I live in this town and drive these streets often. The cameras are a huge unsightly big brother mess on the corners of SOME of the city streets. Even the dumbest criminals take notice to where they are being watched and where they think they can get away with things. All these cameras did was move the criminal behavior to the other corners. While I am not familiar with the implementation done by the city, I think the Sentri system was more Video Surveillance with an add-on of Gunshot detection. ShotSpotter which the city wants installed now, is a more vast array of microphones, of which have no camera tie in, rather a simple Gunshot location on a map, and it doesn't need to be installed directly in the areas of the crime prone street corners. The two systems sound completely different. However its still shame on Sentri for even trying to tout this as a city wide application for gunshot detection if they did that. That should have been made very clear it was secondary to the video and almost like a free add-on as its effectiveness in actually being able to provide usable video is next to none based on gunshot detection. They could be touting that it will alert based on the sound heard, but actually saying it will provide evidence, is going way overboard.
What the city needs to do is analyze how many crimes of gunshot nature occurred within theses cameras ranges to really determine if the hardware was effective or not. That is what there not saying in any of the interviews.
Looking into the numbers even at $14k per camera, if the stated cost is just vendor spending and no internal or monthly cost allocation which I doubt, multiple cameras on a pole, in a city wide rollout the cost is not uncommon just for the video alone.