Re: Technology 'secures' gunfire [CNN]

[Eric Murray <ericm@lne.com>]

Jonathan Wienke writes:
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> At 09:06 PM 10/31/97 -0600, Jim Choate wrote:
> >Forwarded message:
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> >>                    TECHNOLOGY 'SECURES' GUNFIRE IN THE CITY
> >>                                        
> >>      Secures October 31, 1997
> >>      Web posted at: 4:44 p.m. EST (2144 GMT)
> >>      
> >>      ARLINGTON, Virginia (CNN) -- If you heard gunshots ring out in your
> >>      neighborhood, you might be able to tell the general direction they
> >>      came from. And if you happened to glance at your watch, you could
> >>      say about what time. In maybe a minute, if you were so inclined, you
> >>      could call the police to report it.
> >>      
> >>      Now police have an electronic witness that can provide similar
> >>      assistance: a device called SECURES that pinpoints the time and
> >>      location of gunshots.
> 
> This would be a network of microphones and processing stations which could
> perform a reverse-GPS location analysis of sounds picked up by 3 or more
> microphones.  (Sounds common to 2 microphones could be localized with a
> lower degree of accuracy if directional microphone arrays are used.)  Yet
> another instance of Big Brother technology that is of limited value to the
> police.  Of course, this means that you will have the police responding to
> every backfiring car, which will dampen their enthusiasm for responding
> unless full-auto fire or a prolonged gunfight is overheard.


They've been testing this in the city I live in.  The police got
the company who makes it to set it up as a demo.

There's a significant area of town in which most of the residents
are mexican, and they have a habit of firing guns in the air on
important holidays.  The gunshot locator was installed primarily for
tracking down such shooters.

It turns out that it doesn't work very well- when the demo came up or
review, the police said that they didn't want to buy the system, because
it can't tell the difference between a gunshot and a car backfire and
the cops were wasting time searching for non-existent 'gunfire'.

There was an outcry from the citizenry- evidently the gunshot locator
made them "feel safer" although even the cops claim its ineffective.
The sheeple prevailed, and the city council coughed up the money to buy it.




-- 
Eric Murray  Chief Security Scientist  N*Able Technologies  www.nabletech.com
(email:  ericm  at  lne.com   or   nabletech.com)          PGP keyid:E03F65E5