Really talking down to their audience - the only "Siri" part of the tool is that it's using microphones to trigger an action. It's ShotSpotter for sideshows.
ShotSpotter has been a lot more politically controversial than Siri in a law enforcement context, so there is probably a very conscious reason besides condescension for the choice of description.
The article is pretty fluffy towards Flock (they mention the lawsuit but only talk to Flock's spokesperson), so it's probably intentional to associate it with something with less baggage.
This (social media harvesting) is really the only option.
They can’t be reactive and produce the required response to address the core issues, because they need lots of cops. Drones help, but even with drones predicting time/location will lead to a better outcome with regard to tracking than being reactive will.
I think the juxtaposition between this and Flock's (and other's) license-plate reader products is interesting.
My gut reaction to a network of cameras that can track people's movement whether or not there's any cause to believe they've done something wrong is ... that's creepy and we should put laws in place to stop it.
But with a microphone network that's looking for the actual evidence of the crime itself (noises from a sideshow), and isn't in general capturing identifying info, this seems much more reasonable, even if it is broad surveillance. But a key question is, if these mics are rolled out initially to listen for gunshots, and can be updated to listen for side-shows, then what else will they be used for in the future?
ShotSpotter's microphones have already been used to record conversations (they claim this is unintentional). To be fair to them, these cases were arguments that accompanied shootings, but it shows the potential for abuse.
Amusingly/depressingly (from Wikipedia):
> Remarking on these privacy concerns, in 2015 then-NYPD commissioner William Bratton said "the advocates have to get a life." Bratton had been on ShotSpotter's Board of Directors before then, and rejoined it in 2017.
But I have seen reporting that it takes SF and Oakland cops extremely long to respond to complaints about a side-show. Presumably before you actually prosecute people you need cops to actually get there, arrest people, etc while the event is still happening.
But also, even if they don't prosecute people but hold onto their cars for a month or two and then the DA decides before trial oops this isn't actually a priority, and then the police slow-walk returning the vehicles, and (as I've heard is the case) you have to retrieve it from an inconvenient location within a specific time window or else they issue a fine, and possibly it's not actually in the same condition when it's returned as when it was taken but that's hard to demonstrate ... even if no one is prosecuted, they could still have a crappy enough time to be discouraged from doing it continuously.
Cops responding to sideshow events simply means they stand by with their lights flashing until it ends and then ask everyone to go home. How quickly they reach the scene is irrelevant.
Sideshow participants often use stolen cars - which is, you know, another reason to stop sideshow: fewer reasons to steal a car, but... - impounding cars won't necessarily be a deterrent.
That apart, I have a principled objection to "administrative punishment". It catches the wicked and (many more) un-wicked alike. We should aspire to a justice system which works fairly and efficiently.
Despite being in the car scene for a long time, I've never heard the term "sideshows" (in this context) before. Must be a San Fransisco term, maybe?
It's too bad people do this stuff illegally, rather than going to the track. Drag strips near me are like $20 for the whole night, with as many runs down the strip as your car can handle. The full tracks are pretty cheap as well, and have open race days as least weekly throughout the summer.
People in sideshows aren't in the car scene. They're people being idiots in cars. Lots of them in their parents cars. You rarely see any real enthusiast cars at these events. Just mom's stock BMW or Dad's charger. They don't want to actually go drag racing or do anything legally, they just want to look cool for Instagram.
Yep, I had the wrong perspective and have been enlightened! More of a counter-culture, party, etc. thing. I was definitely coming at it from a car enthusiasts perspective.
Yep. They could do the same shit in empty parking lots, but they stop up traffic at the Bay Bridge and other intersections where people are trying to drive through instead.
I only gave a couple examples (drag and track racing) but the tracks near me do drift days, autocross days, etc. Two tracks near me even haul in dirt in the late season for rallycross. The local college opens up their back parking lot in the summer as a freestyle drift pad.
I'm positive that if the attendees joy of these events is car-related (as opposed to enjoying the illegality of it), a track near them can give them the same (or better) feeling.
