Last week there was a small-plane crash in East Palo Alto (SF Bay Area), killing three Tesla Motors employees and knocking out power to a chunk of Silicon Valley for much of the day. (Amazingly nobody on the ground was killed despite the plane striking a home child day-care facility.) East Palo Alto contains some dodgy areas, and is outfitted with the ShotSpotter gunfire detection system.

It turns out the crash triggered ShotSpotter, which is designed to log and triangulate on loud, sharp noises, and to log the sounds preceding and following them. NTSB expects these data to be useful in reconstructing the events around the crash.

Palo Alto Online : ShotSpotter system records tragic plane crash

What's up with all the plane crashes these days? There was one this week about .25mi from where I work...

Man Angry at IRS Crashes Plane into Office - CBS News

For the truely bored, here's the suicide note:

http://www.t35.com/embeddedart.txt

And why would they have a gunfire detection system in East Palo Alto? It's not a gunfire kind of place, IIRC. Newark, sure. Some neighborhoods in Miami, OK. But East Palo Alto?

I know it sounds strange Carl but when I was stationed in the San Jose/Palo Alto area two years ago, I remember one of my colleagues saying that East Palo Alto was the "bad side" of Palo Alto. I found it hard to believe at the time but I guess this confirms his opinion.

East Palo Alto has experienced crime and poverty, especially during the 1980s and early 1990s. In 1992, the city had the highest per-capita murder rate in the country with 24,322 people, and 42 murders, equaling a rate of 172.7 murders per 100,000 residents.[3]. Since then the city's crime problems have somewhat subsided, and the murder rate in particular has declined. In 2006, East Palo Alto experienced a comparatively low 6 murders. There were 7 murders in 2007. According to a 2008 report provided by Ron Davis, Chief of Police, violence is on the decline. Davis reports an overall 42% reduction in homicides and a 20% reduction in overall crime between 2006-2008, compared to the previous three years.

East Palo Alto, California - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

In 1992, the city had the highest per-capita murder rate in the country

Wow. I admit I haven't set foot in Palo Alto in about 20 years. But who woulda thunk it.

Palo Alto and East Palo Alto are different cities. EPA is mostly - but not entirely - on the east side of Highway 101, PA mostly on the west side. So there's a big, physical, other-side-of-the-tracks feeling when you go from one to the other.

Since most of EPA is in that relatively unattractive and uninteresting little slice of land between the freeway and a big expressway that runs along the Bay, it feels like something of an isolated nowheresville. It's perfectly fine light-industrial land, but to me it seems like a mistake ever to have zoned it for housing as well as business. Because the geography and road locations make it fairly bleak to start with, it seems almost destined to wind up as the kind of place that concentrates people who don't have a lot of great options.