City Council President Blaine Griffin and Mayor Justin Bibb, outside the Justice Center. Credit: Scene Archives
A gunshot detection system expanded in Cleveland has come under fire in another American city.

Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson made good last week on a campaign promise to “end the ShotSpotter contract and invest in new resources that go after illegal guns without physically stopping and frisking Chicagoans on the street.” Chicago activists have protested the technology’s role in the killing of 13-year-old Adam Toledo by a police officer in 2021.

SoundThinking, a public safety technology company, says its ShotSpotter tool is used in roughly 150 cities. But the technology is controversial, with questions about its usefulness and reliability.

The city of Dayton scrapped its ShotSpotter program, piloted in the city’s predominantly Black neighborhoods, in 2022. Akron has balked at hiring ShotSpotter for years.

Cleveland began piloting ShotSpotter in the city’s fourth police district in 2020. Using $2.7 million in federal stimulus money, Mayor Justin Bibb expanded the program in May 2023 to the entire city, saying the “technology is effective and is making a difference” in saving lives, solving crimes and confiscating illegally possessed guns. The expansion came a month after Bibb’s administration hired Cleveland State University to conduct a two-year study of ShotSpotter’s effectiveness.

And the Cleveland Community Police Commission is now mulling the police policy behind the technology’s use.

An early draft of the commission’s proposed rules stated that “officers shall not automatically stop and frisk all individuals located at the scene of a ShotSpotter alert.” A working group, which will make recommendations to the entire commission this month, removed that language and revised the draft rules last week to state that:

  • More than a ShotSpotter alert is needed to establish probable cause for vehicle stops or searches, entry into a backyard, business, or residence to search for suspects.
  • “ShotSpotter technology is accurate, but not infallible. Errors (including false positives, false negatives, missed incidents and mislocated incidents) need to be reported to improve the delivery of service and allow for correction.”
  • Suspected gunshot fire data shall be tracked and analyzed daily.
Each policy version maintains existing language that “the alert will be prioritized as an in-progress violent felony and dispatched accordingly.”

This article was published in partnership with The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization covering the U.S. criminal justice system. Sign up for their newsletters, and follow them on Instagram, TikTok, Reddit and Facebook.

This article appears in Feb 14-27, 2024.