because sounded like it had that same kind of compact impact that gunfire usually has. Kind of like what we heard in those first, like, back to back gunshots to me, at least. But, you know, I could be wrong.
- [30:32]
Megan
Right? It's so hard to tell.
- [30:35]
David Duchovny
Yeah, it's hard to say. It is really hard to tell. And turns out that was a gunshot. Okay, now that we've gone through four and, you know, we've knocked the rust off pretty well, let's, I think we have a final mystery sound. See, I'm tempted to say gunshot.
- [31:01]
Megan
I am, too, because that sounded to me a lot like the last one.
- [31:05]
David Duchovny
Yeah, that sounded like.
- [31:07]
Megan
That sounded almost exactly like the last one to me.
- [31:10]
David Duchovny
All right, I'm gonna. I'm gonna. I'm gonna say gunshot with you. Even though I'm kind of like my new. My having lived in New York for almost 10 years, hearing a lot of construction sites. That sounds very constructiony, but also like. It sounds like it could be a gunshot. It was a firework, not a gunshot.
- [31:30]
Megan
The idea that ShotSpotter can determine the difference between. Between, let's say, the gunshot or the firework, it's just. It's hard for me to believe. I mean, like I said, I am uniquely qualified to fill that position, and I would not be able to, like, tell the difference. Let me add, though, that I was not a terrible 911 operator. You know, like, I had high marks and a high quality, and so I had high performance there. But here I would not be able to do this because you don't have that visual aspect. You don't have that witness perspective of someone calling in and telling you that this is what is actually happening.
- [32:08]
David Duchovny
Yeah, and to me, like, that's. That's what's so scary about it, is because, like, we live in a society where children are killed for playing with toy guns, and black people are routinely gunned down by the police for no reason at all. And so it's really not a stretch to imagine that a kid setting off a bottle rocket could trigger a shot spotter alert. And police could come in hot because they're expecting to find an active shooter. And they get there, and they just find a kid messing around. That could be deadly. And it has been deadly because it's. Look at what happened to Tamir Rice. The kid had a toy gun, and a cop shows up, and just a couple seconds later, he's dead. And so what's to stop that from happening again? When you think about the reality of the situation that ShotSpotter creates, ShotSpotter has faced tons of criticism about their rate of false positives. That's a case where police get a shot spotter alert about a gunshot when it was actually a different sound.
- [33:00]
Ariel Federeau
So, for instance, fireworks, construction noises that get identified as gunfire.
- [33:06]
David Duchovny
That's Dennis Mares, a professor of criminal justice at Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville. He studies acoustic gunshot detection systems, and he says shotspotter can misclassify many loud sounds as gunfire.
- [33:19]
Ariel Federeau
If you fire a nail gun, for instance, that can Sound very similar to an actual gun. And then you know that that alert would go out to the police department, police department would respond, and they wouldn't find anything on the scene.
- [33:31]
David Duchovny
For instance, a recent MacArthur Justice center study shows that ShotSpotter generated over 40,000 dead end police deployments in Chicago in less than two years.
- [33:41]
Ariel Federeau
It's not just the cost of the system, which, you know, it's not cheap to get gunshot detection installed, but you're also having to dedicate more personnel to those calls and to the response and to the investigation. So there's a cost to having a gunshot detection system. And it's not just a cost you pay for the system. It's also the manpower and the resources you have to dedicate from a department.
- [34:04]
David Duchovny
Right. It ain't cheap to send officers out on so many calls. And like Dennis said, the system has a hefty price tag. We're Talking up to 90k per square mile per year. So say you live in a big city of 200 square miles and you want to cover half of it. With ShotSpotter, you're looking at 9 million bucks. That's your tax dollars at work because of those costs. You definitely want shotspotter to accomplish what it purports to do. That big goal of reducing gun violence. Dennis conducted research in a couple of cities to find out.
