The contract for the gunshot-detection system, which was deployed in Oakland in 2006 and costs about $800,000 a year, is up for renewal at a moment when cities across the country are reconsidering ShotSpotter's value. Last week, Chicago became the latest city in the U.S. to pull the plug on the system. Houston's mayor recently said he wants the city to drop ShotSpotter.
In May, Seattle abandoned plans to install the technology.
In Oakland, the City Council's Public Safety Committee is scheduled to consider a new $2.5 million, three-year contract with SoundThinking, the company that runs ShotSpotter, at a meeting on Tuesday. The committee is expected to recommend to the City Council whether to approve the contract. Council members on the committee — Carroll Fife, Janani Ramachandran, Treva Reid and Rebecca Kaplan — did not respond to requests seeking comment ahead of the meeting.
Oakland police officials have praised the technology as a tool that can pinpoint when and where shootings occur, allowing for officers to provide swift medical aid to victims. The technology becomes essential, police and SoundThinking said, when no other witnesses report that a shooting occurred.
Critics, meanwhile, say ShotSpotter does little to curb gun violence or solve crimes, believing the money spent on the technology should be put toward other efforts to deter crime, such as the Police Department's crime lab.
Oakland's Privacy Advisory Commission, a citizen group that counsels city leaders on privacy matters, recommend that the city stop using ShotSpotter. In a 4-2 vote in April, the commission called on the city to divert the funds to other police resources.
The city's ShotSpotter contract expired June 30. Police officials said legislative and bureaucratic delays kept the department from presenting a new contract to the City Council sooner. Even so, police continue to use ShotSpotter.
As recently as Wednesday, police said four ShotSpotter notifications alerted officers to multiple rounds fired on Bancroft Avenue in East Oakland, where they found three gunshot victims, who were hospitalized and expected to survive. Officers also located two guns at the scene.
ShotSpotter relies on microphone-equipped sensors to detect gunshots and triangulate where they came from. That data is then transmitted to police dispatchers and computers in patrol vehicles.
The technology covers about 32% of the city. Many of the sensors are placed in areas in East and West Oakland that experience high rates of shootings, according to police.
SoundThinking keeps the exact locations of the sensors a secret. Police officials told the Chronicle in an email that they don't know where exactly the sensors are placed or what they look like.
Police officials and SoundThinking representatives say they believe the technology saves lives. "I don't know how you can put a price tag on the value of someone's life," said Sgt. Huy Nguyen, president of Oakland Police Officers' Association.
According to SoundThinking, ShotSpotter alerted first responders in Oakland to 400 shooting victims that no one called in between 2020 and 2023. "ShotSpotter works — it is accurate, effective and saves lives," a spokesperson said in a statement. Oakland police officials could not immediately corroborate ShotSpotter's data.
SoundThinking says ShotSpotter is 97% accurate at detecting gunshots, with a false positive rate — when the system alerts to sounds that were not gunshots — of less than 0.5%. But those figures have done little to placate critics who question whether those alerts are benefitting Oakland.
Last year, ShotSpotter sent Oakland police 8,318 alerts of gunfire. In 99% of those incidents, no one called in to report gunshots, according to an annual police report on the technology. The analysis looked at calls made within 15 minutes and 1,000 feet of ShotSpotter sensors, police said. Not all of the alerts represented a single shooting. The system can, for various reasons, send multiple gunfire alerts for a single shooting incident.
The exact number of shootings that occurred in Oakland last year is unclear, although the department logged at least 2,600 crimes that involved shootings, including negligent shootings and assaults with a firearm, according to police data.
ShotSpotter alerts last year led officers to at least 29 homicides and 170 shootings of victims who survived, according to the annual report.
In some instances, police and paramedics responded in less than two minutes, police said, although the report did not include specific data on response times.
In 181 cases, vehicles and homes were struck by gunfire. Most of the time — 1,244, according to the report — were negligent shootings, a term that refers to instances that don't result in injuries, such as when someone fires a gun in the air.
ShotSpotter also provides data to fight crime — the department uses the information to identify conflicts among gangs and other groups — and leads officers to guns and evidence, such as casings, according to police. Last year, ShotSpotter alerts led officers to scenes where they found 56 guns that were subsequently confiscated.
"Awareness of gunfire incidents and cumulative data collection enables proactive crime analysis and strategic deterrence," Police Chief Floyd Mitchell said in a recent report.
Critics say they believe the technology doesn't substantively help police solve shootings or deter gun violence, an issue that persists in Oakland despite the technology's use for nearly two decades.
Brian Hofer, chair of the city's Privacy Advisory Commission, who advocates for oversight of mass surveillance technologies, said he believes evidence and data collection is not valuable unless it leads to arrests and prosecutions.
"What I'm frustrated with as a longtime Oaklander is we throw money at things that don't work and we underfund things that could work or we know work," Hofer said.
He added that he believes ShotSpotter sends officers to scenes where they find "nothing of value" most of the time. He cited data in the annual report that show officers took reports in connection with 22% of the alerts last year. Of all of the ShotSpotter-reported shootings, the company provided 20 forensic reports to help police build criminal cases and prepared four cases for prosecution, according to the report.
Thaddeus Johnson, a Georgia State criminology professor who studies technology use in law enforcement, said he believes ShotSpotter doesn't deter shootings. The technology might help improve survival rates or evidence collection, but cities need to decide what they want out of ShotSpotter and evaluate specific metrics to determine its effectiveness.
It's a tool that is only as good as how it is used.
"No technology is a magic bullet," said Johnson, a former Memphis police officer.
In June, an Alameda County civil grand jury released a report that said the department lacks the resources to respond to all ShotSpotter alerts. Officers "would be overwhelmed" if they responded to all alerts, the grand jury said in the report.
The department also lacks protocols to dictate how to prioritize alerts, according to the report. "The lack of formal procedures also limits OPD's ability to evaluate and analyze its effective prioritization of the incidents to which it does or does not respond," the report said.
The debate in Oakland comes as other cities rethink whether ShotSpotter is worth the investment.
In May, Houston's mayor, John Whitmire, called the technology a "gimmick" and said he wants the city to scrap the program. The city's $3.5 million contract expires in 2027.
In Seattle, after years of debate, Mayor Bruce Harrell abandoned plans to install ShotSpotter and opted to use the funds — $800,000 — for surveillance cameras and license plate readers.
In Chicago last week, ShotSpotter came to an end after the City Council voted 33-14 to keep the system, falling a vote short of a veto-proof majority. Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson vetoed the council's vote, saying in a statement that he wants the city to explore "better options that save more lives" and deter violent crime.
©2024 the San Francisco Chronicle, Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
