13 ms·

Gunshot detection system transforms and raises issues

200 points by mindblink 14y ago

gonzo 14y ago
phased arrays of microphones: the future is now
mcantelon 14y ago
>The detection system, which triangulates sound picked up by acoustic sensors placed on buildings, utility poles and other structures, is part of a wave of technological advances — among them, license plate scanners, body cameras, Global Positioning System trackers and hand-held fingerprint identifiers This technology also happens to be very useful for domestic counter-insurgence, something of interest to an economically polarized state during a time of economic transformation.
- cperciva 14y ago
  No, it really isn't. The first step in any insurgency is to compromise intelligence and surveillance systems, and these sensors are very fragile sitting ducks.
  - Daniel_Newby 14y ago
    Insurgents do not attack prepositioned listening posts. Their tools are randomness and radio silence.
ChuckMcM 14y ago
I've seen this in action and it is pretty impressive. I expect the next step will be that a quad-copter UAV will 'nest' on top of a ShotSpotter pole where is will stay charged. And when an alert comes in, if it is closest, it will launch and give the HQ a video feed of the scene in 15 - 20 seconds after the event. I do have concerns about the use of conversations the microphones overhear but I know that in many neighborhoods events are not called in because the neighbor doesn't want the repercussions of turning in the local gang lord or his troops.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- politician 14y ago
  Prediction: When the system goes to dispatch the closest UAV to the disturbance, the launch system will return "500 - Destroyed". EDIT: C'mon, downvotes? You do realize that vandalism will be a serious problem for this system.
  - Jach 14y ago
    I think you need to make a convincing argument that vandalism will be a problem. Paraphrasing from The Information, pg 144, there was also that concern when Morse and Vail set up their wires wrapped in yarn on 20-foot posts. Morse told Congress they could transmit 30 characters per minute and he also told them that the lines had "remained undisturbed from the wantonness or evil disposition of any one." There is even more ample opportunity for domestic terrorism and destruction of things in the US today yet things seem okay. Of course if the UAVs did start getting destroyed, it's not a stretch of imagination to think about how they could be protected...
    - cead_ite 14y ago
      Not really the best analogy: telegraph/phone lines sit there passively and pose no apparent immediate danger, while the aforementioned UAVs would present an active threat to wrongdoers’ wrongdoing and thus become targets...
    - larrys 14y ago
      "I think you need to make a convincing argument that vandalism will be a problem." I think if the people having shoot outs are so brazen that they can do this and people aren't necessarily reporting them it's not a stretch to think that they will, just for fun, attempt to shoot down a UAV. Wearing a mask or course to protect their identity. Or try to damage it while it sits up on the pole with a rock etc. (Although I guess it could be protected from that fairly easily).
zheng 14y ago
I'm not 100% on the laws around this, but if a city was utilizing ShotSpotter, wouldn't they have to disclose the area(s) they were monitoring?
- Palomides 14y ago
  my understanding is that anyone can record any visual or auditory info from any public place (in the US)
  - pbhjpbhj 14y ago
    Unless you use a telephone to do it or are using a telephone when you're being recorded? I understand that making a recording of a phone call without notification is strictly disallowed in many states legislation? (eg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_recording_laws#United_States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_recording_laws#United...)
    - superuser2 14y ago
      Telephone systems are a public place? If I'm walking down the sidewalk talking on my phone, overhearing my voice is not a violation of privacy.
      - njharman 14y ago
        Think point is. Unless that voice is carried over telecommunications network to, say central processing center.
      - pbhjpbhj 14y ago
        >overhearing my voice is not a violation of privacy // But we're talking about recording your voice. Which I think is a violation of my privacy vs just listening to me passively - now that may not be enshrined in any law but then the law doesn't IMO [exclusively?] dictate what is moral.
- Anechoic 14y ago
moreati 14y ago
I wonder if false positives will take off e.g. personal attack alarms that make a sound like gun fire
- Dove 14y ago
  My dad was using a powder-actuated concrete nail gun for some remodeling not long ago. It used .22 loads to drive nails. The sound it made was eerily identical to the real thing.
  - kijin 14y ago
    The system will have to distinguish real firearms from other powder-actuated hardware. Otherwise it's going to become useless anywhere near a construction site. But what if you shoot a person with a nail gun?
    - ComputerGuru 14y ago
      > But what if you shoot a person with a nail gun? What if you stab a person with a knife? It's off-topic. It was designed and built to detect gunshots from real guns.
    - Dove 14y ago
      I think the best way to distinguish between firearms and nail guns would be with a man in the loop listening to the sounds (which they appear to have). Construction doesn't sound like a firefight.
- Jabbles 14y ago
  Wouldn't it make more sense to make the alarm send out a standardised frequency a la DTMF tones?
kijin 14y ago
> the system was not intended to record anything except gunshots So, they could record conversations, but they won't for the time being. A classic example of using software to temporarily cripple the true capabilities of a computing device. In the hands of DRM-wielding corporations, "defective by design" results in inconvenience and loss of users' freedom. In the hands of the surveillance state, the same technique results in a situation where citizens must simply trust the authorities to exercise restraint. Because the police could flip a switch at any time and record all sorts of conversations. Somehow I don't trust that the switch will remain un-flipped for long. And when it does get flipped, as it did in New Bedford, everyone will say it was just an accident. Maybe, just maybe, we should accept systems like this as a necessary evil in certain cities where there's a lot of gun violence. Still, I don't like this. When it comes to the government, I'd much rather give them hardware that can't be unlocked "by accident" because there's nothing to unlock. The thing is, it's unrealistic to do that in all cases, and we have to hit a balance somewhere. Which is exactly why systems like this raise difficult issues.
