It’s 10 a.m. on a bright, sunny morning in Newark, California, but in the windowless control room at ShotSpotter the lights are dimmed. Two operators are watching banks of displays connected to a network of acoustic sensors located in cities across the U.S.
An alarm sounds on one computer and a red alert box pops up: “Backfire. View incident?” it asks the operator. At her console, the operator can listen to recordings collected from several sensors located within a few hundred meters of the noise, which the computer has classified as a car backfiring.
The operators here have listened to thousands of such recordings and, to her trained ears, the sound — more of a pop than the roaring bang we’re used to hearing in movies — is in fact a gunshot. She clicks a button to reclassify the sound and within seconds a report with a location of the shot is despatched to the Oakland Police Department.
Oakland is one of 74 cities across the U.S. that subscribe to the ShotSpotter service, provided by Newark-based SST. Other customers include Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Boston, Washington and San Francisco.
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Source: FULL ARTICLE at PCWorld
