Cape Town - Cape Town’s Hanover Park community has become the first of several gang-ridden local communities across the city to receive the second phase of the ShotSpotter technology.
ShotSpotter (Pty) Ltd, a subsidiary of ShotSpotter, Inc (Nasdaq: SSTI) announced the development today (Weds).
ShotSpotter is an acoustic gunshot detection system that alerts law enforcement authorities to gunfire incidents as soon as they happen.
The technology will work to assist the City of Cape Town’s Law Enforcement Advancement Project (Leap), metro police and the SAPS to effectively respond to escalating gunshot incidents in hot spot areas.
ShotSpotter president and CEO Ralph A Clark said that the company was pleased to facilitate the re-deployment of the technology.
Clark said: “The enhanced response will ultimately help metro police officers and the SAPS improve public safety by ensuring they can respond to every shooting incident, enabling life-saving trauma interventions to gunshot wound victims, collecting critical evidence for follow-on investigations, and aiding in getting criminals and their weapons off the streets.
“We hope to continue expanding our engagement with SAPS and other South African municipalities seeking to improve public safety through more effective and holistic response to gangsters with guns,” he said.
The new ShotSpotter phase comes after an initial phase of the project in 2016, where the innovative technology was installed and used in Hanover Park and Manenberg. According to ShotSpotter, the first phase resulted in more than 200 lives being saved.
“We also saw an impressive reduction in the number of shooting incidents, shots per incident, and the recovery of illegal guns increasing five-fold in these areas. ShotSpotter has also been recognised by Police Minister Bheki Cele.”
“Minister Cele said that technology has both a proactive and reactive value and enhances policing in gang-infested hot spots, and for this reason the police are in support of utilising the technology as part of a multi-disciplinary approach encompassed in the Safer City Policing model,” Clark said.
The new phase of the ShotSpotter project will see the technology deployed in a 9km² area of Hanover Park. It will be used in conjunction with CCTV cameras and other aerial surveillance technologies to help law enforcement identify shooters.
“Since going live in the first week of December 2022, ShotSpotter has detected 68 gunfire incidents and 224 total shots fired in the coverage area.
“The information gathered so far has enabled law enforcement to identify high-risk areas and times of day in Hanover Park where crime operations to retrieve illegal firearms will be targeted.”
Mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis said: “We are doing more to increase safety in communities impacted by high crime levels, and making use of innovative technology like ShotSpotter greatly assists our officers to provide quicker response times and arrest more criminals.
“This project emphasises our targeted focus on innovation and the benefit of intelligence-driven crime fighting for residents. Investments in cutting-edge technology will help make residents feel safer in Cape Town, and more innovative projects are planned for 2023.”
Safety and security Mayco member JP Smith said: “The success of the technology when it was previously used meant that over 70% of the firearms recovered in Cape Town were recovered in just Manenberg and Hanover Park due to the operational efficiencies created by the system.
“With the system expanding to other neighbourhoods now, it will allow for the recovery of many more firearms, improving on the impressive recovery of firearms that metro police and Leap have achieved over the last year and a half, which means many more lives saved.”
Western Cape police commissioner Thembesile Patekile has also reportedly welcomed the re-deployment of the technology, citing that the ShotSpotter technology would assist SAPS in responding quickly to gunshot incidents in these areas.
“We have seen how successful this technology was when deployed previously in hot spots, which is why we support this programme,” he said.