The tracks have noise and pollution restrictions, track days aren’t available year-round, and many/most events require the vehicle to have passed a safety inspection. These severely limit the number of personal vehicles that qualify for doing these activities safely, and as there’s no other unsafe or lower-cost method for doing these things, they end up on the streets.
This is also a side effect of cuts to street traffic motorcycle police staffing, with limited resources allocated elsewhere and funding starved due to seized-up local politics and police mistreatment of citizens. People sometimes now just disregard red lights in the Bay Area as the chances of a traffic cop seeing them do so are so close to zero as to make it a safe bet.
I generally loathe the idea of increasing policing but it’s either that or automated camera enforcement with plate readers, since we can’t trust ourselves to be sensible about it.
I’ve been to many many different tracks, and none had a noise or pollution restriction. My race cars exhaust dumps straight out of the hood and has 0 pollution control. It’s loud. Until I was running sub-11 second quarters, I never had to produce anything safety related.
But as others have pointed out to me, it seems these may be more of a counter-culture/party type thing than a purely car thing. I was looking at it from the wrong perspective.
At all major Bay Area raceways a noise limit is published, and exhaust limits are either stated or implied (i.e. limiting to 90dB requires a muffler).
Sonoma Raceways - 103dB at 50ft.
Thunderhill Raceways - 103dB, mufflers required.
Laguna Seca - 90dB, with rare exceptions.
Antioch - 95dB at 100ft.
Ocean Speedway - 90dB at 100ft.
Petaluma Speedway - 95dB at 100ft, mufflers required.
Stockton 99 Speedway - 95dB, "exhaust must be turned down or out".
Measurement techniques vary; Laguna Seca is especially hostile to noise to the point that some stock exhaust systems do not comply from factory (i.e. Subaru WRX STi); Stockton 99 buries the limit deep in the fine print viewed by racers; Nascar is difficult to host as their cars can reach 130dB; enforcement may be more or less strict; it's possible there are smaller local tracks I don't personally know about that aren't listed here (I'm more familiar with North than East or South, for example).
Thanks for the extra information! I didn't realize it was that strict in that area. I stand corrected.
I actually went and re-read the rules for the three tracks I most commonly go to (just in case I was mistaken/misremembering), however there are no noise provisions at all.
>some stock exhaust systems do not comply from factory (i.e. Subaru WRX STi);
Sure thing. I would expect this is not the case nationwide :)
There's some factory Porsche setups that also cross the 90dB threshold. You could look up automated noise enforcement trials in NYC for some really upset people who found out that their factory-stock cars are illegally loud. I haven't seen anything serious stem from that yet, but I personally cannot wait for enforcement here at home just to put a stop to all the racing exhausts on the streets around here!
Your car would get kicked out of a lot of races. Even the 24 Hours of Lemons has noise limits. Most sanctioning bodies do because they don't want to get noise complaints from neighbors who moved in after the track opened.
It is a flash-mob street party as much or more than it is a car thing. I can't imagine that many of the people who show up would care about anything happening at a track enough to bother driving an hour out of the city for it.
A good example is when I go to the late night drags at Portland International Raceway. It costs like $70 to get an NHRA license for a year then each event is like $30. Then you can run down the drag strip over and over and over.
Meanwhile less than a few miles away on Marine Drive, there are weekly street races happening at the same time. These guys spend thousands of dollars on their cars, but won't spend $100 to get actual times, and have actual timing lights, and avoid any worry about killing someone or getting arrested.
Part of me thinks that the city should help fund a free or discount drag race night just to get some of these guys interested and off the streets. It can be intimidating to bring your car to the track the first time. But I took my old car that ran 18s and had a blast! And I've done it a ton since then. You learn a lot being around other drag racers who are really tuning cars to get the most out of it.
