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90 Cities Install A Covert Technology That Listens For Gunshots (businessinsider.com)
An anonymous reader quotes Business Insider:
In more than 90 cities across the US, including New York, microphones placed strategically around high-crime areas pick up the sounds of gunfire and alert police to the shooting's location via dots on a city map... ShotSpotter also sends alerts to apps on cops' phones. "We've gone to the dot and found the casings 11 feet from where the dot was, according to the GPS coordinates," Capt. David Salazar of the Milwaukee Police Dept. told Business Insider. "So it's incredibly helpful. We've saved a lot of people's lives."
When three microphones pick up a gunshot, ShotSpotter figures out where the sound comes from. Human analysts in the Newark, California, headquarters confirm the noise came from a gun (not a firecracker or some other source). The police can then locate the gunshot on a map and investigate the scene. The whole process happens "much faster" than dialing 911, Salazar said, though he wouldn't disclose the exact time.
The company's CEO argues their technology deters crime by demonstrating to bad neighborhoods that police will respond quickly to gunshots. (Although last year Forbes discovered that in 30% to 70% of cases, "police found no evidence of a gunshot when they arrived.") And in a neighborhood where ShotSpotter is installed, one 60-year-old man is already complaining, "I don't like Big Brother being in all my business."
When three microphones pick up a gunshot, ShotSpotter figures out where the sound comes from. Human analysts in the Newark, California, headquarters confirm the noise came from a gun (not a firecracker or some other source). The police can then locate the gunshot on a map and investigate the scene. The whole process happens "much faster" than dialing 911, Salazar said, though he wouldn't disclose the exact time.
The company's CEO argues their technology deters crime by demonstrating to bad neighborhoods that police will respond quickly to gunshots. (Although last year Forbes discovered that in 30% to 70% of cases, "police found no evidence of a gunshot when they arrived.") And in a neighborhood where ShotSpotter is installed, one 60-year-old man is already complaining, "I don't like Big Brother being in all my business."
I'm not sure fan of big brother, but it's illegal to fire guns within most city limits and anyone doing so I doing something that needs police attention. This is one form of surveillance that seems unobtrusive and doesn't violate any form of privacy. That said, if they start listening with better microphones and storing data, that's a whole other ballgame.
ShotSpotter has had this for over 20 years in cities. In some tinfoil hat just learning about it?
San Francisco Bay Area police departments have been using this technology for years.
ShotSpotter has been used for several years in six Bay Area cities. Police say ShotSpotter has helped them respond more quickly to crime scenes and capture suspects, and provide court evidence to solve homicide cases. Oakland police started using the gunshot detection technology in 2006; it now covers 80 percent of the city, said Capt. Ersie Joyner.
http://www.mercurynews.com/2013/11/11/shotspotter-has-long-history-with-bay-area-police/
Take a brown paper bag, the tall ones you get at liquor stores, blow em up as much as you can, then pop - in the right conditions, in a city, sounds like a fucking gunshot going off.
Says someone with no clue what a real gunshot sounds like.
http://gunfreezone.net/index.p...
Passionately Indifferent
From what I understand, nail guns are typically just .22 caliber and would have different sound from the pressure wave. The question then would be, can we detect the difference and is the difference still detectable at a distance or after echoes/reflections?
A powder-actuated nailer doesn't use a traditional barrel or fire a round that files through the air, so the sound made is different.
A system like this is going to have some false-positives, and is going to miss some actual gunshots. This is a given. The point of a system like this is to have a significantly more likely chance of detecting firearms discharge than just relying on people to report it. People in bad neighborhoods may have a snitches-get-stitches attitude, or may just be so jaded to gunshots that they don't bother calling anymore. Either way, this is a somewhat independent way getting information.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Is it really a covert technology when it's publicized? I've heard about these installations for years. Even the Summary talks about an article last year in Forbes.
