
ShotSpotter IPO suggests there’s not much profit in urban surveillance - BradyDale
http://observer.com/2017/05/shotspotter-ipo/
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knicholes
Their product focus is far too limited. Classification of audio is far more
valuable than detecting shots. One could detect things like sentiment in a
grocery store nearby a particular product (These prices are too damn high!),
reasons your baby is crying, what's that weird sound with your car and who can
fix it nearby, virtually any real-time, real-world analytics. It's like google
analytics for audio. (Audiolytics, might I suggest). I know it has already
been used to try to classify size of cars driving on the freeway.

I particularly enjoy this solution for retail locations. How long does someone
talk to themselves around a pair of new pants before they buy or walk off and
not buy? Is there a correlation between how long a baby screams in a grocery
store and how quickly a parent leaves the store without buying something?

How about a graph showing me how long my neighbor's dog has been barking each
night at 2am? How about that cough? Do other people who have coughs like that
end up being diagnosed with <disease_x>?

~~~
gnode
You're assuming that their implementation is general enough to be applied well
to anything other than their target market. They may use an algorithm that's
only suitable for differentiating a gunshot from other banging noises, for
instance.

~~~
knicholes
I am. But I'm also saying that if this is the case, they should consider
making some changes to generalize (or at least increase the breadth of their
specialization) if they want to increase their revenue.

~~~
pininja
Their algorithm and the acoustics of the hardware, as well as the
enclosure/power solution, is purpose built for triangulating gunshots sounds
from rooftops in a mesh of the devices.

Integrating with public safety organizations also took a considerable amount
of effort.

That is the jist of what I gathered from a former ShotSpotter employee.

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Declanomous
I live in a neighborhood with a ton of gunshots. I've called the police about
gunshots maybe three times, but I probably hear gunshots multiple times a
week. One of those times I was the first person to call in a murder, the other
two didn't even generate a shooting report that I could tell.

I've been following ShotSpotter, and I'm not surprised by the problem they
have been having with false positives. For one thing, gunshots don't sound
like cannons in real life, there are so many things that sound like them,
especially in an economically deprived neighborhood. Backfiring cars,
fireworks, people driving over plastic bottles, lumber being dropped, etc.

One of the reasons I don't call in shots is because it's almost impossible to
figure out where a gunshot actually came from. The grid system in Chicago
combined with the ubiquity of 3 story brick and stone houses means that sound
bounces all over the place. Even sounds that are generally easy to place, such
as trains and sirens, often sound like they are coming from a completely
different direction .

The other reason I don't bother calling in shots is because I feel like any
police officer close enough to respond in a timely manner is likely close
enough that they probably heard the shots themselves. By the time I call 911,
give them my questionable guess to location, and the police actually arrive
there, chances are the shooter is long gone. Even the 911 operators seem
uninterested in my calls unless I can give them extremely detailed information
about what just happened.

If ShotSpotter is as accurate as the paper indicates, then I think it could be
an extremely powerful tool _if the information can be given to officers in a
timely manner_. That being said, from what I've read ShotSpotter is already
considered a bit of a success in Chicago, so I think the technology has a
solid market.

Given the fact that they have a solid market, I can't help but feel their
problem is on the management side of things. Honestly, ShotSpotter seems like
one of those companies that should have 25-50 employees, and could be
reasonably profitable at that level. Looking at their SEC filing, it seems
like they spend way too much on Admin and Marketing, given the fact that 1)
their market seems reasonably straightforward from a sales perspective and 2)
their technology seems to speak for itself.

That being said, I have no idea how much trade shows and such cost, but
overall I feel like there is no reason they shouldn't be profitable after 20
years of existence given the fact that they appear to have basically the only
viable product in the market.

~~~
ghfosahd
Out of curiosity, why do you live in a neighborhood with a ton of gunshots?
Can you afford to live elsewhere?

~~~
Declanomous
I could, but I'm saving a ton of money this way. The owner is a friend of a
friend of a friend who didn't want to rent anymore, but didn't want to sell at
the bottom of the market.

I live two blocks from the train, and it takes me less than 10 minutes to get
to the loop. The neighborhood is also close to the neighborhoods where I like
to spend time.

That isn't to say I wouldn't prefer to live in a nicer neighborhood, but I
don't think the benefits are worth the added cost. Plus, to be quite frank,
nobody is shooting at me.

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accountyaccount
I mean... no shit? You have a fairly complex install for a service that I
don't think most police stations even want.

They have a hard enough time responding to the existing real-life humans who
call them. I've reported gunshots in my neighborhood and waited more than 30
minutes for a response (we also have shotspotter).

