Gonzalez, the East San Jose community organizer, says the lack of 911 calls about shootings is a reflection of how little she and others in the community trust police responses to their neighborhood.

The FAA said in a statement to USA TODAY that federal security partners asked the agency to issue flight restrictions. The FAA published two temporary flight restrictions last month, prohibiting drones over Picatinny Arsenal Military Base and Trump National Golf Club Bedminster.

In a joint statement on behalf of the prosecutor’s office and multiple New Jersey police agencies, the office said it realizes members of the public have concerns about the repeated drone sightings. The office is working with local sheriff’s departments, emergency management offices, police departments, the FBI in Newark, New Jersey State Police and New Jersey Office of Homeland Security and Preparedness partners, the statement read.

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The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) initially said it looked into reports and “did not find evidence of drone activity in the area.” Still, the FAA said, the agency shared information about the reports with federal security partners.

The false-positive rate is of particular concern to communities of color, some of whom fear that gunshot detection systems are unnecessarily sending police into neighborhoods expecting gunfire. Nonwhite Americans are more often subjected to surveillance by the systems and are disproportionately killed in interactions with police. “For us, any interaction with police is a potentially dangerous one,” says Gonzalez, an organizer with Silicon Valley De-Bug, a community advocacy group based in San Jose.

On Tuesday afternoon, the Morris County Prosecutor's Office said there is “no known threat to public safety,” the same messaging officials have released over the past few weeks.

“There was a time when a helicopter was searching for somebody in our neighborhood, and I could swear that they were in my backyard, but I didn’t want to call the police because potentially they could shoot me or my family mistaking me for that person,” she says. “I would rather have the person in my backyard than the police looking for them.”

The FBI issued a statement Tuesday about the sightings, noting that drones have been reportedly seen flying in several areas along the 70-mile Raritan River. According to witnesses, a cluster of what appeared to be drones, as well as a possible fixed wing aircraft, was flying in the area, the FBI said.

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“Obviously we want to reduce gun violence, that’s everybody’s goal,” she says. “For these dollars that we’re spending on enforcement and punishment, we should be spending three-, four-, fivefold on programming and improvement. There are so many people for whom calling the police is not a solution.”

San Jose did not attempt to quantify how many shooting incidents in the covered area the Flock System failed to detect, also known as the false-negative rate. However, the report says that “it is clear the system is not detecting all gunshots the department would expect.”

Eric Piza, a professor of criminology at Northeastern University, has conducted some of the most thorough studies available on gunshot detection systems. In a recent study of shooting incidents in Chicago and Kansas City, Missouri, his team’s analysis showed that police responded faster to shooting incidents, stopped their vehicles closer to the scene of shootings, and collected more ballistic evidence when responding to automated gunshot alerts compared to 911 calls. However, there was no reduction in gun-related crimes, and police were no more likely to solve gun crimes in areas with gunshot sensors than in areas without them. That study only examined confirmed shootings; it did not include false-positive incidents where the systems incorrectly identified gunfire.

“We look into all reports of unauthorized drone operations and investigate when appropriate,” the FAA said in its statement. “Drone operators who conduct unsafe operations that endanger other aircraft or people on the ground could face fines up to $75,000. In addition, we can suspend or revoke drone operators’ pilot certificates.”

The New York City comptroller recommended the NYPD not renew its current $22 million contract with SoundThinking without first conducting a more thorough performance evaluation. In its response to the audit, the NYPD wrote that “non-renewal of ShotSpotter services may endanger the public.”

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Images and footage of the drones have circulated online, leading community members to wonder what’s going on and what authorities are doing about it.

“If you look at the different goals of the system, research shows that [gunshot detection technology] typically tends to result in quicker police response times,” Piza says. “But research consistently has shown that gun violence victimization doesn’t reduce after gunshot detection technology has been introduced.”

Pointing to the report’s finding that only 6 percent of the confirmed gunshots detected by the system were reported to police via 911 calls or other means, police spokesperson Sergeant Jorge Garibay tells WIRED the SJPD will continue to use the technology. “The system is still proving useful in providing supplementary evidence for various violent gun crimes,” he says. “The hope is to solve more crime and increase apprehension efforts desirably leading to a reduction in gun violence.”

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Mysterious drones have been reported flying over parts of New Jersey in recent weeks, leading to an investigation involving multiple police agencies and even the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Newark.

For two decades, cities around the country have used automated gunshot detection systems to quickly dispatch police to the scenes of suspected shootings. But reliable data about the accuracy of the systems and how frequently they raise false alarms has been difficult, if not impossible, for the public to find. San Jose, which has taken a leading role in defining responsible government use of AI systems, appears to be the only city that requires its police department to disclose accuracy data for its gunshot detection system. The report it released on May 31 marks the first time it has published that information.

The department’s media relations division could not immediately locate information about how much SJPD pays Flock Safety for the Raven system or how long its contract is for.

