Syracuse’s Common Council voted Tuesday to fund another year of the Syracuse Police Department’s use of a gunshot detection software.  

The funding supports a subscription of ShotSpotter Gunfire Location, Alert and Analysis Services. ShotSpotter uses a set of sensors to detect and automatically inform SPD of gunshots around the city. 

Syracuse Police Chief Frank Fowler on Tuesday, at the meeting, said there have been 434 gunshot reports this year, as opposed to 239 last year.     

Syracuse began using ShotSpotter in 2017. Fowler said that, in many cases, people hear gunshots and assume others will call the police to report them. That sometimes results in no calls to SPD, at all. 

The police chief said the ShotSpotter technology allows SPD to allocate resources to various areas across the city that have more reported crimes than others. 

“We’re a data-driven police department,” Fowler said. “We have an operations meeting where we hand out charts and graphs like this, and we track all of the data and we send our resources where the problems are.” 

Fowler said if Syracuse had the resources, SPD could use ShotSpotter software to cover the entire city. 

He added that the police department can consider covering a different portion of the city during a ShotSpotter trial period and make a year-to-date comparison, to see if SPD is spending money wisely.  

School resource officers 

The council also voted to authorize a memorandum of understanding with the Syracuse City School District to allow city police officers to serve as school resource officers during the next three academic years. 

Currently, the city pays for four resource officers and the district pays for five. The memorandum of understanding would allow the SCSD to tell city officials how many more officers it needs beyond current numbers. 

Councilor at-large Timothy Rudd said the memorandum does not automatically authorize funds for the officers.

Published on October 9, 2018 at 11:14 pm

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