Implementing unhelpful technology won’t fix Salinas’ murder rate.

The people of Salinas aren’t fed up enough to start turning in the gangsters doing all the shooting, but some of them are fed up enough to complain.

This was demonstrated at the Aug. 30 Salinas City Council meeting as the murder rate remains on track to break last year’s all-time record of 40.

A community activist asked City Manager Ray Corpuz and Mayor Joe Gunter to resign over the skyrocketing murder rate (29 for the year as of Labor Day morning, after many more shootings over Labor Day weekend). A young woman whose uncle was murdered in December decried the low levels of police staffing and pledged to be part of the solution, whatever that solution may be. And a group of mothers of murdered children promised their presence at future meetings until something – anything – is done about the violence.

It’s not that the city is doing nothing, but the question is, are they doing the right things?

At the Aug. 30 meeting, the city approved receipt of a grant from the state. Part of the free $5.5 million will help the city acquire property to build a new police headquarters on East Alisal and fund three years of “violence interrupter” positions through the nonprofit Urban Peace Institute. It’s a good idea, but that headquarters is years down the road.

More immediately, $1.5 million will go to fund a questionable technology play that is supposed to help police pinpoint the exact location of gunfire, but has shown itself to be mostly ineffective at stopping gun-related crimes and hasn’t led to many arrests.

The technology is called ShotSpotter, and Salinas Police Chief Kelly McMillin, a booster of the technology, learned about it from researchers at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey. ShotSpotter’s technology works by deploying a sensor array (or, as I and the Electronic Frontier Foundation like to think of them, microphones) around parts of the city where firearms violence is most likely to take place. When three sensors pick up the sound of gunfire, that information is relayed through ShotSpotter, which determines if the sound is actually gunfire. If the answer is yes, the location is sent to police. In most cases, that exchange occurs in under a minute.

The good news: It’s not going to cost the city any money to deploy ShotSpotter, thanks to the state grant. The bad news is this: The Center for Investigative Reporting, producer Matt Drange and reporter Ali Winston did an in-depth examination of ShotSpotter and how it’s used in a dozen cities across the country. According to that investigation, which went live in April via CIR’s podcast Reveal, a clear pattern emerged: “lots of calls, few tangible results.”

In San Francisco, for example, 3,000 gunfire alerts came in to ShotSpotter over a 30-month period. Those alerts resulted in two arrests, only one of which was gun-related, and that gun-related arrest happened because the shooter stayed at the scene.

Drange did a ridealong with SFPD to track ShotSpotter calls, and in one instance, ShotSpotter pinpointed a shooting a half mile from its actual location. In two-thirds of the ShotSpotter calls in San Francisco, police couldn’t locate evidence of gunshots.

Charlotte, North Carolina, is dropping ShotSpotter and using the money to install more surveillance cameras instead. The reason, a police official says, is there was no data to prove that ShotSpotter helped them increase arrests in gunfire incidents. Quincy, Washington, also dropped ShotSpotter in 2013, after a year and a half, in favor of hiring another police officer.

As troubling as the revelations that ShotSpotter is unlikely to help reduce crime in Salinas is the revelation ShotSpotter owns its data and holds that data close.

When Drange and Winston asked the company for basic information on when and where gunshots are fired, ShotSpotter sent a nationwide memo to customers saying the information was a protected trade secret and exempt from public records laws.

In other words, ShotSpotter just wants us to trust them. And a city that lacks transparency wants us, once again, to trust them.

Maybe Salinas should take that $1.5 million, and a clue from Quincy, and recruit the hell out of more police.

MARY DUAN writes The Local Spin column. Reach her at mary@mcweekly.com.