In the Chicago lawsuit filed by Michael Williams, a Chicago resident who served 9 months in jail before charges against him were dismissed, gunshot detection manufacturer Shotspotter released a 19-page operational document to the plaintiffs. The document was the only response made available for a discovery request for all guidelines, manuals and scientific materials.

The document, which you can read in its entirety below, sets out criteria for the company’s technicians to overrule machine judgments about what is, and is not, gunfire. According to the company’s sworn testimony in 2021, such reversals occur approximately 10% of time.

Among the factors to be considered are: a sideways Xmas tree shape to the sound waves, 100% certainty in the mind of the human reviewer that gunshots did or did not occur, proximate incidents, and the location and time when the incident occurred. Human reviewers are given a brief interval of a minute to overrule the machine’s judgment.

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Portland privacy activists have reported that Oakland Police Captain Trevelyon Jones, the head of OPD’s Shotspotter Division, has been appearing remotely at community meetings in Portland, Oregon at the request of gunshot detection software manufacturer Shotspotter, to hawk their product.

Jones, a city of Oakland employee, appears to be on city time during these appearances, (at least two), in which Shotspotter is trying to gin up community support for a municipal contract. In an earlier appearance, people present at the meeting reported that Lieutenant Jones said he had to depart early from the meeting due to police business.

Why is a high-level OPD lieutenant, who according to Transparent California collected over $60,000 in overtime in 2021 and total compensation of more than $433,000 from the City moonlighting as a Shotspotter sales agent?

Oakland Privacy filed an ethics complaint with the Oakland Public Ethics Commission on 12/21/22. See a copy of the complaint below.

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