Unreliable ShotSpotter Audio Convicted Black Rochester Man of Shooting Police

April 1, 2016

ShotSpotter's questionable audio, serving as scientific evidence, led to a wrongful conviction of a Black man accused of attempting to shoot Rochester's city police. The conviction was later overturned by a county judge, highlighting the critical role of trustworthy AI in crime detection.

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Suggested mapping from embedding similarity (not a formal assessment). Browse all TAIM controls

MEASURE 2.6 — similarity 0.637, rank 1. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MAP 4.1 — similarity 0.621, rank 2. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MEASURE 2.5 — similarity 0.619, rank 3. TAIM detail and related incidents →

Alleged deployer: rochester-police-department
Alleged developer: shotspotter
Alleged harmed parties: silvon-simmons

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/429

Data source

Incident data is from the AI Incident Database (AIID).

When citing the database as a whole, please use:

McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-21). Virtual Conference.

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