• ShotSpotter was originally deployed in the District by the FBI, in August 2006; the Metropolitan Police Department has subsequently taken over operational responsibility.
• By September, police will be covering 16 of the District’s 68 square miles with ShotSpotter.
• Police rely on ShotSpotter to provide accurate information about gunfire more quickly than they hear about it at 911—if anyone calls 911 in the first place (more often than not, they don’t).
• In one district (District 7, where 21 of the City’s 78 homicides occurred last year), ShotSpotter detects as many as 50 gunfire incidents per week.
• ShotSpotter has helped DC police make arrests, save lives, and has provided key evidence in high profile cases, such as the officer-involved shooting of DeOnté Rawlings.

The blogosphere and traditional news media are actively reporting this news.  Check out the coverage and photo on Fox News and  WTOP, and blogs at YourStreet, APBNews, and of course on the ANC2C02 Forum (a resident of Shaw and a regular blogger on the topic).

Personally, it’s gratifying to see a city and its community rally around what my colleagues and I spend our days working so hard to deliver.  Nothing replaces good, hard police work (no ShotSpotter sensor will ever look in someone’s eyes and make a tough decision, put its life at risk every day, or put handcuffs on a suspect), but in the end, our job is to deliver our first responders the best tools they can have, and it appears to be working in our nation’s capital.

Sachs too frequently lapses into a sort of reductio ad PowerPoint. It seems every catastrophe can be averted if we take fewer than 10 simple steps.  Sachs presents “four compelling reasons why the poorest countries need to speed the demographic transition,” “a list of seven requirements to enable family planning programs to accelerate the decline in fertility” and “six steps to transform” American “security policy into a workable framework for the 21st century.”

Maybe it was the little thrill of seeing a Latinate/geekspeak mash up, or just the fact that, structurally, PowerPoint and absurdum are in parallel, but it made my evening.  Sometimes it’s the little things….

One needn’t spend much time browsing in The Bazaar before you realize: the proverbial cat is out of the bag. He is not the first to report that the knowledge of how to construct a nuclear weapon is no longer particularly hard to come by. (You may not quite be able to download the plans off the Internet, but the basic “gun” model used in the Little Boy (Hiroshima) bomb is fairly easy to construct from the right amount of Uranium 235.) Thus for a long time, the world has relied for its nonproliferative intentions on the difficulty of obtaining sufficient quantities of weapons-grade U235 (loosely defined as uranium whose 235 isotope is present at >90% by mass). Building centrifuges requires far more engineering and machining expertise than does building the actual bomb, and Western nonproliferation efforts (and the IAEA’s efforts) have thus focused on nipping the process in the materials production bud.

Blame it on the leaky Russians (Langewiesche convinces us that they had little, if anything to do with nuclear proliferation) or the incredibly trusting Dutch, who initially hired A. Q. Kahn and later let him waltz out of the country with the plans for what are still considered state-of-the-art uranium centrifuges (state-of-the-non-classified-art, I should say), or the Pakistan government, which first propped up Kahn and which later bowed to US pressure to arrest him—and then promptly locked him away under house arrest so that no Western intelligence services could ask any further awkward questions relating to the involvement of the Pakistani government itself—but no matter how you slice it, not only has nuclear knowledge proliferated, but therefore so has nuclear technology. The North Koreans, the Iranians and the Libyans now also have the know-how (if not the machines, in the case of newly-reformed Libya) to produce significant quantities of weapons-grade uranium, and of course so do the Pakistanis, the Indians, the Israelis (not officially :-), the Germans, the French, the British, the Chinese, the Russians and the US. That’s roughly half the world’s population (50.6%, to be precise) whose governments are known have access to nuclear weapons technology. A majority.

Thus I conclude that the nonproliferation agenda is bankrupt. So far as we know, we have kept these weapons out of the hands of non-state actors. But such was not the aim of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty! In order to create effective controls which might curb the transfer of nuclear technologies to non-state actors, we’ll have to start by identifying what didn’t work in the NPT—for starters, the overt inequity between the nations permitted to maintain such weapons (namely the permanent members of the UN Security Council) and those not permitted to do so. The NPT created second-class citizens of half the world. Any surprise the world didn’t abide by the treaty? It’s Versaille all over again: a Phyrric victory of an asymmetric treaty over geopolitical reality.

