Gunshot Detecting Technology Coming To Fort Greene, Police Say

FORT GREENE, BROOKLYN — Technology that calls police when it hears gunshots is coming to Fort Greene.

The ShotSpotter program currently covers 54 square miles across the five boroughs and police hope to expand that terrain to Fort Greene and Washington Heights by the end of the summer, according to NYPD Deputy Commissioner of Information Technology Jessica Tisch.

“ShotSpotter has been an incredible tool for the NYPD,” said Tisch during a press conference Thursday. “We've taken a lot of firearms off the street because of it.”

The NYPD will install the audio sensors — which are able to send recordings of gunshots and approximated addresses to nearby police officer’s smartphones — on rooftops and street poles across four square miles this summer, and to an additional nine square miles in Staten Island, northern Queens and The Bronx by the end of 2017, according to Tisch.

The ShotSpotter program first launched in 2015 and has grown — in three-square-mile increments with 60 sensors per square mile — by 30-square miles in the past year, most recently in Coney Island and Staten Island.

The technology alerted police 2,399 times in 2016 and 1,740 times so far in 2017 — only 16 percent of those shots fired were phoned in to 911.

amNY originally spotted this story.

Photo courtesy of the NYPD