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Shots fired - and detected?

Interesting news at the intersection of high tech and law enforcement - a gunshot-detection system is coming to parts of St. Louis, reports the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:

Using sound-recognition software, the ShotSpotter system claims to pinpoint the location of gunfire. It quickly alerts police by sending the location and details about how many shots were fired.

California-based ShotSpotter Inc., which manufactures the device, says it uses something called “acoustic triangulation,” audio sensors to locate where gunshots were fired.

Wasn’t there something like this in use on board the USS Enterprise-C? Or was that -D?

This is a terribly serious topic - a matter of life and death, as it happens - but the ShotSpotter demonstration animation is hilarious.

I’d not heard of ShotSpotter before, though the company says the system is in use in over thirty cities. You have to wonder - well, I wonder, at least - if the deployment of the system will produce unalloyed feelings in the citizenry. Hey, great that the technology exists - and how utterly terrifying that it’s necessary, you know, here.

The ShotSpotter homepage boasts a map showing other locations where the system is in use. There’s Gary, Indiana! And North Charleston, South Carolina! Now St. Louis joins the list.

The P-D article states that the initial deployment of the system will cover “certain hotspots” in St. Louis. Of course, if you live in one of those “hotspots,” you probably don’t need a ShotSpotter to tell you that you live in a free-fire zone. Just keep your head down, citizen.

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