- tomerv 14y ago
  Given that the microphones are placed in a public location, and that they record noises heard in the street, one could argue that it's a reasonable level of surveillance. The real concern will be when governments start to identify their citizens by their voice signatures, and then use that to track their whereabouts.
  - Jach 14y ago
    >The real concern will be when governments start to identify their citizens by their voice signatures, and then use that to track their whereabouts. And thanks to a recent heavy-hitter at the box office, the public has already had it decided for them that it's unethical! (Unless it's used once for a really really bad guy.) But apart from that this is an awesome system for its purpose. Keep it out of my home (they've already got phone-tapping for that anyway) and I'm fine with it.
  - underwater 14y ago
    If I recall correctly, privacy laws are based more on reasonable expectation of privacy rather than where the recording device is located. I can't climb a telegraph pole and photograph someone inside through a second floor window, for example. I don't know how this would affect the legality of surveillance though.
greg_bt 14y ago
I find it interesting that people's main concerns are the privacy laws. Isn't anyone concerned that there is a need for gunshot detection? I would have thought that the main issue was that there was enough gun related violence to make this product viable? As much as I love to see an innovative solution to a problem this seems a lot like its treating the symptoms and not the cause.
- Kroem3r 14y ago
  I enjoy following these structures of cludge upon subsidy upon moral bankruptcy. I wonder at what point (in the adoption of this technology) it makes sense to invest in gun silencers.
  - Snhr 14y ago
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1q8zKtnU6U http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1q8zKtnU6U I'm sure that silencers will still be detectable? They do make the gun softer but it's still noticeable if you know what you're looking for I'm sure.
- InclinedPlane 14y ago
  Won't somebody think of the children? The problem is that there's always a good justification for reducing rights. It makes law enforcement easier. We need to fight terrorism. We need to stop child rape. Etc, etc, etc. But if you let your rights be stripped away, even for a purportedly good reason, you aren't getting them back.
staunch 14y ago
If they designed the system (hopefully at the hardware level) so that it was incapable of recording voices I would have no problem with it. That would probably be a good thing for a competitor to create: a shot detection system that's designed to address civil liberty concerns. I bet someone on HN could do it.
- bostonvaulter2 14y ago
  But the problem is how can you verify that the system that is actually installed on all the building and telephone poles is actually one that is incapable of recording voices instead of a (really cheap) normal microphone.
- nosse 14y ago
  If you do that simply by damping wavelengths of speech, you possibly make opportunity to alter the sound of a gun so that it doesn't set the alarm of. Maybe more importantly the sound of a gunfire would not sound like anything familiar to human ear, so it would make it very difficult to manually pick the real shots.
hermannj314 14y ago
$40,000-$60,000 per year per square mile. How many gunshots per capita per year per square mile do need for that price to make sense as a way to spend tax dollars? It seems expensive.
- daenz 14y ago
  The city of New York is 303 square miles. So for $12-18M, NYC could be completely covered by this system.
- pavel_lishin 14y ago
  I suppose it depends how much time it shaves off of investigations. Furthermore, I'm assuming they're not putting these in the middle of a Kansas corn field. Three people got shot outside of my apartment last year, I imagine they're going to prioritize that area over the upper east side.
- tptacek 14y ago
  It is a tiny fraction of the cost of police patrols in probably any mid-sized metro area in the US, and an even tinier fraction of that cost in major metros.
  - swalsh 14y ago
    On the other hand, a full police force can handle more than murder. This can't. That would be okay if murder was the function of a police force, but its really just another amongst many responsibilities of theirs.
    - tptacek 14y ago
      Are we talking past each other? Note the words "tiny fraction".
- jes5199 14y ago
  That's probably a single police officer's salary, and it's probably more effective than adding a single officer to patrol a high-crime area.
larrys 14y ago
I think the assumption with this is that all gunshots would be crimes in process and over time and with more ubiquity that might not be the case leading to a less effective system. I would imagine that a criminal could use a system like this to do a DOS of police presence and/or send them on a wild goose chase so they can commit a crime in another area. In other words they get police to scramble to 5th and Main and they have another team to break into a place a few miles away with a non-gunshot crime. Also, as anyone who has experience with home or business alarm systems knows false alarms get to be a "boy who cried wolf" issue and you begin to not take them as seriously as you should.
- eridius 14y ago
  That would only be effective if you could get all the police to go to a specific location. I don't think they typically send every single available police officer to the location of a gunshot.
  - larrys 14y ago
    "get all the police to go to a specific location" Maybe. But I think it would depend on the particular department obviously and geography as well. You don't need all the police. You are decreasing manpower and ability to respond to other calls which can vary greatly depending on what else is going on. And this system might be installed in smaller towns with less backup resources as well.
  - nosse 14y ago
    It's not that hard to put a few timers on few automatic arms.
- prawn 14y ago
  What's stopping people from doing the same via 911 right now?
  - nosse 14y ago