So much for sleeping tonight.

According to this study, lifetime medical costs alone of gunshot injuries range as high as $79,927 per incident (New York State lifetime medical cost for treating self-inflicted non-fatal injuries). That’s in 1994 dollars. Adjusting for inflation, that number would be $113,348. But adjusting for the increase in medical care costs over the past 14 years, that number would now be a shocking $160,448. Other costs are not quite so high, but nevertheless disturbing: the average lifetime medical cost in New York State for all types of gun injury (again in 1994 dollars) was $34,420 (that’s $47,448 in today’s dollars, or $69,096 at today’s medical costs).

In the study year, there were some 134, 445 gunfire-related injuries in the US. (By my calculation, that’s approximately five injuries per 10,000 US residents.) The authors estimate that these injuries cost some $2.3 billion per year in 1994 (that would be $3.2 billion in today’s dollars, or $4.6 billion at today’s healthcare costs). And that’s just the medical costs. Investigation, prosecution, incarceration: all of these costs are separate and no doubt substantive.

But wait, you say. Crime rates are down since their peak in the mid-’90s. Surely we are spending less now than we used to be, right? Although I want to go find more recent data, I contend, in the absence of that data, that we are spending as much or more annually now than we were then. Why? Other data, in this case from the FBI, indicates that although the homicide rate has stayed fairly stable since 2000, the rate of homicide by gun or explosive weapon has increased dramatically:

Oh, and one last thought. Think this is all somebody else’s problem? I mean, after all, it’s not like you are paying for this medical care, right? Wrong. 49% of these costs are born by the government (read: your tax dollars), and another 18% are paid by private insurance (read: higher insurance premiums). Directly or indirectly, you are footing the bill for 67% of the medical costs of gun violence. That’s $3.1 billion of your money we spend per year.

The critical development: whatever might have happened was averted because somebody tipped off police. Of course, it’s often difficult to prove a negative (but not impossible!). Nevertheless, the facts so far made public in this case are compelling enough for me to draw the conclusion that the arrest averted a potential tragedy.

Media Credit: Vanessa Sanchez / Daily Lobo

For every community which organizations like Speak Up! serve there are numerous others in which the threat of student gun violence remains unaddressed. But the promise is tremendous: in 80% of all school violence, someone other than the perpetrators knew about it in advance. Therein lies the opportunity: to save lives by notifying authorities before it’s too late. This time, it worked.

from the CeaseFire website

Thus Kotlowitz’s article about Slutkin’s epidemiological approach to violence struck a chord. In the epidemiology of disease, there is always an “index case“—the first case on record. In violence, there is a precipitating event. And, just like an epidemic, the intensity of transmission amplifies throughout the population: a particularly vociferous antagonist can result in tens of crimes, never mind an asymmetric number of shootings and homicides. Enter CeaseFire, an organization which seeks to interrupt violence at its first, most critical step: what epidemiologists would cause “index case transmission”—when the first victim becomes motivated aggressor.

And, just as public health deals with the results of infection (i.e., sick people who become patients), so the results of unchecked transmission of the disease of violence are higher crime rates, an ever-increasing rate of youth-involved gun violence within the otherwise fixed homicide rate, and an exploding prison population. As my colleague Pascal Levensohn recently summarized, the prison population of the US might as well be its own nation. They are the victims of a disease just as surely as were the nineteenth century’s leper colonies: shunned by society, the very definition of “out of sight, out of mind.”

Fortunately, organizations like CeaseFire and PAX, about which I wrote previously in “A PAX on Gun Violence”, understand that ostracism of those infected with this disease isn’t the answer. Recognizing that the ounce of gun violence prevention created by these worthy organization is worth far more than its proverbial pound of cure (actually, that was Benjamin Franklin), both PAX and CeaseFire appear to understand that nipping violence in the bud requires intervention before the disease spreads.

