Pittsburgh Might Be The Latest Major City To Drop ShotSpotter After Years Of Underwhelming Results

Re-branding isn’t going to save ShotSpotter. While it would prefer to be called “SoundThinking,” its flagship product is still its acoustic detection tech — something the company claims reliably detects gunshots.

Whatever the preferred (and trademarked) nomenclature, the claims the company makes are rarely backed up by facts. Even when it works, it still kind of doesn’t. It scrambles officers to areas where shots may have been fired, only for officers to realize there’s little value in wandering around a neighborhood in search of a shell casing or two to justify their presence, much less the tech’s existence.

Even if we look past the efficiency and accuracy problems inherent in this tech, we’re unable to ignore the uncomfortable fact that this tech has largely been inflicted on low-income neighborhoods, subjecting minorities to yet another layer of always-on surveillance.

For a long time, municipalities just assumed the tech was useful. It generated reports of gunshots. Occasional arrests were made. Every once in a while, homicide cases were closed. But did any of this mean the tech actually contributed anything to the public safety bottom line?

Once these questions started being asked, the answers made it pretty clear cities were spending millions to accomplish nothing. The tech wasn’t creating more leads to close more cases. It wasn’t even all that great at detecting gunshots, generating false positives at an alarming rate.

It seems any time a city takes a close look at ShotSpotter, contract terminations tend to follow. Several cities — both major and minor — have decided it isn’t worth spending money on. They bought into the tech thinking it would help reduce gun violence and now that it hasn’t, they’re looking at other options.

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania is the latest major city to consider dropping ShotSpotter, as Justin Vellucci reports for TribLive.

Over the past decade, Pittsburgh has sunk nearly $10 million into ShotSpotter, the most widely used gunshot-detection system in America. The controversial crime-fighting technology uses sound to quickly pinpoint gunfire, allowing police to be rapidly deployed to crime scenes.

Its makers claim it can help reduce gun violence and save lives.

But as the city stands on the cusp of expanding its ShotSpotter program and weighs renewing a contract with its parent company, California-based SoundThinking, questions have arisen about what exactly the technology is delivering and whether it’s worth the investment.

While a million a year may seem like a drop in a budget bucket for a city the size of Pittsburgh, it’s not exactly nothing. And there’s no reason to keep spending a million a year for something that doesn’t work, even if it’s only one of hundreds of millions being spent annually.

ShotSpotter has shifted its narrative in response to steady criticism of its negligible contribution to violent crime rates, preferring to focus on something else it imagines it does well: alerting first responders to gunshots. According to ShotSpotter’s execs, the greater utility of a vast network of acoustic sensors is decreasing response time to shootings, which means (theoretically) more lives (of shooting victims) are being saved.

Of course, there’s no data to back this up. The company itself can’t even seem to rustle up a spreadsheet of cherry-picked factoids to prove the tech saves lives. Unsurprisingly, cities reconsidering their relationship with SoundThinking are having trouble coming up with anything along these lines to justify continued spending.

Pittsburgh police don’t keep data on gunshot victim mortality rates from before ShotSpotter arrived in 2014, making it tough to link survival rates to ShotSpotter alerts.

And while officials attribute improved police response times to ShotSpotter, there is no evidence locally that the technology makes Pittsburgh safer. Four out of five ShotSpotter alerts in the city don’t even lead to a police report, a TribLive review has found.

A complete lack of data doesn’t prove anything one way or another, so the first paragraph can graciously be called a stalemate between ShotSpotter and its critics. The second paragraph, however, makes it clear the tech isn’t saving lives or contributing to public safety in any meaningful way. Do you know what happens when police come across a gunshot victim? They file a report. They do this even when their first encounter with the victim occurs in a hospital ER.

At best, officers are being “informed” by the tech that a shot may have been fired somewhere in the proximity of ShotSpotter’s mics. There’s almost zero chance these alerts are what any reasonable person would call “actionable intelligence.” The fog of war isn’t dispelled by this tech, either. As the TribLive report notes, the police chief himself doesn’t know where ShotSpotter’s detectors are located.

The debate continues in Pittsburgh. And somehow, despite any verifiable contribution to crime reduction or EMS response to gunshots, plenty of law enforcement officials and city leaders are bullish on the tech. SoundThinking’s PR team talks a pretty good game as well, capable of winning over fence-straddlers who consider reading a press release that has footnotes as the equivalent of cautious due diligence.

As for SoundThinking itself, it still has thousands of law enforcement customers — most of which have never bothered to ask these tough questions, much less institute any form of tracking that would provide some insight into the tech’s contribution (or lack thereof) to public safety.

The upside is that it’s clear ShotSpotter can’t outrun its own reputation, no matter how much spin it applies to each successive piece of bad news. It coasted on an unearned reputation for years. But now people are demanding answers. And it seems pretty clear the company simply doesn’t have any good ones.