It Could Happen Here - The ShotSpotter Leaks

Episode Date: March 6, 2024

Mia and Gare talk to Wired staff writer Dhruv Mehrotra and freelance journalist Joey Scott about their recent piece on leaked data showing the locations of ShotSpotter sensorsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into tech's elite and how they've turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, five-year-old Cuban boy Elian Gonzalez was found off the coast of Florida. And the question was,

should the boy go back to his father in Cuba? Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home, and he wanted to take his son with him. Or stay with his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating. I don't feel emotions correctly. I collect my roommate's toenails and fingernails. Those were some callers from my call-in podcast, Therapy Gecko. It's a show where I take phone calls from anonymous strangers as a fake gecko therapist and try to learn a little bit about their lives. I know that's a weird concept, but I promise it's very interesting.

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Also with me is Garrison Davis. Yeah, and so today we're going to be talking more about something we've talked about on the show, I think a couple of times, but that is the ShotSpotter program. And there was recently a leak of the locations of all of ShotSpotter's gunfire sensors. And with us to talk about it are the people who got the leak and wrote the article about where about where the shots water sensors are and that is drew may row trough as soon as a staff writer at wired and joey scott who's a freelance investigative journalist and photographer and both of you two welcome to the show thanks for having us yes thank you yeah i'm glad to be talking to you about this so i guess for for for the people who don't

remember or like have not listened to other episodes we've done about this so i guess for for for the people who don't remember or like have not listened to other episodes we've done about this or have like read this article which you should go read at wired it's great can you describe what shot spotter is and what it's supposed to do versus what it actually does sure uh joey you want me to take this or do you want to do it? Yeah, go ahead. Sure. Well, ShotSpotter is a sort of controversial gunshot detection system built by the company Sound Thinking. On the face of it, the tech is sort of straightforward. The company will basically install little sensors on streetlights and traffic signs in a jurisdiction. And these sensors are sort of like algorithmically tuned to detect gunshots.

So when one of these sensors hears something, it basically will send an alert to an incident review center, which will then like vet the sound, make sure it was actually a gunshot before then forwarding it to dispatchers who send a cop to investigate the sound. You know, activists and academics have been basically saying for years that this tech is inaccurate and primes police basically to go to low income communities of color expecting gunshots when likely they won't find any.

Yeah, and I think the specifically low income communities of color thing is a big part of this because so you all created a map of where the shot spotter sensors are from the data you got and i looked at chicago one and immediately i was like i recognized that map that is the map of where the non-white people are in the city yeah yeah it's it's it's it's stark um i think a lot uh a lot of the responses that i've seen on twitter and you know in my email inbox are essentially that like look this is just a map of where all the not white people are in whatever city that it's deployed in yeah and y'all did some uh analysis of what you found sort of statistically about where these centers ended up and like the sort of the the the i guess like class and racial composition of those places can you talk about

that a little bit sure i'll take this one uh just because i i worked on the analysis so yeah i mean what we found is that more than 12 million americans live in a neighborhood with at least one shot spotter sensor. We basically joined census data onto the locations of every single shot spotter microphone and looked at the demographic composition of those neighborhoods. And, you know, what we found is that an aggregate nearly 70 percent of the people who live in a neighborhood with one set with at least one sensor identify as either Black or Latina. Nearly three quarters of those neighborhoods are majority not white, and the average household income in a neighborhood with at least one sensor is $50,000 a year. So these are low-income communities of color. It's kind of hard to describe it in any other way. Yeah. And one of the things,

and this has been a thing for so i i'm in chicago there's been a huge series of fights over getting rid of shot spotter here and one of the things you hear all the time that shot is the shots are people will go no well we don't use race as a factor for yeah but like shot spotter insists that they don't use race at all in in determining where where they put these sensors but kaba they've still managed to somehow create this map and i i don't know i i i'm wondering what you think about like their response and whether you and i guess this is more of a subjective thing like how much do you actually believe them when they say this? Well, I think when, you know, we were investigating this, we found that the police don't even know where these locations are.

