March 2009, 1:43am - A gunshot cuts through a late night in the northeast.
Within seconds, ShotSpotter GLS classifies the incident as a single gunshot. Shortly thereafter, incident location and audio data are sent to the police command center via the ShotSpotter PSC software. Dispatcher reviews the incident data and dispatches officers to a known crime hot spot in the south end of town.
Upon arrival, police observed three men walking in front of the incident address. Police approached one of the men who was walking alone with his hand inside his jacket pocket. After stopping the man, police discovered that he was carrying a semiautomatic handgun and wearing a bulletproof vest. The gun was still warm from being fired. A second man was observed throwing a handgun into the snow. That man was also arrested and found to be wearing a bulletproof vest.
Local police commented that these men were possibly testing weapons prior to committing a more serious crime.
About the Success of the Month
Each month we feature an incident where a customer’s ShotSpotter Gunshot Location System played an integral role in removing a threat from our streets. The ShotSpotter GLS provides law enforcement with near real-time alerts, aggregated intelligence data, and forensic data that regularly lead to a successful arrests, weapons confiscations and prosecutions. Please note that some incident details have been altered to preserve both customer and public privacy.
It’s my pleasure to welcome you to the ShotSpotter company blog. Welcome posts tend to be yawn-inducing, so I thought I’d spare you the obligatory statement of intent (”we’ll use this blog to keep you up to date on ShotSpotter’s activities”) and get right to the point: as with any other company, as we’ve grown, publishing something on the website has developed a process all its own. The process is important, especially in a business whose customers are law enforcement, homeland security and defense organization.
Nevertheless, a few of us decided we wanted a more informal medium to keep our community up to date on our activities. One way I get to do that is on traditional media. Just this week, for example, I chatted with the daytime news anchors on KDK in Pittsburgh, just before Mayor Ravenstahl announced an initiative to bring gunshot detection to the Port of Pittsburgh as part of a broader security initiative led in part by our friends (and video integration partners) at Avrio Group.
I look forward to sharing my personal perspective on ShotSpotter: how we help police save lives and reduce violent crime, how our technology helps the US military, and what we look forward to doing in the future. We’re just launching our international expansion, so expect posts from our head of International business development. And (in what I predict will rapidly become our most popular category) look for a regular contribution from our Operations Center featuring an incident we recently detected somewhere nationwide which caught our attention here at HQ (with 161 per night nationwide, we have lots to choose from!), and of course pointers to interesting news stories or success stories.
Nearly everyone who meets a member of the ShotSpotter team notices one consistent characteristic: we are passionate about what we do and deeply committed to making our world a safer place. We have to be passionate: this is pretty much the opposite of a 9-to-5 job. (We’re installing systems in eight cities as I write this, and there are people working late into this Friday night coordinating “live-fire” callibration of one of those systems so it can be commissioned and helping police next week.) I’m looking forward to sharing our experiences with you here as things come up instead of waiting for a more formal content creation process, and to sharing a bit of our passion with you.
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ShotSpotter Gunshot Location System and the ShotSpotter logo are registered trademarks of ShotSpotter, Inc.
ShotSpotter GLS technology is protected by one or more issued U.S. and foreign patents, with other domestic and foreign patents pending.
