Can't even do that shit out here. Metro got this shit called ShotSpotter in place. It detects gunshots and cops are sent to the location, usually before someone calls 911. That hookah lounge shootout I posted about a coupla months ago had cops en route before the first 911 call even came in.
The company ShotSpotter, now known as SmartThinking, was founded in 1996 by a physicist and two engineers, using technology inspired by physicist Robert Showen’s work to determine the location of earthquake epicenters. The company’s product is now used in more than 160 cities, according to its website.
The technology itself employs acoustic sensors that are placed high above the street to avoid street-level sounds, according to Tom Chittum, senior vice president of Forensic Services at SoundThinking. The sensors are triggered by loud sounds that resemble gunshots.
An alert is triggered if three separate sensors detect a loud sound. The system then calculates the time the sound reached individual sensors to determine the location of the gunshot.
An algorithm determines whether the sound is consistent with a gunshot. The recording then goes through further review from employees at SoundThinking’s incident review center. The company says the entire process takes less than a minute between the shots fired incident to showing up in a department’s call center or on an officer’s computer or phone.
In order to determine where sensors go, police departments “analyze and provide historical gunfire and homicide data” to the company. The microphones are then placed in areas “in most need of gunshot detection.
Kade Crockford, the director of ACLU Massachusetts Technology for Liberty Program, said some of the major concerns around the system come from over-policing of minority and underprivileged communities — where critics say most of the sensors are installed — and even false arrests.
In 2020, Michael Williams, a Black man, was arrested in Chicago under suspicion of shooting a passenger in his car.
Prosecutors said ShotSpotter audio indicated Williams shot and killed the man, with little evidence besides the audio and nearby security video footage.
“The arrest was baseless… Officers put blind faith in ShotSpotter evidence they knew or should have known was unreliable in order to falsely arrest and prosecute Mr. Williams for murder,” a
lawsuit filed by Williams against the City of Chicago read.
Williams spent 11 months in jail before the charges against him were dismissed in 2022 based on a lack of evidence. Crockford said the incident raised concerns about overzealous police officers, mainly getting alerts in minority neighborhoods, arresting suspects based on ShotSpotter activations.
The system’s accuracy is one of its most controversial aspects, with different studies coming to wildly varied conclusions.
SoundThinking insists that it has a 97% accuracy rate — with a 0.5% false positive rate — based on an independent audit of the system by
Edgeworth Economics. The company commissioned the study after the MacArthur Justice Center (MJC) published their own
study in 2021 using data from Chicago that indicated 89% of the system’s triggers turned up no gun-related crime.
In its response to the MJC study, Edgeworth wrote that the MJC “fail[ed] to provide a rigorous, balanced, and objective assessment” of the system because it used “inappropriate data” and relied on whether police reports were filed in the incident.
But other studies, too, show varying levels of efficacy for the technology. In 2021, Chicago’s Office of the Inspector General
concluded that only 9.1% of gun-related criminal offenses were found when the Chicago Police Department responded to ShotSpotter alerts.
In Cambridge, former Police Commissioner Branville Bard wrote a
memo during a city council probe of the system in 2021 giving data that showed that over six years, only 35 out of 105 activations were confirmed as a shooting incident — a false positive rate of over 65%.
During that time, 13 arrests were attributed to the system, which cost the city $50,000 a year, according to the Cambridge Public Safety Committee.
Based on records obtained from Cambridge by Boston.com, ShotSpotter has only gone off in the city five times during the past year. Three records were withheld due to active investigations into the incidents, but two others, one in November and one in April, were found to be false alarms likely triggered by fireworks.
In Boston, public records requested by Boston.com showed that out of 571 activations of the system in the past year, about 250 were marked as “shots fired” or “multiple shots fired.”
Apart from the system’s accuracy, studies have shown that the system has little, if any, impact on reducing firearm related crime. A
study of ShotSpotter data between 1999 and 2016 by the Journal of Public Health found that implementing the system “has no significant impact on firearm-related homicides or arrest outcomes.”
Another incident in Chicago involved officers
firing at a 14 or 15 year old child when they received a ShotSpotter alert which turned out to be fireworks. In 2021, 13-year-old Adam Toledo was
shot to death by police responding to a ShotSpotter activation.
The questionable accuracy of the system but the high-tension situations police are expecting when responding to an alert can be a dangerous mix, Naples-Mitchell said.
“Police are being sent assuming there’s a shooter,” she said. “Police are sent into neighborhoods looking for evidence of a shooting which has them on extremely high alert and can make for very dangerous encounters for members of the public and for police, frankly, if they’re expecting there to be someone armed and dangerous when there is no one.”
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