And so they're just giving ShotSpotter data of where to put this stuff. So the police can kind of wipe their hands of like, oh, we insisted that they put it in this place or anything like that. And I think, you know, Drove can probably speak to this, but, you know, the argument is this is where all the shootings are. And so that's where they are. But, you know, when you investigate that, it doesn't call into effect like in other parts of the country outside of like chicago or something you look at gun violence uh and where these alerts are you know they aren't just where the alerts are yeah and you know pasadena is an example you know shootings happen outside of where the alerts are

but they're specifically in a very specific part of pasadena that is poor and non-white. So, yeah. Yeah. And I think, you know, when we spoke to Sound Thinking, you know, I think it's important to point out here that they did not dispute our findings or the sort of authenticity of the doc. But, you know, they said what you would expect, that the sensory deployment is not really informed by race. And, you know, the way it works, as Joey says, is that the company

basically asked police department who purchased the systems for data about gun violence, which sound thinking says is objective, but we have no idea what that data actually looks like, right? We don't know if it's all crime data, which might be, you know, subject to enforcement bias, right? If they include things like drug crimes on their drug arrests. So we just don't really know why sound thinking, you know, makes a recommended plan for their sensor deployment. The other thing that sound thinking had told me is that, you know, sometimes they'll ask for data and they'll do it this sort of data informed way. But other times, cops will just say, like, look, we want, we want the deployment in this area. And that might include like a stadium or a school or places where people

gather. So, you know, it's kind of, we don't really know why exactly sound thinking is deploying its sensors in any given location. Yeah. And having them be deployed by cops is like, is a spectacular way to have cop brain in terms of locations, which is not an especially good way to get a statistically unbiased sampling of where you would potentially want these things. So I guess a thing we should talk about in terms of what the issues with the system is are... Okay, so ShotSpotter claims that it...

And this is something I've seen over and over and over again. It claims it has a 97% accuracy rate of detecting gunshots. There's just... I don't believe it. None of the research I've ever seen backs that up. none of the research I've ever seen backs that up. Can you talk a bit about, a bit about like what it, what it's actually detecting versus what, what they sort of claim it is?

Yeah, I think, well, I guess the, the overreaching kind of theme here is we just don't know. ShotSpotter is very not transparent about their, their data. There have been really no peer-reviewed independent studies

of the technology so when we make when we when we talk about you know how effective it is that that is a claim that shot spotter makes based off of you know very little information given to the public about it you know and that's kind of the the big issue is when you start getting down into the the the nitty-gritty of like what's actually going on you notice that a lot of the times what they consider a gunshot police will investigate and find out it was a firework which if you live in you know i i use pasadena because it's next to me out here in LA, you know, fireworks are kind of how we celebrate and it's a different kind of language out here, you know, fireworks happen all the time. So, once you start getting into looking at some of the data that I have been

able to get, you start seeing that, you know, maybe they claim it was a gunshot, but when police show up, they don't find any evidence of a gun crime. And sometimes they find out it was a gunshot, but when police show up, they don't find any evidence of a gun crime. And sometimes they find out it was a car backfiring or construction equipment and all of that. And that just kind of shows, you know, their claim that it's effective at identifying gunshots is, you know, very questionable to make that claim. you know, very questionable to make that claim. Yeah. And, you know, they're 97, like the 97% figure that they cite in their marketing material is based on police reporting back to ShotSpotter that there was a mistake, right?

Like for, for, for ShotSpotter to count a, to count like a gunshot or to count a sound as an error, the police have to report it back to ShotSpotter. Right. So it's almost like by default, if they hear nothing, they have 100 percent accuracy rate. But the second that, you know, they're informed of this, they, you know, will adjust that rate. Well, and also, I mean, that that's a metric that relies on the cops telling them it relies on the cops taking an extra step. In an investigation.