- [34:37]
Ariel Federeau
So our results in St. Louis show that there was really no impact on gun violence. There was not a noticeable reduction, at least not a statistical reduction in gun violence. In Cincinnati, however, we did find significant reductions in gun violence. So we found reductions in homicides and assaults combined that were committed with a gun. And the reduction was roughly 40 something percent. And so that's a substantial reduction in gun violence.
- [35:04]
David Duchovny
Dennis says the difference maker is how police use the tech.
- [35:07]
Ariel Federeau
So in St. Louis, the resources weren't there to do the investigative work. In Cincinnati, it was. And so I think that helps understand a little bit better when and how and why acoustic gunshot detection systems can or can't work. That is my sort of general perception of it. But, you know, we don't really have enough evidence from enough cities to really make sure that that's the case.
- [35:32]
David Duchovny
Marion says we need to do more work on this. We need to study how shotspotter is being used in various cities. Until then, we just don't know how effective it really is. What we do know is this. When officers investigate ShotSpotter alerts, they're likely to target black and brown communities. Even though ShotSpotter doesn't disclose the locations of their Microphones. It's no secret that they tend to put them in marginalized neighborhoods. Like Abby, the 911 operator, said before, this pattern is clear in the city of Denver. And she's not the only one who's noticed.
- [36:04]
Dennis Mares
I live in a pretty quiet, pretty white just across the cityline suburb. There are gunshot noises here all the time, but there are certainly not ShotSpotter microphones.
- [36:17]
David Duchovny
Ariel Federeau is a deputy public defender in Denver who says ShotSpotter deployment is, in her opinion, discriminatory.
- [36:24]
Dennis Mares
Firecrackers go off people's cars or motorcycles backfire. All of these other things happen, but there's no one sitting around listening in my neighborhood saying, it might be a gunshot. We better send the cops. Because of the racism inherent in the idea of that it's poor neighborhoods and neighborhoods that are primarily black people and other people of color that need to be policed.
- [36:47]
David Duchovny
This biased policing shows up again and again in the cases Ariel takes on.
- [36:52]
Dennis Mares
My work, because I'm a public defender, is with people who are poor. And often that goes hand in hand with people of color, especially because in cities in general, poor people of color are particularly policed. Right. And very systematically caught in nets of policing. So I see that by virtue of my work. But I also see that in shotspotter cases in particular, the police say, oh, we're going to put this just in the hot spots. Funny how police presence makes hotspots of crime, quote, unquote crime, because they're there.
- [37:29]
David Duchovny
More, Ariel says ShotSpotter alerts actually give police reasonable suspicion to stop civilians, even if there's no physical evidence of gunfire.
- [37:38]
Dennis Mares
I think it creates an enormous exception for the police to get up in people's lives in a way that they have no actual business being. I think it creates cases that actually have nothing to do with gun violence, which is what it purports to try and help with. And it gives the police one more excuse to harass poor people, to harass black people, to arrest other people of color, because it's this computer warning the cops the gun might have been shot. And the last thing we need in this country is another reason or excuse for the police to be harassing poor people, black people, and other people of color. And yet here we are endorsing one, paying for one.
- [38:23]
David Duchovny
Despite the very real danger of policing with ShotSpotter, Denver will continue paying for the tech through 2026, thanks to a recent contract extension. And Denver's not alone. In fact, there are a bunch of cities around the country considering ShotSpotter contracts for their police departments, places like Aurora, Colorado, Portland, Oregon, and Green Bay, Wisconsin. But Durham, North Carolina, City council member Jillian Johnson has a message for those cities.
- [38:49]
Reshma Saujani
I would say save your money. Save your money, y' all. Use it for something else. Use it for violence intervention. Use it for crisis care responders. Use it for public health. Use it for your schools. Use it for your neighborhoods.
- [39:02]
David Duchovny
More after the break. An Australian hiker travels to the American west to walk a wilderness trail. Wasn't afraid to be out on his own, but Eric Robinson vanished in the Hyuenta Mountains.
