More than seven years ago, when the city of Chicago began its broad deployment of acoustic technology to identify and locate gunfire in high-crime neighborhoods, supporters promoted the system — which uses acoustic sensors, GPS software, and machine learning algorithms to alert the police in real-time — as an effective way to reduce handgun violence.
At that time, more than 90 cities had adopted the technology developed more than 25 years ago by a San Francisco Bay area firm called ShotSpotter. Today, more than 160 cities are using the ShotSpotter technology, according to its parent company, now called SoundThinking.
