ShotSpotter

ShotSpotter was founded by Robert Showen in the 1990s while he was working for SRI International. He created a company in 1996 and tested prototypes in Redwood City, California. Its early success was described by Wired as being "due to good PR, not good technology." James Beldock joined as CEO in 2003 as a "turnaround specialist"; in 2005 the company merged with Centurist Systems, which was creating acoustic sniper location systems for the military; Centurist held a "deceptively simple patent" for the location algorithm. Centurist's CEO, Scott Manderville, became chairman of the board.^{[5][6][7][8][9]}

As of 2021, the acoustic locator technology was installed in 125 cities and 14 campuses, covering 911 square miles.^[10]: 4 The locators are typically installed at 20–25 sensors per square mile and primarily connected via 4G networks (mostly AT&T and Verizon).^[10]: 39 In 2020, Chicago was 18% of the company's revenue, and New York City was 15%.^[6]

Ralph Clark was named CEO of ShotSpotter in 2010. The company went public in June 2017. The company authorized a stock buyback program in 2019 and bought back $8.3 million by the end of 2020.^[6]

The company's gross revenues were $58.2 million in 2021 (increased coverage by 49 square miles and 10 cities), up from $45.7 million in 2020 and from $40.8 million in 2019 (increased coverage by 82 square miles and 6 cities).^[10] The company had a net loss of $4.4 million in 2021, in part from nonrenewal of contracts and increases in legal costs, PR from Trident DMG, and lobbying.^[11]

Toronto, Ontario has declined to use the technology, as the Ministry of the Solicitor General (Ontario) believes it violates Section 8 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The company previously provided indoor gunfire locator technology, but discontinued it in 2018.^[6]

ShotSpotter illegally lobbied the city of Oakland, California in 2014 and received a $5000 fine.^[12][13]

In April 2023, the company rebranded to SoundThinking to better represent "holistic approach to gun violence", but retained the ShotSpotter product name.^[14][15]

In July 2023, a Houston Chronicle investigation showed that ShotSpotter calls resulted in lower incident report rates and longer police response times. Over 80% of ShotSpotter alerts were false positives or otherwise useless. The almost 5500 alerts led to 99 arrests and 126 charges, about half of which were misdemeanors. A disproportionate number of residents in coverage areas are people of color. The Houston Police Department cast the system as a way to invest in historically marginalized areas.^[16]

In an August 2023 earnings call, the CEO of SoundThinking announced that the company had begun the process of absorbing parts (including the "engineering team") of Geolitica, formerly known as PredPol.^[17]

The company spent nearly $24 million in sales and marketing in 2023.^[18]

Studies

A June 2021 study in the Journal of Experimental Criminology stated the system "may be of little benefit to police agencies with a pre-existing high call volume. Our results indicate no reductions in serious violent crimes, yet [ShotSpotter] increases demands on police resources."^[19] An October 2021 paper in the Journal of Urban Health, studying the longitudinal effects of ShotSpotter over a 17 year period, found "implementing ShotSpotter technology has no significant impact on firearm-related homicides or arrest outcomes. Policy solutions may represent a more cost-effective measure to reduce urban firearm violence."^[20]

In 2021 the NYU School of Law Policing Project published "Measuring the effects of ShotSpotter on Gunfire in St. Louis County, Mo", a paper which indicated a significant drop in gun violence in the area; however, the paper also discloses that ShotSpotter "has provided the Policing Project with unrestricted funding".^[21]

Jennifer Doleac told Voice of San Diego that ShotSpotter "resisted attempts (by me and others) to do a rigorous evaluation of its impacts", noting "they've clearly found that they can get cities to sign their contracts without such evidence."^[22]

As of 2021, ShotSpotter evidence has been used in 190 court cases, though it is often withdrawn when challenged. ShotSpotter has admitted it manually alters the computer-calculated evidence "on a semiregular basis", and it has never been independently tested, leading to doubts about its accuracy. Vice's Motherboard noted that ShotSpotter "frequently modify alerts at the request of police departments." Associated Press also noted their "methods for identifying gunshots aren't always guided solely by the technology."^{[23][24][3][25]}

While the company claims a 97% accuracy rate, the MacArthur Justice Center studied over 40,000 dispatches in an under-two-year period in Chicago and found that 89% of dispatches resulted in no gun-related crime, and 86% resulted in no crime at all.^{[26][27][28][29]} These results were backed up by a subsequent report by the Chicago Inspector General, which also found that police officers had begun stopping and searching people solely because they were in a place known to have many ShotSpotter alerts.^[30] ShotSpotter's CEO described an earlier 80% accuracy rate as "basically our subscription warranty," but employee Paul Greene said "Our guarantee was put together by our sales and marketing department, not our engineers."^[31] A study published in January 2024 showed that ShotSpotter implementations in Chicago and Kansas City did not result in reductions in shootings or crime or increased clearance rates.^[32][33]

The ACLU has raised questions about privacy and surveillance, as the detectors keep hours or days of continuous audio.^[34] This audio has been admitted as evidence in at least one trial and rejected under a Massachusetts wiretapping law in a 2017 case.^[35] When Forbes sent public records requests to agencies in 2016, ShotSpotter sent a memo to all of its customers, detailing how they should deny or redact the requests.^[24] ACLU of Massachusetts noted evidence of gunfire is not found for 70% of alerts, and at least 10% of alerts are from fireworks.^[18][36]

The Associated Press reviewed a confidential operations document that indicated 10% of the algorithm's decisions were overridden by a human.^[37]

Additionally, the sensors are disproportionately placed in minority communities, leading to more interactions with police, often from false alerts from pneumatic nail guns, jackhammers, manual hammers, and even a piñata.^{[18][22][11][3][38][28][39]}