    Nothing. That's why police usually sends some patrol to the site to check things up. If you would get a signal of multiple assault weapons firing at the same time, you would not send just one patrol. It's not very likely. Unless someone manages to simulate gunfire accurately with a boombox or with a pipe and some layered gunpowder + lead shots.
tptacek 14y ago
Reading this feels like accidental time travel. When did this start happening? $40,000-$60,000/sqmile/year is an extremely reasonable number. Chicago has 50+ officers per square mile, implying tens of patrolling officers per square mile; the fully loaded cost of a single police officer is six figures, with potentially explosive defined-benefit pensions and benefits just to make things fun. Moreover, like in many big cities (read Peter Moskos _Cop In The Hood_ for details), the squad car patrol tactics used in Chicago do a terrible job of suppressing gun crime. Over a 24 hour period this holiday weekend, we had 25 gunshot injuries (god knows how many illegal firearms were discharged above and beyond that). The police can't be everywhere, and the patrol process keeps them mostly in rolling squad cars. And obviously, the overwhelming majority of gun crime in the city of Chicago are concentrated in a small percentage of our square miles: Austin, Garfield Park, and (particularly) Englewood and Chatham. Which makes systems like this cost-effective to roll out, and, particularly, easy to pilot.
- toomuchtodo 14y ago
  A Chicago suburbs resident here: You would think that as the system scales up, your cost per square mile would drop, as you're automating as much of a analysis and detection as possible.
- moldbug 14y ago
  One little bird (presumably a Chicago cop): By my totals 17 shot on Sunday, 7 of them in 011. With 11 more starting at midnight to 0800 monday morning. The blackberry was ringing all night. 2 of the "victims" dead so far. http://secondcitycop.blogspot.com/2012/05/not-one-shooting-sunday.html#5081118908871824492 http://secondcitycop.blogspot.com/2012/05/not-one-shooting-s... Note the scare quotes on "victims." Our informant continues: The city should embrace all the violence and make it a tourist attraction. See if you can come to Chicago and make it out alive! Have tour buses go through the ghetto and stop at all the crime scenes. Get your picture with the body! Only 20 bucks. Better make it 30, 10 goes to the alderman of the ward the body is in. That way the visitors can get a small taste of how business is conducted in Chicago. As a special treat you may also get robbed at gun point during your tour. And if you want to see the indigenous population acting normally in its own habitat start using your Iphones where you can be seen. But you will be charged extra if you get apple picked! End the tour with specially trade marked Chalkie shirts with all proceed going to hire some real leadership at the FOP so we don't get screwed on our contracts. And give one buck from each tour to a special fund for the kids. ITS FOR THE CHILDREN!!! God I love the Internets...
lhnn 14y ago
Time to hack it: Drive around with a 1963 Oldsmobile and get pulled over immediately.
rayiner 14y ago
I think people should consider the upsides to these technologies in addition to the privacy concerns. Faster police response could lead not just to saved lives, but also to much better suspect identification. Our current methods for identifying suspects using evidence gathered long after a shooting hall are complete trash. Of the wide array of forensic techniques used by police, only DNA is remotely reliable. If a system like this meant the difference between apprehending a fleeing suspect a couple of minutes later and picking up a random ethnic minority days later based on highly flawed identifications, this technology could have major benefits that must be weighed.
- specialist 14y ago
  Potential upsides. Rarely realized. I'd rather pay for more cops. These technologies are just used to put more distance between the corporate profits and accountability to the communities effected. As a history lesson, dehumanizing intelligence services, preferring satellites and wiretaps to HUMINT, has crippled our capabilities. But it did enrich defense contractors, so it's all good.
  - tptacek 14y ago
    This whole system deployed at scale appears to cost 0.5% of what patrol does. There's no reason cities can't do this and ramp up patrol.
  - rayiner 14y ago
    Paying for more cops has its own problems. In a high-cop low-crime environment, e.g. most suburbs, cops spend most of their time harassing people for minor things or figuring out ways to increase ticket revenue.
hartror 14y ago
Reading about this in a country where there is tight gun control feels like reading about a dystopia future by Gibson or the like. It is the future, but not necessarily in a good way.
- protomyth 14y ago
  I would imagine ND has more firearms than Chicago with a smaller total population. FBI[1] has listed 9 murders in 2009 and 3 were firearm related. Of the 3 in 2008[2], 0 were firearm related. Gun control doesn't stop people from killing others, it just makes them use something else. The something else can be a lot worse. 1) http://www2.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2009/data/table_20.html http://www2.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2009/data/table_20.html 2) http://www2.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2008/data/table_20.html http://www2.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2008/data/table_20.html
  - hartror 14y ago
    I am not in the mood for a debate on gun control. I do agree that guns aren't a prerequisite for violet death but they do make the process significantly easier given they are designed for that purpose. Your example compares apples with oranges.
    - protomyth 14y ago
      The important question is "why?" not "how?" - concentrating on any tool is missing the real problems and solutions in life. The tools isn't Chicago's problem or else it would cause the same problem in ND. My cousin is alive because he had a shotgun on him when attacked by abandoned dogs. I don't blame the dogs ("how"). I blame the owner's who abandoned them ("why").
wccrawford 14y ago
"If nothing else, ShotSpotter has made it clear how much unreported gunfire takes place on city streets. In many high-crime urban neighborhoods, gunshots are a counterpoint to daily life, “as common as the birds chirping,” as Commander Mikail Ali of the San Francisco Police Department put it. But whether out of apathy, fear or uncertainty, people call the police in only a fraction of cases." Or maybe, they got sick of calling the cops and not having them come. If the gunshots are that common, it wouldn't be uncommon for the police to ignore the complaints as a high-crime district. Now they can ignore the automated reports instead of the called-in ones.
