Like There Was Ever Any Chance This Kind of Thing Wouldn't Happen ...

"ShotSpotter" was supposed to make it easier to solve crimes. Instead, it's being used to manufacture fake evidence. Via Motherboard:

On May 31 last year, 25-year-old Safarain Herring was shot in the head and dropped off at St. Bernard Hospital in Chicago by a man named Michael Williams. He died two days later. Chicago police eventually arrested the 64-year-old Williams .... A key piece of evidence in the case is video surveillance footage showing Williams’ car stopped on the 6300 block of South Stony Island Avenue at 11:46 p.m. -- the time and location where police say they know Herring was shot. How did they know that’s where the shooting happened? Police said ShotSpotter, a surveillance system that uses hidden microphone sensors to detect the sound and location of gunshots, generated an alert for that time and place.

But ShotSpotter actually "spotted" the "shot" as a firework, and placed it a mile away from the location in question. A ShotSpotter analyst manually reclassified it as a gunshot.

Then, months later, another analyst changed the location to match the location where Williams was seen on camera.

Naturally, Williams's attorney challenged the "evidence." And rather than let a judge examine it, the prosecutor withdrew it.

And that's apparently not unusual. Back to Motherboard:

Motherboard’s review of court documents from the Williams case and other trials in Chicago and New York State, including testimony from ShotSpotter’s favored expert witness, suggests that the company’s analysts frequently modify alerts at the request of police departments -- some of which appear to be grasping for evidence that supports their narrative of events.

And whenever prosecutors are challenged, they withdraw the supposed evidence rather than let ShotSpotter's technology and procedures be examined.

ShotSpotter's end users -- police and prosecutors -- want "evidence" that gets convictions. And if the unmodified data doesn't work for that, ShotSpotter apparently takes a "customer is always right" attitude toward modifying it. Go figure.