NYPD’s ShotSpotter picking up otherwise unreported shootings. That’s the headline sitting above the story by Ryan Sit at nydailynews.com. “The majority of shootings picked up by the NYPD’s ShotSpotter technology would have gone unreported without the system, police said on Monday. ShotSpotter — the technology that triangulates where a shooting occurred and alerts police officers to the scene — was activated 186 times in October, but received 911 calls for less than half of those incidents,” Ryan writes. “The NYPD’s deputy commissioner for information and technology, Jessica Tisch, called the ShotSpotter activations a relatively standard showing, but she added that only 48 percent of those shooting incidents had 911 calls connected with them.” Now wait just a gosh darn minute . . .
How many of those alerts were false alarms triggered by random noises? How many times did New York’s Finest respond to ShotSpotter alerts to no avail – wasting valuable police time and money? How many times did ShotSpotter provide information that 911 callers did not? How much does this damn thing cost, anyway? The New York Daily News itself reported on this; Big Apple is spending $1.5m on a ShotSpotter trial. Which means both the company that makes the technology and the City have a vested interest in showing that it works.
Journalists have a vested interest in finding the truth – no matter what. A “real” journalist doesn’t have an agenda beyond that. This story – like so many in the anti-gun rights mainstream media – is an epic fail. Sit fails to do what any good reporter should do: assume that everyone is lying. It doesn’t matter if you’re talking to Everytown for Gun Safety supremo Michael Bloomberg or NRA jefe Wayne LaPierre. A journalist should treat every piece of information as agenda-driven spin. And attempt to get to the truth.
Which is something we do here. BUT we’re a blog not a news source (hence Google’s refusal to put TTAG on their news feed). We come at all gun-related stories from a pro-gun rights perspective. So the question is, how biased against gun rights is the mainstream media? Is it getting any better? Will it get any better? How?