Suzanne Smalley
Boston
Globe
Sunday, January 7, 2007
Boston city councilors, law enforcement officials, and community
leaders are pressing City Hall to come up with $1.5 million to
buy a promising acoustic gunshot-detection system.
The sensor system could blanket a 5.6-square-mile swath of the
city's most dangerous neighborhoods -- the source of 80 to 85
percent of calls citywide reporting shots fired -- and give officers
a jump on arresting suspects, improve police response time to
911 calls, and possibly reduce firearm violence, proponents say.
Suffolk District Attorney Daniel F. Conley said he believes the
technology would help prosecutors win more gun cases and would
require a "relatively modest investment," given the
city's $2 billion annual budget.
"Police would be able to get the scene quickly and perhaps
apprehend someone fleeing the scene, or identify someone who actually
saw something," Conley said in an interview yesterday. "It
would also corroborate witness testimony."
City Councilor Robert Consalvo , who first proposed that Boston
look into the ShotSpotter technology last February, said Mayor
Thomas M. Menino's budget director, Lisa Signori, is trying to
find $1.5 million in the current or next fiscal year's budget
to install the system and maintain it for four years.
Dorothy Joyce, a spokeswoman for Menino, said the mayor is "interested
in any type of technology that can let police officers do their
jobs safely and more effectively." Joyce said Menino asked
Signori to review whether the city could afford the system, and
has asked new Police Commissioner Edward F. Davis for his advice.
The City Council's new president, Maureen E. Feeney, said she
supports buying the system, and said Davis and Menino told her
they are interested as well. "It's just now trying to figure
out how we get to the point of purchasing this," she said.
Davis said he plans to make his recommendation to Menino within
a month, after department officials study how the system is working
in Chicago. "Any time we can use technology to reduce response
times, or get us more focused on where crime is occurring, I think
it's a tremendous benefit," the commissioner said in an interview
yesterday.
Still, Davis said, he wants to carefully study whether the system
is the best way to use the city's limited public safety resources.
"Ultimately, you have to look at whether you're going to
reduce shootings better with a police officer there or a piece
of technology," he said.
Consalvo arranged for police commanders to test the system in
August at the department firing range on Moon Island . Commanders
decided the technology could be of great help by telling officers
the exact location of a shooting within a few seconds, said Police
Superintendent Robert Dunford, who supervises the department's
patrol officers.
The system relies on a network of sensors, roughly the size of
a coffee can, that by triangulating can locate gunfire from as
far as 1 1/2 miles away within seconds, according to its manufacturer,
ShotSpotter Inc., based in Santa Clara, Calif. It is so sensitive
and sophisticated that it can isolate gunshots from other sounds,
and can even distinguish between shots fired from different kinds
of weapons, the company says.
Once the sensors confirm a gunshot, the system immediately notifies
police dispatchers, who can then alert nearby officers.
Reports of gunshots, because of the way sound travels, can be
wildly inaccurate as to their source, law enforcement officials
say. Sometimes, they aren't anywhere near where callers say, or
they aren't gunshots at all.
Boston finished last year with 74 homicides, 54 from gunshot
wounds. The figure for 2005 was 75 slayings, a 10-year high, 51
of them with a firearm. The total number of shootings, however,
increased last year over 2005 by more than 10 percent, to 377.
Police could not say yesterday how many of the shooting cases
were solved, but said that of 610 cases involving shootings or
brandishing a gun last year, 23 percent resulted in the arrest
or identification of a suspect.
Police would not say yesterday exactly where they would deploy
the system, but based on the department's crime statistics, it
is considered likely to cover parts of Dorchester, Mattapan, Roxbury,
and the South End.
Davida Andelman , who lives on Clarkson Street in Dorchester,
just yards away from where 14-year-old Jason Fernandes was shot
to death on New Year's Day, said she hopes the city finds money
to pay for the technology soon.
"It's a little disconcerting at quarter of six on New Year's
Day morning to hear six gunshots," said Andelman, chairwoman
of the Greater Bowdoin-Geneva Neighborhood Association. "This
is happening far too often in our neighborhood."
Similar gunshot-detection systems are already being used by police
in a number of US cities in addition to Chicago, including Minneapolis;
Washington, D.C.; Los Angeles; Oakland, Calif.; Gary, Ind.; Charleston,
S.C.; and Rochester, N.Y.
In an October incident in Washington, the technology led police
to a suspect minutes after a man was gunned down while mowing
a lawn.
And just hours after being activated in Minneapolis late last
month, the system caught a suspect in a shooting that hadn't been
reported to police. Minneapolis Police Lieutenant Gregory Reinhardt
said the city's mayor has emphasized investments in police technology,
a choice that he said is paying off.
"We've had four significant events captured," he said.
"An officer-involved shooting, a homicide, an arrest of a
convicted felon with a gun, and the recovery of another gun. That's
in a 2-square mile area within 10, 12 days of each other."
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