In cities with cancelled contracts, ShotSpotter still provides alerts to police.^[40]

Individual cases

In April 2017, ShotSpotter was able to locate mass-shooter Kori Ali Muhammad, enabling police to apprehend him within minutes.^[41]

In 2017, Rochester Police Department officer Joseph Ferrigno shot Silvon Simmons in the back. Accounts between Ferrigno and Simmons vary, but ShotSpotter initially detected the gunshots as a helicopter. The company reclassified it as three gunshots "per the customer's instruction," then revised it to four shots. Later the company's employee Paul Greene "was asked by the Rochester Police department to essentially search and see if there were more shots fired than ShotSpotter picked up," so it was revised to five gunshots, which put it in alignment with Ferrigno's claims. The jury didn't believe ShotSpotter's evidence, and Judge Ciaccio overturned a gun possession charge, describing the ShotSpotter evidence as flawed. Simmons filed a civil lawsuit against ShotSpotter in 2017, for which (as of November 2023^[update]) a jury trial is set for April 2024.^{[3][42][43][44][45][46][47][excessive citations]}

Greene also testified in a 2018 case in Chicago where ShotSpotter initially reported two gunshots. On request of the Chicago Police Department, he re-analyzed and found seven gunshots. This matched the police department's account and was not supported by video or bullet casing evidence.^[3]

Another case of reclassification occurred in 2020 with the arrest of a Chicago man for the shooting murder of Safarain Herring. ShotSpotter initially classified the sound as a firework, but a ShotSpotter employee changed it to gunfire a minute later, and later changed the calculated location to match the defendant's known location — over a mile away.^[23] A public defender in the case filed a Frye motion to examine the ShotSpotter forensic method, and the prosecution withdrew the evidence to avoid scrutinizing it.^[3][48] The MacArthur Center along with Lucy Parsons Labs filed an amicus curiae in the case, supporting the Frye hearing, noting the false positives, the disproportionate deployment, and that "ShotSpotter provides a false technological justification for overpolicing."^[28] The defendant spent 11 months in jail before being released in 2021 when his case was dismissed for insufficient evidence.^[23]

A ShotSpotter report of shots fired was the impetus for police response which resulted in the March 2021 police shooting death of 13-year-old Adam Toledo by the Chicago Police Department.^[3] This is part of the reason Chicago did not continue its Shotspotter contract in 2024.^[49][50]

In New Bedford, Massachusetts, the gunshot sensors recorded parts of a conversation, leading to concerns that it violates Fourth Amendment rights.^[5][51] Remarking on these privacy concerns, in 2015 then-NYPD commissioner William Bratton said "the advocates have to get a life." Bratton had been on ShotSpotter's Board of Directors before then, and rejoined it in 2017.^{[52][53][54][55]}

In July 2022, the MacArthur Justice Center brought a class action lawsuit against the City of Chicago, the Chicago Police Department, and several individual police officers for constitutional violations in connection with the use of ShotSpotter.^[56] The lawsuit alleges that more than 90% of the time police respond to a ShotSpotter alert they find no indication of a gun-related incident and instead use the alerts to justify scores of illegal stops and arrests.^[57] The lawsuit also alleges that Chicago's ShotSpotter policy is racially discriminatory because the system was only implemented in areas with the highest concentration of Black and Latino residents.

Part of ShotSpotter's appeal to privacy is that ostensibly, police do not know the installed locations, which could otherwise allow police to acquire conversations from the ShotSpotter microphones. Bloomberg News reported, however, that not only were location addresses given to the New York Police Department, ShotSpotter actually relied on police to help lobby for their installations, and NYPD stated they have also accompanied ShotSpotter teams on site surveys.^[58] In Durham, Shotspotter wanted police officers to lobby for installations for safety and legitimacy.^[59] In 2024, WIRED received a leaked listing of precise installation locations for over 25,000 microphones, placing them in the neighborhoods of over 12 million Americans. Their analysis showed the sensors are installed in disproportionaly nonwhite neighborhoods, and determined roughly 10% of the sensors were defective. WIRED also noted sensors are installed on public schools, billboards, hospitals, in public housing complexes, and at the headquarters buildings of the FBI and USDOJ.^[60]

ShotSpotter was activated for a shooting at the house of New Mexico Senator Linda M. Lopez; police were dispatched but did not find evidence.^[61]

Judge Jeff Beaverstock allowed a ShotSpotter alert to be used as the basis of an arrest in Mobile, Alabama.^[62]

Pasadena, California's use of ShotSpotter showed false alerts and wasted police time in a 2023 report. 75% of gunfire calls resulted in no gun casings being found, with some calls being attributed to pneumatic nail guns, fireworks, or cars backfiring.^[63]

In January 2024, a Chicago Police Department officer responding to a ShotSpotter alert heard a loud bang, fired at a juvenile boy, and missed. An initial police communication stated the boy had fired a gun at officers. After investigation, it was determined the loud noise were fireworks. The juvenile was not hit by the police in the shooting.^[64][65][66]

ShotSpotter's gunshot detection system utilizes a series of sensors to capture loud, impulsive sounds.^[67] When such sounds are identified, sensors send data to a pair of algorithms responsible for identifying a location and determining if the event can be classified as potential gunfire. Employees at the company are charged with confirming incidents and notifying local police.^[68]

Although it is designed to be just an investigative tool for the police, it has also been used for actual primary evidence in trials, leading to criticism about ShotSpotter's effectiveness beyond its primary purpose.^[69][70]

Current

Pending

ShotSpotter has been removed or bids to install it were rejected in communities. It is considered controversial by many.^[90]

Former

Rejected

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