In Bay Area of all places we should really be demanding that the software running on these devices are open-sourced so we can have the confidence that this isn't used to monitor/surveil people in general
Even China's Supreme People's Court in 2021 banned the public use of facial recognition technology
> China's Supreme People's Court in 2021 banned the public use of facial recognition technology
Did they, or only non-government use? I'd presume in China, the government doesn't need to attempt to abuse the third-party doctrine, they can do all the surveillance themselves.
Couldn’t this also be handled by hiring some more cops and having them patrol at times and locations where these things happen? I don’t feel like the creeping surveillance tech we are seeing is better at all than just hiring some more humans.
This is obviously less bad than gunshot detectors. The risk of those is they bring not just some police response, but police with violence at top-of-mind. Very dangerous at the best of times; moreso when they're wrong. This doesn't seem like it poses the same risk. I don't care for surveillance but I understand why it's being implemented considering the disgracefully bad results of policing and criminal justice in SF.
SFPD is currently understaffed. I don’t keep up with local politics in other Bay Area cities anymore but my understanding is it’s the same pretty much across the region and sideshows were originally more of an Oakland/East Bay thing that spread out from there.
Oakland police is understaffed but it's not for lack of funding - starting salary is over $100K. Due to the lack of officers and high demands, average officer compensation is $250K and some officers get over $600K due to overtime.
I've always wondered if playing back recordings at loud volumes could full these things... do a flyby with a drone that has a big enough speaker on it every 15 minutes. How sophisticated is their audio analysis?
You probably don't even need a recording for a car, if it's like ShotSpotter, a lot of common noises that will trigger them. ShotSpotter has a specific "firework suppression mode" turned on for holidays and still 1 in 10 alerts were from fireworks: https://data.aclum.org/2024/04/08/boston-shotspotter/
Yeah this whole effort is just more money wasted on security theater and this whole discussion thread is filled with disgruntled tech workers who drive into the city rather than take Bart and are so clearly salty about the inconvenience of people being people. To be honest I would have thought sideshows would’ve gone out of style by now I’m sort of impressed it’s this much of a problem lol
A sideshow is a very specific sound that lasts much longer than a gunshot.
In the summer with windows open, I can hear them from miles away and they last for 30-40 minutes sometimes. On Friday and Saturday the usual time is around 1-3am, too. It’s hard for me to believe the cops don’t know about them in time to do something. They probably don’t have enough officers on duty at this time of night.
The mics for shot spotter are mounted high up. The word on the street is if you shoot the ground in an area confined from sound on the sides but not above your neighbors won't be too accosted but the police will probably get an alert.
People who are morally adjacent to the kind of people bringing stolen cars to sideshows do this because "fuck the police" or something along those lines and they only care about their neighbors so far as they don't want their neighbors thinking there's a shootout going on and manually calling it in.
I love cars. I love good hacks. I love cars that have been cleverly hacked, and I'd happily pay to attend a side show that was hosted in a blocked off area reserved for it.
But when a pack of sociopaths decides to block the Bay Bridge, my desire to throw them and their cars off into the bay is tempered only by my unwillingness to pollute the water.
Really talking down to their audience - the only "Siri" part of the tool is that it's using microphones to trigger an action. It's ShotSpotter for sideshows.
ShotSpotter has been a lot more politically controversial than Siri in a law enforcement context, so there is probably a very conscious reason besides condescension for the choice of description.
The article is pretty fluffy towards Flock (they mention the lawsuit but only talk to Flock's spokesperson), so it's probably intentional to associate it with something with less baggage.
I don't really know why they need this when a lot of these sideshows are advertised on social media in advance.
This (social media harvesting) is really the only option.
They can’t be reactive and produce the required response to address the core issues, because they need lots of cops. Drones help, but even with drones predicting time/location will lead to a better outcome with regard to tracking than being reactive will.
I think the juxtaposition between this and Flock's (and other's) license-plate reader products is interesting.
My gut reaction to a network of cameras that can track people's movement whether or not there's any cause to believe they've done something wrong is ... that's creepy and we should put laws in place to stop it.
