On a fateful afternoon on May 17, 2023, a tragic incident unfolded in the parking lot of Roosevelt High School in Petworth, where Jefferson Luna-Perez lost his life to gunfire. Coincidentally, merely a quarter-mile away, a rooftop device was picking up the sounds of gunfire in the vicinity. This device forms a fragment of the gunshot detection framework known as ShotSpotter, active around the district to aid police forces by alerting them of gunfire. The ShotSpotter system has received substantial investment from the Metropolitan Police Department since the first decade of the 21st century, yet concerns swirl around its value given the lackadaisical supervision and insufficient data monitoring.
Disquiet around the efficacy of the technology has caused some significant cities to cease contact with SoundThinking Inc., a California-based entity that provides the ShotSpotter system to the District. Independent scrutiny has thrown shade onto the technology’s utility and ignited discourses on possible infringements of civil liberties. The oversight mechanisms of the D.C. government fall short to such an extent that the Metropolitan Police Department fails to provide current sensor locations for the ShotSpotter system.
Following a request under the Freedom of Information Act, the police department divulged in November that SoundThinking Inc. had ceased sharing sensor location data with the District, with the exact timeline remaining in the shadows. The statement issued in response to the request mentions that although the police department funds an area for coverage, it does not possess any information about the positioning of the sensors. The ShotSpotter system seems to have skipped the lethal bullet that claimed Luna-Perez’s life, despite it being within the assumed detection radius of the microphone.
The unfortunate Luna-Perez was found unconscious when officers arrived at the scene at the school premises. With immediate medical attention needed, he was rushed to a nearby hospital where, unfortunately, he was declared deceased. The possible role of an expedited police response on receiving a ShotSpotter alert in averting Luna-Perez’s death remains under a cloud of ambiguity.
A representative from the Metropolitan Police Department stated that ShotSpotter alerts are generally grouped with low urgency calls, on par with traffic-related grievances. Unless confirmed as real incidents of gunfire via a service call or an onsite officer, ShotSpotter alerts are not accorded seriousness. The spokesperson evaded a direct query about the benefits the ShotSpotter system bestowed upon their operations.
SoundThinking’s spokesperson, Jerome Filip, defends the technology in an email, stating that ShotSpotter assists law enforcement in a speedy response to gunfire incidents, allows for quick victim assistance, and aids in reinforcing criminal investigative proceedings. He veers towards the system’s pivotal role in bridging the gap between unreported gunshots and enabling first responders to identify the occurrence and location of potential gunshots in real time.
In his statement, Filip stressed that the technology has led to the Metropolitan Police Department being directed to hundreds of gunshot victims without corresponding 911 calls. This implies that the first responders could administer necessary medical aid to victims who otherwise may not have received timely intervention.
The cross-verification of crime data from the Metropolitan Police Department and ShotSpotter alerts between January 2014 and January 2025, conducted by City Paper and the Investigative Reporting Workshop, confirmed that there were at least three shootings, including Luna-Perez’s death, which were within the ShotSpotter coverage area but were not detected by the system. These instances could serve as the tip of an iceberg of additional, yet undetected incidents in the same category.
It appears that while the Metropolitan Police Department maintains a database of sounds detected by the sensors, it does not keep a record of which alerts actually correspond to usubstantiated shootings. The crucial requirement of merging the two datasets has been overlooked, thus complicating discerning between genuine gunshots and fireworks-like sounds for the police department.
ShotSpotter was first instituted in the Seventh District of the District in 2005, convering the majority of Wards 7 and 8, garnering support from the Federal Bureau of Investigation as a part of the initiative to build a safer D.C. The technology gained momentum and expanded over the years, and it was stated in a 2018 hearing that the technology now covers 17 square miles within the First, Third, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Seventh Police Districts.
According to the Office of Contracting and Procurement, the MPD has incurred an expenditure of around $5.16 million on the ShotSpotter system since 2016. However, the total expenditure incurred by the city on the program since its establishment in 2005 is yet to be disclosed by the agency. The ShotSpotter coverage underwent further upgradation and expansion in 2019 to enhance law enforcement efforts against gun violence and to boost safety in communities.
In 2021, as ShotSpotter expanded to more than 170 cities worldwide, SoundThinking made D.C. the home for its East Coast headquarters. Nevertheless, this development coincided with a nationwide controversy arising around the ShotSpotter system. Reports and audits cast doubts on the technology’s effectiveness and raised concerns about potential racial bias in the clustering of its sensors.
The District’s expenditure has been more than $5.16 million on ShotSpotter’s technology up till now, but worries remain regarding the lack of adequate oversight of the surveillance system. As of two years ago, a year that marked the highest homicide rate in D.C. in more than two decades, the Metropolitan Police Department had only a 52% resolution rate for the 274 homicide cases by year’s end, a reflection of decreasing closure rates on a national level.
Although 2024 saw a substantial drop in homicide rates and a raise in the resolution rate to 60%, there seem to be no conspicuous correlation these numbers and the spending on the ShotSpotter system. High investments in the technology do not appear to have a significant influence on the decrease in gun violence or the closure rate increase in the District, as per the view of Eric Piza, co-director of Northeastern University’s Crime Prevention Lab.
In a comprehensive study on gunshot detection technology which was funded by the Department of Justice, Piza studied over a decade’s worth of ShotSpotter data from Kansas City, Missouri, and Chicago to validate the benefits of the programs in both cities. While it was found that ShotSpotter could be a useful tool for forensic purposes, its effects on reducing gun violence or aiding law enforcement in crime resolution were minimal. Two years subsequent to Luna-Perez’s fatal shooting, the case remains unsolved, with detectives having only potential suspects and no arrests made.
The post Unanswered Questions: The ShotSpotter Detection System and Its Efficacy appeared first on Real News Now.
About Author