- acdha 14y ago
  There's a potentially huge difference: if these outside company reports exist independently of the official PD story it becomes much easier for a reporter to start asking why the numbers are much higher. If the police are under pressure to get their stats down (i.e. cook the books) there will probably turnout to be a number of real incidents which were described as mistaken reports
nosse 14y ago
I've kind of been waiting for this. This could provoke really interesting renaissance of the crossbow among street gangs. And other deadly melee weapons might get big leaps of progress. There might be a telescopic sword coming or something similar. Here's something from India. From times when weapons had to be carried secretly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urumi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urumi My forecast is that in the long run, bystanders will get less damage. But real murders get harder to investigate as there will be no gunpowder residue. And crossbow is easier to manufacture by oneself than firearm and that makes murder weapon tracking harder.
- protomyth 14y ago
  I would bet on bows before crossbows (speed, easier to hide). Quite a few hunters here are learning bow because the number of rifle deer licenses this season have been cut in half, but a lot of bow licenses remain.
  - nosse 14y ago
    You don't have to have a leaf spring in the bow as is custom right now. With spiral spring, a "crossbow" can look more like a big pistol.
jrockway 14y ago
They have to replay the sound because the gunshots are indistinguishable from the sound that lady's bones make when she contorts herself to sit at the terminal. (Look at her arm.) What an ergonomic nightmare.
DigitalSea 14y ago
The movie Minority Report is starting to look a hell of a lot more real. I didn't even know this technology existed, it's awesome but at the same time scary. I wonder what other technologies are out there like this nobody really hears about?
DanielBMarkham 14y ago
“If the police are utilizing these conversations, then the issue is, where does it stop?” he said. Libertarians consistently make slippery-slope arguments when most everybody else is just happy that some immediate problem is solved. This line of debate is freaking getting old, and I'm the first person to do it. The problem is that it always is a slippery slope. No bullshit. Changes take place over years or decades, so there's no single time you can raise an alarm. Right now it's gunshots. Next it will be car sounds -- estimating speeders and the conditions for traffic accidents. Then somebody will work out screaming. Then, perhaps conversations. And let's not forget that the systems will be justified by talking about the horrendous inner city. In actuality the vast majority of the time these systems will be used in places nowhere like that. When you read stories like this remember that these guys are selling equipment just like any other startup. You're getting their best pitch. Big cities need this stuff, so it's a good thing for them. (Although I imagine we'll just start seeing a lot of silencers). What concerns me is that 90%+ of the time there's no crime being committed, save for discharging a firearm. So there's all these thousands of "criminals" discharging firearms that haven't been arrested before but could be now. Yay? Is it always a good thing with the grip of the state tightens, as long as we can point to something good coming of it? Hopefully the cops will be so overloaded with gunshots they'll ignore the system and use it only for forensic purposes. But I doubt it. Instead I imagine we'll see these discharge numbers added to the crime reports for cities in an effort to secure more funding for even more police presence. Whether that's a good thing or not is debatable. There's obviously a real problem in Chicago and several other cities, but the rest of the country not so much.
- CamperBob2 14y ago
  Slippery-slope arguments come into play almost any time you use technology to solve social problems. It doesn't matter that the slippery slope is a logical fallacy, if the entities involved (i.e., people) aren't logical ones. "Libertarians" harp on this stuff because historically, the cost of letting governments do anything they want runs into the hundreds of millions of lives. A more enlightened approach would be to ask why Chicago has so much trouble with gun crime, given that many other American cities have higher per-capita rates of firearm ownership both legal and otherwise. One thing's absolutely certain: the real problem, whatever it is, will not be solved with digital signal processing.
danielharan 14y ago
I wonder if this could also detect car crashes?
- Gustomaximus 14y ago
  It is a fairly distinct sound. You could probably scale this out to a bunch of other uses. Detect for; cries for help, cars doing burnouts or loud parties at inappropriate hours. It would combine really well with CCTV if it could alert an operator to look in the area of a sound rather than have to send a patrol out for minor things.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
kens 14y ago
I'm confused about the timeline in the NYTimes article. The gunfire was detected at 7:22:07, and tactical team arrives at 7:25:02 (Pacific). The article says, "Total elapsed time: 3 minutes, 55 seconds." Isn't that a total elapsed time of 2 minutes, 55 seconds?
phreeza 14y ago
Another interesting application of this (which I believe is being done) is sniper spotting in warzones.
- jauer 14y ago
  I've heard of it being mounted on humvees. This article says there are hand-held versions as well: http://www.defenseindustrydaily.com/scaneagle-shotspotter-sniper-spotter-02986/ http://www.defenseindustrydaily.com/scaneagle-shotspotter-sn...
tocomment 14y ago
I've always wondered if a similar system could be developed to monitor and locate the sound of windows being broken? You could have one in every neighborhood. It might also be good in parking lots/garages.
rwallace 14y ago
As a libertarian, I'm generally iffy about the expansion of surveillance, or of government activity in general. But I try to be pragmatic about it. Gunshots fired in urban areas are one thing that really is the business of the police! There's always some tension between law and order versus liberty; the trick is to find ways to trade the latter for the former at as high an exchange rate as possible. This system strikes me as having a very good exchange rate indeed.

