Let Facts Guide Council ShotSpotter Decision

A gunshot detection system unveiled on July 28 and touted at an Aug. 1 Town Hall meeting might have rolled on to Planning Board endorsement on Aug. 5 and City Council approval by Aug. 16. But somehow its unannounced presentation Aug. 5 gave Planning Board members pause and they asked for more information at their Aug. 19 meeting. And as early as Aug. 2, a flurry of OPRA requests began, asking how much it cost to stage the on-air Town Meeting, simulcast on WBLS and WLIB and featuring The Rev. Al Sharpton.

Some residents also took issue with letting the entire metropolitan listenership know about Plainfield’s wave of gun violence starting in May that the ShotSpotter system was supposed to help alleviate. When the $1 million tab for the system became known, another rumble of concern arose. The city had just had two rounds of layoffs in order to wrap up the FY 2010 budget.

The Planning Board voted on Aug. 19 to recommend the ShotSpotter project to the governing body as a capital item, though member Horace Baldwin remained unconvinced of the plan’s usefulness. The detection system would place 40 sensors in a two-square-mile section of the city identified as having the most gunfire. The exact location of any gunshot would be conveyed to laptops in patrol cars.

But before the council met on Sept. 7, Plaintalker received and posted images of documents showing WBLS received $20,000 for the Town Meeting and that funds were drawn from the hardware and software maintenance account of the city’s new Information Technology division. Council members expressed concern at their meeting and called for an investigation.

At the Sept. 13 regular meeting (which Plaintalker could not attend), representatives of the ShotSpotter company gave a presentation on the system, but no action was taken.

Now West End Heights residents are questioning a possible stigma on their neighborhood if the system is installed there, and are planning a Town Hall meeting in early October.

So instead of being an easily understood and accepted project, the gun detection plan now seems itself to be under fire.

As a former reporter, I read about the initial July 28 demonstration with some sympathy for those who got assigned to cover it. Obviously, there had been a request for coverage that the editors could not ignore, but it seemed to be more PR than news. The Town Hall meeting following on the heels of the demonstration came across to several blog commenters as a big show and not much more. In the cold light of day after the Town Hall meeting, people wanted to know how much it cost.

My first clue that major hype was involved came at the end of the Aug. 5 Planning Board meeting, when one of the law enforcement officials asked me to suppress information on the blog, specifically the scope of the detection system. I responded that the facts in question were given in testimony at a public meeting. It was one of the very few times as a reporter or blogger I had been asked to do such a thing and I found it both offensive and somewhat intimidating,

Well, never mind. The hype didn’t fly and now more and more questions are being asked. Those who called for a fast approval in early August argued that lives were at stake. But of all the strategies that can be brought to bear on gun violence, and there are many in effect right now, the use of a costly and sophisticated gunshot detection system has somewhat lost its glamour amidst the ensuing controversy.

Whatever the governing body decides, it is now more than ever likely to be based on facts, not emotion or pressure. And that’s a good thing.

--Bernice Paglia