Honestly, I wrote a wall of text about this, but I think the benefit to ShotSpotter is that it isn't a human calling it in. The lag time between the shots happening and an officer receiving information about it is so long when a human calls them in that I can see why they wouldn't even bother unless the call was extremely detailed. It isn't like people hang out after shooting at someone, and if the response takes five minutes the shooter could easy be half a mile away even on foot.

If ShotSpotter can give a location to within a couple hundred feet within 30 seconds of shots being fired, then the officers already have a much better chance of doing something useful.

I think the real opportunity would be combining data from ShotSpotter with other data sources and using them for predictive/preventative policing. That's much harder to quantify from a sales perspective though.

I think you are under-estimating the police response time by a fairly large margin. It's not like cops have shotspotter (TM) information going to straight into their heads and can react at a moment's notice. The information goes to a command center, then if a unit is available, they might send them out for a look, which means going through the dispatcher. There really isn't some police reaction force just sitting around waiting for calls.

It's dumb technology--it's like everything the MIC has done to try and re-market to police agencies, it's unnecessary and pretty much worthless.

One of the articles I read implied that ShotSpotter could send information to the computer inside the squad car. I'm not sure if that is true or not.

I'm well aware police officers aren't specifically sitting around waiting to be dispatched, but my neighborhood has a lot of idle officers that exist as a 'show of force'. I don't mean that in a derogatory way, I just mean that this officers are already dispatched to my neighborhood as a way of reducing violence. I think that responding to areas ShotTracker has flagged would be both within their capabilities in addition to being in line with their duties and priorities.

I talked to an officer in my city and they don't actually look at ShotSpotter data in real-time. They don't have the resources.

They use it to aggregate reports and consider increasing patrols (I say consider, because they often don't look at it anyway ).

Interesting. Now I'm really interested in this subject I should talk to some of the people I know in Chicago who work with policing data about it. They might have some insight.

Though I guess this is probably good motivation to go to one of the Chi Hack Nights, because I'm sure if someone there doesn't know how Chicago is using the ShotSpotter data, they probably know how to find out.

I wish they would at least open up the APIs to the public... mostly so I can use it to track down people setting off fireworks and personally go yell at them. So maybe that's a bad idea.