I can't help but think how easily such a system - which is hardly sophisticated, in technical principle - could be used to pinpoint things that are 'problematic' in my neighbourhood. Loutish vehicle behaviour of various kinds. The loud Harley Davidson and dirt-bike signatures associated with the comings-and-goings of local gang members. Squealing tyres of deliberate burn-outs on the road. The occasional fool loudly blasting down the road at twice the speed limit. Things which the current system of "wait until someone gets annoyed enough or gets the courage to call the police to complain, and one might arrive 15 minutes later, by which time the coop has been long flown" allow to run mostly unchecked.
But those thoughts go hand in hand with a vague but distinct discomfort.
Some of the illegal things you listed aren't things that benefit much from a hastily dispatched response. If you want to catch people on cars or dirt bikes driving down the street, you kinda have to already be there. Also, a couple of the things you listed are nuisances, but not illegal activity in their own right.
ShotSpotters don't repel crime, let alone prevent it. They're intentionally covert, as shown in the OP, which gives credence to the notion that they aren't intended to deter criminal activity from the surrounding area. If anything, repelling/deterring crime would defeat the purpose of the technology.
At best, ShotSpotter merely detects crime, and its effectiveness in that capacity is kept a secret. The world of police tech is a knee-deep in snake oil. A bit of transparency would go a long way for ShotSpotter.
> Some of the illegal things you listed aren't things that benefit much from a hastily dispatched response. If you want to catch people on cars or dirt bikes driving down the street, you kinda have to already be there.
Yes and no. Intelligence (in the data sense of the word) can accrue usage patterns. You might not catch them that time, but you know where they'll be next time. What routes they travel. Where to focus.
If it's a live event, the police officer is not having to stand there fruitlessly questioning a witness about which direction the offender hooned off in 5 minutes ago - the system is already telling them, by tracking the relevant data.
It's a form of telemetry.
And it's also quite a disturbing (to use an overused phrase!, but which I hope is justified here) slippery slope.
Indeed, from a playing around perspective it can be a lot of fun. You do need to be able to identify the start time of a particular sound event though on 3 or more microphones (Technically 4x mics, there are two solutions to a 3 mic localization).
But those thoughts go hand in hand with a vague but distinct discomfort.