In February 2023, San Jose began piloting AI-powered gunshot detection technology from the company Flock Safety in several sections of the city, including Gonzalez’s neighborhood. During the first four months of the pilot, Flock’s gunshot detection system alerted police to 123 shooting incidents. But new data released by San Jose’s Digital Privacy Office shows that only 50 percent of those alerts were actually confirmed to be gunfire, while 34 percent of them were confirmed false positives, meaning the Flock Safety system incorrectly identified other sounds—such as fireworks, construction, or cars backfiring—as shooting incidents. After Flock recalibrated its sensors in July 2023, 81 percent of alerts were confirmed gunshots, 7 percent were false alarms, and 12 percent could not be determined one way or the other.

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According to the college, the North Branch Fire Department contacted the school at 6:40 p.m. on Nov. 26 about the incoming helicopter.

The landing zone was relocated nearby and the victim was taken to a local hospital, Sgt. Jeffrey Lebron of the New Jersey State Police confirmed to USA TODAY Thursday morning.

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Saleen Martin is a reporter on USA TODAY's NOW team. She is from Norfolk, Virginia – the 757. Follow her on Twitter at@SaleenMartin or email her atsdmartin@usatoday.com.

In another study in Kansas City, Piza found that shots-fired reports in areas with gunshot sensors were 15 percent more likely to be classified as unfounded compared to shots-fired reports in areas without the systems, where police would have relied on calls to 911 and other reporting methods.

In its report, San Jose’s Digital Privacy Office recommended that the police department continue looking for ways to improve accuracy if it intends to keep using the Raven system.

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Flock Safety says its Raven gunshot detection system is 90 percent accurate. SoundThinking, which sells the ShotSpotter system, is the most popular gunshot detection technology on the market. It claims a 97 percent accuracy rate. But the data from San Jose and a handful of other communities that used the technologies suggest the systems—which use computer algorithms, and in SoundThinking’s case, human reviewers, to determine whether the sounds captured by their sensors are gunshots—may be less reliable than advertised.

Liz González’s neighborhood in East San Jose can be loud. Some of her neighbors apparently want the whole block to hear their cars, others like to light fireworks for every occasion, and occasionally there are gunshots.

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The Campus Safety Department works with police, fire, and medical services for "rapid traffic control in the immediate area when a helicopter needs to land," wrote Donna Stolzer, director of media relations at Raritan Valley Community College, in an email Wednesday.

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This week, New York City’s comptroller published a similar audit of the city’s ShotSpotter system showing that only 13 percent of the alerts the system generated over an eight-month period could be confirmed as gunfire. The auditors noted that while the NYPD has the information necessary to publish data about ShotSpotter’s accuracy, it does not do so. They described the department’s accountability measures as “inadequate” and “not sufficient to demonstrate the effectiveness of the tool.”

Reports of drone sightings have emerged from multiple counties including Morris, Somerset, Warren and Sussex counties, according to NorthJersey.com, part of the USA TODAY Network.

Darcie Green, a community health advocate and member of San Jose’s former Reimagining Public Safety Community Advisory Group, says that disclosing data about the accuracy of the system is a good step, but the city also needs to examine whether the technology is actually making the city safer or whether the money and human resources devoted to responding to real and false gunshot alerts could be better invested elsewhere.

According to the college, the campus is used as a landing site for helicopters from the New Jersey State Police Emergency Medical Services Responses Program (North-Star), which provides emergency transport for patients.

Jonelle Ferentinos, who lives near the Boonton Reservoir in Parsippany, told the Morristown Daily Record, part of the USA TODAY Network, that she had seen the drones while she was out walking her dog at night. One night, she spotted five drones. The next night they were back in her neighborhood, she said.

Last year, journalists with CU-CitizensAccess obtained data from Champaign, Illinois, showing that only 8 percent of the 64 alerts generated by the city’s Raven system over a six-month period could be confirmed as gunfire. In 2021, the Chicago Office of Inspector General reported that over a 17-month period only 9 percent of the 41,830 alerts with dispositions that were generated by the city’s ShotSpotter system could be connected to evidence of a gun-related crime. SoundThinking has criticized the Chicago OIG report, saying it relied on “incomplete and irreconcilable data.”

"It was dark, so I really couldn't see where they were coming from or going to," she told the Daily Record. "They just seemed to be flying around."

It was not immediately clear Thursday morning if the drones at Raritan Valley Community College had any relation to the other sightings in the area.

“Raven is over 90 percent accurate at detecting gunshots with around the same accuracy percentage at detecting fireworks,” Josh Thomas, Flock Safety senior vice president of policy and communications, tells WIRED in a statement. He adds that this is “based on measurements across the board,” meaning data from all Flock's customers. “And critically, Raven alerts officers to gun violence incidents they never would have been aware of. In the San Jose report, for example, of the 111 true positive gunshot alerts, SJPD states that only 6 percent were called in to 911.”

“We have reports from the public and law enforcement dating back several weeks,” the FBI Newark said in a news release obtained by USA TODAY.

The Morris County Prosecutor's Office first announced the sightings in November. The office said that on Nov. 18, patrolmen from law enforcement saw the drones. At the time, the prosecutor’s office said the agencies would “coordinate, monitor, and investigate the drone activity.”

Elsewhere in New Jersey, drones prevented a medevac helicopter from picking up an injured individual after a car crash last week, a spokesperson from Raritan Valley Community College confirmed to USA TODAY Wednesday evening.