Quote:
Originally Posted by SIGSEGV
I think Shotspotter is far over-selling what its sensors can do. Acoustic propagation unfortunately is quite complicated, and I think they're partially in the business of providing "evidence" to police when convenient. It's too bad because if the technology actually worked well it would be helpful.
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The technology behind shotspotter is incredibly simple and the audio of each shot can be reviewed. Very few are false. It gives location down to a few feet along with the number of rounds fired. There is little ambiguity in the audio profile of gunfire.
The purpose is to allow emergency services to respond to the area of gunfire quickly, determine if someone is still shooting or if someone is shot and needs help.
The vast majority of time there is gunfire in most cities, it's because some jackass is shooting his gun on his porch or in an alley or popping off rounds in a vacant lot. The reason there is no evidence collected about 7 out of 8 times after a shotspotter report i
s because the gunfire did not result in property damage or injury. About one out of 8 times someone may have been shot or shot at and they need people to help them.
Before shotspotter, the only way emergency services knew about gunfire was when someone called it in. A lot of
those reports are cars, fireworks or construction. With shotspotter, police aren't called to nearly as many places where there isn't gunfire. A family party with fireworks is where you
don't want armed police showing up. Shotspotter makes that less likely to happen. And if there is gunfire and you don't want police responding as rapidly as possible, then you are on the side of pain, disorder and violence.
The reason there is an anti-shotspotter megaphone is the simple belief that it’s racist to police high-crime neighborhoods. This is very odd to me — what would be racist would be abandoning the victims! With or without ShotSpotter that’s where cops should be. Poor cities and high crime neighborhoods are underpoliced. What I would love to see is a city partnering with someone to do a proper evaluation of ShotSpotter. Critics generate a negative evaluation of ShotSpotter by counting every incident of gunfire that doesn’t involve an identified shooting victim as a “false positive” which is dumb. What we want to know is whether alerting cops to those shootings helps reduce crime.
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I had confidence that it would all go well but I would be less than candid if I did not admit that I was a little bit on pins and needles all week. We can all breathe a collective sigh of relief now. Not only was a black eye avoided but, dare I say, I believe this city lifted its national/international profile in a positive way for a change. We drove a stake through the heart of boogeyman flame throwers!
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