But with a microphone network that's looking for the actual evidence of the crime itself (noises from a sideshow), and isn't in general capturing identifying info, this seems much more reasonable, even if it is broad surveillance. But a key question is, if these mics are rolled out initially to listen for gunshots, and can be updated to listen for side-shows, then what else will they be used for in the future?
ShotSpotter's microphones have already been used to record conversations (they claim this is unintentional). To be fair to them, these cases were arguments that accompanied shootings, but it shows the potential for abuse.
Amusingly/depressingly (from Wikipedia):
> Remarking on these privacy concerns, in 2015 then-NYPD commissioner William Bratton said "the advocates have to get a life." Bratton had been on ShotSpotter's Board of Directors before then, and rejoined it in 2017.
If you want to actually solve the problem, start prosecuting the people who are causing it. Everything else is performative and pointless.
But I have seen reporting that it takes SF and Oakland cops extremely long to respond to complaints about a side-show. Presumably before you actually prosecute people you need cops to actually get there, arrest people, etc while the event is still happening.
But also, even if they don't prosecute people but hold onto their cars for a month or two and then the DA decides before trial oops this isn't actually a priority, and then the police slow-walk returning the vehicles, and (as I've heard is the case) you have to retrieve it from an inconvenient location within a specific time window or else they issue a fine, and possibly it's not actually in the same condition when it's returned as when it was taken but that's hard to demonstrate ... even if no one is prosecuted, they could still have a crappy enough time to be discouraged from doing it continuously.
Cops responding to sideshow events simply means they stand by with their lights flashing until it ends and then ask everyone to go home. How quickly they reach the scene is irrelevant.
Start impounding cars and it’ll end real quick.
If we want a certain behavior to end we have to raise the cost until it does.
Sideshow participants often use stolen cars - which is, you know, another reason to stop sideshow: fewer reasons to steal a car, but... - impounding cars won't necessarily be a deterrent.
That apart, I have a principled objection to "administrative punishment". It catches the wicked and (many more) un-wicked alike. We should aspire to a justice system which works fairly and efficiently.
Shotspotter for tire screeches? Because Shotspotter works so well for shots: https://www.macarthurjustice.org/blog2/shotspotter-is-a-fail...
Despite being in the car scene for a long time, I've never heard the term "sideshows" (in this context) before. Must be a San Fransisco term, maybe?
It's too bad people do this stuff illegally, rather than going to the track. Drag strips near me are like $20 for the whole night, with as many runs down the strip as your car can handle. The full tracks are pretty cheap as well, and have open race days as least weekly throughout the summer.
People in sideshows aren't in the car scene. They're people being idiots in cars. Lots of them in their parents cars. You rarely see any real enthusiast cars at these events. Just mom's stock BMW or Dad's charger. They don't want to actually go drag racing or do anything legally, they just want to look cool for Instagram.
Yep, I had the wrong perspective and have been enlightened! More of a counter-culture, party, etc. thing. I was definitely coming at it from a car enthusiasts perspective.
It originated in Oakland years ago and caught on bigtime in LA and SF after the pandemic.
The track doesn't have cross traffic that has to stop and wait.
>The track doesn't have cross traffic that has to stop and wait.
Is that.. something the people participating want?
I kind of figured it was about doing cool shit with your car, but is it more about pissing other people off?
You could provide a free place for sideshows, and it probably would get a crowd, but there would still be illegal sideshows.
Being illicit & counter-culture is part of the draw.
Yep. They could do the same shit in empty parking lots, but they stop up traffic at the Bay Bridge and other intersections where people are trying to drive through instead.
Yes. It's exciting and makes them feel powerful.
Which makes sense because they might actually be people who otherwise feel powerless and deserve empathy like anyone else
Sideshows are not racing. They are typically shutting down an intersection and drifting in circles.
I only gave a couple examples (drag and track racing) but the tracks near me do drift days, autocross days, etc. Two tracks near me even haul in dirt in the late season for rallycross. The local college opens up their back parking lot in the summer as a freestyle drift pad.
I'm positive that if the attendees joy of these events is car-related (as opposed to enjoying the illegality of it), a track near them can give them the same (or better) feeling.
