At a regular meeting of the Little Rock City Board of Directors Tuesday evening, members questioned local law enforcement about ShotSpotter — a controversial law enforcement technology that alerts police to the noise of gunshots.
The equipment has come under fire across the country for its costliness and high rate of false positives. On Tuesday evening, city directors were shown evidence that Little Rock's ShotSpotter devices have a low rate of false positives. LRPD Sergeant Courtney Bewley claimed the technology had been very successful, and city board members seem keen on continuing to use it.
“Prevention is something that's really hard to prove,” Bewley told the board. “I can't tell if I walked into lunch today and they saw 'oh a police officer is eating here' and they decided not to rob that business today.”
Studies, including one by UA Little Rock, found no significant effect on homicide rates after ShotSpotter installation. Bewley did not argue the equipment solves or prevents crime, saying police use it to quickly alert them to a shooting.
Bewley pulled up ShotSpotter data the company gave her from November 2023 to October 2024. She said, in that time, there had been about 1,100 incidents, or times when the technology was triggered. In only 12 of those instances, someone called the police within one minute of the noise, and only 172 times did someone call in three minutes.
“You can imagine if you or your family member was shot,” Bewley said. “Three minutes is a long time. In three minutes, someone could pass.”
At-large City Director Antwan Phillips mentioned that some cities have ended their contracts with ShotSpotter. This includes cities like Chicago that are currently being sued over an alleged false conviction involving ShotSpotter technology.
Bewley said there have been scenarios where the technology helped police get to a crime scene faster. She also said it helped in a recent case where different eyewitnesses were telling different versions of a crime. Looking at the ShotSpotter data, she said police were able to see who was telling the truth.
“This is just a piece of the investigation,” she said. “The ShotSpotter data alone isn't going to be the sole reason that someone is arrested.”
Bewley described three incidents where someone's car was hit and they couldn't get to their phone, but the loud noise alerted the ShotSpotter.
When asked by Phillips about false positives, Bewley insisted there had been less than ten.
Ward 1 Director Virgil Miller said constituents have asked him to support ShotSpotter, though at the last city board meeting about the technology, most members of the public spoke against it.
The city also uses other surveillance technologies, such as Flock Safety license plate readers and video doorbell partnerships.
Little Rock has spent over $140,000 on ShotSpotter over the past few years. City board members will vote next week whether to renew the ShotSpotter contract for another year, at a cost of $188,000.