About a year or so ago, I was lucky enough to meet Dan Gross, the co-founder and CEO of PAX, a New York-based organization which has developed two truly innovative programs which reduce gun violence long before anybody ever fires a weapon. A former advertising executive, Dan found his life changed forever when his brother became the innocent victim of gun violence himself: his younger brother Matthew was critically wounded in the now infamous 1997 shooting on the observation deck of New York’s iconic Empire State Building. Leaving his lucrative advertising career behind, Dan has since become first the leader of PAX and then the creator of two important programs.

One of these programs, Speak Up, addresses the reality that many school shootings are avoidable. According to the US government, over 1,000,000 students take some kind of weapon to school at least once a month. Moreover, over 80% of school attacker tell someone of their plans before they execute them. In other words, in four out of five cases, friends of the perpetrators−often themselves students in the very schools which will later fall victim to gun violence−have heard rumors, threats, innuendo, or otherwise have reason to suspect the perpetrators may turn to guns to settle their grievances. Although it seems obvious that a “hotline,” reminiscent of suicide prevention hotlines, should be created for kids to report such threats anonymously, it turns out not to be quite so simple. There are both legal and procedural complications inherent in accepting anonymous tips regarding minors. Enter Speak Up! Thanks to a 24/7 hotline at 866-Speak-Up and numerous educational and support materials, students now have a safe an anonymous resource on which they can rely. Perhaps equally importantly, PAX has spent the time and money to develop a carefully-calibrated protocol which is endorsed by national law enforcement and educators’ organizations.

The second program, called ASK, encourages parents to ask if the homes which their children visit to play contain firearms. Why? Because a shocking 1.7 million children in the US live in homes with weapons which are both loaded and unlocked. In 2003, nearly eight children and teens were killed by firearms every single day. And in 2004, a horrifying 37 children and teens were injured by firearms every single day. With 40% of children living in households containing firearms, it’s not unreasonable for parents to ask: “Are there any guns where my children are playing?” (As aside: neither I nor, it seems, PAX, have any objection to properly licensed and secured—i.e., locked—firearms. This is not a gun control issue. This is a safety issue.) This year, on June 21st (the first day of summer), communities nationwide will recognize ASK Day, a day to focus on asking a simple question which can save kids’ lives.

If you have a moment, browse over to the PAX website and learn a little bit more. Find out how you can help. Every time these two PAX programs succeeds in reducing an incident of gun violence—even if that eliminates an opportunity for a ShotSpotter-assisted arrest—I, for one, will feel our society has taken a step in the right direction.

Gun violence has become not only the tool of murderers but the tool of intimidators, and thus it is becoming all the more prevalent. One city in which our technology is deployed, for example, suffered 100 murders last year. There were another 300-500 people wounded by gunfire. But in that same city, over that year, we detected more than 3,000 incidents of gunfire. All of this in a city in which it is illegal to fire a weapon outdoors within city limits (unless, of course, one is at a licensed shooting range). It is safe to assume this approximately one-in-ten ratio is not the result of preternaturally poor aim on the part of those shooting the weapons. Nor is it anything to be happy about. As these data indicate, guns are fired illegally just as often for purposes other than to kill someone. So one need not only be concerned about murders and hard-core felons. We also need to worry about the people who fire guns for the sake of intimidation, to “mark territory,” or simply because it’s fun.

The solution to our nation’s gun violence problem does not lie solely in technology such as ShotSpotter. Naturally, as the company’s CEO I am inclined to recommend the technology as a reliable mechanism to reduce gun crime (in fact, ShotSpotter systems have been proven to reduce gunfire and violent crime), but that’s not the point of this posting. The sad reality is that, by the time ShotSpotter finds out about a crime, society as a whole has missed the opportunity to prevent that crime from happening in the first place. Around the office, we can occasionally be heard saying that ShotSpotter can’t help put the bullets back in the gun. Nor can we stop the gun from being fired. But what if somebody could? Therein lies a tremendous opportunity.

The next post in this series: capitalizing on that tremendous opportunity

So, we’re back on the air.  Stay tuned….