The tracks have noise and pollution restrictions, track days aren’t available year-round, and many/most events require the vehicle to have passed a safety inspection. These severely limit the number of personal vehicles that qualify for doing these activities safely, and as there’s no other unsafe or lower-cost method for doing these things, they end up on the streets.
This is also a side effect of cuts to street traffic motorcycle police staffing, with limited resources allocated elsewhere and funding starved due to seized-up local politics and police mistreatment of citizens. People sometimes now just disregard red lights in the Bay Area as the chances of a traffic cop seeing them do so are so close to zero as to make it a safe bet.
I generally loathe the idea of increasing policing but it’s either that or automated camera enforcement with plate readers, since we can’t trust ourselves to be sensible about it.
I’ve been to many many different tracks, and none had a noise or pollution restriction. My race cars exhaust dumps straight out of the hood and has 0 pollution control. It’s loud. Until I was running sub-11 second quarters, I never had to produce anything safety related.
But as others have pointed out to me, it seems these may be more of a counter-culture/party type thing than a purely car thing. I was looking at it from the wrong perspective.
At all major Bay Area raceways a noise limit is published, and exhaust limits are either stated or implied (i.e. limiting to 90dB requires a muffler).
Sonoma Raceways - 103dB at 50ft.
Thunderhill Raceways - 103dB, mufflers required.
Laguna Seca - 90dB, with rare exceptions.
Antioch - 95dB at 100ft.
Ocean Speedway - 90dB at 100ft.
Petaluma Speedway - 95dB at 100ft, mufflers required.
Stockton 99 Speedway - 95dB, "exhaust must be turned down or out".
Measurement techniques vary; Laguna Seca is especially hostile to noise to the point that some stock exhaust systems do not comply from factory (i.e. Subaru WRX STi); Stockton 99 buries the limit deep in the fine print viewed by racers; Nascar is difficult to host as their cars can reach 130dB; enforcement may be more or less strict; it's possible there are smaller local tracks I don't personally know about that aren't listed here (I'm more familiar with North than East or South, for example).
Thanks for the extra information! I didn't realize it was that strict in that area. I stand corrected.
I actually went and re-read the rules for the three tracks I most commonly go to (just in case I was mistaken/misremembering), however there are no noise provisions at all.
>some stock exhaust systems do not comply from factory (i.e. Subaru WRX STi);
Yikes! They definitely wouldn't like my WRX STI.
Sure thing. I would expect this is not the case nationwide :)
There's some factory Porsche setups that also cross the 90dB threshold. You could look up automated noise enforcement trials in NYC for some really upset people who found out that their factory-stock cars are illegally loud. I haven't seen anything serious stem from that yet, but I personally cannot wait for enforcement here at home just to put a stop to all the racing exhausts on the streets around here!
Drag racing is a lot less strict on noise.
Your car would get kicked out of a lot of races. Even the 24 Hours of Lemons has noise limits. Most sanctioning bodies do because they don't want to get noise complaints from neighbors who moved in after the track opened.
Lemons also has extremely specific safety requirements; they're a best in category example of how to do relatively cheap safety.
https://24hoursoflemons.com/safety-checklist/
It is a flash-mob street party as much or more than it is a car thing. I can't imagine that many of the people who show up would care about anything happening at a track enough to bother driving an hour out of the city for it.
A good example is when I go to the late night drags at Portland International Raceway. It costs like $70 to get an NHRA license for a year then each event is like $30. Then you can run down the drag strip over and over and over.
Meanwhile less than a few miles away on Marine Drive, there are weekly street races happening at the same time. These guys spend thousands of dollars on their cars, but won't spend $100 to get actual times, and have actual timing lights, and avoid any worry about killing someone or getting arrested.
Part of me thinks that the city should help fund a free or discount drag race night just to get some of these guys interested and off the streets. It can be intimidating to bring your car to the track the first time. But I took my old car that ran 18s and had a blast! And I've done it a ton since then. You learn a lot being around other drag racers who are really tuning cars to get the most out of it.
