Some Cities Are Ditching ShotSpotter, But Police Tech Firms Are Just Getting Started

The city of Chicago will start winding down the use of the gunshot detection technology ShotSpotter in September. Organizers launched a grassroots campaign against the product in 2021 after police shot and killed a 13-year-old boy while responding to one of its alerts. Chicago will have spent nearly $50 million on ShotSpotter by the time its contract runs out, despite significant national criticism and mounting evidence that it’s ineffective at preventing gun violence. ShotSpotter disputes such claims, but Chicago isn’t alone: Houston wants out of its contract early, and New York City might follow suit, too. 

Despite a few last-ditch attempts by Chicago’s City Council to force the mayor to make a new deal, Mayor Brandon Johnson appears poised to keep a campaign promise to cut ties with ShotSpotter—but not the product’s parent company, SoundThinking, which is piloting another product with the city. ShotSpotter may be falling out of favor with some U.S. cities, but SoundThinking and its competitors have succeeded in getting major municipalities hooked on costly—and often problematic—technology. 

In response to charges of discrimination and bias in policing, cities large and small have turned to technology to help legitimize the profession. These “objective” computer programs feign impartiality while letting the state peer into more intimate details of our lives. All the while, the sellers of surveillance capitalism bring in impressive profits. These technology firms are now doing what any good corporate enterprises do: Buying up competitors, offering more services, and getting clients to use whole suites of products. 

A provider’s products typically integrate with one another, allowing cops to piece together a surveillance apparatus that fits their needs and budget. Once a department is plugged in, it’s difficult to cut the cord. Migrating the massive amount of data police maintain is difficult and time-consuming. And hardware compatibility issues discourage agencies from purchasing products piecemeal. (Gunshot detection with Flock Safety’s Raven, for example, is only available if used alongside its lineup of license-plate readers.)

SoundThinking offers numerous services, thanks to some acquisitions and partnerships. Chicago is currently piloting CrimeTracer, a product that allows law enforcement to search data from police departments nationwide. Ralph Clark, SoundThinking’s CEO, told investors he anticipated Chicago would sign a “mid- or high-six-figure” contract for the search engine in late 2024. The company also recently entered the automatic license-plate reader market by partnering with Rekor Systems to offer “PlateRanger,” which bundles ShotSpotter with Rekor’s plate scanners.

Axon, maker of bodycams and Tasers, has diversified its offerings over the years, most recently with the purchase of Dedrone, the self-billed global leader in “smart airspace security.” And Motorola sells cops everything from AI security cameras to two-way radios. 

These products—be they ShotSpotter or Axon’s AI report-writing Draft One or ZeroEyes’ “automated optical AI gun detection”—are sold a la carte to law enforcement in the form of subscriptions that police can trial for free. It’s a win-win for these companies: a free trial could lead to a multi-million-dollar contract, and, even if not, vendors can boast of their partnerships with major city police departments to bolster their reputations.

By exporting functions of policing to opaque and unaccountable private institutions, politicians have farmed out essential services to companies that often need violence to profit. What incentive does SoundThinking’s CEO have to address gun violence if doing so makes his product obsolete? His primary stakeholders are investors, not community members.

Policing, by its very nature, is a tool of violence and white supremacy. Surveillance compounds racial biases and further constricts the state’s grasp on Black, brown, and other marginalized communities. In promoting these “unbiased” tools as solutions to police brutality and systemic oppression, cops and corporations not only set the terms of the debate, they also decide what’s possible.

For those reasons, Stop ShotSpotter organizers in Chicago chose not to make the gunshot detector’s alleged inefficiency the central highlight of their campaign.

“It never mattered to us if ShotSpotter worked,” two organizers wrote in Inquest last month, “because we knew that it could never foster safer communities.” 

Their campaign’s focus is not on any one technology but rather the multifaceted collusion between police and capital—and how both benefit from continued surveillance of our communities. 

“The fight against surveillance is a fight against the deeply entrenched systems of oppression that maintain and exacerbate inequalities within our city and society,” they wrote. 

When ShotSpotter powers down in Houston or Chicago, something else will fill its place. 

Officials in a suburb of Los Angeles are testing first-responder drones that can broadcast live footage of crime scenes and airdrop medical supplies. Dallas police recently turned to Clearview AI, a facial recognition system with a database of more than 40 billion images of people scraped from social media and government records. So-called “robot dogs” have proliferated in New York City and Los Angeles. 

There will always be another business selling its solution to the latest public safety threat.

ICYMI—From The Appeal

We’re finalists! The Appeal’s reporting on pro-Palestinian campus arrests is a finalist in the Breaking News category for the Online Journalism Awards. Ethan Corey and Elizabeth Weill-Greenberg’s investigation into prison commissaries is a finalist for two Nonprofit News Awards awards—the Best Investigative Journalism Award and the Insight Award for Best Explanatory Journalism.

The Appeal studied cases in which queer defendants faced the death penalty. Anti-LGBTQ+ bias impacted more than half of them—including a case overseen by a judge who’d harassed his own gay son.