San Francisco believes in gunshot-location technology

Nov 12, 2008 9:43 AM, By Glenn Bischoff

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SAN DIEGO—One of the problems faced by the law-enforcement community is that when a firearm is discharged, many times the incident is never reported. That reality led the city of San Francisco to deploy a gunshot-location system developed by Mountain View, Calif.-based Shotspotter a year and a half ago in two districts prone to such incidents.

That decision has worked out so well that the city will deploy the system in a third district next month, said Mikail Ali, senior advisor for public safety in the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice, who spoke yesterday during an educational session at the International Association of Chiefs of Police annual conference.

“There is a tremendous amount of gunfire that isn’t reported. … The general rule is that if you receive 100 calls reporting gunfire, there really have been 200,” Ali said.

There are several reasons for this. Fear is chief among them, according to Greg Rowland, senior vice president of Shotspotter. “A lot of times there are no witnesses, because they’re afraid of retribution, or they simply ran like hell as soon as the shots were fired,” Rowland said.

Apathy is another reason, according to Ali. “In some areas, there is so much gunfire that people become numb to it,” he said.

Still another reason is that gunshots often sound similar to other sounds. Rowland described an incident where multiple firecrackers were exploded just prior to a gunshot. “No one called it in because they thought it was another firecracker,” he said.

Ali agreed. “Even a trained law-enforcement professional can’t always identify gunfire from other sounds,” he said.

The city deployed the Shotspotter system in Bay View—where there is “lots of crime and gang activity,” Ali said—in a footprint that covers 1.3 square miles, and in the Northern district, covering 1 square mile. The latter district, which includes the Fillmore and Nob Hill sections of the city, is affluent and “at the opposite end of the demographic spectrum,” from Bay View, according to Ali. Nevertheless, the Northern district was chosen based on the amount of gunfire and homicides that occur in it.