200 points by mindblink 14y ago

gonzo 14y ago

phased arrays of microphones: the future is now

>The detection system, which triangulates sound picked up by acoustic sensors placed on buildings, utility poles and other structures, is part of a wave of technological advances — among them, license plate scanners, body cameras, Global Positioning System trackers and hand-held fingerprint identifiers This technology also happens to be very useful for domestic counter-insurgence, something of interest to an economically polarized state during a time of economic transformation.

cperciva 14y ago
No, it really isn't. The first step in any insurgency is to compromise intelligence and surveillance systems, and these sensors are very fragile sitting ducks.
- Daniel_Newby 14y ago
  Insurgents do not attack prepositioned listening posts. Their tools are randomness and radio silence.

ChuckMcM 14y ago

I've seen this in action and it is pretty impressive. I expect the next step will be that a quad-copter UAV will 'nest' on top of a ShotSpotter pole where is will stay charged. And when an alert comes in, if it is closest, it will launch and give the HQ a video feed of the scene in 15 - 20 seconds after the event. I do have concerns about the use of conversations the microphones overhear but I know that in many neighborhoods events are not called in because the neighbor doesn't want the repercussions of turning in the local gang lord or his troops.

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
politician 14y ago
Prediction: When the system goes to dispatch the closest UAV to the disturbance, the launch system will return "500 - Destroyed". EDIT: C'mon, downvotes? You do realize that vandalism will be a serious problem for this system.
- Jach 14y ago
  I think you need to make a convincing argument that vandalism will be a problem. Paraphrasing from The Information, pg 144, there was also that concern when Morse and Vail set up their wires wrapped in yarn on 20-foot posts. Morse told Congress they could transmit 30 characters per minute and he also told them that the lines had "remained undisturbed from the wantonness or evil disposition of any one." There is even more ample opportunity for domestic terrorism and destruction of things in the US today yet things seem okay. Of course if the UAVs did start getting destroyed, it's not a stretch of imagination to think about how they could be protected...
  - cead_ite 14y ago
    Not really the best analogy: telegraph/phone lines sit there passively and pose no apparent immediate danger, while the aforementioned UAVs would present an active threat to wrongdoers’ wrongdoing and thus become targets...
  - larrys 14y ago
    "I think you need to make a convincing argument that vandalism will be a problem." I think if the people having shoot outs are so brazen that they can do this and people aren't necessarily reporting them it's not a stretch to think that they will, just for fun, attempt to shoot down a UAV. Wearing a mask or course to protect their identity. Or try to damage it while it sits up on the pole with a rock etc. (Although I guess it could be protected from that fairly easily).

zheng 14y ago

I'm not 100% on the laws around this, but if a city was utilizing ShotSpotter, wouldn't they have to disclose the area(s) they were monitoring?

Palomides 14y ago
my understanding is that anyone can record any visual or auditory info from any public place (in the US)
- pbhjpbhj 14y ago
  Unless you use a telephone to do it or are using a telephone when you're being recorded? I understand that making a recording of a phone call without notification is strictly disallowed in many states legislation? (eg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_recording_laws#United_States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_recording_laws#United...)
  - superuser2 14y ago
    Telephone systems are a public place? If I'm walking down the sidewalk talking on my phone, overhearing my voice is not a violation of privacy.
    - njharman 14y ago
      Think point is. Unless that voice is carried over telecommunications network to, say central processing center.
    - pbhjpbhj 14y ago
      >overhearing my voice is not a violation of privacy // But we're talking about recording your voice. Which I think is a violation of my privacy vs just listening to me passively - now that may not be enshrined in any law but then the law doesn't IMO [exclusively?] dictate what is moral.
Anechoic 14y ago

moreati 14y ago

I wonder if false positives will take off e.g. personal attack alarms that make a sound like gun fire

Dove 14y ago
My dad was using a powder-actuated concrete nail gun for some remodeling not long ago. It used .22 loads to drive nails. The sound it made was eerily identical to the real thing.
- kijin 14y ago
  The system will have to distinguish real firearms from other powder-actuated hardware. Otherwise it's going to become useless anywhere near a construction site. But what if you shoot a person with a nail gun?
  - ComputerGuru 14y ago
    > But what if you shoot a person with a nail gun? What if you stab a person with a knife? It's off-topic. It was designed and built to detect gunshots from real guns.
  - Dove 14y ago
    I think the best way to distinguish between firearms and nail guns would be with a man in the loop listening to the sounds (which they appear to have). Construction doesn't sound like a firefight.
Jabbles 14y ago
Wouldn't it make more sense to make the alarm send out a standardised frequency a la DTMF tones?

kijin 14y ago

> the system was not intended to record anything except gunshots So, they could record conversations, but they won't for the time being. A classic example of using software to temporarily cripple the true capabilities of a computing device. In the hands of DRM-wielding corporations, "defective by design" results in inconvenience and loss of users' freedom. In the hands of the surveillance state, the same technique results in a situation where citizens must simply trust the authorities to exercise restraint. Because the police could flip a switch at any time and record all sorts of conversations. Somehow I don't trust that the switch will remain un-flipped for long. And when it does get flipped, as it did in New Bedford, everyone will say it was just an accident. Maybe, just maybe, we should accept systems like this as a necessary evil in certain cities where there's a lot of gun violence. Still, I don't like this. When it comes to the government, I'd much rather give them hardware that can't be unlocked "by accident" because there's nothing to unlock. The thing is, it's unrealistic to do that in all cases, and we have to hit a balance somewhere. Which is exactly why systems like this raise difficult issues.

