We heard from many departments, telling us how the materials helped make planning their campaign easier. For me and for everyone else at ShotSpotter, hearing this was a great morale booster and shows the kind of successes possible when a community works together with their police department.

As departments across the U.S. gear up for another holiday associated with celebratory gunfire, we’ve revamped these free community relations materials to be specific for the upcoming Fourth of July holiday.

Please note that the materials and tips provided are only suggestions and can be modified to suit your agency’s style and approach.

Free Materials include:

• Door hanger
• Campaign Flier in both Spanish and English
• Facts about celebratory gunfire
• Public Service Announcement script
• Sample press release

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD the package of free campaign materials

To add extra oomph to the above materials, we’ve compiled a list of tips you can use in your campaign to prevent celebratory gunfire.

Tips to prevent celebratory gunfire:

• Review all ShotSpotter and other gunfire data from the previous year, and based on last year’s data, do targeted enforcement tactics including having teams in the area to respond to ShotSpotter GLS alerts as they happen
• end press releases about the campaign to all local media outlets informing them about your efforts to target celebratory gunfire on Independence Day
• Host a press conference with city leaders to inform the public that patrols will be up on Independence Day and officers will be out in force combating illegal gunfire
• Recruit local faith leaders, civil and youth organizations to spread the word that celebratory gunfire is illegal and will not be tolerated
• Mobilize community adult and youth organizations, like the Police Explorers program, to go door-to-door and pass out door hangers and fliers alerting residents to the dangers of celebratory gunfire
• Recruit concerned citizens and local businesses to display fliers and posters with facts about illegal gunfire in their windows
• Contact local gun and ammunition dealers asking them to ban the sale of ammunition a week before the Independence Day holiday
• Approach local billboard companies to donate billboard space to display your anti-celebratory gunfire campaign slogan
• Create a public service announcement for the local television and radio stations to broadcast

Share your successes!
If you have a great tip not listed above, or a program that has given you great success year after year, please let us know! We love to hear about the successes our customer’s have in tackling gun crime and violence associated with it.

Your suggestions may be incorporated in future campaigns, and most importantly, can help other agencies better serve and protect their communities.

Wishing all a safe and fun Fourth of July holiday!

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD the package of free campaign materials

Learn more about the holiday and ways to celebrate safely: http://www.usa.gov/Topics/Memorial_Day.shtml

Many National Police Week events are scheduled nationwide. Learn more at: www.nleomf.org/programs/policeweek/

View the news story and video here.

According to police, these promising results are the result of a comprehensive effort including; large-scale drug sweeps of the city’s drug strongholds, increased police presence on city streets at night, community safety caravans, and technology such as video surveillance and the ShotSpotter GLS.

Read more about Newark’s achievement and the city’s goals here.

As concerned neighbors and citizens of Silicon Valley, all of us at ShotSpotter wish to express our profoundest condolences to the families of the victims, the employees of Tesla Motors, the families whose homes and workplaces were damaged, and all those who were affected on the ground.  When such tragedy occurs, it’s natural to want to help out in some way. As community members, we felt there was something we might be able to do to help with the crash investigation. Our normal policy would have been to keep the fact of our involvement confidential and not publically disclosed our assistance, as we have done in other cases (of different natures) over our fifteen year history.  But since the East Palo Alto Police Department (our customer) and the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) have made our contribution public, we wanted to confirm their statements and clarify our minor role in helping to piece together the puzzle:

When we heard that a plane had crashed in an East Palo Alto neighborhood, all of us at ShotSpotter knew there was a high probability the city’s ShotSpotter Gunshot Location System had detected the incident.

ShotSpotter systems are designed to trigger only on loud, impulsive noises (loosely speaking, things that go “bang”).  Sadly, yesterday’s plane crash created such a noise and it did trigger more than one ShotSpotter sensor deployed in East Palo Alto.  Through subsequent filtering, the ShotSpotter system automatically classified the event as loud and impulsive but not gunfire and therefore correctly did not report the incident in real time to the East Palo Alto Police dispatch.  However, for forensic purposes, all loud, impulsive noises are logged by ShotSpotter systems, even if they do not trigger an automatic alert, in case those noises needed to be reviewed after-the-fact.  (Note:  this only applies to loud, impulsive noises, of which there are relatively few per day in any given city.)

Once we determined that the system had registered a loud, impulsive, non-gunfire noise at the time of the crash, we assisted the East Palo Alto Police Department with the retrieval and storage of the audio captured by their system’s ShotSpotter sensors for the seconds surrounding the impulsive noise (the crash).  The East Palo Alto Police Department then provided that data to representatives of the National Transportation Safety Board to support their investigation of the crash.  As with all audio associated with a ShotSpotter incident, the audio we assisted the East Palo Alto Police Department in providing to the NTSB starts a few seconds before the sound of the crash (providing the sound of the engines), includes the sound of the crash itself, and a few seconds after the crash.  Because the ShotSpotter sensors each contain a GPS receiver with a precision clock, the NTSB now has a precise, millisecond-by-millisecond recording of the incident, as captured by several ShotSpotter sensors deployed throughout East Palo Alto.  In total, five ShotSpotter sensors generated data which contribute consistently to the mathematical location of the crash.  The sensors were located at various distances from the crash, the closest being just over 600 feet away and the furthest being roughly 1,500 feet away.

