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from the better-way-to-find-dalmations-and-leopards? dept.
For years, gunshot detection has been bought, and criticized, by cities nationwide.
With the president at Camp David for most of the weekend, the United States Secret Service decided that now would be a good time to fire off a few live rounds on the grounds of the White House—so it can evaluate a gunshot-detection technology known as ShotSpotter.
The mounted microphone and computer system is designed to detect gunshots via their audio signature and send prompt alerts to local authorities.
In a series of tweets on Saturday morning, the CEO of ShotSpotter, Ralph Clark, said that 90 cities and 10 university campuses currently use it, including recent additions in Louisville, Kentucky, and Cincinnati, Ohio. The system has been in use by the Metropolitan Police Department—which serves the city of Washington, DC—for many years.
However, the company has sometimes been criticized for being overly expensive, not particularly effective, and potentially invasive of people’s privacy.
Recently, San Antonio, Texas, decided that, after using the service for a year, ShotSpotter was no longer worth the price tag—over $500,000, which includes the cost of the service plus officer overtime. During the year that it was in use, the city only arrested four people as a result of the gunshot detection setup, or $136,500 per arrest, according to the San Antonio Express-News.
-- submitted from IRC
[How many shots could a ShotSpotter spot, if a ShotSpotter could spot shots? source --Ed.]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 29 2017, @10:49PM
Seriously? Carry a poor-man's grenade, with no safety pin, on your person? WTF is wrong with you?
Just carry a gun. I recommend a .32 or .22 magnum revolver, loaded with whatever combination of blanks and live cartridges seems right to you. (No blanks for me -- if I need a warning shot, I'll aim at the ground.) If you've got laws preventing you from carrying a modern gun, blank-firing guns may be a workaround, antique and/or muzzle-loading guns may be another.
The great thing about guns is, they're designed to be dangerous when needed, so you don't have to defeat the safety features that protect you the rest of the time. A box of matches is designed to be safe (e.g. striking surface on outside), and by defeating the safeties, you make it all danger, all the time.