Because gunshots are rare and if you're just triangulating loud noise you're gonna be overwhelmed by false positives. Even if you do basic filtration to try and tease out the sound of a gunshot vs everything else you're still gonna get overwhelmed by false positives.

I don't know enough about the procedures, but would citizens calling 911 to report gun shots help coroborate and help weed out false positives?

Many citizens can't tell the difference between gunshots and other explosive sounds like fireworks.

If ShotSpotter can't either then it effectively useless.

If I remember correctly from a radio story, the police can listen to a recording of the shot report before investigating to confirm it sounds like a gun.

It's not useless, sometimes it can be used to fuel a prosecution against an innocent person who happens to be a racial minority.

Police locking up black people in America is the reason police in America were created.

> Police locking up black people in America is the reason police in America were created.

Formal policing in America has a long and sometimes infamous history, but it definitely did not begin with "locking up black people"; it varied based on the locale.

For example, in NYC, it goes back to the Tammany Hall days and was notoriously corrupt.

In the west (where there were very few black people, and those that were there were free), police forces began with various marshals and sheriffs who were hired, typically by the merchants, to tame the wild western towns.

According to Time, "The first publicly funded, organized police force with officers on duty full-time was created in Boston in 1838."

https://time.com/4779112/police-history-origins/

The Boston police were started to defend the rights of property owners, not citizens.

In the South, post-Civil War, police used gold star badges because they were adapted from the gold star badges used by slave patrols.

You should learn more about the history of policing in America: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-history-of-america...

>In the west (where there were very few black people

According to Smithsonian Magazine, 1 in 4 cowboys were black. I suspect popular culture (movies) are what's to blame for this misconception. Many fled to the West after the Civil War to find work.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/lesser-known-history-...

Maybe it gets harder around june/july/new years, but the rest of the year has very little firework activity.

I think that depends on the city/neighborhood. We heard fireworks pretty regularly throughout the year when we lived in San Jose. And they became more frequent after the Flyod protests.

On the flip side, we heard far more gunshots than fireworks when we lived in Kansas City.

I live in Chicago. We have fireworks year round, some neighborhoods more often than others. Usually you will hear fireworks far more frequently than you hear gunshots.

It's presumably some sort of machine learning to distinguish gunshots from firecrackers, backfires and other kinds of impulsive sounds one would find in a city. It just does not appear to work well.

Cincy PD disables alerts for ShotSpotter on the 4th of July and disables it during baseball/football games downtown because the pyro from the games causes false alarms.

I m not convinced that simple triangulation works in a city environment. Sound reflected off of buildings can mess things up good. I can think of several ways in which a later reflection can be louder than the initial sound.

Triangluation works in these cases if you apply some DSP tricks (marketed in this case as AI).

Multipath interference can be mitigated to a large extent with multiple listening devices calibrated against a known acoustic impulse - i.e. intentionally firing something like a gun at a precise time & location known to the system beforehand.

It’s just marketing speak. If your tech product doesn’t use AI, machine learning or have an algorithm then it won’t look as bright and shiny to customers.