Missing an easy target
Boston's a funny place -- not always, as has become plenty apparent, in the best possible way.
We are the navel-gazing capital of the universe. And we dither. Do we ever dither. In the same time that the people of Louisiana have pretty much rebuilt major parts of New Orleans, we've figured out precisely nothing about the barren stretch of dirt called the Rose Kennedy Greenway.
And then there's this thing called the ShotSpotter. Councilor Rob Consalvo proposed it last March, voicing a rare good idea to emerge from that chamber. The proposal calls for a collection of sensors that can detect the sound of gunshots from up to 2 miles away. These sensors send an immediate signal, along with the precise location of the shots, to police dispatchers, allowing police to arrive at violent crime scenes in a matter of moments. Consalvo wants to locate the system in a 5.6 mile swath of Mattapan, Dorchester, Roxbury, and the South End.
Minneapolis has it. So does Los Angeles; Chicago; Charleston, S.C.; and Rochester, N.Y. In other words, we're not talking about futuristic technology that only a rocket scientist can understand.
Consalvo held a two-hour hearing in March. He held another in May. He held a demonstration on Moon Island in August. In January, as shootings surged and young people were dying all over town, others began championing the cause.
But when the City Council unanimously approved the $1.5 million cost last month, several members whose districts would be helped the most acted as if it were being forced down their throat .
Chuck Turner said he didn't think it was fair to "be pushed into voting on something without having a real hearing." Charles Yancey questioned why it was being located in what amounts to the most crime-ridden section of town.
And this from Councilor Sam Yoon: "Every decision we make about a dollar we spend is a dollar we don't spend on something else." Thank you, sir, for that analysis.
One recent morning, I did what any of these councilors could have done, and stopped into the Metropolitan Police headquarters in Washington, D.C., and asked how the new ShotSpotter system works. The city is experimenting in the Seventh District, where gunfire is common and murder is a fact of life.
Lieutenant Vanessa Moore led me into the hectic command center, where flat-panel monitors hung all over the room, and stopped at a computer terminal halfway down a long conference table.
"It's notorious," she said of the Seventh District, "But we've seen a decline in gunshots. They know the system's there. It's in the news; it's all over the papers." She paused and added, "Oh, yeah."
When the sensors pick up gunshots, Moore said, the speakers chime and an officer clicks on the computer. A recording plays the sound, a satellite map appears on the computer screen with a red dot highlighting the location of the noise, and the officer makes a determination. The department has spent months weeding out sounds of thunder, helicopters, and firecrackers from the system.
As Moore spoke, Officer Dietra Wallace-Cordell sat in front of her and clicked on an incident from 11:11 a.m. on October 16, 2006. An eerie sound played through the speakers: "Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang."
It was the sound of someone dying. On that morning, police dispatched a car to the scene before anyone had called 911. They found a 35-year-old landscaper dead on a lawn. They found the shooter nearby. "He still had the gun on him," Wallace-Cordell said.
That was good enough for me. On the way out, I told Moore about the hesitations of some city councilors in Boston, and she scoffed.
"What do you want?" she asked. "You want the police, you don't want the police? You want crime to go down, you don't want crime to go down."
Sane people want it to go down. ShotSpotter is due to be installed by summer, assuming no more dithering. As young people die, that doesn't seem soon enough.
Brian McGrory is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at mcgrory@globe.com. 
