TPD renews gunshot detection system as NYC audit casts doubt on ShotSpotter accuracy [More]
Despite the fact that “in more than 80 percent of its activations, no one called 911.”
What else would we expect from a Bloomberg city, which makes this all the more difficult to explain…
[Via Edmund M]
Any audiophile can tell you more than you ever wanted to know about the subject of “multipath distortion”. Ditto for anyone who has heard the siren of an approaching emergency vehicle, then saw it appear from a completely unexpected direction.
In an urban environment, sounds and radio waves can bounce off of the myriad of hard reflective surfaces and appear to have occurred from more than one source and from multiple directions. It’s just simple physics. Unfortunately, as I often saw in my career with “a large public futility” and my wife saw at our county government, the politicians who have control of the money have no clue about physics, and the people who do know about physics are not allowed anywhere near the money.
So you end up with large expensive mainframe computers with mostly empty cabinets, (No suit is going to write a 7 figure check for a box the size of a refrigerator.) And you end up with taxpayer dollars going to products like “ShotSpotter” that might have a prayer of identifying the source of a gunshot in a Kansas cornfield but a “snowball’s chance in hell” of doing the same trick in downtown Chicago.