Detroit needs more than high-tech gimickery to get a grip on public safety

Detroit police chief Ralph Godbee wants to deploy (at a cost of $2 million plus) some new technology that will hear gunshots, triangulate where they came from and automatically notify police dispatch. Like all the new whiz bang high-tech stuff the police-industrial complex comes up with the ex-cop salesmen who hawk it promise it lead to a huge decline in gunfire on the streets. Well it could conceivably but only if DPD had enough officers to appropriately respond to the alerts. And that's the rub.

What's up with all the "flash mob" violence in American cities this summer?

Says Walter Russell Mead: "...[I]t is not unlikely that future violence in the cities would look more like flash mobs and less like the urban riots of the 1960s.  Those riots targeted Black neighborhoods, Black owned stores and much of the property destroyed in the riots belonged to Blacks; any new trouble would likely be more effective at spreading the pain beyond the inner city.  Link ups in some cases with religious radicals or foreign interests who seek to do us harm cannot be excluded."