And these are like. You are dealing with one of the most notoriously. Lazy group of people. In the entire country. I have watched these people on duty in Chicago. They spend like 80% of their time. Standing around on their phones playing Candy Crush. Right?

This entire statistics thing. Requires them to do another step it's like like what percentage of the time is a cop going to admit that they ran out to this thing and like drew their guns and we're doing their like whole oh there's been gunshots thing and then there's just nothing there it's like i don't know it seems like cast a pall over even this even the sort of potential that their data can be right right i mean we all know that cops lie yeah and we we've seen them kind of use shot spotter alerts you know chicago was one of the examples where they were using it as cover to make illegal stops and, you know, that sort of thing. So, you know, if there is room for that, it's hard to then take what data police are giving them in this way as accurate.

And then again, it goes back to, well, we don't, the public doesn't get to see any of that information. So we don't get to make that, I guess, distinction between the two and, you know, know what's best for people's communities because of that. That's one of the things about this program that is really alarming is that you have this mass surveillance technology. mass surveillance technology and the people in charge of it were like the people people who'd be in charge of sort of like deciding whether or not you want it it's like like both both the general public and like city mayors etc etc seem to have so little information about whether about what it's even doing that it's incredibly difficult to make any kind of like any kind of sort of database choice all you have is sort of this combination of like the company going oh yeah well obviously our stuff works and then this sort of let me this is the thing that's been happening in chicago is this sort of like crime panic stuff they just that

people just fall back on and they combine this sort of crime panic with just the assumption that it works because that's what it says on the box. And that's, I think, a really alarming combination to me. Yeah, I mean, I think the fact that city council members are kept in the dark about the locations of these things, as are the police departments who pay for it. I think it's something that's really been quite interesting after we published is that I've gotten a bunch of emails from city council

members asking me if I can provide them data about the locations, because they can't even get them from the company, right? So, yeah, there's a lot of transparency issues here. Yeah, and this is a public public this is a tool being paid with public money. You know, another thing we found in the data was that there are a list of sensors that are broken or out of service or anything like that. In talking to various police departments, ShotSpotter doesn't let them know uh when that happens and and you know referred us to talk ask the shot spotter about that so you know not even the the functionality of like how many sensors are down are really communicated and that's a huge problem but like again this data as a journalist to to investigate it to request documents, I can count at least three separate cities where ShotSpotter intervened and

said the release of the data would be a trade secret. And so therefore, yeah. So like it, even any data that shows transparency of like anything more detailed than just an alert that many cities have uh shot spotter won't release because it is quote unquote a trade secret mind you i have uh gotten documents from other cities that are more detailed uh and then when i request those from other cities shot spotter intervenes and goes no that's a trade secret so it's this kind of uh trying to hide the transparency that then adds more skepticism to the effectiveness and usefulness

of the product which the public i believe everyone would agree deserves a right to know especially if it's taxpayer money yeah and it's a lot of money too um so speaking of a lot of money unfortunately we have to take an ad break uh so we will be back in a second hola mi gente it's honey german and i'm bringing you gracias come again the podcast where we dive deep into the world of latin culture musica peliculas and entertainment with some of the Thank you. for Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German, where we get into todo lo actual y viral. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, better offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel winning economists to leading journalists

in the field. And I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge, and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough, so join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry,

and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, you look so fresh.

And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian Gonzalez. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with.

