Gunshot detection (ShotSpotter)

Supporters describe ShotSpotter as a way to get help to victims faster, especially when no one calls 911. At the June hearing, a mother said the technology helped officers reach her 7-year-old son after he was shot. Some community-violence-intervention leaders spoke in favor, describing it as one tool among many.

Police leadership credits the system with helping locate victims and contributing to a historic drop in violence: the city reported record-low homicides in 2025, which it attributes to a mix of community policing, community violence intervention, and technology including ShotSpotter. The Chief has cited hundreds of arrests tied to alerts.

This is where the record turns hard for the program. Peer-reviewed research on Detroit's first deployment found that of 5,853 alerts, just two — 0.03% — led to an arrest. City data for 2024–25 tells a similar story: of some 24,225 alerts, shell casings were recovered after roughly 12%, a witness was located after about 2%, and aid reached a victim after fewer than 1%. A University of Michigan study found the one measurable effect — an early drop in 911 gunshot reports — faded after about a year, with no measurable change in response time or shootings.

The city's own numbers have also moved. Publicly, the Chief cited 256 arrests at one briefing and 78 at another; a council member put the arrest rate at 2–3% of alerts. When the results used to justify a contract shift depending on the room, independent verification stops being optional.

Detroit's ShotSpotter contract — signed October 2022 and read in full from the city's own public records — sets three performance standards SoundThinking must hit: locate 90% of outdoor gunfire within 25 meters, review 90% of incidents within 60 seconds, and keep 99.9% system uptime. The accuracy formula only counts a shot the system found and correctly placed. It says nothing about, and charges nothing for, an alert sent for gunfire that was never there.

The penalty for missing the standards is close to nothing. Fall short on two of the three in a given quarter, and the city is owed “one free week of service” — credited not now, but at a future renewal. No refund. No fee reduction. No cost tied to how many alerts turn out to be false.

The contract also directs SoundThinking's review center to push uncertain detections forward — labeled “Probable Gunfire” — to dispatch, patrol computers, and officers' phones rather than hold them back. A system built to err toward reporting, paired with a fee structure that never charges for being wrong, is close to the exact mechanism a 2024 New York City Comptroller audit found in that city's ShotSpotter contract, which had no financial penalty for an 80–92% unconfirmed-alert rate. Detroit's contract isn't identical — it does specify an accuracy target the NYC audit found lacking there — but on the question that decides the incentive, whether being wrong costs the vendor anything, the answer here is the same one New York got: no.

When Council pushed on price in 2026, the city said SoundThinking declined to renegotiate the underlying terms at all — only the price and length of the extension were on the table. The performance clauses now running through March 2027 are the ones the company wrote in 2022, and no public hearing on this contract has discussed them.

One person connects the grant program and the technology. Todd Bettison built Detroit's ShotStoppers community-grant program as Deputy Mayor in 2023 — selecting the grantees and writing the rules. In 2025 he became Chief of Police, the department that operates ShotSpotter, and he is now the technology's most prominent champion and the source of the arrest figures used to defend it.

In fairness to the record: as Deputy Mayor he was not the official who pushed the 2022 ShotSpotter expansion through Council — that was then-Mayor Mike Duggan and then-Chief James White. But the overlap now is real. The same person who designed the community-investment alternative to surveillance leads the department buying the surveillance — and vouches for its results. When one office shapes both the grants and the technology, independent oversight matters more, not less.

Some of the most visible community support for renewal came from Live In Peace, led by Pastor Maurice "Mo" Hardwick. Live In Peace is one of seven groups paid through the city's ShotStoppers program — a community-violence-intervention effort funded at up to $1.4 million per group per year. Notably, ShotStoppers was created as the community-investment alternative many residents asked for instead of surveillance technology. A member of the Board of Police Commissioners also testified in support.

To be clear about what this is and isn't: the ShotStoppers grants are tied to reducing violence, not to supporting any technology, and no rule bars a resident or an appointee from voicing a policy view. But these funding and oversight relationships were not disclosed at the podium. Some residents argue that when people paid or appointed through the city's public-safety system speak on a related contract, that connection should be stated plainly — so the public can weigh the testimony with full context.

The company behind ShotSpotter is shrinking, though not vanishing — SoundThinking (NASDAQ: SSTI) still reported 319 customers and 178 cities under contract at the end of 2025. But it also reported a $9.4 million net loss, its market value has fallen roughly 38%, and its annual report discloses a "material weakness" in internal financial controls. It is heavily concentrated: New York City alone accounts for about 29% of revenue — and New York's Comptroller declined to register the NYPD's renewal in 2025 over procurement-rule concerns, not a full cancellation.

The list of cities walking away keeps growing, each for its own documented reason. Charlotte-Mecklenburg canceled in 2016 after a police major told local reporters the department "very few" times actually located the shooter, for $180,000 a year. San Antonio let its contract lapse in 2017; police confirmed no arrests were made from detections afterward. Fall River, Massachusetts ended its deal in 2018 — the mayor said the city wasn't paying $120,000 a year "for something that works less than 50 percent of the time," after the system missed every shot in a fatal shooting months earlier. Dayton, Ohio didn't renew in 2022, after fewer than 2% of its deployments produced an arrest across three years and roughly $615,000 spent. New Orleans declined to convert an 8-month pilot into a contract in 2023 — one arrest from 1,399 alerts — though it resumed use in 2025, a reminder these decisions aren't always final. Chicago decommissioned the system in 2024 after its Inspector General found only 9.1% of alerts produced evidence of a gun-related offense; Durham, Winston-Salem, Syracuse, and Toledo have also moved on; Houston's mayor called it "a gimmick."

Detroit is renewing against that tide — and, in doing so, helping keep a struggling vendor afloat.

None of this settles the Detroit question on its own — supporters note local conditions differ and that violence fell in 2025. But it belongs in the record as the city weighs a long-term path.