Houston, Texas Poised To Become The Next Major City To Drop ShotSpotter

ShotSpotter hasn't been doing all that well lately. While it's the market leader in acoustic detection tech for law enforcement, it has seen several large contracts slip through its re-branded fingers in recent months.

While ShotSpotter executives and press releases tout the accuracy of its sensors, real-life experience hasn't been quite as stellar. Even if you ignore the fact that most sensors in most cities are placed in low-income neighborhoods populated by minorities, you still have to deal with the uncomfortable reality that spotting shots doesn't do all that much to deter gun crime. It rarely leads to closed cases and successful prosecutions. And it tends to exacerbate existing staffing problems by scrambling cops to reported gun shots where they're expected to do a lot with little more than the knowledge an electronic device heard something in the vicinity.

Chicago is letting its contract with ShotSpotter expire in September after an Inspector General's report found the tech wasn't millions of dollars better than doing nothing at all. That termination is now up for debate, thanks to ShotSpotter (now known as SoundThinking) managing to talk a few city officials into advocating on its behalf.

But other cities have dropped the tech for the same reason. Houston is the latest to declare it's going to stop spending millions of dollars a year on a product that has demonstrated extremely limited value when it comes to preventing or investigating gun-related crime.

Mayor John Whitmire said Tuesday he wants to cancel Houston's $3.5 million ShotSpotter contract, calling the gunshot detection technology a gimmick."

I'll continue to call it a gimmick," he said. I think it was one of those programs that was implemented to make people think we're really fighting crime, but it doesn't affect the crime rate."

That's the mayor's opinion. ShotSpotter has one of its own, of course. The statement given to Houston's KHOU says the company believes the mayor's comments are misinformed and inaccurate." It provided no supporting data for its counterclaim, but suggested the tech had been instrumental in helping EMTs find 35 gunshot victims since its arrival in Houston in 2020.

Even if true, that's not really doing much for Houston's desires or even the company's stated aims. Finding shot people may occasionally lead to the arrest of a perpetrator, but finding shot people doesn't actually contribute to public safety. Nor does it suggest hearing gunshots has any sort of deterrent effect on people prone to shooting guns at others.

While the mayor may want to terminate the contract, it's not entirely clear that he can. It's a five-year contract that runs through 2027. While he's free to let it expire, pulling the plug early may lead to additional financial charges or, in the worst case scenario, legal difficulties for the city.

The bigger problem with ShotSpotter's defensive statements on behalf of its bottom line is that it's not just the mayor saying the tech is unhelpful. During a city council workshop" dealing with the Houston PD budget, interim police chief Larry Satterville had this to say about the tech:

While he explained that ShotSpotter technology had benefitted some gunshot victims, he revealed there were downsides. Satterwhite also acknowledged that ShotSpotter alerts which are coded as high priority sometimes diverted officers from other crimes, including burglaries in-process.

Much like the people ShotSpotter is supposed to help catch, the Houston PD is far better at shooting guns than helping people who have been shot, especially when they've been shot by Houston police officers. The Houston PD, on the other hand, has previously touted the tech as a success, claiming the more than 5,000 alerts delivered between 2020 and 2023 led to [squints at PD brag sheet] 99 arrests.

If a <2% return on gunshot alert investment is worth spending $3.5 million a year on, you'd think there would be more full-blown support for the tech by the city and its PD. Instead, the top officials for both have called it a gimmick" and a distraction.

Meanwhile, ShotSpotter is in revival mode, spraying PR at anyone willing to host it or listen to its CEO defend a product that has seen a remarkable downturn over the last couple of years. CEO Ralph Clark was granted an interview with The News Tribune ahead of Tacoma, Washington's planned test run of its tech.

In that interview, the CEO basically contradicts ShotSpotter's marketing materials.

It's not designed to reduce crime. In fact, there's no single modality that I'm aware of that can reduce violent crime. And I think what it really does take is a collection of tools and a real commitment and process from not only law enforcement, but, frankly, also communities that have a role to play in overall prevention and reduction of violent crime. There's no panacea to that. And we're not trying to position our single-tool technology as being the panacea for that. So that's my first response is that they're measuring the wrong thing, and a very unrealistic thing. What they should be measuring and looking at is OK, is this a tool that can help bridge the public safety gap that exists when guns are fired, and there's no call for service and there's no dispatch? That's an untenable situation.

That's a shift in stance from a couple of years ago, when cities first started ditching the tech (and the company got busy suing journalists for reporting facts). When things began to heat up in 2021, ShotSpotter was issuing statements saying that any report or study finding it didn't contribute to crime reduction or arrests was just wrong, rather than measuring the wrong thing, as the company's CEO asserts above in his interview.

In its annual report, ShotSpotter said 2021 saw the company's legal costs increase by $1.3 million and an additional $400,000 was spent on public relations.

That additional PR money was directed in part at refuting the blistering wave of criticism and studies questioning ShotSpotter's efficacy. ShotSpotter has explanations for all of it.

According to the company, the study showing ShotSpotter had no impact on arrests was designed poorly. In the talking points sent to Howard, Greene pointed to a different study byNYU's Policing Projectwhich found areas in St. Louis with ShotSpotter saw a 30% decline in assaults. That same study, however, found no change in the number of arrests. Data from the Chicago Office of the Inspector General didn't reveal a flaw with ShotSpotter but rather how the Chicago police use it, the company has said in response.

If this is the result of ShotSpotter realizing it's been marketing its product incorrectly, then that's a positive change. But if this is just the company and its PR wing moving the goalposts because they've had to weather a few tough years in a row, then we should expect a return to normal once ShotSpotter stops making the news for all the wrong reasons.