rss feedSensors that help police respond to gunfire? ShotSpotter in Silicon Valley says: Yes
I typically don’t focus on crime issues - I prefer edible items such as tofu skin (also called yuba). I also covered enough criminal justice issues at my previous job.
But ShotSpotter, a Silicon Valley-based company which uses sensor technology to alert police to gunshots, gave me reason to pause.
As in: Huh?
The reason the sensors apparently are needed – at least in Richmond, Calif. – is that residents reportedly hear gunfire on such a regular basis that they no longer feel it’s imperative to call for help.
As in (for rational thinkers): No need to dial. The computer will get it.
I came across this company founded by Robert Showen – who, according to his biography, has studied “acoustic and geophysics research experience” and “the effects of lightning on the ionosphere” - in a roundabout way.
I was interested in journalist Daniel Weintraub’s HealthyCal, which contained an article from reporter Heather Tirado Gilligan of Richmond Confidential, an online outlet in the San Francisco Bay Area.
The first sentence of her article, which should be read for the entire context:
Gunfire is so common in Richmond, Calif., that residents of neighborhoods like the Iron Triangle no longer call 911 at the sound of shots fired, according to the city’s police department.
And so city leaders contracted with Mountain View, Calif.-based ShotSpotter.
The obvious should be stated because at least in Richmond, Calif., not enough people are calling the police after, well, someone fires a gun - in a “lawless” manner - in public.
You can go ahead and state the obvious because if I type it, well, it would look a bit strange – at least to me.
So ShotSpotter has come up with a way of blending the failure of conflict resolution, apathy (or fear), human intelligence, technology, government need and unintended consequences and responding to the market.
ShotSpotter has attracted a slew of venture capitalists - which are certainly needed as the country tries to shake off the impact of The Great Recession.
The best way to see how ShotSpotter’s sensors and video technology work is to view the company’s Flash animation and video compilation.
This is how the company describes its work on its Web site:
ShotSpotter GLS solutions use acoustic sensors deployed over areas from one square mile up to hundreds of linear miles to locate gunfire and other violent threats within seconds. When an impulsive sound is detected within a ShotSpotter GLS coverage area, the system springs into action; accurately locating the incident (within 25 meters) and classifying the impulsive sound as a violent threat or an everyday sound (e.g. car backfire or firecracker). Detailed alert information, including actual audio recording clips, is quickly relayed to dispatch communications centers, command stations, and field-based vehicles.
Here’s the mapping system that dispatchers and police officers in the field see after the technology alerts them.
If you’re interested in how the company formed, consider this:
The idea for ShotSpotter was conceived in the early 1990s by Dr. Robert Showen, then a senior engineer at SRI International in Menlo Park, CA and now Chief Scientist at ShotSpotter. Dr. Showen wanted to find a way to do real-time gunshot detection as an aid to law enforcement. At roughly the same time, scientists, at the United States Geological Survey (USGS) in 1992, found that they were able to locate the sound of gunfire by running acoustic data through the same software designed to locate earthquakes, although at the time no sensor platform existed to collect the necessary acoustic data. Upon learning of the USGS results, Dr. Showen determined that a sensor network and law enforcement-friendly software could be developed to detect gunfire and assist government and public safety agencies. In 1995, Dr. Showen founded ShotSpotter a precursor firm with the purpose of developing this technology.
As a kid who grew up in Northern California, I always recalled that SRI was just a building where people worked.
Now, I have a better idea of the place that once was referred to as the Stanford Research Institute.
Although, based on the company’s online map of clients, no police agency in Washington state is using the system, cities such as Los Angeles, San Francisco and Washington, D.C. have signed on with ShotSpotter.
If you’re inclined, you also can read the company’s patents.
In a way, I still don’t know what to think about ShotSpotter.
I have written about the Seattle police using cameras to crack down on red-light runners – a program which has expanded since I wrote about it in 2007.
I’m also interested in technology and realize that experts have questioned whether robots would one day become smarter than humans.
And that an IBM supercomputer once played a human in chess and that one was supposed to compete against humans on Jeopardy!
In the case of ShotSpotter, though, we have humans who aren’t communicating by phone and other humans who have conceived a way to help address illegal gunfire – and have other humans respond to the scene.
The company founder once studied lightning.
Certainly, I hope that communities are safer because of this technology.
But I’m still scratching my head about the step that humans missed.
Hi, Brad. James from ShotSpotter here. You’re right that the “9-1-1 call rate” for gunfire being 20% in many cities is pretty distressing. That means that 4 out of 5 times, nobody calls 9-1-1, and it’s perfectly fair of you to ask what that means about our society. To be equally fair to society, though, we’re talking about some parts of the country where shootings happen five, six, even ten times *PER NIGHT*, at which point it is reasonable to assume that people will stop calling 9-1-1 as the night goes on.
There is much more to what we do, however. In general, in the roughly 20% of cases where there is a call to 9-1-1, that call comes in about 2 minutes and 35 seconds after we detect and report the incident to police. Those 2:35 can be life-saving. Since 2005, for example, we’ve helped first responders (police, medical personnel, etc.) locate 250 gunshot *survivors*–many of whom would not have survived but for our timely notification and life-saving aid from EMTs.
There are two other pieces of the puzzle. First, bear in mind that someone calling 9-1-1 generally can only provide a vague sense of the location of the shooting. So if someone calls from 123 Main Street, the usual procedure is for police to drive to 123 Main Street and drive in concentric circles until they locate an incident. Since the sound of gunfire can travel more than a mile, that’s a big circle (3.14 sq. mi., to be precise :-). Obviously this is a potentially huge waste of resources, and one of the reasons ShotSpotter can be so valuable: we deliver very accurate positions (within yards) to the police, so they know for example that the shots heard at 123 Main Street actually took place 1/4 mile away at 234 Chestnut, in the front yard, behind the large tree, etc.
Finally, our data provides a level of accuracy in investigations previously unheard of. We can tell police, for example, who shot which gun first, at precisely what time (down to milliseconds), and standing precisely where, etc. A recent case in LA highlights this: we were able to prove that two individuals were shooting two separate weapons, fired virtually simultaneously (1/10th of a second separation) at a distance of 15 feet separation–too far away to be the same person holding both guns. This sort of forensic evidence has proven critical to a number of criminal cases. Check out http://www.shotspotter.com/results/casestudies/ShotSpotter_LACSD_Case%20Study_031109.pdf for more info.
Thanks again for your post. Feel free to email me (your blog should have my email address; if not is jbeldock [at] our domain .com) if you’d like more info.