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It's been around for decades.

http://www.shotspotter.com/

[From Ald. Leslie Hairston Wants To Revive Gunshot-Location Technology In Chicago - cbs2chicago.com ]

Fifth Ward Ald. Leslie Hairston wants Chicago to reintroduce the Shotspotter gunshot location technology. After all, Shotspotter's web site says it can reduce crime. So why isn't the CPD using it? Don't they care?

The CPD did adopt Shotspotter and found mixed results in Chicago. Specifically:

The city conducted three separate tests of gunshot sensors between 2003 and 2007 in the West Side’s Harrison Police District. Only on one occasion did the detection system send a warning prior to a person calling 911 to report the shooting. As a result, the city felt the gunshot detection systems were too expensive at a cost of $200,000 a square mile.

The city is going forward with installing the technology in the Loop. However, Shotspotter is an expensive technology and the CPD decided it wasn't the best use of their scare resources. The city of Chicago is approximately 227 square miles, so to cover the entire city would cost close to $50 million.

The Shotspotter technology locates gunshots. In a dense city, 911 calls often serve the same function. Gunshot location is a useful piece of information for police officers, but it is not a silver bullet. It cannot by itself reduce crime. If the system is reliable and works well with officers, it could lead to less shootings (but not necessarily less crime). The independent studies I have seen show the results are quite mixed.

In Chicago, there has been a rash of shootings in Chicago were no regard for the police or cameras. Shotspotter is now the silver bullet. I am concerned that Shotspotter is seen as the answer because people are scared. It doesn't make sense to spend money on technology that makes us feel better, but is ineffective. The city can address this by making public its tests of Shotspotter. I would like more details about the tests, for example: How many gunshots were there during the tests? How accurate was the system?

Link

Interesting, I wonder if they could add some sort of shot location module and share the data over a mesh formed by the robots. That would be sweet!

this has been done
http://www.shotspotter.com/

There are systems in place, albeit mainly fixed location (for the most part) that perform this task. Shotspotter is one that comes to mind, along with FireFinder for larger caliber weapons.

What caught my eye was that it was BU doing this research and development. I lived in Boston for a long time (Cape Cod resident now) and still read the Boston Globe. Just about two weeks ago there was an article (beware, Undertone pop-unders) about the Boston city government looking into deploying Shotspotter in Roxbury and Dorchester, neighborhoods that have seen an uptick in gun violence in the last couple of years (after about a decade of falling rates of shootings).

Now, despite the OP's write-up, I don't anticipate F-16s with LGBs loitering over Grove Hall, waiting to drop a 500 lb. smart bomb on a triple-decker on Blue Hill Ave. Nor do I think that this will happen in Sadr City, Baghdad. Iraqi insurgents would quickly adapt to this tactic and hold human shields.

Bottom line, speaking domestically, the police depend on citizens to call in with a report of "shots fired". Anything that takes the voluntary calls out of the loop can only decrease response time, and it's the sort of surveillance that's targeted to the transient sound of a gunshot, not a camera on a lamppost taking indiscriminent pictures of anyone who happens to be on a particular corner.

k.

There is already a commercial system that does this. They say there is a six second delay between a gun being fired and the location showing up on 911.

Oh, and it looks like both systems use microphones -- not cameras

Here's an evaluation. Median location error is about 25 feet. That at least gets it down to two or three houses.

I met the designer of this system some years ago. The original prototype worked using microphones and hard-wired phone connections for each microphone. The signal from each microphone was transmitted using an analog FM carrier system over the phone line designed to trade frequency response for dynamic range. The system had terrible audio frequency response but huge dynamic range, so that pulse events like gunshots come through cleanly without overload. When you have enough dynamic range, gunfire is easy to recognize, because the leading edge of the pulse is so sharp. Few other sounds have that form.

The microphones are up on telephone poles and atop buildings, and they're omnidirectional. So they mostly pick up loud bangs, wind, and aircraft noise. The original pole units were entirely analog, phone line powered, and very dumb. The original central processing system was a PC with some data acquisition cards running LabView. Since then, it's become fancier, with better integration with mapping programs and transmission of gunfire locations to PDA-type devices. But it's not really very complicated.

Their original test city was Redmond, CA in 1996.

Uh, I thought it was ShotSpotter, who deployed one of their first systems in redwood city, ca; and has since seen growing successes across the country, www.shotspotter.com

A former co-worker of mine actually worked for a company that developed technology to triangulate gun fire location. He worked for Bradshaw Consulting Services and a write up on the technology is included in this link. Combining the technologies could help alert the camera monitors to watch a particular area to video capture people in a potential crime area.