Little Rock, Arkansas, Drops Intrusive, Ineffective ShotSpotter System

For all the money spent on it, the gunshot detection system has a spotty record at best.

The city government of Little Rock, Arkansas, recently dumped ShotSpotter, a gunshot detection tool that's been adopted by some crime-troubled cities, but which has long been controversial. While billed as a means of speeding response to violent crime the technology has a history of unreliability, generating large numbers of bogus reports. Also, being based on the use of microphones, ShotSpotter can capture sounds other than gunshots, including private conversations. Altogether, even acknowledging the city's struggles with crime, it made the right choice in putting its resources elsewhere.

Last week's vote by the Little Rock Board of Directors (essentially the city council) apparently came as something of a surprise when the decision to extend the contract with SoundThinking Inc., the company behind ShotSpotter, failed by one vote. One important factor in dropping the contract was that the city has relied since 2018 on federal funding to pay for what the Arkansas Times describes as "dozens of ShotSpotter sensors in a 2-square-mile area south of Interstate 630," but would have needed to tap tax revenues to continue the project. But disappointing results also played a role.

"I cannot support this continuation of this contract because I do not think the technology is there," Director Kathy Webb commented.

That's a fair concern considering not just the expense of the contract—the original deal cost $290,000 for two years—but also of the resources tied up in responding to false ShotSpotter reports. Other cities have run into the same problem, finding that relatively few incidents reported by the technology result in the discovery of criminal activity.

ShotSpotter "Rarely Produces Evidence" of a Crime

"Of the 50,176 confirmed and dispatched ShotSpotter alerts, 41,830 report a disposition—the outcome of the police response to an incident," a 2021 report from Chicago's Inspector General noted of the technology's record in that city from 2020 to 2021. "A total of 4,556 of those 41,830 dispositions indicate that evidence of a gun-related criminal offense was found, representing 9.1% of CPD responses to ShotSpotter alerts." Even fewer alerts, 2.1 percent, led to an investigation.

The Chicago Inspector General concluded that "ShotSpotter alerts rarely produce documented evidence of a gun-related crime, investigatory stop, or recovery of a firearm."

Worse, then-65-year-old Michael Williams spent a year in jail after Chicago police tried to massage a ShotSpotter report into a homicide case against him during the unrest of 2020. Prosecutors eventually conceded they had insufficient evidence to go to trial.

Then, last year, Chicago police responding to a ShotSpotter alert fired at a teenager who was lighting fireworks. Fortunately, they missed.

A 2021 report from the School of Criminal Justice and Criminology at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock was less negative than its Chicago counterpart, but still not encouraging. In Little Rock, ShotSpotter was implemented alongside the creation of a Crime Guns Intelligence Unit (CGIU) by the police department, and the two were assessed together. While there was some decline in violent crime during that period, "analyses of gun-involved homicides did not provide evidence of an effect of the CGIU or ShotSpotter on homicides. It is likely that the sample size of homicides was too small to identify a significant effect."

Little Rock has spent a lot of money on a gunshot detection system that doesn't seem to do much of anything, and what little results are seen could be attributed to a dedicated unit within the local police department. That might be OK so long as the price of the surveillance system is paid by gifts from the feds, but not when it comes from locally sourced tax revenue.

ShotSpotter Is Always Listening

Then there's the fact that a microphone-based technology inherently has the ability to record more than just gunshots. As Anthony Fisher wrote for Reason in 2015, "when ShotSpotter is triggered, it captures a few seconds of sound before and after the triggering moment. Though the microphones are as high as 100 feet above the ground, they have the ability to pick up intelligible conversations."

In Oakland, California, ShotSpotter captured the last words of a dying man and helped to identify the killer. That might be called a win for the system. But audio surveillance of streets is sufficiently worrisome that a court in Massachusetts excluded a ShotSpotter recording of an argument from evidence as a violation of the state's wiretap laws. 

There are inherent risks in sprinkling microphones around populated areas and counting on the people controlling them to not misuse their tools to eavesdrop, or to listen only to bad people. You never know which people, neighborhoods, or businesses the powers-that-be will decide are worthy of extra scrutiny, and which verbal exchanges might attract their attention.

"People in public places—for example, having a quiet conversation on a deserted street—are often entitled to a reasonable expectation of privacy, without overhead microphones unexpectedly recording their conversations," the Electronic Frontier Foundation's (EFF) Matthew Guariglia warned about the surveillance tool as he called on "cities to stop using ShotSpotter."

Unsurprisingly, EFF applauded Little Rock for discontinuing its arrangement with SoundThinking for the ShotSpotter system. Through its Atlas of Surveillance, EFF maintains a list of agencies that still use ShotSpotter and other surveillance technologies.

A Waste of Federal Grant Money

Incidentally, SoundThinking has developed a reputation as a matchmaker for linking local law enforcement agencies with federal grants that fund the use of ShotSpotter. "In at least three cases, the company offered to prepare a police department's application for a federal grant and get letters of support from other government officials," Jon Schuppe and Joshua Eaton reported for NBC News in 2022. That encourages the adoption of the system by localities that are happy to use anything that somebody else is paying for—at least for the first few years.

With the new Trump administration looking to improve government efficiency and setting DOGE loose to trim wasteful and unnecessary federal expenditures, it might be useful to take a look at those grants. Why should the federal government be subsidizing clumsy and dangerous local surveillance schemes?

As a threat to our civil liberties that doesn't live up to its anti-crime billing, ShotSpotter would be a worthy place to cut spending.