Last week, the city of Roanoke, Virginia, ended its brief and fumbled experiment with Flock Safety’s Raven acoustic gunshot detectors (AGD) after 41 of the 75 approved devices had been installed—30 of them in the wrong locations. Roanoke isn’t alone. Numerous other cities have canceled contracts with Flock or with SoundThinking Inc, a competing provider of ShotSpotter, a similar technology, over cost, effectiveness, and privacy concerns related to scattering microphones across a city.
Botched Installation Joins Privacy Concerns Over Microphones in Public Places
According to The Roanoke Star‘s Stephanie Harper, “an internal review traced the misplacements to data-entry errors: sensor addresses were mistyped, including ‘Orange Ave.’ rendered as ‘Grange Ave.’ more than once, and installation crews worked from a location list that council had never approved. The city first reported 16 misplaced sensors in late June, then corrected the figure to 30 a day later.”…