On Tuesday evening, Oakland’s Public Safety Committee met to consider whether to renew the contract for the city’s 20-year-old ShotSpotter program.
Police said it’s a valuable tool for officer and public safety. Others say, in a time of massive budget deficits, it isn’t worth the cost.
Facing a $170 million deficit, Oakland is looking wherever it can to trim costs and that’s putting the police department’s ShotSpotter program in the crosshairs.
The technology uses microphones mounted on poles and buildings in high-crime areas to detect the sound of gunfire. The noise is then triangulated to give a location within a couple hundred feet.
Huy Nguyen, the president of the Oakland Police Officers Association, said that gives officers an accurate idea of where to look, increasing safety and helping identify the location of possible victims.
“When I used to work the street, sometimes there’s days that we don’t find a body until the following morning,” Nguyen told CBS News Bay Area. “Because we go out there at nighttime, a gunshot victim’s been shot, and we can’t seem to locate him because we don’t have the exact location where it came from.”