Gunshot detection system transforms and raises issues

Reading this feels like accidental time travel. When did this start happening?<p>$40,000-$60,000/sqmile/year is an extremely reasonable number. Chicago has 50+ officers per square mile, implying tens of <i>patrolling</i> officers per square mile; the fully loaded cost of a single police officer is six figures, with potentially explosive defined-benefit pensions and benefits just to make things fun.<p>Moreover, like in many big cities (read Peter Moskos _Cop In The Hood_ for details), the squad car patrol tactics used in Chicago do a <i>terrible</i> job of suppressing gun crime. Over a 24 hour period this holiday weekend, we had 25 gunshot <i>injuries</i> (god knows how many illegal firearms were discharged above and beyond that). The police can't be everywhere, and the patrol process keeps them mostly in rolling squad cars.<p>And obviously, the overwhelming majority of gun crime in the city of Chicago are concentrated in a small percentage of our square miles: Austin, Garfield Park, and (particularly) Englewood and Chatham. Which makes systems like this cost-effective to roll out, and, particularly, easy to pilot.

I've seen this in action and it is pretty impressive. I expect the next step will be that a quad-copter UAV will 'nest' on top of a ShotSpotter pole where is will stay charged. And when an alert comes in, if it is closest, it will launch and give the HQ a video feed of the scene in 15 - 20 seconds after the event.<p>I do have concerns about the use of conversations the microphones overhear but I know that in many neighborhoods events are <i>not</i> called in because the neighbor doesn't want the repercussions of turning in the local gang lord or his troops.

&#62; <i>the system was not intended to record anything except gunshots</i><p>So, they could record conversations, but they won't for the time being. A classic example of using software to temporarily cripple the true capabilities of a computing device.<p>In the hands of DRM-wielding corporations, "defective by design" results in inconvenience and loss of users' freedom. In the hands of the surveillance state, the same technique results in a situation where citizens must simply trust the authorities to exercise restraint. Because the police could flip a switch at any time and record all sorts of conversations. Somehow I don't trust that the switch will remain un-flipped for long. And when it does get flipped, as it did in New Bedford, everyone will say it was just an accident.<p>Maybe, just maybe, we should accept systems like this as a necessary evil in certain cities where there's a lot of gun violence. Still, I don't like this. When it comes to the government, I'd much rather give them hardware that can't be unlocked "by accident" because there's nothing to unlock. The thing is, it's unrealistic to do that in all cases, and we have to hit a balance somewhere. Which is exactly why systems like this raise difficult issues.

<i>“If the police are utilizing these conversations, then the issue is, where does it stop?” he said.</i><p>Libertarians consistently make slippery-slope arguments when most everybody else is just happy that some immediate problem is solved. This line of debate is freaking getting old, and I'm the first person to do it.<p>The problem is that it always <i>is</i> a slippery slope. No bullshit. Changes take place over years or decades, so there's no single time you can raise an alarm. Right now it's gunshots. Next it will be car sounds -- estimating speeders and the conditions for traffic accidents. Then somebody will work out screaming. Then, perhaps conversations. And let's not forget that the systems will be justified by talking about the horrendous inner city. In actuality the vast majority of the time these systems will be used in places nowhere like that. When you read stories like this remember that these guys are selling equipment just like any other startup. You're getting their best pitch.<p>Big cities need this stuff, so it's a good thing for them. (Although I imagine we'll just start seeing a lot of silencers). What concerns me is that 90%+ of the time there's no crime being committed, save for discharging a firearm. So there's all these thousands of "criminals" discharging firearms that haven't been arrested before but could be now. Yay? Is it always a good thing with the grip of the state tightens, as long as we can point to something good coming of it?<p>Hopefully the cops will be so overloaded with gunshots they'll ignore the system and use it only for forensic purposes. But I doubt it. Instead I imagine we'll see these discharge numbers added to the crime reports for cities in an effort to secure more funding for even more police presence. Whether that's a good thing or not is debatable. There's obviously a real problem in Chicago and several other cities, but the rest of the country not so much.

I've kind of been waiting for this. This could provoke really interesting renaissance of the crossbow among street gangs. And other deadly melee weapons might get big leaps of progress. There might be a telescopic sword coming or something similar.<p>Here's something from India. From times when weapons had to be carried secretly. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urumi" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urumi</a><p>My forecast is that in the long run, bystanders will get less damage. But real murders get harder to investigate as there will be no gunpowder residue. And crossbow is easier to manufacture by oneself than firearm and that makes murder weapon tracking harder.

