No ShotSpotter
ShotSpotter is back in the news and on the City Council agenda. A broad-based citizen coalition is urging people to speak out against the $8.5 million contract to expand the technology in our city. The mayor and the chief of police are both urging the council to spend $7 million from the federal Covid relief funds and $1.5 million from the city budget to expand the technology to more than 28 square miles in the city. ShotSpotter is already in two precincts. This technology was established without public consent.
ShotSpotter has long had Detroit in its sights. In 2011, the Detroit City Council rejected the proposal for a $2.6 million dollar contract. Under emergency management, without public comment, the city implemented the technology in two precincts. Since then, Mayor Duggan and both Chiefs Craig and White have pushed for expansion. They tried in June of this year, but pulled back because of public pressure, acknowledging the lack of citizen input.
This push for expansion parallels ShotSpotter’s public relations efforts. As Wired Magazine reported the early successes of ShotSpotter were “due to good PR, not good technology.”
ShotSpotter is part of a company called Centurist Systems, a military technology firm. Centurist specializes in developing technologies that use global positioning satellites to triangulate the location of a sound. It made a fortune during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan locating and killing snipers. The company promoted its capacity, saying it was especially effective against guerrilla warfare, “If a sniper gets vaporized after he takes his first shot, word is going to get around among insurgents.” Now with the withdrawal from Afghanistan, ShotSpotter needs new markets.
The push to deploy ShotSpotter across the country has nothing to do with reducing crime. It has everything to do with companies whose profits are tied to war. ShotSpotter is cynically using the fear of crime to expand its business, offering an illusion of safety, while installing the basis of very dangerous and possibly deadly technologies in neighborhoods of mostly Black and brown people.
Study after study has challenged the claim of ShotSpotter’s effectiveness. According to a recent article in the Free Press,” Multiple studies have raised concerns regarding ShotSpotter’s effectiveness — including one peer-reviewed, 17-year study that shows ShotSpotter did not reduce gun violence in 68 large metropolitan counties that utilize the technology.”
The same article goes on to list an Associated Press Investigation that found that the system often misses gunfire, or misclassifies the sounds of fireworks or cars backfiring as gunshots. They pointed out the technology “allows for ShotSpotter employees to “improperly claim that a defendant shot at police, or provide questionable counts of the number of shots allegedly fired by defendants.”
The University of Michigan’s Ford School of Public Policy recently concluded that “The technology’s accuracy, effectiveness, cost and systemic biases raise serious concerns.”
In Chicago, an early adopter of ShotSpotter, a report by the city inspector general showed there were more instances of “unrelated investigator stops,” or stop and frisk tactics, in neighborhoods where ShotSpotter was implemented. And in St. Louis, “there was a decrease in residents calling police regarding shots fired in their neighborhoods, and overall police response times did not improve.”
ShotSpotter is not worth $8.5 million. Recycling the weapons of war in our cities perpetuates the worst in our culture. Instead, we need to continue our efforts to create relationships of care and respect, to find ways to solve our problems in ways that affirm and protect all of us.