[dragonsngoblins]

>Alert fatigue is a big problem for any alerting system, but here the baseline is 911 reports. If they receive a 911 report for a shooting, they're going to arrive after the report. If they receive a ShotSpotter alert before a 911 report for the same incident, then they're probably going to arrive as soon or sooner than they would have otherwise. If they receive an alert but don't receive a 911 report, then any response time will be faster than no response.

I'd like to suggest that it might lead to slower response times in the cases of false negatives: someone calls in a report and the ShotSpotter doesn't make an alert. If ShotSpotter tends to be over sensitive police might assume if they don't get an alert from it something definitely didn't occur and take their time

[meowface]

I can see how this could be a risk if it were an assumption they make, but my guess is all PDs would consider human reports far more reliable than ShotSpotter alerts. I'm sure in all or almost all areas, a 911 report of a gunshot is much more likely to be a true positive compared to any automated alert. A lack of a report doesn't imply a lack of an incident, but the presence of a report implies a high likelihood that there is an incident.

A system could be considered generally "sensitive" in some way (e.g. seemingly firing in response to any loud noise) while actually performing poorly in terms of statistical sensitivity (the percentage of actual gunshots that the system detects and alerts on with high confidence).