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The Recognized Industry Leader
ShotSpotter has deployed more gunshot location systems, detected more gunfire, and saved more lives than products from any other company. Our systems are deployed in more than a dozen cities in the US, in addition to contracts with the US Army, the US Air Force and the US Joint Forces Command. With nearly a decade of experience deploying urban gunshot location systems, we have the experience which allows us to deliver consistently good results, excellent system uptime and unparalleled forensic assistance both to investigators and prosecutors.
Patent-Protected Technologies Not Available Anywhere Else
ShotSpotter-patented benefits:
- Low Sensor Density – ShotSpotter’s patented spatial filter technology makes ShotSpotter the only company to offer sensor densities lower than 25 sensors per square mile. In fact, ShotSpotter systems generally use only eight to twelve sensors per square mile. No other company can offer a sensor network with fewer than 25 sensors per square mile. And sensor density is critical, not only for the speed and ease of installation and low cost, but also for accuracy.
- GPS-Synchronized Sensors – ShotSpotter holds patents on GPS-integrated gunshot detection sensor. This key advance allows ShotSpotter users to “install and forget” sensors—with no difficult surveyor’s tools, external GPS devices, or data entry required. Moreover, because the clocks in GPS-enabled devices are accurate to 20 nanoseconds or less, ShotSpotter sensors are always precisely time-synchronized, thereby eliminating the time-consuming and costly task of time-calibrating disparate arrays of sensors.
Technical Superiority
ShotSpotter systems offer features and functionality unavailable in other systems:
- Incident Audio Immediately Available – within seconds of gunfire or other detected events in a coverage area, ShotSpotter systems deliver the actual audio detected at each sensor to system users, including dispatchers and/or officers in the field. Dispatchers can listen to audio to confirm system characterization, listen to sounds before and after the event, and, more importantly, make critical safety assessments before dispatching personnel. The audio is immediately and permanently archived for later use in forensic analysis and court proceedings.
Sample audio capture from the drive-by shooting in Charleston, SC :
- A sensor 567 feet away heard the eleven shots like this:
WMA | WAV | MP3
- While a sensor nearly a mile away heard this:
WMA | WAV | MP3
- Detailed Forensic Analysis – ShotSpotter provides the absolute best forensic analysis of gunfire incidents available on the market. The system automatically detects when those shooting a gun are moving and calculates direction and speed of travel. The Forensic Tool Suite allows investigators to review incidents to establish precise firing locations, number of shooters, and sequence of events. The above audio, for example, was taken from a drive-by shooting in Charleston, SC. Using ShotSpotter’s Forensic Tool Suite, investigators established both the precise location of the event and the shot-by-shot sequence of events. Individual shots were plotted and used by investigators to establish key facts: 1) that there were two gunmen in the car; 2) that the passenger fired first; 3) that the car kept moving at 9 m.p.h. throughout the incident; and 4) that a total of twelve shots were fired. (Police reports from citizens on the scene varied wildly, especially because the second gunman’s firing sounded like, but was in fact not, an echo of the first’s.)
- Echoes Don’t Fool ShotSpotter – In an urban environment, echoes can confuse the listener and mislead investigators. Residents or witnesses often report a number of gunshots higher than were actually fired, often because they were fooled by echoes. Echoes can be caused by virtually anything—a building wall, a truck, or even the ground on which a gunman is standing—and they are capable of fooling competitive systems. But because of our patented spatial filter technology, along with our array of redundant acoustic sensors, ShotSpotter isn’t fooled. Our system actually collects more data available than strictly necessary to perform triangulations (hence the term “redundant” sensors), and ShotSpotter uses that redundant information, along with azimuthal sensors in some cases, to eliminate echoes and generate accurate results.
- ShotSpotter Separates Real from False Alarms – Humans often mistake other noises for gunfire. Car backfires, bottle rockets, fire crackers, and even nail guns can confuse “ear” witnesses into thinking they heard gunfire. Every day, thousands of such false alarms are reported to police and first-responders nationwide. ShotSpotter uses sophisticated Acoustic Incident Classification technology to separate the wheat from the chaff. Using a complex network of algorithms, data acquired over more than a decade of deployments, and real-time processing and analysis, ShotSpotter separates incidents into gunfire and other categories, and then reports all of them together with a short audio snippet so that dispatchers can verify the sound.
Why report what isn't gunfire? Because nearby residents, or other police officers, may have heard it, and sometimes having information that an incident was not a gunshot is just as important to police as knowing that something was. In several cases, police have even used ShotSpotter-calculated locations of bottle rockets or other illegal fireworks to prosecute non-gunfire-related crimes.
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