Tampa City Council will vote on funding for controversial gunshot detection program

Tampa City Council is set to vote on a gunshot detection program that has made international headlines over the past year for its lack of effectiveness and negative influence on police behavior.

On today’s city council agenda is a $280,000 contract with “ShotSpotter” a company that offers monitoring technology, which scans sounds in a specific area, and has a remote analyst call the police if the sound resembles a gunshot.

ShotSpotter is marketed as an effective way to address gun crime. But recently, the technology has come under heavy scrutiny, which has led councilwoman Lynn Hurtak to ask TPD to bring an analysis of the program to council. This afternoon, the council members will vote on whether or not TPD should bring a review of the program to a future council meeting.

The Tampa Police Department has been using the ShotSpotter technology since 2019. Last year when the contract was being renewed, a TPD spokesperson said officers made 14 arrests due to ShotSpotter notifications.

In March of 2022, the Associated Press profiled an innocent Chicago man who spent nearly a year in jail for murder after evidence from ShotSpotter technology helped convict him. Leading up to his release, the company came under criticism by the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) for the City of Chicago, among other critics.

After the Chicago Police Department (CPD) had used the ShotSpotter technology for three years, an OIG investigation released in August of 2021 said that the use of the technology rarely led to evidence of gun-related crime. The investigation found that only 9% of ShotSpotter alerts contained any physical evidence of a gunshot.

ShotSpotter’s PR firm told CL that, “The report itself states that this may be due to limitations on the data and, further, many real-word circumstances can also explain this result.”

But not only that, the technology changed police behavior.

“The OIG identified evidence that the introduction of ShotSpotter technology in Chicago has changed the way some CPD members perceive and interact with individuals present in areas where ShotSpotter alerts are frequent,” OIG wrote about the technology.

The ACLU points out that the use of ShotSpotter leads to increased chances of people near the technology being unjustly approached and patted down by police. Oftentimes, the sound sensors are placed in neighborhoods where people of color live, leading to increased police presence in those neighborhoods.

And there are problems with the technology’s accuracy, which is subject to human error.

“The company’s sensors automatically send audio files to human analysts when those sensors detect gunshot-like sounds,” the ACLU wrote. “Those analysts then decide whether the sounds are gunshots or other loud noises such as firecrackers, car backfires, or construction noises.”

In a deep dive into ShotSpotter, the BBC said that the company claims that the determinations if the sounds are gunshots are 97% accurate.

“But that claim is exactly that, a claim,” BBC wrote. “It’s hard to see how ShotSpotter knows it’s that accurate – at least not with the public information it has released.”

In March, the CEO of ShotSpotter, Ralph Clark, offered a response to the ACLU’s claims. Clark wrote that the technology is often used in communities of color because it’s where gun crimes often occur. He also wrote that ShotSpotter evidence and expert witness testimony have been successfully used in over 200 court cases in 20 states.

TPD and the city haven’t yet responded to request for comment on the recent controversy surrounding the technology—but we’ll update this post if comment comes in.

UPDATED 08/30/22 10:51 a.m. Updated with comment from ShotSpotter.

This article appears in Aug 25-31, 2022.