Jonathan Wienke writes:
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At 09:06 PM 10/31/97 -0600, Jim Choate wrote:
Forwarded message:
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