~~~
Declanomous
Honestly, I wrote a wall of text about this, but I think the benefit to
ShotSpotter is that it isn't a human calling it in. The lag time between the
shots happening and an officer receiving information about it is so long when
a human calls them in that I can see why they wouldn't even bother unless the
call was extremely detailed. It isn't like people hang out after shooting at
someone, and if the response takes five minutes the shooter could easy be half
a mile away even on foot.

If ShotSpotter can give a location to within a couple hundred feet within 30
seconds of shots being fired, then the officers already have a much better
chance of doing something useful.

I think the real opportunity would be combining data from ShotSpotter with
other data sources and using them for predictive/preventative policing. That's
much harder to quantify from a sales perspective though.

~~~
fivestar
I think you are under-estimating the police response time by a fairly large
margin. It's not like cops have shotspotter (TM) information going to straight
into their heads and can react at a moment's notice. The information goes to a
command center, then if a unit is available, they might send them out for a
look, which means going through the dispatcher. There really isn't some police
reaction force just sitting around waiting for calls.

It's dumb technology--it's like everything the MIC has done to try and re-
market to police agencies, it's unnecessary and pretty much worthless.

~~~
Declanomous
One of the articles I read implied that ShotSpotter could send information to
the computer inside the squad car. I'm not sure if that is true or not.

I'm well aware police officers aren't specifically sitting around waiting to
be dispatched, but my neighborhood has a lot of idle officers that exist as a
'show of force'. I don't mean that in a derogatory way, I just mean that this
officers are already dispatched to my neighborhood as a way of reducing
violence. I think that responding to areas ShotTracker has flagged would be
both within their capabilities in addition to being in line with their duties
and priorities.

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pdxgoat
Some research using ShotSpotter data: [https://www.brookings.edu/wp-
content/uploads/2016/07/Carr_Do...](https://www.brookings.edu/wp-
content/uploads/2016/07/Carr_Doleac_gunfire_underreporting.pdf) . The takeaway
is that gun shots are significantly underreported. Here are maps that
accompany the paper:
[http://jenniferdoleac.com/maps](http://jenniferdoleac.com/maps)

~~~
dsfyu404ed
It depends on your definition of "underreported"

When you consider how often reporting gunshots or (pretty much anything) to
your local PD does any good to any stakeholder I would say they're wildly
over-reported.

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preinheimer
So this might just be me, but it doesn't seem creepy at all. Detecting a
particular audio signal seems much less creepy than running facial analysis on
everyone who walks by ([https://www.facefirst.com/industry/retail-face-
recognition/](https://www.facefirst.com/industry/retail-face-recognition/))

If they were recording all audio everywhere, hey, that's creepy. But it
doesn't seem like that's what they're doing.

~~~
jasonkostempski
The simple fact is, you can never trust they're not doing it, no matter what
it seems like or what they say. This kind of technology needs to be kept out
of public places, open hardware, open source and self-hosted, without
exception, otherwise it is creepy.

~~~
GrinningFool
Actually, you can trust them.

I'm not saying whether or not that's a good decision, but saying "you can't"
is misleading. Trust is a choice, and time tells whether you made the right
one.

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evanwolf
There's value in automated reporting but cities like Oakland, California, had
trouble justifying the expense at current signal/noise ratios. Efforts to
boost the signal are expensive and involve human analysts today. And the sales
cycle with city governments can be long and labyrinthine, driving up sales
costs and soaking up cash.

The business strategy is to keep revenue coming in. They need to fund R&D (and
an IPO could help with that) and time to drive up signal/noise and drive down
costs.

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dullgiulio
Frankly I find the whole idea behind this company troublesome to say the
least.

The solution to the gunshots problem is before the guns shoot, like background
checks required to own a weapon.

That a company could make an IPO over such an idea goes very, very far in
describing today's America.

Soon to come: the laptop you can assembly yourself and that can be carried in
the cabin?

~~~
tomschlick
> The solution to the gunshots problem is before the guns shoot, like
> background checks required to own a weapon.

Most uses of a firearm in cities are by people who are already prohibited from
having/buying one.

They will use stolen or straw purchased guns that are passed from prohibited
person to prohibited person for as little as $50 until someone is caught with
it.

Now the tech behind this actually helps the police find unreported gunshots
and run reports on where most gunshots occur so they can focus their attention
on that area. I don't find that troublesome in the least. As a country with
high firearm ownership there are always going to be certain problems, so we
try to mitigate those issues with tech.

