I've lived in Oakland, LA, and SD and have heard shots in all of them.

Though to be fair it was New Years in San Diego, and Santee is a bit out of the way

I don't doubt that you can hear gunshots in the rough parts of Oakland or LA, but this idea that people in the US are constantly in fear of getting shot is just so ridiculous.

East bay here, while I don't necessarily fear getting shot, it would be very nice if I was able to feel safe walking home at night, feel safe having my phone out, etc... I really would prefer to not be constantly checking my surroundings every half second

I've heard gunshots in SF more than a few times. Several times in the mission, once in the tenderloin, and once was a half block away from my house in the Richmond. I walked over right as EMS got there and saw them trying to stabilize a neighbor in a pool of blood.

I also made the dumb mistake of tapping on a window sitting on my couch once when I saw a bunch of funny dudes with helmets just outside it. When they looked in the window I realized it was actually SWAT, right before they raided the house two doors down.

Right? I thought that was just something from TV/Movies - this looks more like they are selling fear than something real.

Why would a city invest in something like this? Especially if you get the information via emergency calls?

I happened to start working with a similar system today. For our customer there are several factors they are interested in:

# Mapping gunshots in both time and space. These types of sensors can attempt to classify the type of weapon used based on the audio signature. If there are are several shots from similar-sounding sources moving through the city at a certain, or in a certain area over the period of days (or month), this can tell you more than you could determine from just emergency calls.

# Tieing the gunshot sensors in with other input devices, like cameras. You can reduce the time spent looking through, say, traffic camera recordings that happened in the vicinity of the gunshot looking for related video.

# Automatically pointing moveable cameras to look in the direction of a gunshot. Means you don't need as many camera for the same effective coverage.

Depends where you live. We've had gunshots in our neighborhood every day (or very nearly so) for 2+ weeks. I lost count of fatalities sometime around 9. Bit of a gang war going on here.

The ShotSpotter they put in last fall is definitely seeing some use here.

Gun violence is made up.