- [39:17]
Megan
I remember thinking, Eric, what were you.
- [39:19]
David Duchovny
What are you thinking, mate? I'm Dave Cawley. Join me on my podcast Uinta Triangle, where I travel the world. To answer the question what happened to Eric Robinson? Follow Uinta Triangle, that's U I n T a triangle on Apple podcasts or wherever you listen.
- [39:37]
Megan
I'm Meredith Goldstein, host of the Boston Globe's Love Letters podcast, which features real people from all over the world telling stories about their relationship lives. This season we're talking about how to change for the better.
- [39:50]
David Duchovny
I just remember thinking like, wow, this is what a healthy relationship looks and feels like. The reason why I'm getting emotional is.
- [39:57]
Trayvon Free
I didn't want to leave you.
- [39:59]
Dennis Mares
I never thought I would be this way again.
- [40:01]
Megan
Join us at Love Letters, wherever you get your podcasts.
- [40:09]
David Duchovny
We're back. Like so many cities in this country, Durham, North Carolina has a gun violence problem. It was another violent weekend in Durham. On Saturday alone, there were three shootings that left one man dead and two other people injured. The number of shootings are on the rise in Durham. In fact, more than 90% of homicides there have yet to be solved.
- [40:28]
Megan
People in the community, they're fed up and demanding that more be done to curb gun violence.
- [40:34]
Reshma Saujani
People are of course concerned about gun violence and Durham has a gun violence problem like most cities in America, unfortunately. And people are looking for any kind of solution. And when their politicians tell them that shotspotter is a solution, then they, you know, then they, they want to hold onto that.
- [40:56]
David Duchovny
Jillian Johnson is an at large city council member in Durham, a city that recently entered into a six month long pilot program with ShotSpotter. Jillian's been critical of ShotSpotter from the start. At a virtual city council meeting earlier this year, she cited the Chicago police killing of Adam Toledo as one of her concerns. It was a shot spotter alert that led police to the 13 year old. And Jillian has continued to voice her concerns ahead of the program's official kickoff this fall.
- [41:24]
Reshma Saujani
There is no information right now from the police department or the city administration broadly about how the shotspotter pilot success or failure will be evaluated. There are no metrics. There really aren't even any goals to evaluate success or failure by. I still feel a little bit in the dark about exactly what this is going to look like.
- [41:48]
David Duchovny
Even if Jillian doesn't have the complete picture of how the program will work, she has a pretty clear vision of the potential harms. Especially because the communities that are most likely to be targeted by ShotSpotter are also the most under resourced. Nearly a fifth of shootings this year happened in just one square mile of Durham, a majority black neighborhood where over half of the kids are living below the poverty line.
- [42:11]
Reshma Saujani
There are serious concerns about sending police into communities unnecessarily based on these false alerts. And I think there are really significant concerns around the placement of the sensors in communities that are already experiencing over policing. It's very easy to say, oh, you know, well, we put the sensor here and we found all of these gunshots going off all the time. So now we need more police in this community. And it feels like there's really the potential for a negative feedback loop there.
- [42:46]
David Duchovny
One part of this feedback loop that Gillian fears is this more shotspotter alerts will lead to a false demand for increases in police staffing and funding.
- [42:56]
Reshma Saujani
It's kind of a backdoor to increased policing by manufacturing demand for policing without really ever having to justify whether that demand is is actually there. Having police going out into communities when nothing is going on, there is the opportunity for people to come into contact with the carceral state in ways that could be harmful for them. And it wasn't necessary for police to be there at all. So I think that that's very concerning.
- [43:34]
David Duchovny
It is very concerning because we know it's already happening. It seems like ShotSpotter is disproportionately targeting black and brown communities. And it also seems like it's giving police an excuse to arrest people like Silvan, whose story you heard at the top of the episode. Remember, Silvan was arrested in Rochester, New York, where nearly 40% of the population is black. Stories like Sylvain's have made headlines as examples of policing taken too far. But despite these cautionary tales, Gillian gets why so many leaders across the country, including her own colleagues on city council, are drawn in by shotspotters promises.