His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home, and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura Podcast Network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Okay, we are back. Something I wanted to talk about with the way that these sensors are used. So about actually, I okay, sorry, I should have actually figured out the exact date after which the story originally came out, but it may be like four or five days after your story came out. a a sort of effectively the cover-up of a case where a cpt was was responding to a shot spotter ping and it was just like a 13 year old kid shooting off fireworks and the cop showed up and immediately started shooting and like thankfully cops came inside of a barn so the kid didn't get shot but like this child had a cop shoot at him while the kid was running towards the cop going no it was fireworks yeah so i i was wondering what kind like you know how how many of those kinds of stories did you run into when you were sort of like doing this running into the story and yeah what is the impact of that stuff sort of been? You know, I think that that example you bring up is particularly egregious. But what happens more often, I think, are these sort of like less dramatic events where, you know, sound thinking or shot spotter will detect two shots and deploy cops to a corner.

will detect two shots and deploy cops to a to a corner and you know they'll detain someone on the scene run their name through their you know their databases and find this guy's got a bench warrant or you know pick someone up on a misdemeanor right so like i think you know while there are some really egregious examples the thing that that i think about a lot here is that is just how much unnecessary, how many unnecessary arrests are happening because of shot spotter, right? How many people are being picked up on bullshit essentially. Yeah. And you know,

that, that recent case in Chicago with the kid with the firework and you know, it wasn't too long ago that, you know, Adam Toledo was shot. Yeah. A 13 year old kid with the firework and you know that it wasn't too long ago that you know adam toledo was shot yeah you know a 13 year old kid for the same reason cops were responding to a shot spot earlier and the chicago oig and their report about it kind of highlighted one of the things which is cops are just primed to be you know expecting you know gunfire somebody shooting at them and everything and you know i think that's that is a danger you know but again to what drove saying is like it also

leads to a lot of unnecessary stops it it opens up people to be profiled and patted down and you know so both options are not great you You know, when you consider the harm that this causes, it's just we all know that like cops are very jumpy to begin with. So, you know, they hear a firework or, you know, an acorn hits their cop car or something. We all know that like that's probably not what we need police to be expecting on a call. And so you're just telling people, oh, gunshots. And then they're going to run in expecting to be fired upon. And I don't think that's great for society. Garrison, do you want to talk a bit about that? Oh, I don't know if there's much more to say.

I think- That's true. We did do a lot of Acorn Cop. I think the Acorn incident stands on itself. I don't think it needs to even be to say. That's true. We did do a lot of acorn cop. I think the acorn incident stands on itself. I don't think it needs to even be talked about. I think one sentence speaks

a whole book's worth of possible analysis of police behavior. The notion of police rushing into every situation thinking that there's there was there was a gunshot obviously has its inherent problems now like mind you a lot of the times you know and at least in uh in other cities it's 60 to 80 percent of the time they don't find anything

you know which i i i think is good in the sense that nobody's being harmed or stomped but it's Yes. lowering crime and more in terms of like safety and arriving to a scene quicker to render aid and help police find shell casings you know you've seen over the years the kind of switch of focus on what the technology does and that most certainly happened around the time they changed their name to sound thinking yeah i think know, the other thing I wanted to mention here is that, you know, from a different leaked internal report from the state's attorney's office in Illinois, in Cook County, Illinois, it found that like a third of arrests stemming from a shot spot or alert actually had nothing to do with the gun in the first place. So it's not even like, you know, their 89% of alerts don't,

you know, result in finding a shell casing. It's that even when there are arrests that occur from a shot spotter alert, 30% of them have nothing to do with a gun. Right. And that just shows you sort of the criminalization of what happened or of people in areas that have these microphones. Yeah. And I think, I think the sort of the combination of those two things gets you to this point about shot spotter's effectiveness which is that like okay so we've had shot spotter for a while in chicago right chicago police do not solve murders like it's sub it's their their their murder clearance rate and you have to keep in mind that murder clearance doesn't actually mean they solved a murder but like even that jacked up murder clearance rate i don't think has like i think they may

have had one year in my entire life over 50 and that was because murder clearance counts if if two people both shoot each other and they both die that counts as a clearance or they find their suspect dies in like another way so it's it's pretty clear that it's not actually substantively contributing to chicago police department solving murders like you have a better than coin flip odds if you kill someone in chicago that like the police aren't even gonna like really try to figure out what happened and so yeah i think i think it makes a lot of sense they've been pivoting away from even like even claiming that this can do anything to solve gun violence because it just clearly hasn't at all. like shadows which either results in them arresting just random people or like having these really sort of terrifying incidents or it just results in straight up nothing yeah we're gonna

go to ads we'll be back in uh however long capitalism dictates. So see you then. chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, better offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough.

