If only we took companies out to defend their product at face value we could waste even more time and resources!
So much so that it's "obstructing a meaningful analysis of the effectiveness of the technology". Their words, not mine.
> Everywhere it's installed officers find usefulness in triangulating where shots are popped off.
At best, cops are going on 'feels' here because, presumably, the data aren't sufficient to provide a solid basis for analysis. Or the police are withholding data that proves the system works well, which prima facie seems unlikely.
I don't know what the real numbers are, but from that article it seems noone does...
A proper reporting of numbers would be nice.
I would rather the cameras go to the gunshot noises than stay bolted to a pole outside my house, which is where they are now.
Also, a faster response could result in a better rate of finding crime. "89% of ShotSpotter’s reports led police to find no gun-related crime" does not equal "89% of reports weren't gunshots". It could be that police show up too late.
In a sort of magical way where there is a drone that can easily be dispatched from within it's range that has the intelligence to not only navigate to the scene through a complex city environment but also find and gather evidence. I bet any current drone deployment is likely to be slower than dispatching people patrolling and there will be far fewer of them than regular cops. It's basically fantasy when the Shot Spotter stuff doesn't even seem to work.
Drone navigation has been progressing quite a lot over the past decade, and law enforcement in some places is already using them in an automated way, as the article mentions. Also, the suggestion above was forward looking, it wasn't suggesting that the NYPD should glue these systems together today.
It doesn't tell a gunshot from a dumpster lid slamming shut.
It does produce almost entirely false positives.
It doesn't identify the location of a gunshot to any useful level of precision.
I suppose if you want to start a police state, and make every fourth resident a cop, you might be able to mitigate the 90% false-positive rate, and the horrible location-identification rate, but at that point, do you even need shot-spotter?
Right now, police have data about where loud sounds generally come from, and video from fixed poles where crime happened in previous years. Both of these aren't great data points on their own.
The intersection of that data: [Video around locations where loud noises just happened] is probably much better than disjointed data points of [video of where crime happened in previous years] and [general locations of where loud sounds are happening].