Oakland Sees Double-Digit Drop In Murders And Gunfire According To ShotSpotter Analysis
OAKLAND (KCBS)— Oakland police claim the city is seeing a double-digit drop in murders and gunfire according to the first year-to-year analysis from ShotSpotter, a gunfire detection company.
Police say the listening technology, which they've had for several years is helping officers better respond to crimes in progress, but they never actually looked at what the alerts were saying versus what 911 calls were saying.
Police Captain Ersie Joyner is in charge of gun-violence reduction. He said the difference was stunning.
"We saw that we had less than 20 percent of our 911 calls actually matched the corresponding gunfire. If you did a deeper analysis and looked at the geo-coding of where the 911 calls came in, a lot of them weren't even close to where the actual gunfire started," he said.
That suggests officers were going on wild goose chases. Despite an audit that shows people called police in only 13 percent of gunfire incidents, the department is better equipped to track down the shooters.
"We've had dramatic double-digit decreases for the last two years in a row, which has been unheard of and we haven't seen since 1969 when we started tracking homicides," Joyner said.
Joyner credits not just ShotSpotter, but the Operation Ceasefire program where they get all the top gang leaders together and read them the riot act.