So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. Hola mi gente, it's Honey German and I'm bringing you Gracias, Come Again,

the podcast where we dive deep into the world of Latin culture, musica, peliculas, and entertainment with some of the biggest names in the game. If you love hearing real conversations with your favorite Latin celebrities, artists, and culture shifters, this is the podcast for you.

We're talking real conversations with our Latin stars, from actors and artists to musicians and creators, sharing their stories, struggles, and successes. You know it's going to be filled with chisme laughs and all the vibes that you love. Each week, we'll explore everything from music and pop culture to deeper topics like identity, community, and breaking down barriers in all sorts of industries.

Don't miss out on the fun, el té caliente, and life stories. Join me for Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German, where we get into todo lo actual y viral. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. you get your podcasts. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian.

Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died

trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. I think like looking at the effectiveness, like two cities that have continued to deny ShotSpotter contracts are Atlanta and Portland. Two cities that spend a lot of time thinking about how they equip their

police spend a lot of time like making sure that their police are able to serve uh the largest amount of the community possible and the fact that like specifically atlanta with their massive like flock program of an integrated camera network across the whole city like it is one of the most surveilled cities in the country um if not the most the the fact that they are turning down this equipment for not being effective enough and it being too costly is is is a sign for like beyond just being a sign it's also like a look at what why other police departments are interested in this and like what what it allows them to do and being deployed to uh to to these various communities that have the what like 25 000 sensors but no i mean like they've constantly

tried to send this stuff to atlanta and it's like and it's just it's simply not happening. And even after 2020, Portland's like, no, it's two super useful examples to measure how much this technology actually is going to get used for what they say it's being used for versus just having an excuse to act like there's gunfire all across the city. to act like there's gunfire all across the city yeah and and you know i i think when we start more police departments are going to start relying more on technology sure largely because many departments cannot hire more cops now this isn't advocating me you know i don't want police departments to hire more cops you know they've slowly defunded themselves in that way. But like, you know, cities like Los Angeles are trying to grow their surveillance capabilities for that reason. They just do not have enough.

They say they do not have enough cops. And so this is where kind of the surveillance capitalism is going to really thrive is police departments are going to get desperate and they're going to start reaching out and getting more invasive surveillance technology. And, you know, I think in some cities, ShotSpotter is kind of, they're a way of quieting the narratives about, you know, the growing gun violence and everything in their communities. You know, they're like, oh, look, we've deployed this new toy to kind of help us without really solving anything

because we all know cops aren't really good at solving crime. Yeah. So it kind of gives them cover of like, we're bad at our jobs. So how do we make it look like we're better? Well, let's invest in some new technology. So it looks like we're trying something.

But at the end of the day, it's a waste of money. And then the impacts of that is harm, you know, greater than the good. Yeah, it's like we're spending an only one of sound thinking's offerings, right? Like they, you know, when they changed their name to sound thinking, it's sort of like reflected this pivot in the company where now they were going to start thinking more about like resource management, right? How do we convince departments that our technology is going to better help them allocate their resources? And, you know, surveillance is the way to do that.