tomerv 14y ago
Given that the microphones are placed in a public location, and that they record noises heard in the street, one could argue that it's a reasonable level of surveillance. The real concern will be when governments start to identify their citizens by their voice signatures, and then use that to track their whereabouts.
- Jach 14y ago
  >The real concern will be when governments start to identify their citizens by their voice signatures, and then use that to track their whereabouts. And thanks to a recent heavy-hitter at the box office, the public has already had it decided for them that it's unethical! (Unless it's used once for a really really bad guy.) But apart from that this is an awesome system for its purpose. Keep it out of my home (they've already got phone-tapping for that anyway) and I'm fine with it.
- underwater 14y ago
  If I recall correctly, privacy laws are based more on reasonable expectation of privacy rather than where the recording device is located. I can't climb a telegraph pole and photograph someone inside through a second floor window, for example. I don't know how this would affect the legality of surveillance though.

greg_bt 14y ago

I find it interesting that people's main concerns are the privacy laws. Isn't anyone concerned that there is a need for gunshot detection? I would have thought that the main issue was that there was enough gun related violence to make this product viable? As much as I love to see an innovative solution to a problem this seems a lot like its treating the symptoms and not the cause.

Kroem3r 14y ago
I enjoy following these structures of cludge upon subsidy upon moral bankruptcy. I wonder at what point (in the adoption of this technology) it makes sense to invest in gun silencers.
- Snhr 14y ago
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1q8zKtnU6U http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1q8zKtnU6U I'm sure that silencers will still be detectable? They do make the gun softer but it's still noticeable if you know what you're looking for I'm sure.
InclinedPlane 14y ago
Won't somebody think of the children? The problem is that there's always a good justification for reducing rights. It makes law enforcement easier. We need to fight terrorism. We need to stop child rape. Etc, etc, etc. But if you let your rights be stripped away, even for a purportedly good reason, you aren't getting them back.

staunch 14y ago

If they designed the system (hopefully at the hardware level) so that it was incapable of recording voices I would have no problem with it. That would probably be a good thing for a competitor to create: a shot detection system that's designed to address civil liberty concerns. I bet someone on HN could do it.

bostonvaulter2 14y ago
But the problem is how can you verify that the system that is actually installed on all the building and telephone poles is actually one that is incapable of recording voices instead of a (really cheap) normal microphone.
nosse 14y ago
If you do that simply by damping wavelengths of speech, you possibly make opportunity to alter the sound of a gun so that it doesn't set the alarm of. Maybe more importantly the sound of a gunfire would not sound like anything familiar to human ear, so it would make it very difficult to manually pick the real shots.

hermannj314 14y ago

$40,000-$60,000 per year per square mile. How many gunshots per capita per year per square mile do need for that price to make sense as a way to spend tax dollars? It seems expensive.

daenz 14y ago
The city of New York is 303 square miles. So for $12-18M, NYC could be completely covered by this system.
pavel_lishin 14y ago
I suppose it depends how much time it shaves off of investigations. Furthermore, I'm assuming they're not putting these in the middle of a Kansas corn field. Three people got shot outside of my apartment last year, I imagine they're going to prioritize that area over the upper east side.
tptacek 14y ago
It is a tiny fraction of the cost of police patrols in probably any mid-sized metro area in the US, and an even tinier fraction of that cost in major metros.
- swalsh 14y ago
  On the other hand, a full police force can handle more than murder. This can't. That would be okay if murder was the function of a police force, but its really just another amongst many responsibilities of theirs.
  - tptacek 14y ago
    Are we talking past each other? Note the words "tiny fraction".
jes5199 14y ago
That's probably a single police officer's salary, and it's probably more effective than adding a single officer to patrol a high-crime area.

larrys 14y ago

I think the assumption with this is that all gunshots would be crimes in process and over time and with more ubiquity that might not be the case leading to a less effective system. I would imagine that a criminal could use a system like this to do a DOS of police presence and/or send them on a wild goose chase so they can commit a crime in another area. In other words they get police to scramble to 5th and Main and they have another team to break into a place a few miles away with a non-gunshot crime. Also, as anyone who has experience with home or business alarm systems knows false alarms get to be a "boy who cried wolf" issue and you begin to not take them as seriously as you should.

eridius 14y ago
That would only be effective if you could get all the police to go to a specific location. I don't think they typically send every single available police officer to the location of a gunshot.
- larrys 14y ago
  "get all the police to go to a specific location" Maybe. But I think it would depend on the particular department obviously and geography as well. You don't need all the police. You are decreasing manpower and ability to respond to other calls which can vary greatly depending on what else is going on. And this system might be installed in smaller towns with less backup resources as well.
- nosse 14y ago
  It's not that hard to put a few timers on few automatic arms.
prawn 14y ago
What's stopping people from doing the same via 911 right now?
- nosse 14y ago
  Nothing. That's why police usually sends some patrol to the site to check things up. If you would get a signal of multiple assault weapons firing at the same time, you would not send just one patrol. It's not very likely. Unless someone manages to simulate gunfire accurately with a boombox or with a pipe and some layered gunpowder + lead shots.

