Tracking shots a step to ending them
It’s 11pm and most people in Hanover Park in Cape Town are fast asleep. The crack of gunfire pierces the silence. A father startles awake, grabs his three children and crawls with them under a bed, telling them to keep quiet until the shooting stops.
The gunshots are instantly picked up by acoustic sensors installed on buildings in the township. They send an alert to the City of Cape Town’s control room, identifying that the shots were fired from behind a vibracrete wall of a house on Johndown Road. South African Police Service patrol cars are immediately dispatched.
In recent weeks five people, one of them a 13-year-old, have been arrested for possession of illegal firearms as a result of this chain of events.
In just more than a week in April, 505 rounds of gunshots were fired in 176 separate shooting incidents in one Cape Town neighbourhood. That’s an average of 20 shootings a day. This is the daily reality for tens of thousands of residents.
Parents in Hanover Park regularly keep their children home from school to avoid them being caught in the crossfire. Catching up on several days’ school work several times a year is no easy task. Many manage to do this, some do not.
Over time these children fall through the cracks and eventually drop out of school. With no education and stuck in an environment where they are hounded by gangsters who promise protection, what options do they have? They join the gangs and a new cycle of violence begins.
Crime does not care whose problem it becomes. It happens, and it affects everyone, no matter how many fingers are pointed at others.
Crime is not just a police problem; it is a community problem, a political problem and a business problem. Unless all these role players work together, crime will keep plaguing communities.
The police have the toughest job. They get all the blame, but are often under-resourced (a reality for governments across the world). They become the victims of politicking when communities grow frustrated and point fingers at their elected leaders. They constantly need to work on building trust with communities exhausted by the violence outside their front doors. When gunshots go off in a community ravaged by gang violence, a permanent state of post-traumatic stress experienced by its residents results in a tragically apathetic and hopeless mindset.
As more gunshots go unreported, the cycle of violence is further entrenched.
The community needs to know that when a crime occurs there will be a response. But this is often more difficult to achieve than it should be.
While resources are limited, so too is access to real-time crime information. For example, if the police had data on where gunshots are fired more regularly they can patrol those areas more frequently, preventing the gun violence from erupting in the first place.
And when the gunshots do go off, if they know immediately when and exactly where to go, their responses will become more regular and rapid. This is the way to begin rebuilding the trust of a community, to show that the police care.
We believe that information like this can make cities safer and transform police officers into the trusted guardians of their communities. We all want a day where a father and his children sleep through the night until morning when they set off for school and work without worrying they will not return.