If the false positive rate is 5%, it’s probably not much of a problem in terms of the overall balance of effectiveness.
If the false positive rate is 95%, it’s pretty obviously going to be a diversion of police resources from whatever else they could be doing if not responding to zero-value alerts.
This claims the false positive rate is under 3%. It's based on Shotspotter's statistics and "independent audit" statistics.
Not sure how trustworthy either is, but without better stats from anywhere else I have no reason to doubt the claim the false positive is pretty low.
Seems like even if false positive rate was at 50% it wouldn't be that big of a deal. Cities have police on patrol at all times anyway - it would just mean sending someone to drive 5 minutes away to see if there is visible a disturbance instead of them driving around the area they were currently randomly patrolling.
Yeah, you’re thinking of Boomerang. ShotSpotter did some limited body-worn stuff for the military back in the day, but the vehicle mounted stuff is all Boomerang. Entirely different approaches (distributed microphones vs. a single microphone array at the expected target) done by different companies.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/chicago-watchdog-harshly...
https://twitter.com/greg_doucette/status/1512138327205589004 (criminal defense attorney)
https://boingboing.net/2022/04/12/shotspotter-wastes-million...
I supported units with them while I was a contractor to the US Army, and the soldiers I talked to didn't think much of it either.