Police Commissioner Frederick H. Bealefeld III told Baltimore Sun police reporter Justin Fenton in a recent interview that he doesn't mind that Hopkins put the sensors in its own, relatively gunfire-free back yard, a move I have questioned.
"I saw an article about, well, we should do it in harder-hit neighborhoods," Bealefeld told the reporter. "Come on, give us a break. They're spending the money, getting it done, and potentially saving the city taxpayers a lot of money.
"Because I'll tell you what: Several months before this, we tested a system, not that system, but a system, and if I had to rate it on a scale of A through D, it would be a D-minus-minus," the commissioner added. "We saved a ton of money. I was ready to get it, I was ready to sign the check. It was a dismal failure. It was a horrible, horrible failure."
A police spokesman said the city looked at a number of different vendors, and the commissioner could not remember which company failed the test.
Police in Washington seem pleased with ShotSpotter. It is programmed so that an alert goes off for a variety of sounds, categorizing them as thunder, helicopters, jackhammers, transformer explosions, as well as single and multiple gunshots.
By being able to listen to the sounds almost immediately, Jones and other dispatchers can judge for themselves what they are hearing. Some of the gunshots she played for me were crisp and loud; others were muffled, sometimes because they were far from sensors or lost in background noise such as rain, and it was hard to say whether what we were hearing came from guns or something else.
Burke pulled up one detection on East Capitol Street in which the computer indicated six gunshots had been fired but the responding officer found nothing and nobody called 911 - a typical scenario there and in Baltimore. The officer did notice a car in the area, pulled it over and found a gun, Burke said.
In another case, an off-duty police officer shot and killed a teenager suspected of stealing the officer's car. No gun was found, though the officer insisted the boy had been armed and had fired a weapon. ShotSpotter located a gunshot at virtually the same time and place the officer had said it occurred, a factor police used to clear the officer.
Washington police are working to enhance the system even further by having the gunshot alerts trigger an alarm inside squad cars, enabling officers to respond without the delays from dispatch. "Cops want to be heroes," Burke said. "They want to get to places quickly and save lives and make arrests."
