Today at the International Association of Chiefs of Police convention, ShotSpotter CEO Ralph Clark announced a new partnership with General Electric, integrating the company's gunshot detectors into General Electric's smart streetlights. It's the first major law enforcement feature for GE's Smart City project, which has traditionally focused more on the environmental and logistical benefits of IT integration.

At its heart, the new partnership is about shared hardware. GE's smart streetlights already come with a sophisticated processor, which is powerful enough to perform the same operations that power a ShotSpotter device. All that's required to turn the lights into gunshot detectors is some new software and what Clark described as "a two-dollar-and-fifty-cent microphone." ShotSpotter's computing infrastructure can handle the rest.