The Little Rock City Board of Directors voted unanimously Tuesday to continue using ShotSpotter technology in the city.
ShotSpotter uses sound sensors placed atop poles or buildings to listen for gunshots and then alert the police. The technology has garnered controversy for being generally unreliable and allegedly having high rates of false positive reports. The company disputes these allegations saying they “bolster” the mission of police to “protect and serve.”
Little Rock has several ShotSpotter devices. Most are located in the southwest corner of the city.
“It's a tool,” said Mark Edwards, the media specialist for the Little Rock Police Department. The contract the city has with the company won't allow him to discuss certain components of the devices such as why the city chose southwest Little Rock for installation.
The City of Little Rock started its three-year contract with ShotSpotter in 2018.
Last year, only one public police report attributed a criminal investigation to ShotSpotter evidence. Police were alerted to a murder in the early morning of December 11 at 4424 W. 27th Street after ShotSpotter detectors went off near there. When officers arrived at the scene, they found a man lying dead on his stomach. Witnesses said, after the shots, a man fled from the scene in a car. The perpetrator has not been identified.
In 2022, Jon Johnson, a prosecutor in Little Rock, did an interview with NBC where he expressed his skepticism over the devices which he felt would be more helpful if they were cameras and not just noise detectors. He said had never seen the devices lead to an arrest.
A lawsuit is currently underway against the city of Chicago after 24-year-old Michael Williams was arrested using ShotSpotter evidence. He was near a ShotSpotter device when a woman was shot. After being held in jail for a year, he was released when prosecutors threw out the ShotSpotter evidence and dropped the charges. His attorney, Jonathan Manes, is alleging Williams was falsely accused.
“The police treat everybody who happens to be in the vicinity as a possible shooting suspect,” Manes said.
ShotSpotter says they help prosecutors by providing “detailed forensic reports as evidentiary documents [including] precision positioning calculations of each gunshot, exact timing of shots, and map placements of firing locations for every shot fired.”
Manes says any prosecutor hoping to enter ShotSpotter evidence in court would “face challenges as to the reliability of the evidence.” He believes the devices “drain police resources,” and says they can be triggered by fireworks or a car engine backfiring.
This goes to a larger criticism that the devices are unreliable. Edwards, the spokesman for the Little Rock Police Department, says the rates of alerts are not visible in public dispatch logs, but other cities report them going off thousands of times a year.
The Chicago Police Department reported over 50,000 ShotSpotter alerts from 2020 to 2021. Of those, 41,830 had documented police responses or “dispositions.”
“A total of 4,556 of those 41,830 dispositions indicate that evidence of a gun-related criminal offense was found,” the report said. “Representing 9.1% of CPD responses to ShotSpotter alerts.”
The company says they are virtually always accurate with less than 1% of cases being false positives.
Over 80 cities use ShotSpotter in some form, including several square miles in larger metropolises like New York City and San Francisco.
ShotSpotter is adamant that the technology helps to lower crime.
“ShotSpotter detected 141,452 gunfire events in 2019,” their website says. “An increase of 32 percent over the 107,000 incidents reported in 2018.”
A study by UA Little Rock conflicts with these findings. A report for the Justice Resource and Policy Center and the School of Criminal Justice looked at the crime rates for each year after the devices were installed.
“Analyses of gun-involved homicides did not provide evidence of an effect of the CGIU or ShotSpotter on homicides,” the report said. “It is likely that the sample size of homicides was too small to identify a significant effect. It is also likely that other factors (both internal and external to LRPD) affected homicide trends.”
The report goes on to say that there was a small decrease immediately after the ShotSpotters were installed. Ultimately though, nonfatal shootings flatlined after the devices were installed. The rate of homicides leading to arrests also saw no changes. The report suggests doing more research on the effects of ShotSpotter to get a better analysis.
Another report funded by a grant from the National Institute of Justice, a federal program, looked at ShotSpotter data in Kansas City, Mo. The city installed the technology in 2012 but then went on to see one of the most violent decades on record.
ShotSpotter says cities where the technology fails have only themselves to blame.
“The very few cities that did not have a positive experience had suboptimal deployment strategies and poor practices.”
Little Rock will use funds from the American Rescue Plan Act to fund the ShotSpotter contract's $149,000 price tag. This includes a subscription to “ShotSpotter Flex” a cloud-based alert service that transmits the data to a ShotSpotter “Incident Review Center” before sending the alerts to police. The technology only covers about two square miles.
The resolution calls the technology “critical” and says it will improve public safety.
Little Rock uses other forms of police surveillance technology in addition to ShotSpotter. A company called Flock Safety provides LRPD with license plate readers while the city also partners with homeowners to use data from video doorbells as evidence.
Sound Thinking ShotSpotter's parent company sent Little Rock Public Radio a statement: "Over 80% of gunfire goes unreported to 911 and law enforcement must have a tool to close that gap and respond immediately to any instance of outdoor gunshots in case there is a corresponding victim. ShotSpotter has led police to hundreds of gunshot-wound victims with no corresponding 911 call, so we must not ignore the importance of this technology’s ability to bring care to victims who may otherwise not receive the aid they need, resulting in hundreds of lives saved."