We can measure where crime is. We can measure where gunshots is and where gunshots are, and we can deploy police there. And one of ShotSpot or recently SoundThinking had acquired like a notorious predictive policing company called PredPol that happens, I think, earlier this year. So, you know, they're trying to expand their offerings here to be this kind of resource management solution for departments. See, Mia, did you have anything else you wanted to bring up here? Yeah, I guess there's one more thing I wanted to talk about, which is that

so one of the things that I've heard from places that have gotten rid of their contracts is that shot spotters not like taking their sensors down. Even when cities stopped doing contracts. I was wondering what you two sort of know about that. Yeah. I reached out to Dayton, Ohio who recently got rid of their contracts and I reached out, you know,

cause I, I was like asking departments who had it, like, are you aware of the, the of the status of the sensors? Do you know the locations? You know, both knows. And then I asked Dayton, you know, well, now that the contract's over, what happens to the sensors? And they basically said, we don't know.

That's Shotswater's responsibility. And their responsibility is maintenance and care and removal and installation. So who knows? Obviously, somebody knows because it's not like some person can just start climbing telephone poles and installing surveillance equipment. So obviously, you know, somebody is issuing permits to install stuff and put stuff up there. But like, you you know as we're

finding out city council members don't know police departments don't know and so who knows what happens to these devices afterwards and then say a city like chicago you know say they cancel their contracts well a new mayor can come in and then just instantly turn them back on you know and that way and so that's kind of the the other thing we're slowly starting to learn here is more cities start canceling their contracts or not renewing them you know it is what happens to the technology afterwards and we don't know which is not a great sign like i mean the the you know it's not good that there's just a bunch of state surveillance technology around all the time but it somehow feels even worse that we don't have any idea what happens to it even if the state decides it doesn't want to use it so yeah i guess on that

somewhat disquieting note um do you have anything else you wanted to make sure you get to? No, nothing from me. No, I mean, this is, you know, thanks to, you know, somebody brave enough to send us the info. And it's the only way this information has been able to get out. And I think if I implore the public to really research and dig into this technology, if their cities are thinking about extending their contracts or bringing a contract in and really questioning it and trying

to get ShotSpotter on the record to answer for some of these things. And, you know, we know what works and what doesn't work. And I think most cities are starting to find out that there is a better use of that amount of money to stop these sort of gun crimes interventions and other more community-based solutions rather than just dumping money into surveillance technology and you know you can get a lot done with an eight million dollars yeah you know it's just it's just like there's always money in the banana stand sort of thing there's like there's always money for police so it's just like why don't we just re-transform that money into things that actually work in these communities and you know go behind that so yeah and i i think i don, hopefully, hopefully this will encourage more cities to stop paying for this shit.

Yeah. So where can people find you choose work? I mean, I know like, obviously this one's on wired, but I are online places, et cetera, et cetera. Social media places, plug yourself, go. Yay. social media places. Plug yourself. Go. Yay. Well,

you can find my stuff on wire.com and I'm on X or Twitter or whatever you want to call it. I'm at DMero and on Blue Sky at DMero. D-M-E-H-R-O. And you can find me on Instagram

and Twitter with the username JoeyNeverJoe. And then my writings have been in local press out here in LA, LA Public Press, and KnockLA. Yeah, and thank you to both so much for coming on.

Thanks for having us. Thank you so much. Appreciate it. Yeah, and I'm going to encourage everyone else to go Thanks for having us. Thank you so much. Appreciate it. Yeah. And I'm going to encourage everyone else to go get your city to not use this stuff because it sucks. All right. This has been this has been it could happen here. You can find us in the usual places. Goodbye.

It could happen here as a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, Thanks for listening. At times unhinged, look at the underbelly of tech brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. On Thanksgiving Day 1999, five-year-old Cuban boy Elian Gonzalez was found off the coast of Florida.

And the question was, should the boy go back to his father in Cuba? Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or stay with his relatives in Miami? Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating. I don't feel emotions correctly.

I collect my roommate's toenails and fingernails. Those were some callers from my call-in podcast, Therapy Gecko. It's a show where I take phone calls from anonymous strangers as a fake gecko therapist and try to learn a little bit about their lives. I know that's a weird concept, but I promise it's very interesting. Check it out for yourself by searching for Therapy Gecko on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.