Shot-spotting tech is notoriously unreliable. The industry leader, ShotSpotter, continues to claim it’s helping solve gun crime even as many law enforcement customers shift from “current” to “former.”
In Newark, New Jersey, three-quarters of “gunshots” “detected” by ShotSpotter were false positives. In another city, the failure rate wasn’t quite as spectacular, but it was little better than a coin flip.
Out of Fall River’s 51 ShotSpotter activations in 2017, 21 have been false alarms, a 41 percent error rate. The sensors often report loud noises such as car backfires and fireworks as gunshots.
The city of San Diego, California terminated its contract with ShotSpotter after complaints from residents. It also saw little reason in spending more than a million a year on tech that produced false positives more than 10% of the time and had only led to two arrests in four years.
With all this good news about reliability and accuracy (and that’s just about the market leader), one might reasonably wonder why the DHS has decided to get into the shot-spotting business. A sense of wonderment is always welcome, but it should not be confused with what this DHS press release provokes, which is closer to “concerned bemusement.”
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