Privacy, efficacy concerns continue as Detroit police seek more than $2M extension to ShotSpotter

This story was originally published by Michigan Advance.

The Detroit Police Department is seeking an extension to its gunshot detection technology contract with California-based SoundThinking, Inc., whose ShotSpotter technology has been used in Detroit since 2020.

The city’s current contract for the technology, which was signed in 2022 and is set to expire at the end of June, is for $7 million — a price tag that advocates and city lawmakers alike have raised concerns over. Now, the police department is asking city council to approve a nine-month extension to the contract, through the end of March 2027, for another nearly $2.06 million.

The extension is coming down to the wire on the deadline. It was first brought to the city council on May 12, less than two months before the current contract expires. It was referred to the council’s Public Health and Safety Standing Committee for debate, where the proposal currently sits.

Police officials have argued that the technology has contributed to decreasing gun crimes in the city since it was established in Detroit, emphasizing its use as an important investigative tool.

“It’s a large contributing factor. It’s not the only factor, because that would be disingenuous. Community violence intervention has been significant as well,” Detroit Police Chief Todd Bettison told the committee on May 18. “But ShotSpotter, the technology has absolutely been a key to allowing us to find the evidence and also get guns that are used to shoot off the streets in the city.”

The reason for the short-term extension, police officials explained to the committee, is that the department opened earlier this year a Request for Proposal to consider more options for gunshot detection technology in the city. Bettison noted that when the city began using ShotSpotter, it was the only such technology on the market, while now there are numerous companies that offer it.

“But we don’t want to lose the coverage area and the benefits that we have. We believe that this technology definitely is beneficial, it saves lives. I’ve never seen a point in time when our non-fatal shooting closure rate was as high as it is,” he continued. “We don’t want to see a lapse when it comes to that coverage, but we want to be responsible when it comes to taxpayer dollars as well.”

Some, however, have disputed the actual efficacy of the ShotSpotter technology — pointing to questions about how often ShotSpotter alerts actually return evidence of gunfire.

According to information shared by SoundThinking Inc., of the 24,225 ShotSpotter-triggered incidents in Detroit between 2024 and 2025, shell casings were recovered in just over 12% of those incidents. Witnesses were located in just over 2% of incidents. And in less than 1% of the cases was aid rendered to a victim by a first responder.

In new data obtained by Michigan Advance through a public records request, nearly 81% of all police incidents originating from ShotSpotter alerts are currently inactive, versus 9.24% that have been cleared by an arrest and just 1.28% that are currently under active investigation. 

Compared to non-ShotSpotter gunfire-related crime incidents, available on  to the Detroit Open Data portal, 54% of cases are inactive, 13.2% were cleared by arrest, and nearly 25% remain under active investigation. 

Still, the police department maintains that the technology is working and that it is deterring gunfire in the city. 

“The Detroit Police Department, we have been good stewards,” Bettison said. “Our patrol officers who are getting to the scenes of rapid gunfire within two, three, four minutes, finding individuals, rendering aid, oftentimes and sometimes catching individuals with the smoking gun still in their hands.”

All three members of the Detroit Public Health and Safety Standing Committee — City Council Members Gabriela Santiago-Romero, Denzel McCampbell and Mary Waters — have expressed concerns about the extension of ShotSpotter.

“I will just have doubts on this until I see a direct correlation of reduction of crime,” Santiago-Romero, who chairs the committee, said. “I’m still very doubtful that ShotSpotter has helped the city reduce crime. I really do think that that’s CVI, that it’s the city investing in our communities and working together with police.” 

CVI refers to community violence intervention programs, which focus on preemptively working with individuals most at risk of being a victim of or committing an act of gun violence.

Santiago-Romero added that she has doubts about the price tag, telling police officials, “the time and the money does not make any sense if you look at it.”

McCampbell also raised the fact that the Detroit Police Department does not have access to the locations of ShotSpotter sensors in the city, which Michigan Advance first reported in December.

Consistent with their past statements, police officials said that they do not need access to the precise locations of the sensors, and that the triangulation offered by the company is enough to justify the technology’s use.

Detroit Police Deputy Chief Mark Bliss told the committee that “it’s no benefit to us to know where they are.”

Bettison also told McCampbell that the department “can definitely get with the vendor and be able to provide that information or know that information as to where the exact sensors are,” even though SoundThinking told the Advance that the company does not disclose precise locations of sensors to any customer, including the Detroit Police Department.

Santiago-Romero raised privacy concerns with police officials, particularly around audio recording. Although Bliss noted that the only audio shared with the department is the short clip of actual gunfire, Santiago-Romero said that the company itself, which analyzes audio recordings to determine what is actual gunfire, has access to much more audio than just those short clips. McCampbell posited similar concerns about using a third-party vendor and how that data and its audio recordings are maintained.

Waters sent a memo on May 13 to the council’s legislative policy division requesting further information on “an overview of all wrongful arrests, as well as all lawsuits filed against the City of Detroit, that involve the usage of ShotSpotter by the Detroit Police Department since the launch of the technology in the city.”

As of June 1, her office confirmed that she had yet to receive any information regarding the memo, which is set to be brought back to discuss before the committee at its June 22 meeting, just eight days before the current ShotSpotter contract expires. 

Santiago-Romero committed to Detroit Police Department officials that she would get the proposal in front of the full City Council before the current contract expires — even if it comes with a recommendation from the committee not to approve it. 

In 2022, Santiago-Romero and Waters joined Council Member Angela Whitfield-Calloway, who is also still on the council, and now-Mayor Mary Sheffield in voting against the expanded contract with ShotSpotter.

Sheffield did not respond to requests for comment on the current extension proposal. Though she will not vote directly on it as mayor, her predecessor, Mike Duggan, was a major proponent of the technology and advocated for the 2022 contract to be passed.

Committee members are not the only ones raising concerns about the contract extension. Public comment at the last two city Public Health and Safety Committee meetings heavily encouraged council members to reject the extension. 

“We don’t need police officers on autopilot going into our neighborhoods on high alert from a technology that is so inaccurate,” said District 7 Police Commissioner Victoria Camille, speaking in a personal capacity to the Public Health and Safety committee. “None of the data I’ve seen about ShotSpotter convinces me that it improves our society and instead, it makes us disconnected from each other. I am asking you to reallocate those funds to boost on the ground resources for community violence intervention, relationship building, de-escalation training and youth programs.”

Daanyal Syed, an activist with the Detroit Anti-War Committee, added that they believe the city can better spend the money going to ShotSpotter, including on education, housing or other community violence intervention programs.

“There’s just a lot of other things that need immediate money, but to see there being a push for $2 million for just nine months for a surveillance program that’s proven to do nothing rather than when they could use it for anything else that could actually benefit the city. Invest in CVI programs, if you want to actually stop violence before it actually happens, stop crime before it’s actually happening, more money to CVI programs is going to show less crime,” they continued, referring to community violence intervention programs.

Syed added that, because ShotSpotter is an inherently reactive program — police respond to alerts after the gun has already been fired — it cannot be as effective in preemptively preventing gunfire as other violence intervention programs that target root causes of crime. 

Gabrielle Dresner, a Policy Strategist for the ACLU of Michigan who focuses on surveillance and policing, said that she hears in Detroit, much like she heard in 2022, that the priority of residents is safety — and that some people think that surveillance is the way to achieve that. 

“The data shows us that surveillance does not equal safety,” she said. “I think there’s an opening for how do we create safety without relying on surveillance technologies.”

Michigan Advance is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Michigan Advance maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jon King for questions: info@michiganadvance.com.