ShotSpotter contract extension approved

Detroit’s City Council narrowly approved a $2 million contract extension for a controversial gunshot detection software following hours of intense public comment and debate.

The nine-month agreement with SoundThinking, formerly known as ShotSpotter, has sparked controversy over its cost and effectiveness. The council’s 5-4 approval will keep ShotSpotter in place through March 31, 2027, and brings overall contract costs to $9 million.

Council President James Tate and Members Gabriela Santiago-Romero, Denzel McCampbell and Mary Waters voted no. Santiago-Romero reiterated Tuesday that she’s been opposed to ShotSpotter from the very beginning.

“There’s no data to show the effectiveness of this technology,” she said. “I’ve also heard stories of residents being negatively impacted by the police who came to their home after getting a call from ShotSpotter and just that people are not feeling safe.”

Tate, on the other side of the coin, said he was an early supporter of ShotSpotter, even when it was initially brought into the city as a free pilot. But the steep cost of the brief extension is something he said he couldn’t support.

“The fact that this company is telling us ‘nine months for $2 million’ is real challenging …,” said Tate. “That leads me now to a situation where I cannot approve this particular amendment.”

Council Member Renata Miller, who supported the contract, highlighted the culture in the city of not calling 911 out of fear of being identified as a witness or as a person complaining about gun violence. 

“We go to sleep with gunshots, we wake up with gunshots,” said Miller, noting it’s a reality in Detroit that many suburban communities don’t live with. “As we embark on the Fourth of July this week, we start hearing gunshots 24-7, and our kids have been normalized to that way of life.”

The city spends money on a lot of things she doesn’t support, she said, but this isn’t one of them.

“The police department has a job to do, and I am for every single thing they bring to create a deterrent for crime. Public safety has to be No. 1,” Miller said.

Detroit Police Department Assistant Chief Franklin Hayes told BridgeDetroit after the vote that DPD welcomes the feedback and sees it as “an opportunity for us to get better” and ensure best practices in any technology they deploy. 

“We feel that we will continue to drive violent crime down, gun violence specifically in the city with this approval today,” he said. 

ShotSpotter is currently covering 50 square miles of the city in all areas apart from the third and seventh police precincts, Hayes said. When Detroit first began using ShotSpotter a decade ago, it was the only gunshot detection technology available. DPD is in the process of going through proposals for future gunshot detection technologies now that the market is expanding. 

Tate said Tuesday that he’s looking forward to proposals for what might come next, whether SoundThinking rebids on the contract or other companies step forward with new options. 

Hayes said those proposals are being collected and evaluated. 

“Just like technology evolves, we have different companies that are now in this, and we look forward to seeing their product with the goal that it can be just as effective – if not more – and certainly at a cost reduction than what we have, to be responsible stewards to the taxpayers,” Hayes told BridgeDetroit.

More than 100 people submitted public comment cards for Tuesday’s formal session; the great majority spoke about ShotSpotter, including the mother of a 7-year-old shooting victim police say they located last week based on gunfire alerts from the software.

Lakesha Brooks and her relatives tearfully credited the technology for saving her son’s life following a shooting last week on the city’s west side that claimed the life of her nephew. 

“If not for this ShotSpotter, my 7-year-old son would be dead, so I support it because it’s going to save a lot of children,” she said. 

Hayes told council members that the incident spurred two different ShotSpotter alerts, officers responded and found one man in his 20s who was deceased and a second location where the child was found.

“Our officers were the first ones there, the only ones there,” said Hayes, noting the 7-year-old spent time in a medically-induced coma and is now recovering, asking for food and to watch his favorite television show. 

“This technology gave him a fighting chance to be whatever he wants to be in his life.”

Detroit Police Commission Vice Chair Darryl Woods added that absent the ShotSpotter alerts: “That baby, our baby, would have bled out.”

“Is it perfect? Absolutely not,” Woods continued. “But, it’s a tool that’s being used. Let’s continue this service as they get even better technology to be able to help. This is not about us turning on each other; we should be turning to each other.”

A group of community activists from Pastor Maurice “Mo” Hardwick’s Live In Peace movement took turns Tuesday, reading a prepared statement supporting violence prevention technology, including ShotSpotter, saying that the group stands on “saving lives and changing lives” and that the tool “can truly be a shot stopper.”

Hardwick depicted a scenario of a person lying in the darkness, struggling to breathe after being targeted by gunfire, saying that in that situation, only three things can save them: “God, the will to live and a smart technology program (ShotSpotter) that has pinpoint accuracy.”

Others, including members of the Detroit Community Action Committee and ACLU, argued the data is “faulty” and that the city shouldn’t direct millions more toward its use.

Community advocate Jacob Smith said the city shouldn’t renew the contract, saying it’s “an expensive surveillance technology that does not work.”

Resident Richard Clay, an advocate with the National Federation of the Blind, gave an impassioned speech against the contract, screaming into the microphone, “ShotSpotter should die” and “nobody wants it.”

“The citizenry is trying to shut it down right now, today,” he said. “It should be over, no more surveilling us,” he said. “Facial recognition technology, Flock cameras, ShotSpotter – all of this stuff.”

Victoria Camille, a District 7 police commissioner and community organizer, joined the chorus against the contract. She stressed that the city should invest funds into ways “to prevent shots from happening in the first place,” including neighborhood police officers, Community Violence Intervention, de-escalation training and restorative justice. 

“Yes, there are investments to be made, but they are in people and relationships, not in expensive algorithms,” she said. 

Detroit Deputy Police Chief Mark Bliss said during a June 22 Public Health and Safety standing committee meeting that DPD is partnering with the University of Michigan on an “academic review” of ShotSpotter specifically focused on how it is used in Detroit. 

“Apples are not apples sometimes in regards to different departments. The expectations and metrics for success are different based upon the area,” he said. ‘We’re not running away from criticism; we’re running toward legitimacy.”

McCampbell has said that he doesn’t feel the data is strong enough to make a case for the continued contract, and he’s also “deeply concerned” about data being collected and stored by the third-party contractor. “We still can’t verify that they’re not recording conversations,” he said during the June 22 meeting. “We don’t have access to those (audio) files.”

During the police department’s spring hearing for the 2025-26 fiscal budget, Police Chief Todd Bettison credited ShotSpotter for hundreds of arrests and said it’s integral in the city’s historic drop in homicides. 

Bettison touted the benefits of the program to Detroit City Council members, saying that last year ShotSpotter notifications led to 256 arrests. And – because residents are often hesitant to call 911 in the event of gunfire – the alert system potentially saved the lives of 114 shooting victims.

“(With ShotSpotter) The officers are there and able to render aid and get that person to the hospital,” he said during the March 23 hearing. “Without it, I wouldn’t have the closure rate that I have and a lot of families wouldn’t have the justice they deserve.”

Detroit City Council first approved ShotSpotter in 2020, and, in 2022, members narrowly approved an expansion of the program.

A team of researchers studied the effectiveness of the gunshot detection technology in Detroit during its first two years. The analysis examined 911 calls reporting gunshots before and after the first deployment of ShotSpotter in Detroit, covering February 2018 to November 2022. In the areas of Detroit where ShotSpotter was implemented in 2021, calls to 911 to report gunshots initially dropped by 47%. The effect, however, disappeared after about a year. The study, which is under peer review, does not cover the 2023 expansion of the program.