Undark Magazine, August 2024
More than seven years ago, when the city of Chicago began its broad deployment of acoustic technology to identify and locate gunfire in high-crime neighborhoods, supporters promoted the system — which uses acoustic sensors, GPS software, and machine learning algorithms to alert the police in real-time — as an effective way to reduce handgun violence. At that time, more than 90 cities had adopted the technology developed more than 25 years ago by a San Francisco Bay area firm called ShotSpotter. Today, more than 160 cities are using the ShotSpotter technology, according to its parent company, now called SoundThinking.
But from the beginning, critics have questioned ShotSpotter’s actual impact on handgun violence, its accuracy, and the reliability of SoundThinking’s closely guarded, proprietary data. Now a growing number of cities — including Chicago, believed to be one of ShotSpotter’s largest markets — are having second thoughts or abandoning their commitment to the strategy.
