According to the New Jersey Newsroom, the East Orange Police Department announced the arrest of an East Orange man in connection with Monday's fatal shooting of a 19-year-old boy.
Through the gunshot detection system, East Orange Police were able to swarm the shooting scene within minutes. Sanders was spotted only blocks away fleeing from the area. After obtaining a search warrant, detectives recovered two handguns at the defendant's East Orange home.
In March, 2009 New Jersey Police heralded their gunshot detection systems making claims as, "Once criminal elements know that you can't just shoot guns, it's going to be a deterrent for guys carrying guns." However, it didn't take too long before the public figured out the truth – these systems appear to be pushing murder into the next town, not deterring crime as intended.
According to NJ.com
To the north in East Orange, overall crime dropped 71 percent from 2003 to 2008. And to the northeast in Newark, murders fell more than 37 percent in the past three years. That trend hasn't spread to Irvington. Last year there were 25 homicides, up slightly from 2007. On top of that, 45 people were wounded by gunfire. There have been five murders so far this year.
Officials say some criminals are finding a new place to conduct business in Irvington. "Crime really has no borders," said Anthony Ambrose, the county's chief of investigators. "Drug dealers don't care. If Newark is coming down on them, and Orange is coming down on them, they're going to go to a place with less police and less strategies." As a stopgap measure, the State Police began patrolling Irvington in mid-2003, a year when there were a record 30 homicides.
The aim is to turn the tables in Irvington, where crime has risen in part because aggressive policing in nearby Newark and East Orange drove gangs and drug dealers out of those cities and into the township of nearly 60,000.
It's great to hear that this gunshot detection system is securing arrests. However, securing arrests and potentially convictions is a radically different result than what the public officials thought it would do – deter gunshot murders. The arrest secured also followed a very similar pattern to the vandalism problem in the Baltimore parks. The parks used combined technologies to capture an event, an alert was sent, and an officer intervenes. Event-alert-intervene is also what made the arrest happen in East Orange.
Other communities should pay attention to this story so that they do not become a potentential victim of murder displacement. If your town or neighboring towns have a high murder rate and you are going to install gunshot detectors, make sure they get installed in all the neighboring towns at the same time to level the playing field.
Politicians should also work with academic institutions before making claims that these systems are effective. Cities should also modify their crime reporting standards to capture new data which will report on the overall private and public surveillance initiative effectiveness.
It still seems the net number of murders is down. Is that incorrect?
If so, even if one area slightly increase, if other areas significantly decreased, is that not overall better for the state of NJ?
I think displacementis an important issue. However, if crime goes from 100 and 50 in cities A and B to 60 and 60 after city A implements a solution, city B may be slightly worse off but overall the 'state' is better, no?
Hi. James from ShotSpotter here. That's our technology in all three cities mentioend: East Orange, Newark, and Irvington. Maybe I can provide a little more context:
First of all, the "event-alert-intervene" flow is *PRECISELY* what gunshot location/detection technology most directly helps improve. Bear in mind that with the exception of one particular city, less than 50% of gunfire is reported to 9-1-1 in any city we're deployed in nationwide (we're in 45 cities). In many cities, that number is less than 20%. So the first step in improving the event-alert-intervene process is to alert on a higher percentage of gunfire incidents than would otherwise be alerted on. (That does increase the number of calls for service, but since the location is far more precise than a 9-1-1 call usually is, there's a substantially reduced workload for responding officers when they get to a reported incident.)
Second, the systems in New Jersey have, by in large, not been installed long enough to produce noticeable trends in murder rates, primarily because (thankfully) the murder rate is a "small n" problem (in other words, fewer than 100 incidents per year–thankfully!), so it takes a long time to measure improvement. If you're looking for data on reduced murder rates, I can point you to this article about a 40% reduction in homicides in Los Angeles (http://www.shotspotter.com/news/articles/2009/1-January/012309_LACounty.html) or this one about a 35% reduction in violent crime in South Carolina (http://www.shotspotter.com/customers/casestudies/cs_ncharl_630-0010-01-A.pdf).
Best,
-James
John,
Great question. Unfortunately the up-to-date crime counts are not on-line. If you look at the crime counts on citi-data for East Orange, Newark, and Irvington, you'll see murders are higher for 2003 – 2007 in Newark and Irvington and slightly down for East Orange. I cannot find the crime count numbers on-line for 2008 and 2009 for all three cities. Also, those crime counts are murders, not specifically death-by-gunshots. They could have been stabbings.
So, until we can see the murder crime counts for 2003 to 2009, broken out by murder-by-gunshots, I believe overall murders for these three towns have not declined. I believe per capita, they may have actually increased.
Maybe even murder by strangulations have increased because criminals know they stand a good chance of getting caught if they use a gun.
I agree with your greater good theory, but unfortunately for the citizens of Irvington, they may have ended up on the wrong side of East Orange and Newark's gunshot social experiment. Mayor Cory Booker is a good man, but he is a politician on the rise. He will talk up the good aspects of this initiative (i.e. Murder in Newark is lower) and downplay any residual side effects that may be occurring in Irvington.
James,
Thanks for the note. It sounds like your spotshotter technology is helping the police arrive on the scene quicker, which increases the likelihood that a victims life can be saved. That is definitely a fantastic benefit of the system. From my surveillance research, I believe gunshot detection has the ability to have a bigger impact on a city due to the sheer size of the coverage area. In addition, costs are much smaller when compared that of a public CCTV system. In some cases, I have also read the private sector has funded your systems. All of those things are a win in my book.
As far as your comment on "not enough data", I am thinking the opposite. I see there has already been two academic papers written on your technology to date. According to the abstract, the first paper only used 2 months of data.
One could argue that these three cities comprise perfect datasets – one for the experimental location (East Orange), and two controls (Newark and Irvington). From what I understand, East Orange installed the system in 2003, Newark installed the system in 2007, and Irvington is currently underway.
The small number of murders, as you put it, spaced over a 10-12 year time series analysis would be dealt with by using the proper statistical methodology. Possibly even with the poisson method as found in the paper I co-authered (see news link on top).
There is a great paper written by Farrington and Painter which lays out how to perform a CCTV impact analysis. The same methodology and approach can be applied to any spotshotter installation.
As far as the link describing LA county and crime reduction, I am not disagreeing. However, until a thorough study has been performed which includes peer-review, claims of success can only be just that – a claim. A peer-reviewed paper could help your company point out the positive things like the lives that are being saved due to the rapid dispatch of an ambulance.