tptacek 14y ago

Reading this feels like accidental time travel. When did this start happening? $40,000-$60,000/sqmile/year is an extremely reasonable number. Chicago has 50+ officers per square mile, implying tens of patrolling officers per square mile; the fully loaded cost of a single police officer is six figures, with potentially explosive defined-benefit pensions and benefits just to make things fun. Moreover, like in many big cities (read Peter Moskos _Cop In The Hood_ for details), the squad car patrol tactics used in Chicago do a terrible job of suppressing gun crime. Over a 24 hour period this holiday weekend, we had 25 gunshot injuries (god knows how many illegal firearms were discharged above and beyond that). The police can't be everywhere, and the patrol process keeps them mostly in rolling squad cars. And obviously, the overwhelming majority of gun crime in the city of Chicago are concentrated in a small percentage of our square miles: Austin, Garfield Park, and (particularly) Englewood and Chatham. Which makes systems like this cost-effective to roll out, and, particularly, easy to pilot.

toomuchtodo 14y ago
A Chicago suburbs resident here: You would think that as the system scales up, your cost per square mile would drop, as you're automating as much of a analysis and detection as possible.
moldbug 14y ago
One little bird (presumably a Chicago cop): By my totals 17 shot on Sunday, 7 of them in 011. With 11 more starting at midnight to 0800 monday morning. The blackberry was ringing all night. 2 of the "victims" dead so far. http://secondcitycop.blogspot.com/2012/05/not-one-shooting-sunday.html#5081118908871824492 http://secondcitycop.blogspot.com/2012/05/not-one-shooting-s... Note the scare quotes on "victims." Our informant continues: The city should embrace all the violence and make it a tourist attraction. See if you can come to Chicago and make it out alive! Have tour buses go through the ghetto and stop at all the crime scenes. Get your picture with the body! Only 20 bucks. Better make it 30, 10 goes to the alderman of the ward the body is in. That way the visitors can get a small taste of how business is conducted in Chicago. As a special treat you may also get robbed at gun point during your tour. And if you want to see the indigenous population acting normally in its own habitat start using your Iphones where you can be seen. But you will be charged extra if you get apple picked! End the tour with specially trade marked Chalkie shirts with all proceed going to hire some real leadership at the FOP so we don't get screwed on our contracts. And give one buck from each tour to a special fund for the kids. ITS FOR THE CHILDREN!!! God I love the Internets...

lhnn 14y ago

Time to hack it: Drive around with a 1963 Oldsmobile and get pulled over immediately.

rayiner 14y ago

I think people should consider the upsides to these technologies in addition to the privacy concerns. Faster police response could lead not just to saved lives, but also to much better suspect identification. Our current methods for identifying suspects using evidence gathered long after a shooting hall are complete trash. Of the wide array of forensic techniques used by police, only DNA is remotely reliable. If a system like this meant the difference between apprehending a fleeing suspect a couple of minutes later and picking up a random ethnic minority days later based on highly flawed identifications, this technology could have major benefits that must be weighed.

specialist 14y ago
Potential upsides. Rarely realized. I'd rather pay for more cops. These technologies are just used to put more distance between the corporate profits and accountability to the communities effected. As a history lesson, dehumanizing intelligence services, preferring satellites and wiretaps to HUMINT, has crippled our capabilities. But it did enrich defense contractors, so it's all good.
- tptacek 14y ago
  This whole system deployed at scale appears to cost 0.5% of what patrol does. There's no reason cities can't do this and ramp up patrol.
- rayiner 14y ago
  Paying for more cops has its own problems. In a high-cop low-crime environment, e.g. most suburbs, cops spend most of their time harassing people for minor things or figuring out ways to increase ticket revenue.

hartror 14y ago

Reading about this in a country where there is tight gun control feels like reading about a dystopia future by Gibson or the like. It is the future, but not necessarily in a good way.

protomyth 14y ago
I would imagine ND has more firearms than Chicago with a smaller total population. FBI[1] has listed 9 murders in 2009 and 3 were firearm related. Of the 3 in 2008[2], 0 were firearm related. Gun control doesn't stop people from killing others, it just makes them use something else. The something else can be a lot worse. 1) http://www2.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2009/data/table_20.html http://www2.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2009/data/table_20.html 2) http://www2.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2008/data/table_20.html http://www2.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2008/data/table_20.html
- hartror 14y ago
  I am not in the mood for a debate on gun control. I do agree that guns aren't a prerequisite for violet death but they do make the process significantly easier given they are designed for that purpose. Your example compares apples with oranges.
  - protomyth 14y ago
    The important question is "why?" not "how?" - concentrating on any tool is missing the real problems and solutions in life. The tools isn't Chicago's problem or else it would cause the same problem in ND. My cousin is alive because he had a shotgun on him when attacked by abandoned dogs. I don't blame the dogs ("how"). I blame the owner's who abandoned them ("why").

wccrawford 14y ago

"If nothing else, ShotSpotter has made it clear how much unreported gunfire takes place on city streets. In many high-crime urban neighborhoods, gunshots are a counterpoint to daily life, “as common as the birds chirping,” as Commander Mikail Ali of the San Francisco Police Department put it. But whether out of apathy, fear or uncertainty, people call the police in only a fraction of cases." Or maybe, they got sick of calling the cops and not having them come. If the gunshots are that common, it wouldn't be uncommon for the police to ignore the complaints as a high-crime district. Now they can ignore the automated reports instead of the called-in ones.

