San Antonio – A program intended to help police officers identify where a shooting happens, get there quicker and ultimately cut down on crime has been stripped from the proposed city budget because city leaders said it’s not effective. It cost the city $270,000 to put ShotSpotters on the city’s crime-ridden east and west sides, but police Chief William McManus said the program’s results don’t match up with its hefty price tag.
“The measure of success for the police department would be arrests and case closures, and we have not seen it at all. We’ve gotten four arrests,” McManus said.
Source: ShotSpotter program stripped from proposed city budget
An expenditure of $270,000 for four arrests. That comes to $67,500 per arrest.
The average salary for a police officer in San Antonio is $47,986 a year. That is 5 officers that the city could be using.
The problem with ShotSpotter (other than accuracy) is that the company and the cities getting the system, seems to firmly believe shooters will remain in place long enough for the police to arrive and arrest them.
Oh well… it is only taxpayer’s money, right?
As I understand it, Shot Spotter works moderately well in dense urban areas. San Antonio is anything but dense, well except for the politicians. But that is true of pert near all of them everywhere.
5 more officers on the street would have been a far better bang for our buck (yes I live in SA in case it isn’t obvious). Hey, the PD is ‘only’ some 100+ under strength. And the chief and the mayor and the city manager are all proponents of sanctuary cities – and the Border Patrol are STILL finding truck loads of illegals, almost every day…………………SMH
I live in an urban area and have seen the results first hand. They had missed the location at last 100 yards and some even more. In a locatio with lots of houses and apartments is as well as useless.
“That’s five officers . . .” Well, not exactly. When you count the cost of benefits, the true cost of an officer is roughly twice his/her salary. A good rule of thumb is, each cop costs the city 100 grand a year. So you’re really just wasting the money you’d spend on 2.5 cops.
But those 2.5 cops, assuming they’re still allowed to do proactive police work, will be much more valuable to the taxpayers than a bang locator.
Don’t get me started.
New rule: Don’t get Old 1811 started. 🙂