I think people should consider the upsides to these technologies in addition to the privacy concerns. Faster police response could lead not just to saved lives, but also to much better suspect identification. Our current methods for identifying suspects using evidence gathered long after a shooting hall are complete trash. Of the wide array of forensic techniques used by police, only DNA is remotely reliable. If a system like this meant the difference between apprehending a fleeing suspect a couple of minutes later and picking up a random ethnic minority days later based on highly flawed identifications, this technology could have major benefits that must be weighed.

I find it interesting that people's main concerns are the privacy laws. Isn't anyone concerned that there is a need for gunshot detection? I would have thought that the main issue was that there was enough gun related violence to make this product viable? As much as I love to see an innovative solution to a problem this seems a lot like its treating the symptoms and not the cause.

"If nothing else, ShotSpotter has made it clear how much unreported gunfire takes place on city streets. In many high-crime urban neighborhoods, gunshots are a counterpoint to daily life, “as common as the birds chirping,” as Commander Mikail Ali of the San Francisco Police Department put it. But whether out of apathy, fear or uncertainty, people call the police in only a fraction of cases."<p>Or maybe, they got sick of calling the cops and not having them come. If the gunshots are that common, it wouldn't be uncommon for the police to ignore the complaints as a high-crime district.<p>Now they can ignore the automated reports instead of the called-in ones.

I think the assumption with this is that all gunshots would be crimes in process and over time and with more ubiquity that might not be the case leading to a less effective system.<p>I would imagine that a criminal could use a system like this to do a DOS of police presence and/or send them on a wild goose chase so they can commit a crime in another area. In other words they get police to scramble to 5th and Main and they have another team to break into a place a few miles away with a non-gunshot crime.<p>Also, as anyone who has experience with home or business alarm systems knows false alarms get to be a "boy who cried wolf" issue and you begin to not take them as seriously as you should.

Reading about this in a country where there is tight gun control feels like reading about a dystopia future by Gibson or the like. It is the future, but not necessarily in a good way.

If they designed the system (hopefully at the hardware level) so that it was incapable of recording voices I would have no problem with it.<p>That would probably be a good thing for a competitor to create: a shot detection system that's designed to address civil liberty concerns. I bet someone on HN could do it.

I'm confused about the timeline in the NYTimes article. The gunfire was detected at 7:22:07, and tactical team arrives at 7:25:02 (Pacific). The article says, "Total elapsed time: 3 minutes, 55 seconds."<p>Isn't that a total elapsed time of 2 minutes, 55 seconds?

I wonder if false positives will take off e.g. personal attack alarms that make a sound like gun fire

As a libertarian, I'm generally iffy about the expansion of surveillance, or of government activity in general.<p>But I try to be pragmatic about it. Gunshots fired in urban areas are one thing that really is the business of the police! There's always some tension between law and order versus liberty; the trick is to find ways to trade the latter for the former at as high an exchange rate as possible. This system strikes me as having a very good exchange rate indeed.

$40,000-$60,000 per year per square mile. How many gunshots per capita per year per square mile do need for that price to make sense as a way to spend tax dollars?<p>It seems expensive.

I'm not 100% on the laws around this, but if a city was utilizing ShotSpotter, wouldn't they have to disclose the area(s) they were monitoring?

&#62;The detection system, which triangulates sound picked up by acoustic sensors placed on buildings, utility poles and other structures, is part of a wave of technological advances — among them, license plate scanners, body cameras, Global Positioning System trackers and hand-held fingerprint identifiers<p>This technology also happens to be very useful for domestic counter-insurgence, something of interest to an economically polarized state during a time of economic transformation.

I wonder if this could also detect car crashes?

The movie Minority Report is starting to look a hell of a lot more real. I didn't even know this technology existed, it's awesome but at the same time scary. I wonder what other technologies are out there like this nobody really hears about?

I've always wondered if a similar system could be developed to monitor and locate the sound of windows being broken?<p>You could have one in every neighborhood. It might also be good in parking lots/garages.

Another interesting application of this (which I believe is being done) is sniper spotting in warzones.

They have to replay the sound because the gunshots are indistinguishable from the sound that lady's bones make when she contorts herself to sit at the terminal. (Look at her arm.) What an ergonomic nightmare.

phased arrays of microphones: the future is now

Time to hack it: Drive around with a 1963 Oldsmobile and get pulled over immediately.