The New York police department (NYPD) announced it will begin using drones to respond to reports of robberies and alerts from a city-wide gunshot detection system. The drones will fly to the scene, piloted by an NYPD officer, and record video and audio that will be sent to police officers' smartphones in real time, according to a press release. The integration of these two surveillance technologies is part of a broader "Drone as First Responder" program that has existed since 2018. The New York city mayor, Eric Adams, and the city's interim police commissioner, Tom Donlan, announced the expansion on Wednesday afternoon. It will be initially rolled out to five precincts in Brooklyn, the Bronx and Manhattan.

The United States Justice Department (DOJ) is being asked to investigate whether a gunshot-detection system widely in use across the US is being selectively deployed to justify the over-policing of mainly Black neighborhoods, as critics of the technology claim. Attorneys for the nonprofit Electronic Privacy Information Center--a leading US-based civil liberties group--argue that "substantial evidence" suggests American cities are disproportionately deploying an acoustic tool known as ShotSpotter in majority-minority neighborhoods. Citing past studies, EPIC alleges that data derived from these sensors has encouraged some police departments to spend more and more time patrolling areas where the fewest number of white residents live--an allegation disputed by SoundThinking, the system's manufacturer. In a letter today to Merrick Garland, the US attorney general, attorneys for EPIC call for an investigation into whether cities using ShotSpotter are running afoul of the Civil Rights Act--namely, Title VI, which forbids racial discrimination by anyone who receives federal funds. "State and local police departments around the country have used federal financial assistance to facilitate the purchase of a slew of surveillance and automated decision-making technologies, including ShotSpotter," EPIC says.

SoundThinking, the company behind the gunshot-detection system ShotSpotter, is quietly acquiring staff, patents, and customers of the firm that created the notorious predictive policing software PredPol, WIRED has learned. In an August earnings call, SoundThinking CEO Ralph Clark announced to investors that the company was negotiating an agreement to acquire parts of Geolitica--formerly called PredPol--and transition its customers to SoundThinking's own "patrol management" solution. "We have already hired their engineering team," Clark said during the call, a transcript of which is public. He added that the acquisition of patents and staff would "facilitate our application of AI and machine learning technology to public safety." SoundThinking's absorption of Geolitica marks its latest step in becoming the Google of crime fighting--a one-stop shop for policing tools.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) says its Science and Technology Directorate division has created a portable gunshot detection system with the help of a company called Shooter Detection Systems (SDS). The agency notes that whereas other systems only detect audio, SDS Outdoor can pinpoint flashes of gunshots as well. DHS claims this approach can reduce false positive rates. DHS has not disclosed details about the accuracy of the system. SDS, which is owned by Alarm.com, says its indoor gunshot detection system has a near-100 percent detection rate with fewer than one false alert per 5 million hours of use.

On Thursday, a federal lawsuit was filed that alleges gunshot detection technology that uses artificial intelligence wrongfully imprisoned the plaintiff Michael Williams. The gunshot detection technology that has been thrown into question is developed by the company ShotSpotter, which deployed numerous microphones around the city, which are paired with an AI system that is capable of determining when a gunshot has been fired. Once that system detects the appropriate sound, it notifies local police. In Williams' case, Chicago police used audio recordings by ShotSpotter as critical evidence against Williams, who was charged with murder in 2020 for allegedly shooting a man inside his vehicle. Now, Williams, along with the human rights advocacy group The MacArthur Project, is looking to recover damages from the city of Chicago, as well as reparations for loss of income, legal bills, and the mental anguish caused by being imprisoned.

Michael Williams spent almost a year in prison before prosecutors asked a judge to dismiss his case due to insufficient evidence. The 65-year-old was jailed over the shooting of a man inside his car. Now, he is suing the city of Chicago for using an unreliable artificial intelligence system called ShotSpotter as critical evidence in charging him with first-degree murder. The human rights advocacy group out of Northwestern University claims the city's police relied solely on the technology and failed to pursue other leads in the investigation. The lawsuit, filed by the MacArthur Justice Center, is seeking damages from the city for mental anguish, loss of income, and legal bills for Williams, who still suffers from a tremor in his hand that developed while he was locked up.

Editor's Note: It has come to our attention that several statements in this article have been based on sources that have later been recanted and are factually incorrect. Court documents from the case show that ShotSpotter accurately showed the location of the gunfire as reported in both the real-time alert, as well as in the forensic report. The initial alert was classified as a possible firework, but through their standard procedure of human analysis, it was determined within one minute to be gunfire. The evidence that ShotSpotter provided was later withdrawn by the prosecution and had no bearing on the results of the case. Sixty-five-year-old Michael Williams was released from jail last month after spending almost a year in jail on a murder charge.

Sixty-five-year-old Michael Williams was released from jail last month after spending almost a year in jail on a murder charge. The "gunshot" sound that pointed the finger at Williams was initially classified as a firework by the AI. After the charges were dropped due to "insufficient evidence" it was revealed that one of ShotSpotter's human "reviewers" had changed the data to fit the crime, reclassifying the sound as a gunshot instead of a firework [1]. The case highlighted the dangers that the system poses to civil liberties and brings to question how much power we should give to AI "witnesses", especially those that can easily be tampered with. Shotspotter is a patented acoustic gunshot detection system of microphones, algorithms, and human reviewers that alerts police to potential gunfire [2].

In brief Authorities in the United Arab Emirates have requested the US Department of Justice's help in probing a case involving a bank manager who was swindled into transferring $35m to criminals by someone using a fake AI-generated voice. The employee received a call to move the company-owned funds by someone purporting to be a director from the business. He also previously saw emails that showed the company was planning to use the money for an acquisition, and had hired a lawyer to coordinate the process. When the sham director instructed him to transfer the money, he did so thinking it was a legitimate request. But it was all a scam, according to US court documents reported by Forbes.

Michael Williams' wife pleaded with him to remember their fishing trips with the grandchildren, how he used to braid her hair, anything to jar him back to his world outside the concrete walls of Cook County Jail. His three daily calls to her had become a lifeline, but when they dwindled to two, then one, then only a few a week, the 65-year-old Williams felt he couldn't go on. He made plans to take his life with a stash of pills he had stockpiled in his dormitory. Williams was jailed last August, accused of killing a young man from the neighborhood who asked him for a ride during a night of unrest over police brutality in May. But the key evidence against Williams didn't come from an eyewitness or an informant; it came from a clip of noiseless security video showing a car driving through an intersection, and a loud bang picked up by a network of surveillance microphones. Prosecutors said technology powered by a secret algorithm that analyzed noises detected by the sensors indicated Williams shot and killed the man. "I kept trying to figure out, how can they get away with using the technology like that against me?" said Williams, speaking publicly for the first time about his ordeal. Williams sat behind bars for nearly a year before a judge dismissed the case against him last month at the request of prosecutors, who said they had insufficient evidence.