This isn't secret surveillance, it's highly targeted mass surveillance--it only triggers on a very particular thing that involves a high degree of risk to the public. Save your big brother complaints for things like actual internet surveillance, overreaching electronic searches, or better yet for things like reform around the existing big-brother-esque things that cause massive damage to the economy every day. (E.g. bad uses of criminal records or credit reports)
Real lawyers write in C++
Ooooo! "Covert"!!! Big Brother Bad!
My guess is it's not "covert" if you follow city politics and the city council approval at public meetings necessary to buy and install this technology.
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is making sure the crime doesn't spill over from the poor neighborhoods to the rich ones. Crime 'fighting' is about containment. If you're old enough to remember the Rodney King riots you might also remember people asking why they just destroyed their own neighborhoods. The reason was the neighborhoods were surrounded by swat teams. The teams didn't move in and quell the riots, they just kept 'em in.
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When the City of Pittsfield installed these the amount of gun shootings went down noticibly. My neighborhood is quiet now. I am now very much pro ShotSpotter.
CDE open sourced! https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/
I've always liked the idea of sensors over a city to detect gunshots, but police still take some time to arrive to see what is going on.
I think a big improvement on this would be a fleet of camera drones around the city that could be launched as soon as a gunshot was heard, so you could have a view of the scene in under 30 seconds anywhere in a city...
It would also be really helpful for 911 calls so police could get a video of what was happening at the scene of a call even as they were en-route.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
As a gun lover, and privacy lover I can't see how this is a bad thing. Cities have gun regulations making it illegal to fire a firearm. If it is a justified self-defence act the person being attacked would like the police to come anyway. If it's an illegal firing then we want the police to respond.
Make it so it's not possible to be used for any other use than dispatching armed officers/first responders even with a warrant or national security issue though without being put forward as vote by all of the voters. It's reasonable to allow surveillance uses of automated technology as long as the public interest and their privacy is protected.
I used to live in Maryvale, a suburb of Phoenix AZ
The gunfire was getting ridiculous in the late 1990's, with bullets coming through my front window, teenagers shot in front of my house and 'celebratory' gunfire that included people emptying 30 round clips from AKs and AR-15s
The city installed a shot location system and the state passed 'Shannon's Law' that made it a felony to discharge your weapon into the air in a city
It did not help the drive-by situation directly, but it cut down on the overall amount of gunfire
Perhaps not, but enforcement gives dignity to the law. People begin to respect the law when it is consistently and quickly enforced.
Smart criminals do, at least insofar as it doesn't curtail their criminal enterprise. If you're an intelligent criminal and making good money, you'll avoid drawing police attention to yourself as much as possible. Stupid criminals won't, which just makes them easier to catch.
It's probably less expensive to move a sensor that listens for gunshots than an entire police precinct. It also doesn't really matter where you locate the precinct either since the police can take their cars and patrol wherever they're most needed. You'd want to have your precincts located in such a way that it makes it easy and efficient for police to deploy anywhere in the city, otherwise if you locate them nearest the worst neighborhoods you'll probably not have a very even distribution as bad neighborhoods tend to be clustered.
Not really. Unless you really have a barrel length of zero and a round of zero mass, there will be a sonic boom from the bullet for at least a little while. A microphone staged downrange will pick up two cracks: one from the sonic boom of the bullet and a second one from the charge exploding. The bullet is supersonic, so the sound from it originates closer to the microphone, whereas the gun is stationary and its sound will arrive later. The reverse is true if the microphone is behind the gun, and there's an area of ambiguity if you're perpendicular to the muzzle on either side, which is why multiple microphones.
Firecrackers, nail guns, and anything else that doesn't send a supersonic projectile doesn't have that double crack. It's not hard to tell by ear in many cases and certainly not too hard to automate classification to some acceptable level of false alarm rates.
Slight nitpick, sub-sonic .22LR rounds are a thing.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Shannon's Law was directed specifically at celebratory gunfire, such as firing into the air for New Year. This is a feature of, um, a certain culture. Shannon was a young girl who went outside with her family to see the New Year in and suddenly dropped dead of a round that had been fired miles away.
