It works very well where I live (DC) and I and people I know have seen police respond to actual things with shotspotter
Many shootings where nobody calls it in and cops respond with shotspotter
Many shootings where nobody calls it in and cops respond with shotspotter
Also ShotSpotter has false positives. You have no way of knowing if you (or it) even heard a gun or one of many other things.
I'm pretty sure, "don't bother with this technology which reports shots to the cops, because it has false positives" is a very weak argument.
If the false positive rate is 95%, it’s pretty obviously going to be a diversion of police resources from whatever else they could be doing if not responding to zero-value alerts.
This claims the false positive rate is under 3%. It's based on Shotspotter's statistics and "independent audit" statistics.
Not sure how trustworthy either is, but without better stats from anywhere else I have no reason to doubt the claim the false positive is pretty low.
Seems like even if false positive rate was at 50% it wouldn't be that big of a deal. Cities have police on patrol at all times anyway - it would just mean sending someone to drive 5 minutes away to see if there is visible a disturbance instead of them driving around the area they were currently randomly patrolling.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Seth_Rich
We talked to the cops (not in this instance but in another homicide)