Gun Shot Detector
Boston city councilors, law enforcement officials, and community leaders are pressing City Hall to come up with $1.5 million to buy a promising acoustic gunshot-detection system.
The sensor system could blanket a 5.6-square-mile swath of the city’s most dangerous neighborhoods — the source of 80 to 85 percent of calls citywide reporting shots fired — and give officers a jump on arresting suspects, improve police response time to 911 calls, and possibly reduce firearm violence, proponents say.
Via David, who notes:
I guess if they need to resort to this, Operation Ceasefire must not be working all that well…
Now, some of my gunnie friends are opposed to this. I really don’t care. After all, the lawful discharge of a firearm in city would likely mean that the person doing the shooting wants the police notified. And the unlawful discharges, everyone else wants the police notified.
My issue with it is that it will create a black market for suppressors. And then there will be a push to regulate them more than they already are.
January 8th, 2007 at 11:49 am
A quick question. (Actually two.)
Approximately how long do you think that it would be for the ‘locals’ to toss firecracrackers in an alley to generate false alarms? And after a few hundred of those, how much will the response time deteriorate? Just wondering.
Paul
January 8th, 2007 at 11:55 am
Paul,
Wow. Beat me to it. Are they just going to turn the system off on July 1? Would it even register a .22?
January 8th, 2007 at 11:56 am
Dunno. Could suffer from car alarm syndrome, where no one reacts to it anymore.
January 8th, 2007 at 11:56 am
I don’t know a thing about the system they are referring to, but I suspect that it works passed on the sonic signiture of the bullet, not the gun. If this is the case then suppressors would not defeat the system but would allow people living in the area a little relief from gun blast; that sounds (pun intended) like a win/win. This would also mean subsonic bullets would probably defeat the system even without suppressors.
Re: black market for suppressors. I don’t think suppressors should be regulated, so the more of them out there the better; drawback to them becoming popular in this fashion is that it would reinforce the movie image of suppressors being a criminal thing only where it should be incouraged for all of us to use them — both to save our own hearing and to be a little more “neighborly” about the amount of noise we generate.
That blackmarket for suppressors will also have to supply barrels and gunsmithing. It would also make handguns a little less concealable. I just don’t see it being too big an issue.
January 8th, 2007 at 12:01 pm
These type of systems are suppose to be able to filter out firecracker type explosion noise and not give false positives. I have no idea if that is true or marketing sales talk.
Even so, I know I would be sorely tempted to try and spoof the system just because.
January 8th, 2007 at 12:34 pm
Cops on the street, doing their jobs, would make great gun shot detectors.
January 8th, 2007 at 1:43 pm
What Rustmeister said.
January 8th, 2007 at 3:25 pm
One could have considerable fun by getting his friends to concurrently discharge a couple of fire crackers under, say, 15 – 20 geographically dispersed sensors at a specified time (e.g. rush hour).
I would like to hear that many “shots fired” calls going into and out of the police dispatcher’s office at the same time.
Of course, where we live (with our first responder program) all you would see is firetrucks and ambulances going in different directions.
January 8th, 2007 at 4:48 pm
Anyone got frequency and amplitude data on gunshots vs firecrackers? With those data, could firecrackers be engineered to exactly duplicate gunshot noise?
January 8th, 2007 at 5:07 pm
Hasn’t Chicago implemented something of this nature?
January 8th, 2007 at 5:29 pm
just drop a firecracker down a tube.
There are places in Europe that require suppressors before one can shoot. It’s considered polite.