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Police ask to use $1 million DOJ grant to expand gunshot-detection coverage; committee advances item
Summary
The committee advanced a resolution to accept a $1 million DOJ COPS grant to expand the ShotSpotter gunshot-location system from 3.3 to 7.3 square miles. Police presented usage data (1,924 gunfire events captured in 2009 across current coverage) and said the system has about a 75% accuracy rate; members pressed on integration with CAD/ComStat and long-term maintenance costs.
The Budget and Finance Committee voted to send a resolution to the full Board of Supervisors authorizing the Police Department to retroactively accept and expend a $1,000,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Justice Office of Community Oriented Policing Services to expand the city’s ShotSpotter gunshot-location system.
Lieutenant Mikael Ali, the department official in charge of the ShotSpotter project, said the grant would extend coverage from 3.3 square miles to 7.3 square miles and expand the number of police districts receiving real-time notifications. “The purpose of these dollars is to expand our current system from 3.3 square miles to a total of 7.3 square miles,” Ali said.
Ali told the committee the system has captured more gunfire events than previously reported through phone calls: in the pilot areas the system detected 626 gunfire events in 2008, and in calendar 2009 the three operational areas recorded a total of 1,924 gunfire events. He added that the department is seeing an approximately 75% accuracy rate in classifying sound events as gunfire and that software upgrades and dispatcher training have reduced false positives over time.
Supervisors questioned whether the system is integrated with existing computer-assisted dispatch (CAD) and CompStat reporting; Ali said integration is “in the works,” that much reconciliation is still done manually, and that the department is pursuing an interface between ShotSpotter, the Tiburon CAD system and internal CompStat processes to better track outcomes such as arrests and medical response. He also said the current maintenance contract for the 3.3-square-mile deployment runs about $87,000 annually and that the vendor market is limited.
Committee members expressed interest in metrics tying ShotSpotter activations to arrests, injuries, and response-time improvements. Ali offered anecdotal examples of faster response times—officers arriving in under two minutes for an event captured by ShotSpotter where a citizen call arrived minutes later—and said the department is working to produce systematic outcome data as integration proceeds.
The committee moved the item forward without objection; the resolution will be considered by the full board.
