It’s good to see the Chattanooga Police Department trading up.
Not that there is anything wrong with the solid shoe-leather type policing that our officers already are using, but if all goes as planned, Chattanooga police hope in coming months to add another tool.
The tool — a network of microphones and sensors placed around the city — is called ShotSpotter, and it triangulates the location of gunfire then gets that information to officers faster than most people who hear gunshots can get to a phone, call 911 and make a report of what they heard.
More importantly, in an era when many people don’t want to report gunshots in their neighborhoods at all, the system will help police fill in the blanks, according to Police Chief Fred Fletcher, who estimates that currently only 15-30 percent of gunshots fired within the city are being reported to police.
“We had incidents throughout last year where by the time somebody got hurt, the investigation revealed that there were one, two or three shootings previously that nobody reported,” Fletcher told Times Free Press reporter Shelly Bradbury recently. “What we’d really like to do is get ahead of that curve. To be in the areas and protecting people before someone gets hurt.”