Controversial gunshot detection technology Shotspotter is up for contract renewal for the next three years in Oakland. The system depends on outdoor microphones that ping when exposed to a loud noise that might be a gunshot and a dispatch system that sends an immediate alert to the Oakland Police Department. The system sent at least 8,300 alerts in 2023, so upwards of 22 a day on average.
The tech has come under significant criticism in recent years: for repetitively sending police into low-income neighborhoods where the sensors are place and pumped up for violence that may or may not exist, for high rates of false alarms, for distracting police from real 911 calls to chase electronic beeps, and for altering forensic reports to support police narratives after the fact.
Many cities have recently declined or canceled Shotspotter contracts, most notoriously but not exclusively Chicago and there was some hope Oakland would follow in their footsteps. But in a lengthy Public Safety committee hearing on October 8th, the renewal of the contract was recommended on a 2-1-1 vote with council members Kaplan and Reid voting in favor, Ramachandaran voting against and Fife abstaining.
On October 15th, after another lengthy conversation which was heavily attended by Shotspotter staff and featured accusations that Shotspotter critics didn’t care about Black lives lost to gun violence in East Oakland and multiple sets of contradictory facts about how the system was or wasn’t working, the Council voted to renew the contract for one year, with an automatic option to renew to the full three years and to modify the contract to state the City owns the data, not the company. The contract is not coming back to the Council, so advocates will need to check that the new contract is modified as per the Council resolution. To the best of our knowledge, SoundThinking has never allowed a city to own their own data and it wasn’t clear last night that the company had agreed to do so.