Shotspotter is also a deterrent to would-be shooters. A robber who gets his loot by "merely" pointing a gun at a victim is less likely to shoot the victim if he knows the shot will immediately trigger an automatic response. Minus shotspotter, shootings will increase, guaranteed.

The problem with a private org taking this on, is liability for errors & outages, not to mention the cost of setting it up in the first place. $264K is a drop in the bucket of a city budget the size of Oakland's. It's equivalent to the yearly salary + tax & processing costs of three or at most four administrative/management employees, or the price of replacing two or three municipal vehicles such as buses or road sweepers.

What I think would be interesting, is for the same coalition that opposed the Domain Awareness Center, to put a similar effort into demanding the city reinstate that budget. This would immediately get media attention as a "man bites dog" story and has a decent chance of getting results. SR and allies would gain credibility for taking a thoughtful approach to surveillance issues, so when the next DAC-style "item" comes up, opposition would be taken more seriously.

One way for Oakland to "find the money" for this, would be to keep 2 - 3 city vehicles on the road past their "normal" replacement schedule. This could be done by offering a financial reward to the vehicle operators in those fleets, for the best-maintained vehicles each year or the oldest ones kept in service past their scheduled retirement dates. An award in the range of about $5,000 per vehicle/driver ought to be sufficient, and SR could even help with fund-raising. This method has historically worked for large municipal vehicle fleets in the USA, UK, and Europe, so any fleet manager should recognize it and agree.

As for privacy concerns with shotspotter mics, this, from Jake, is right on: "...it would be impossible to hear a conversation from the top of a telephone pole that wasn't already loud enough to be heard inside nearby houses (or the phone in your pocket)."

As for Gabrielle's comment "You realize it would be extremely controversial if Sudo was involved in building something that called the police on people, right?", that's beneath contempt. If anything deserves an immediate police response, it's a gunshot in a city with an astronomical crime rate. And if that's not enough, a nuanced approach to what the OPD should and shouldn't be doing, has a lot more credibility than knee-jerk anti-government rhetoric.

-G.

=====

On 14-03-14-Fri 3:41 PM, Jake wrote:

well i think it would be obvious to combine city funds and the mesh network with shotspotter, but i wouldn't be surprised if a lot of people were opposed for various reasons.

i feel that if our lisence is strong enough, we could accept money and utility poles (and electricity) from the city without being forced to do anything unethical.

On Fri, 14 Mar 2014, X wrote:

Is there a map and count of how many of these there are, how would those positions overlay as part of a mesh network. If there's a bunch of spots with power on a
pole, that seems quite useful.

On Fri, Mar 14, 2014 at 3:23 PM, Jake <jake@spaz.org> wrote:
      what do people think of the shotspotter system installed in oakland?

      it's a network of microphones on telephone poles, each with a GPS (for a precise clock) and a network connection. When a gunshot-like sound is detected,
      they send the sound and its precise timing to a central server that determines the location of the shot, and tells the police to go there.

      some people have expressed concern that the microphones are used to spy on people, but it would be impossible to hear a conversation from the top of a
      telephone pole that wasnt already loud enough to be heard inside nearby houses (or the phone in your pocket).

      apparently the city pays $264,000 per year to keep shotspotter going. I think sudoroom people could do it for much less if they thought it was a useful
      thing. They would be discontinuing it to save money, or perhaps to avoid having to send cops to do actual work once in a while...

      i mean.. sending police toward the gunfire? sounds like a good idea...

      http://www.sfgate.com/crime/article/Oakland-cops-aim-to-scrap-gunfire-detecting-5316060.php
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--
ThanX,
;+)

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