ShotSpotter Hits the Suburbs as the Police Fight Gun Violence
[From ShotSpotter Hits the Suburbs as the Police Fight Gun Violence - NYTimes.com]
An article on ShotSpotter mentioned an independent study on gunshot detection.
In 2008, Peter Scharf, a criminologist at Tulane University in New Orleans, conducted a study for the National Institute of Justice about an early competitor of ShotSpotter, called Secures, in two Virginia cities. He found the system frequently sent the police on wild goose chases by reporting false positives, had an inconclusive effect on response time and, crucially, had little impact on arrest rates.
The report is very well done. Some of the interesting findings include how the gunshot detection system was negatively affected by radio frequency interference and fireworks/bottle rockets.
The report also discusses the tradeoffs between false positive and false negative error (an unavoidable part of these systems). The report found that “2/3 of SECURES®-related dispatches were “but-for false alarms” – both not a confirmed gunshot and no call corresponding call for service.
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