Here Are the Secret Locations of ShotSpotter Gunfire Sensors

 Here Are the Secret Locations of ShotSpotter Gunfire Sensors

The locations of microphones used to detect gunshots have been kept hidden from police and the public. A WIRED analysis of leaked coordinates confirms arguments critics have made against the technology.

By Dhruv Mehrotra and Joey Scott

The gunshot-detection system ShotSpotter has for years drawn criticism from activists and academics who believe the company behind the system, SoundThinking, places its microphone sensors primarily in low-income communities of color. Now, a WIRED analysis of data leaked from the company reveals the secret locations of ShotSpotter sensors around the globe and the US communities most directly impacted by the surveillance.

The Walmart Effect

 The Walmart Effect

New research suggests that the company makes the communities it operates in poorer—even taking into account its famous low prices.

By Rogé Karma

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The most direct upshot of the new research is that Walmart isn’t the bargain for American communities that it appears to be. (When I reached out to Furman about the new research, he said he wasn’t sure what to make of it and suggested I talk with labor economists.) More broadly, the findings call into question the legal and conceptual shift that allowed Walmart and other behemoths to get so huge in the first place. In the late 1970s, antitrust regulators and courts adopted the so-called consumer-welfare standard, which held that the proper benchmark of whether a company had gotten too big or whether a merger would undermine competition was if it would raise consumer prices or reduce sellers’ output. In other words, the purpose of competition law was redefined as the most stuff possible, as cheaply as possible. But as the new Walmart research suggests, that formula does not always guarantee the maximum welfare for the American consumer.

The outgoing Biden administration, with its focus on reviving antitrust, recognized this. Its most recent enforcement guidelines, for example, direct the government to take into account a merger’s effect on workers, not just consumers, and the antitrust agencies have included such claims in multiple lawsuits. The question is whether the incoming Trump administration, which has sent mixed messages on corporate consolidation, will follow the same path.

Recent history shows the political danger in threatening low consumer prices. The public’s reaction to the inflation of the past few years suggests that many Americans would rather be slightly poorer but have price stability than be richer but with more inflation. That will tempt policy makers to prioritize low prices above all else and embrace the companies that offer them. But if Walmart’s example reveals anything, it is that, in the long term, low prices can have costs of their own.

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Todays Thought

If you pray for rain long enough, it eventually does fall. If you pray for floodwaters to abate, they eventually do. The same happens in the absence of prayers. 

-Steve Allen, television host, musician, actor, comedian, and writer (26 Dec 1921-2000)

Todays Thought

The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs, and explosions, and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices, to be found only in the minds of men. For the record, prejudices can kill and suspicion can destroy; and a thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all of its own for the children, and the children yet unborn. 

-Rod Serling, writer of the science fiction TV series "The Twilight Zone" (25 Dec 1924-1975)