Seattle Takes A Pass On ShotSpotter, Will Beef Up Other Surveillance Efforts Instead

Here comes a little more bad news for a company that’s seen quite a lot of it lately.

SoundThinking, which formerly did business as ShotSpotter, is seeing another high-profile, would-be customer walk away from the table after determining the costs would outweigh the benefits.

As Matt Markovich reports for KIRO News, Seattle has decided to move on with other surveillance options after taking a close look at SoundThinking’s tech.

Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell has abandoned plans to install acoustic gunshot locators in Seattle. The decision, which ends over a decade of efforts to implement this technology, was made after receiving more precise cost estimates for the comprehensive “Crime Prevention Technology Pilot.”

Last year the Seattle City Council authorized $1.8 million for a suite of new crime-finding technologies including ShotSpotter, a gunshot detection system using microphones, GPS and cell networks to alert police of gunfire. It faced criticism for its high false alarm rate and potential to increase over-policing in communities of color.

That aligns Seattle with other major cities that have decided ShotSpotter/SoundThinking isn’t worth paying for. The biggest one, of course, is Chicago, which decided to end its contract with ShotSpotter later this year. Or did it? The mayor says the city is done with ShotSpotter, but city council members — perhaps persuaded by SoundThinking’s low-effort “save us” web form — have voted to keep the contract running past its September 2024 expiration date.

Losing Chicago means losing a few million a year in service charges. Losing Seattle doesn’t really cost ShotSpotter anything as it never went live there. And it’s not as though the proposed deployment would have been all that expensive, at least in terms of an annual budget in a city the size of Seattle. But even at (only?) $800,000 a year, the city council and mayor decided this relative drop in the law enforcement budget bucket was too much to spend.

That’s not to say the PD money won’t be spent, however. The city — via a statement from the mayor’s office — will definitely shell out more cash for surveillance options and cop tech. It just won’t be ShotSpotter.

Following a robust public engagement, research review, and cost analysis process, the City will prioritize two new technologies – CCTV and RTCC – as well as an expansion of Automated License Plate Readers (ALPR). The combination of CCTV and RTCC [real-time crime center] will help provide near-term improvements to deter crime with public awareness of the cameras, address serious crimes, and collect evidence in the pilot areas to hold offenders accountable. The expansion of ALPR from its current use in 11 vehicles to all police vehicles with dashcams will also help solve active investigations, find missing persons, and recover lost or stolen vehicles. 

So, it’s not really much of a win for Seattle, even if it’s a pretty decisive loss for ShotSpotter/SoundThinking. The questionable tech may have been sidelined, but the city is throwing money at another problematic crime “solution:” a real-time crime center tied to a network of CCTV cameras and roving ALPRs. A real-time crime center may provide fast reactions to unfolding events, but it’s also only a few software installations away from becoming a predictive policing hub, which means the “over-policing in communities of color” the mayor cited as a reason to move away from ShotSpotter will just be replaced with algorithms, garbage data, and enforcement efforts even more questionable than hanging mics off any available piece of public property.

The mayor’s office says it’s heard concerns about “over-policing communities of color,” but the list of areas set to see the first deployment of increased surveillance are these:

The pilot will deploy closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras in three targeted neighborhoods that suffer from a disproportionate amount of criminal activity: Aurora Avenue North, the downtown Third Avenue corridor, and the Chinatown-International District (CID).

Huh. Not the way I would have gone with that statement. While the other two areas seem to have some persistent traffic concerns and some spots of increased crime, I’m not sure anyone’s going to be convinced “over-policing communities of color” is the concern the mayor’s office swears it is when Chinatown is on the list of “targeted” neighborhoods.

Whatever the case, the solution — at least for the time being — appears to be ramping up alternative surveillance options that don’t involve listening for loud noises. Instead, cops will be able to look at more people more often. And, with their roaming ALPRs, they’ll be able to create a pretty comprehensive database of people’s movements that will no longer rely on drivers passing strategically placed (but immobile) plate readers scattered around the city.

And there’s an added benefit to running plates while on the run, so to speak. Let’s hope Seattle steers clear of this, but other cities have allowed police officers (and other city employees) to go war-driving for plates to find people with unpaid tickets, uninsured vehicles… even people who are just behind on their property taxes. As long as the city can resist the urge to turn ALPRs to ATMs, the damage should be minimized.

But no matter what Seattle does, ShotSpotter won’t be a part of it. And that’s not really going to help its sales pitches to other law enforcement entities around the nation. When major cities are deciding with alarming frequency this tech just isn’t worth paying for, the future of this particular tech seems a whole lot less rosy than the trade show pamphlets might suggest.