- [44:11]
Reshma Saujani
You know, they will offer you a free trial, you know, a free pilot in order to try to hook cities. And politicians are under so much pressure to be seen to be doing something to solve problems, even when those problems are so beyond the scope of what our local governments really have the power and the capacity and the funding to do. Gun violence is a national problem. It is a problem in every large city in America and lots of small cities in America. And it's natural for people to look to their local government for solutions. And politicians are under a lot of pressure to provide those solutions. But we can't just sell people snake oil. We can't promise them solutions to problems when those solutions aren't real. And we have to be honest about the limitations of our power, that if the state of North Carolina refuses to allow our city council to regulate guns in Durham, that that is going to be a major barrier to reducing and ending gun violence in Durham.
- [45:25]
David Duchovny
So let's get real. ShotSpotter only works if you assume we're living in a world where police are racially unbiased, where microphones stop bullets, and where reactionary measures are more effective than upstream violence intervention. I don't live in that world, and I don't think it's going to be a reality for most of us anytime soon. Because in reality, police are crime responders, not crime preventers. We have no evidence that ShotSpotter actually reduces crime. No other forensic tool has gone through such little vetting. It's truly wild that a private sector company said it works. Trust us. And hundreds of police departments, city officials, prosecutors and judges took it as gospel and currently use it to incarcerate people. We can't let ourselves live in a society where that's okay. If you want to take action against Shotspotter, you can contact your local elected official at Cancelshotspotter.com to demand investments in proven solutions against gun violence, not private corporations. In our next episode. How did the term with no scientific validity start showing up on death certificates all over the country? Baby side delirium was something that routinely happened in the world. It would be something that would occur in all types of situations, not just when the police are around. So that should also raise our suspicions. It's a tale of race science, bad expert testimony and Taser buying. A particular book for every medical examiner in the the country. And it's in your feed right now. Go listen. The Untold Story is a Lemonada Media original presented by Campaign Zero. This episode is produced by Hannah Boomershein with production help from Nicole Gottelin and Priscilla Alaby. Our supervising producer is Kristin Lepore. Our production intern is Jayla Everett. Music, sound design and mixing by Hannis Brown engineering for from Andrea, Kristen's daughter. Our executive producers are Jessica Cordova Kramer, Stephanie Whittles Wax, DeRay McKesson, and Jay Ellis. For bonus content from the Untold Story, subscribe to Lemonada Premium on Apple Podcasts. I'm Trayvon Free. You can find me at Trayvon on Instagram and Twitter. And thank you for listening. Peace. Parents.
- [48:08]
Reshma Saujani
We know the child care crisis is.
- [48:10]
David Duchovny
Not just another headline. It's a daily struggle playing out in millions of homes across this country. Gloria I'm Gloria Rivera, and this is no One Is Coming to Save Us. This season, we're demanding a child care system that actually works for kids, parents and educators.
- [48:27]
Reshma Saujani
We mean free birth to five full day nearby, easy to apply.
- [48:33]
David Duchovny
No one is coming to Save Us Season 5 from Lemonada Media. Out now.
- [48:44]
Megan
Tired of the same old political shouting matches and talking points? Looking for thoughtful conversations that go beyond the headlines and help you understand issues that matter?
- [48:53]
Reshma Saujani
I'm Sarah. And I'm Beth.
- [48:55]
Megan
Together we host Pantsuit Politics, a podcast where we bring grace, nuance and perspective to the news because democracy deserves more than hot takes. Join us as we approach politics and current events with curiosity, empathy, and a.
- [49:07]
David Duchovny
Community commitment to understanding the bigger picture.
- [49:08]
Megan
If you want to stay informed without the anxiety, we're the show for you. New episodes drop on Tuesdays and Fridays. Subscribe to Pantsuit Politics wherever you get your podcasts.