After the expiration of the latest contract last month, the future of ShotSpotter – a surveillance technology used by law enforcement to detect gunshots – in Minneapolis is up in the air.
Though law enforcement claims the sensors help officers more accurately determine the locations of gunshots and get to the scene faster, opponents and researchers alike say the technology is ineffective and promotes discriminatory policing against the city’s Black and Indigenous residents.
The technology
ShotSpotter, developed by technology company SoundThinking, uses sensors installed in locations around a city that employ microphones, a machine-learning algorithm and human evaluators to detect gunshots. Once detected, the system triangulates the sound’s locations and alerts local police to the sensor’s activation.
The technology is active in more than 160 cities nationwide.
The exact locations where the sensors are installed are hidden from police and the public alike, but data leaked from SoundThinking in February revealing the coordinates of more than 25,000 sensors globally showed that the devices are placed anywhere from atop elementary schools and public housing complexes to billboards and government buildings.
Minneapolis has been using ShotSpotter for nearly two decades, investing nearly $2.2 million in contracts with the company since 2007. St. Paul briefly considered using the gunshot technology during an increase in gun violence in 2019, but officials eventually decided against it.
Minneapolis Ward 2 City Council Member Robin Wonsley, chair of the Administration and Enterprise Oversight Committee, facilitated presentations to her committee last month to learn more about the issue ahead of possible renewal after hearing from constituents and researchers. Wonsley said the council has no authority on if or when a renewal is brought before council and that the decision is up to the mayor and the city’s Office of Community Safety (OCS), which houses the Minneapolis Police Department.
In a statement, OCS spokesman Brian Feintech said they plan to pursue renewal of the contract.
“The Office of Community Safety and its departments will be presenting to the City Council on the city’s use of ShotSpotter in the coming weeks,” Feintech said. “OCS departments view ShotSpotter as a valuable tool to collect data that we would not otherwise have.”
In the meantime, however, Wonsley said she plans to bring forward a proposal within the next two weeks to kickstart an evaluation of ShotSpotter conducted by an external party. Council members, she said, need to have a better understanding of the technology’s effectiveness and potential impacts before spending more money on it.
“From my understanding, we’ve never done an evaluation of ShotSpotter since we entered into a contract with them prior to my tenure on the City Council,” Wonsley said in an interview. “I think it’s timely that we do that and from that analysis – be able to have data in front of us so that we can make a sound decision.”
Despite its widespread use nationwide, research conducted on the technology’s use in recent years suggests it is ineffective, prompting more skepticism from local officials when contract renewals come up. Many cities used American Rescue Plan (ARPA) funding earmarked from crime prevention to pay for ShotSpotter contracts, but now funding isn’t as readily available for most cities, adding to that skepticism, said Abdul Nasser Rad, managing director of research and data at Campaign Zero, a public safety-focused research group.
“(Cities) were able to leverage a lot of that ARPA funding, which cities were like ‘this is free money,’” he said. “Now I think generally there’s a lot more skepticism and concern, but there’s also much more harder questions, like is this actually taking resources away from people calling 911 … and how is it actually being deployed.”
Does it even work?
Rad said research has shown ShotSpotter is susceptible to activating in error due to the sensors’ use of sound waves to detect gunshots, but similar sounds like fireworks or a car backfiring can trigger activation. That causes 911 response times to lengthen overall as false detections pull officers away from other calls.
In Chicago, the MacArthur Justice Center reviewed nearly two years of ShotSpotter activation data in 2021 and found that 89% – or about 40,000 – of alerts resulted in police finding no gunfire-related crime. Nearly three years later, Chicago city officials announced in February they would not be renewing their contract.
Research conducted by Alexander Lindenfelser of the University of Minnesota Law School and Legal Rights Center found that the use of ShotSpotter disproportionately impacts Black and Native residents across Minneapolis. By analyzing all ShotSpotter activations between 2020 and 2023 and comparing that to U.S. Census data, Lindenfelser found that Black and Native residents were more than three times likely to live in an area with a ShotSpotter sensor installed.
Lindenfelser said the higher amounts of activations in those neighborhoods could further harm the police department’s relationship with the community, citing a report from the Chicago Office of the Inspector General that found officers perceived neighborhoods blanketed with ShotSpotter sensors as more dangerous.
“ShotSpotter sensors detect a gunshot that is instead a firework, a backfiring car, construction noise or another loud impulsive sound, and police respond to an incident that they think is dangerous and treat bystanders accordingly,” he said in an interview. “This has a lot of potential for police interactions to escalate out of fear in a way that can damage community trust.”
Rad said the fear opponents of ShotSpotter have is that it facilitates over-policing in areas that have historically experienced fraught relations with law enforcement. Police departments could point to the data provided by the technology to justify aggressive police response in those neighborhoods, he said.
“This is the concern with a lot of policing technologies, that it will legitimize the sort of racist practices that police departments use in order to respond to social problems,” he said. “This is a further way of just basically making it seem like this is a neutral or objective way of sending in more police.”
The perception of danger in those areas with high ShotSpotter activations could have longer lasting effects. Opponents say developers and retailers may use the data to avoid investing in those neighborhoods, which further disenfranchises the areas’ residents by limiting the availability of housing and essential services like pharmacies and grocery stores.
At this moment, as local officials nationwide continue to examine whether to maintain their use of ShotSpotter as a method to curb gun violence, Rad said he hopes existing research on its effectiveness and more research going forward will steer cities toward more proven gun violence prevention measures.
“It’s an opportunity for the city to actually look into alternative reporting systems and actually be serious about this issue,” he said.
Mohamed Ibrahim
Mohamed Ibrahim is MinnPost’s environment and public safety reporter. He can be reached at mibrahim@minnpost.com.
