Cambridge City Council votes to end use of ShotSpotter technology [More]
Even if it wasn’t a documented boondoggle and if it did prevent violence they’d be against it because it “leads to the over-policing of communities of color” and “ShotSpotter devices could be used by the federal government to perpetuate an immigration enforcement agenda that is deeply unpopular in Cambridge.”
Massholes get the “gun violence” they vote for.
[Via Michael G]
Since 2014, there have been eleven incidents where ShotSpotter detected the sound of gunshots without a 911 call to alert police, not including the recent gunshots at River Street and Memorial Drive which was out of range of the system. That works out to slightly less than one incident per year where the system worked. What is not mentioned in the article is the number of false reports of gunshots during that interval and the costs of the responses to those false reports.
According to some reports, approximately 30% of ShotSpotter’s incident reports are actual gunshots. ~70% are false positives which include cars backfiring, balloons popping, construction, debris falling, etc.
So for every one incident per year, expect at least two that aren’t real.
And that says nothing about the inaccuracy of the location triangulation, which is reportedly really, really bad at accounting for echoes … in the concrete-and-glass urban jungle.
The Cambridge City Council are the kings and queens of virtue-signalling.
In the mid-70s, I was perpetually tickled by the highly visible highway-department-style signs on poles all over town reminding everyone that Cambridge had declared itself a “nuclear-free city.” With an operating reactor at Harvard, and at least two at MIT, Cambridge was actually more “nuclear” than any other municipality in the USA.