> Siri-type tool
So a voice assistant that they can use to set kitchen timers?
In Bay Area of all places we should really be demanding that the software running on these devices are open-sourced so we can have the confidence that this isn't used to monitor/surveil people in general
Even China's Supreme People's Court in 2021 banned the public use of facial recognition technology
> China's Supreme People's Court in 2021 banned the public use of facial recognition technology
Did they, or only non-government use? I'd presume in China, the government doesn't need to attempt to abuse the third-party doctrine, they can do all the surveillance themselves.
Couldn’t this also be handled by hiring some more cops and having them patrol at times and locations where these things happen? I don’t feel like the creeping surveillance tech we are seeing is better at all than just hiring some more humans.
Caltrans already has cameras on the Bay Bridge anyone can look at: https://cwwp2.dot.ca.gov/vm/iframemap.htm
They could probably just have someone watch those for cars drifting in circles. Obviously this isn't perfect, but there's definitely other solutions.
This is obviously less bad than gunshot detectors. The risk of those is they bring not just some police response, but police with violence at top-of-mind. Very dangerous at the best of times; moreso when they're wrong. This doesn't seem like it poses the same risk. I don't care for surveillance but I understand why it's being implemented considering the disgracefully bad results of policing and criminal justice in SF.
SFPD is currently understaffed. I don’t keep up with local politics in other Bay Area cities anymore but my understanding is it’s the same pretty much across the region and sideshows were originally more of an Oakland/East Bay thing that spread out from there.
Oakland police is understaffed but it's not for lack of funding - starting salary is over $100K. Due to the lack of officers and high demands, average officer compensation is $250K and some officers get over $600K due to overtime.
I've always wondered if playing back recordings at loud volumes could full these things... do a flyby with a drone that has a big enough speaker on it every 15 minutes. How sophisticated is their audio analysis?
You probably don't even need a recording for a car, if it's like ShotSpotter, a lot of common noises that will trigger them. ShotSpotter has a specific "firework suppression mode" turned on for holidays and still 1 in 10 alerts were from fireworks: https://data.aclum.org/2024/04/08/boston-shotspotter/
Yeah this whole effort is just more money wasted on security theater and this whole discussion thread is filled with disgruntled tech workers who drive into the city rather than take Bart and are so clearly salty about the inconvenience of people being people. To be honest I would have thought sideshows would’ve gone out of style by now I’m sort of impressed it’s this much of a problem lol
A sideshow is a very specific sound that lasts much longer than a gunshot.
In the summer with windows open, I can hear them from miles away and they last for 30-40 minutes sometimes. On Friday and Saturday the usual time is around 1-3am, too. It’s hard for me to believe the cops don’t know about them in time to do something. They probably don’t have enough officers on duty at this time of night.
The mics for shot spotter are mounted high up. The word on the street is if you shoot the ground in an area confined from sound on the sides but not above your neighbors won't be too accosted but the police will probably get an alert.
I assume this tech is similarly half baked.
For what purpose do people on the street want to shoot into the ground to elicit a police response while not unduly inconveniencing the neighbors?
Is this a way to jump the queue on the emergency service phone line or something?
People who are morally adjacent to the kind of people bringing stolen cars to sideshows do this because "fuck the police" or something along those lines and they only care about their neighbors so far as they don't want their neighbors thinking there's a shootout going on and manually calling it in.
You know you’re not allowed to shoot the ground in a city right?
Surveillance tech is the worst and I hope this fails miserably.
There should be an outreach program that goes to the community and works with the people who perform sideshows to make them less disruptive.
Narc tech won’t fix the problem it just wastes money
I love cars. I love good hacks. I love cars that have been cleverly hacked, and I'd happily pay to attend a side show that was hosted in a blocked off area reserved for it.
But when a pack of sociopaths decides to block the Bay Bridge, my desire to throw them and their cars off into the bay is tempered only by my unwillingness to pollute the water.