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Meager results for gun sensors

By Jonathan Simor

The desperation of governing through crime thinking comes through loud and clear in Wyatt Buchanan's story in today's SF Chron, on early results from the high tech gun fire sensor systems recently installed in SF and Oakland. The lead is that thanks to the detectors police have responded to twice as many gun shots as they did before they were installed. Lets return in a moment to the interesting question of why in a democracy computers are necessary to discover that gun shots are being fired in a major city's neighborhoods, the real question here is whether public safety was improved by lashing our police officers to this technological alternative to a citizen. As we are learning in our recent debates about whole body imaging, discovering more spots in your body that might be cancer is not the same thing as curing more cancer and does not necessarily improve your health outcomes (to date, inconclusive)...continue to full post

Full post as published by Governing Through Crime on May 13, 2008 (boomark / email).