With Criticism Of Its Tech Going Federal, ShotSpotter Fires Back With Inconsistent Assertions

ShotSpotter isn’t having a great year. Or two.

Its tech has been called into question — both for its ability to truly detect gunshots and for its contribution (if any) to public safety.

What is known about ShotSpotter isn’t great. The most in-depth examination of the tech was performed by the Inspector General of the city of Chicago. The report produced by the IG was anything but flattering. It found that mics were clustered heavily in neighborhoods predominantly occupied by people of color. It also found the tech wasn’t doing much to help cops tamp down on gun crime in Chicago. Not only did reports rarely produce suspects, much less evidence that would be useful in investigations, it tended to re-route cops from productive patrolling to wandering around streets looking for bullet casings or whatever.

As the tech’s shortcomings became more apparent, more and more cities have chosen not to do business with ShotSpotter. Some terminated their contracts or chose not to renew them. Some reviewed the tech but decided to spend money elsewhere.

Other controversies reared their heads as well. Multiple accusations surfaced claiming ShotSpotter analysts were altering gunshot reports to fit police officers’ narratives or justify questionable stops and arrests. ShotSpotter made things worse by trying to sue journalists who reported on these accusations, even when they did nothing more than report on the contents of court documents.

Presumably, this collective shitstorm was the impetus for ShotSpotter’s re-branding. It now refers to itself as SoundThinking, but underneath the new letterhead, it’s still just ShotSpotter.

The latest broadside was issued by the federal government. Multiple legislators asked the DOJ to look into recipients of grants from the department to ensure they weren’t being spent on tech that was being deployed in contravention of the Civil Rights Act. ShotSpotter was named specifically, due to its omnipresence in neighborhoods primarily occupied by minorities.

ShotSpotter is fighting back. But its efforts haven’t been all that successful, much less coherent. It erected a “save ShotSpotter” page in hopes of peppering Chicago alderpersons with requests that the city not end its contract with the company later this year.

Now, it’s firing back against statements made by federal legislators and the ACLU of Massachusetts. Certainly, one would expect nothing less from a company that is now aware its back is against the wall.

But you’d expect a better effort to be made, especially when it’s not being made by some PR intern, but by company executives. It has hired Boston PR firm Regan Communications Group to assist in its pushback, but the ROI of that disbursement isn’t immediately observable here:

“[I]n incidents where lives may hang in the balance and every second counts, the ShotSpotter system alerts police to virtually all gunfire in a community’s coverage area within 60 seconds,” the company’s president and CEO Ralph A. Clark, wrote in a 35-page, heavily footnoted letter to the lawmakers.

“The fast response made possible by this technology ultimately helps save lives, locate suspects, and collect critical evidence,” he said.

The ShotSpotter response team needs to get on the same page. Earlier this month, the company insisted people complaining about the tech’s uselessness in criminal investigations were looking at the wrong metric for measuring success. Instead, it claimed the tech’s true value was providing fast response to reported gunshots to save victims of shootings.

But in this statement, the company tries to have it both ways. Even if it’s true ShotSpotter creates better response times for medical professionals, very few law enforcement agencies are going to pay millions for tech that does little more than scramble ambulances faster. So, the company continues to insist — despite plenty of evidence to the contrary — that the tech is a meaningful contributor to criminal investigations and public safety.

“We are proud of the value that ShotSpotter delivers to law enforcement to help address criminal gunfire and save lives,” Clark wrote.

Are you really? The “value” you speak so highly of hasn’t been conclusively demonstrated anywhere. When officials have taken a close look at the tech, those close looks are often followed by contract terminations.

The company also responded to the ACLU’s accusations that its tech — at least as deployed by most law enforcement agencies — violates the Civil Rights Act. And again, a company executive was on hand to deliver an inconsistent statement that claims the tech is good for things (1) no one has asked it to be good at (locating gunshot victims) and (2) stuff it has been shown on multiple occasions it’s actually bad at.

“If you read headlines across the country and you can subtract out those pieces that are merely opinion, what you will see reflected over and over again is ShotSpotter locating gunshot wound victims, leading police to arrest offenders,” said Tom Chittum, SoundThinking’s senior vice president of analytics and forensic services.

“And it’s not because this technology simply gets lucky. It’s because it really works,” he said.

While it’s disappointing to learn Tom Chittum isn’t reading my headlines, the real problem here is the claims the company is making. Recently, the company has begun insisting the real value of the tech is locating gunshot victims, rather than locating criminals — a new PR spin that seems to have been adopted because so much data shows the tech isn’t doing much to locate suspects, close investigations, or deliver criminal convictions.

Now, every statement says two things: we save lives and we stop crime. The latter clearly isn’t an accurate portrayal of the tech’s contribution to law enforcement. And the former is something that can’t clearly be determined because absolutely no one is tracking data on EMS response times in relation to ShotSpotter reports.

Obviously, statements issued by companies on the defensive will be extremely self-serving. But no one should be duped by this desperation play from SoundThinking. If the company wants us to believe it saves lives, it should make an effort to compile data that demonstrates it, at the very least, can make this contribution to public safety. And while it does that, we’re free to draw inferences from existing data on its law enforcement utility, which appears to be almost nil.