Data of the Night

Gunshot detection systems are a form of geographical information system, a technology that has expanded rapidly in the past two decades and has substantially altered how we deal with the physical landscape. For the past decade, our beloved city has confronted the problems of nightly gunfire with a shot detection network, a web of sensors and computers that identifies a shot's location before the sounds have finished echoing off buildings and hills. The local police were quite proud of the system, one of the first deployed in the country, because it captured a detailed abstraction of all gunfire.