It is our hope that the audio recordings will help investigators establish the cause of the crash and thus perhaps make recommendations to avert future accidents.  We spend our days at ShotSpotter developing a system which has saved numerous lives nationwide, and in this case we hope our data can help investigators establish what went wrong and thus, perhaps, avoid this tragedy repeating in the future.

Our congratulations go out to the city and residents of Montgomery!

You can read more about the city’s success here.

The ShotSpotter Team

In the years I’ve been with ShotSpotter, I’ve seen customers successfully drive down celebratory gunfire through a combination of community outreach and police tactics, including using the ShotSpotter Gunshot Location System to track and locate New Year’s gunfire (click here to read our Gary, Indiana case study). As another New Year’s holiday approaches, we realized we were sitting on a trove of customer-generated ideas that could help all law enforcement agencies reduce the amount of illegal gunfire that traditionally accompanies the New Year’s Eve holiday.

To add extra oomph to these ideas, ShotSpotter has created a variety of community relations materials your agency can use in your anti-celebratory gunfire campaigns. Please note that these tips and materials are merely suggestions and can be modified to suit your agency’s style and approach.

Materials include:

• Door hanger
• Campaign flyer
• Facts about celebratory gunfire flyer
• Public Service Announcement script
• Sample press release

Click here to download a package of FREE CAMPAIGN MATERIALS

We’re a staunch believer that good police work, good technology, and community outreach is the winning combination for tackling many of society’s ills. Some of the tactics listed below may be new to you. Others may come as no surprise. For me and for everyone else at ShotSpotter, what matters is that we work together to diminish the allure of illegal gunfire and make everyone’s New Year’s Eve safer.

Tips to prevent celebratory gunfire

• Review all ShotSpotter and other gunfire data from the previous year, and based on last year’s data, do targeted enforcement tactics including having teams in the area to respond to ShotSpotter GLS alerts as they happen

• Send press releases about the campaign to all local media outlets informing them about your efforts to target celebratory gunfire on New Year’s Eve

• Host a press conference with city leader’s to inform the public that patrols will be up on New Year’s Eve and officers will be out in force combating illegal gunfire

• Recruit local faith leaders, civil and youth organizations to spread the word that celebratory gunfire is illegal and will not be tolerated

• Mobilizing community adult and youth organizations, like the Police Explorers program, to go door-to-door and pass out door hangers and fliers alerting residents to the dangers of celebratory gunfire

• Recruit concerned citizens and local businesses to display fliers and posters with facts about illegal gunfire in their windows

• Contact local gun and ammunition dealers asking them to ban the sale of ammunition a week before the New Year’s Eve holiday

• Approach local billboard companies to donate billboard space to display your anti-celebratory gunfire campaign slogan. Some good slogan’s we’ve heard include the Glendale, Arizona Police Department’s “Fire a shot, you’ll get caught,” and Richmond, California Police Department’s “No Shooting on New Year’s Eve.”

• Create a public service announcement for the local television and radio stations to broadcast

Click here to download a package of free campaign materials

Happy holidays, everyone!

Erin Lopez
ShotSpotter

This challenge is exacerbated by the fact that, in a number of cases, first responders do not have the data necessary to arrive in time to prevent further injury or loss of life.

At ShotSpotter, we are proud to offer a tool that improves the level of gunfire intelligence afforded to public safety agencies. ShotSpotter data is used by our customers on a daily basis to increase the chances that lives will be saved and perpetrators will eventually be brought to justice.

This month’s “success of the month” post highlights an incident where a young man was assaulted by several men, resulting in a gunshot wound to his neck. A ShotSpotter GLS alert brought first responders to the scene, where they were able to administer aid that may have prevented further injury.

In the early morning hours of a populous city, a shot rang out.

Listen to the gunfire

Within seconds, police dispatch received a ShotSpotter alert and sent responding officers to the scene. Upon arrival, officers discovered a 20-year-old man bleeding from the mouth. The victim explained that he had been assaulted by two to three men, and was injured.

Location of the incident as shown on the ShotSpotter Public Safety Console (PSC)

The victim was rushed to a nearby hospital where X-rays found a bullet lodged in the back of his neck. Following treatment, the victim is expected to make a recovery.

Like many other incidents of this type, timely aid may have made the difference between the young man being a victim or a casualty.

Source: U.S. Department of Justice, National Crime Victimization Report 2008.

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.