acdha 14y ago
There's a potentially huge difference: if these outside company reports exist independently of the official PD story it becomes much easier for a reporter to start asking why the numbers are much higher. If the police are under pressure to get their stats down (i.e. cook the books) there will probably turnout to be a number of real incidents which were described as mistaken reports

nosse 14y ago

I've kind of been waiting for this. This could provoke really interesting renaissance of the crossbow among street gangs. And other deadly melee weapons might get big leaps of progress. There might be a telescopic sword coming or something similar. Here's something from India. From times when weapons had to be carried secretly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urumi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urumi My forecast is that in the long run, bystanders will get less damage. But real murders get harder to investigate as there will be no gunpowder residue. And crossbow is easier to manufacture by oneself than firearm and that makes murder weapon tracking harder.

protomyth 14y ago
I would bet on bows before crossbows (speed, easier to hide). Quite a few hunters here are learning bow because the number of rifle deer licenses this season have been cut in half, but a lot of bow licenses remain.
- nosse 14y ago
  You don't have to have a leaf spring in the bow as is custom right now. With spiral spring, a "crossbow" can look more like a big pistol.

jrockway 14y ago

They have to replay the sound because the gunshots are indistinguishable from the sound that lady's bones make when she contorts herself to sit at the terminal. (Look at her arm.) What an ergonomic nightmare.

DigitalSea 14y ago

The movie Minority Report is starting to look a hell of a lot more real. I didn't even know this technology existed, it's awesome but at the same time scary. I wonder what other technologies are out there like this nobody really hears about?

DanielBMarkham 14y ago

“If the police are utilizing these conversations, then the issue is, where does it stop?” he said. Libertarians consistently make slippery-slope arguments when most everybody else is just happy that some immediate problem is solved. This line of debate is freaking getting old, and I'm the first person to do it. The problem is that it always is a slippery slope. No bullshit. Changes take place over years or decades, so there's no single time you can raise an alarm. Right now it's gunshots. Next it will be car sounds -- estimating speeders and the conditions for traffic accidents. Then somebody will work out screaming. Then, perhaps conversations. And let's not forget that the systems will be justified by talking about the horrendous inner city. In actuality the vast majority of the time these systems will be used in places nowhere like that. When you read stories like this remember that these guys are selling equipment just like any other startup. You're getting their best pitch. Big cities need this stuff, so it's a good thing for them. (Although I imagine we'll just start seeing a lot of silencers). What concerns me is that 90%+ of the time there's no crime being committed, save for discharging a firearm. So there's all these thousands of "criminals" discharging firearms that haven't been arrested before but could be now. Yay? Is it always a good thing with the grip of the state tightens, as long as we can point to something good coming of it? Hopefully the cops will be so overloaded with gunshots they'll ignore the system and use it only for forensic purposes. But I doubt it. Instead I imagine we'll see these discharge numbers added to the crime reports for cities in an effort to secure more funding for even more police presence. Whether that's a good thing or not is debatable. There's obviously a real problem in Chicago and several other cities, but the rest of the country not so much.

CamperBob2 14y ago
Slippery-slope arguments come into play almost any time you use technology to solve social problems. It doesn't matter that the slippery slope is a logical fallacy, if the entities involved (i.e., people) aren't logical ones. "Libertarians" harp on this stuff because historically, the cost of letting governments do anything they want runs into the hundreds of millions of lives. A more enlightened approach would be to ask why Chicago has so much trouble with gun crime, given that many other American cities have higher per-capita rates of firearm ownership both legal and otherwise. One thing's absolutely certain: the real problem, whatever it is, will not be solved with digital signal processing.

danielharan 14y ago

I wonder if this could also detect car crashes?

Gustomaximus 14y ago
It is a fairly distinct sound. You could probably scale this out to a bunch of other uses. Detect for; cries for help, cars doing burnouts or loud parties at inappropriate hours. It would combine really well with CCTV if it could alert an operator to look in the area of a sound rather than have to send a patrol out for minor things.
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kens 14y ago

I'm confused about the timeline in the NYTimes article. The gunfire was detected at 7:22:07, and tactical team arrives at 7:25:02 (Pacific). The article says, "Total elapsed time: 3 minutes, 55 seconds." Isn't that a total elapsed time of 2 minutes, 55 seconds?

phreeza 14y ago

Another interesting application of this (which I believe is being done) is sniper spotting in warzones.

jauer 14y ago
I've heard of it being mounted on humvees. This article says there are hand-held versions as well: http://www.defenseindustrydaily.com/scaneagle-shotspotter-sniper-spotter-02986/ http://www.defenseindustrydaily.com/scaneagle-shotspotter-sn...

tocomment 14y ago

I've always wondered if a similar system could be developed to monitor and locate the sound of windows being broken? You could have one in every neighborhood. It might also be good in parking lots/garages.

rwallace 14y ago

As a libertarian, I'm generally iffy about the expansion of surveillance, or of government activity in general. But I try to be pragmatic about it. Gunshots fired in urban areas are one thing that really is the business of the police! There's always some tension between law and order versus liberty; the trick is to find ways to trade the latter for the former at as high an exchange rate as possible. This system strikes me as having a very good exchange rate indeed.