There's lots of common handgun ammunition that is subsonic. The .45 Colt and .45 ACP come to mind immediately because I have sidearms chambered for those cartridges. There's also plenty of "specialty" sub-sonic ammunition for other common cartridges like 9mm. There's even subsonic rifle ammunition that is not too hard to find.
I've seen the reasons for these subsonic cartridges to exist in the modern era. First is that they are cheap. It takes less metal and allows for lower tolerances for subsonic ammunition. Second is that there seems to be a lot of people doing cowboy action shooting and other hobbies that like the old style guns. Supersonic ammunition is a fairly recent development, especially for handguns. Third, for a firearm suppressor to work properly subsonic ammunition must be used.
The .45 ACP is apparently quite popular among the special forces types because it can be effectively suppressed. It bothers me when I see people that will make YouTube videos that "show" how ineffective firearm suppressors are by putting one on a gun and fire off supersonic ammunition. I can tell that the ammunition is supersonic by it's distinctive "crack" as it leaves the barrel. Both sides do it too. The "pro-gun" people will want to show that guns can still be detected by things like these shot detectors. The "anti-gun" side do this to show that no one would want them since they don't work, therefore they can be banned, or something.
One thing that I wonder about is the number of false negatives. People talk about the false positives with things like firecrackers or something being detected as a shot but what of a shot that was not detected? Isn't that a thing? I remember reading somewhere of someone that shot another and not waking sleeping children in the next room by wrapping a revolver with a pillow. Had to have been something subsonic like a .45 Colt or .38 Special.
I have to wonder if the criminals will figure this out. Wrapping a revolver in a pillow might be rather conspicuous but there might be other ways to suppress the noise with something to the point it would not be detected by these shot spotters. In the US federal law the possession of a firearm suppressor is tightly controlled. Using a firearm suppressor in the commission of a crime can get a 30 year sentence. I'd think though that in the interest of getting away with murder someone might not be all that concerned about an additional 30 year sentence.
There is a movement in the USA to get firearm suppressors regulated like shotguns (no fees, must be 18 years old, show ID, not have a criminal history, done with 5 minute phone call) instead of like machine guns ($200 tax, fingerprints, extensive background check, 2 years wait for processing, signatures from sheriff, psychiatrist, and your mom, and usually involves a lawyer to get the paperwork in order). This movement is growing because of the obvious hearing protection advantages from suppressors. If that happens then criminals could get them more often by theft, falsifying records, straw purchase, etc.
I'm not a fan of banning suppressors because criminals might use them in a crime. If that were true then we'd be banning a lot of things because criminals use them to harm others. I'm just thinking of how ineffective these shot spotter devices could be in the not too distant future. I think people are relying too much on government and technology to save them from what they fear. That's just not healthy thinking, IMHO.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
and calling someone a racist aren't even remotely the same thing. If we're going to tackle a problem we have to acknowledge it's existence. You can't really believe Philando Castile was shot just because the cop thought he was reaching for his gun. Hell, the worst thing was the cop probably really thought he was. The cop was more likely to believe a black man would shoot him than hand over his driver's license.
That's institutionalized racism in a nutshell. When you don't even realize you're doing it. When you can say with a straight face "my black friends are fine but..." and mean it. Are law enforcement practices are a huge part of that.
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when we took action during the civil rights movement. The point is to get folks to take action, particularly at the polls, by making sure the narrative is steered away from "Everything's fine now and there's no racism or oppression" when nothing could be further from the truth.
So yeah, it's helps.
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Han shot first. Greedo never shot at all.
Yeah, I've never understood the "laws are useless because criminals break laws" approach. You hear it a lot in the Second Amendment community.
If you are referring to "when guns are outlawed only outlaws will have guns." Well, that is one of those word games that proves itself. What it is really going after is that by outlawing guns, law abiding citizens are not allowed to have guns. If you wade past the extremist (AKA the absolutely no gun regulations crowd) you will find that most people agree to background check as long as it is reasonable. When I took my Concealed Weapons class, even my instructor called "constitutional carry" asinine.
~Less think, more do