Crime-fighting program under fire
99 arrests in 2 years don’t justify its $3.5M cost, critics charge
Two years in, Houston’s Shot-Spotter program has resulted in 5,450 alerts, 99 arrests and the seizure of 107 guns, but no real consensus on its value as a crime-fighting tool or even how to measure its success.
Critics say the numbers — just 19 percent of the gunfire alerts in the last 25 months even led to an offense report — do not justify the $3.5 million cost of the controversial tool. In the remaining cases, officers were dispatched based on the alerts but did not find any evidence, such as shell casings.
ShotSpotter alerts resulted in the filing of 126 criminal charges, including one capital murder charge, according to Houston Police Department Assistant Chief Milton Martin, who presented an update to a City Council committee recently. Half of those charges involved misdemeanor offenses, most commonly the illegal discharge of a firearm in the city.
Not directly reflected in those statistics, Martin said, is the intelligence that police were able to gather from ShotSpotter data. Because residents do not always call 911 to report every gunshot, the tool has allowed officers to map areas where gunfire problems are the most severe and deploy officers accordingly, he said.
“Just in the first year of operation, over 200 shell casings that we collected were linked to firearms that were used in other crimes in other parts of the city,” Martin said. “While that’s not an automatic ‘Oh, now we know who to arrest,’ it’s information that investigators did not have before.”
Some advocates, however, say the numbers do not justify the cost: $3.5 million for a five-year contract from 2022 to 2027 at an annual price of approximately $74,000 per square mile.
“Only 20 percent of alerts result in an offense support, meaning that 80 percent of responses are a waste of public resources,” said Christopher Rivera, outreach coordinator at the Texas Civil Rights Project. “We can use the $3.5 million … and put it into programs that actually reduce gun violence, like housing and health care and debt relief.”
A ShotSpotter spokesperson said that the company’s realtime alerts have helped improve police response times to gunfire and helped save lives in Houston.
“It is our belief that the rough
ly $700,000 annual cost is a small price to pay compared to what could have happened without ShotSpotter when the stakes are life or death,” the ShotSpotter spokesperson said in a statement.
The ShotSpotter gunshot detection system uses sensors placed in communities to pinpoint the location of suspected gunfire. Every time the system detects a potential gunshot, it sends a short clip of the recording to ShotSpotter technicians, who listen to the clip, verify that the sound is gunfire and send the information to partner law enforcement agencies.
The statistics that Martin presented only pertain to the first ShotSpotter zone, covering five square miles on the southeast side, that was set up in December 2020. No data was available on the second zone, a fivesquare-mile area on the north side that has been operational for the past six months. Martin said HPD has not yet integrated ShotSpotter with its other computer systems and officers have not had time to sort the data from the newer zone to produce a report.
Because ShotSpotter offers more precise location information than most 911 callers, police have treated the alerts with more urgency than they do regular reports, Martin said. While officers do not always immediately respond to a call about gunfire, he said the department dispatches an officer to investigate almost every alert.
“We treat (a ShotSpotter alert) as a very high-priority call and we run over there as quickly as we can,” Martin said. “And that, I think, has resulted in a lot of those arrests that we made. People didn’t expect us to get there as quickly as we did.”
Meanwhile, critics and studies of the system in other cities raise questions about the accuracy and efficacy of ShotSpotter.
Little consensus exists even among officials who have adopted the technology. In Texas, San Antonio canceled its contract in 2017 after just one year of operation, saying that ShotSpotter was not worth the money. Harris County officials, however, have called ShotSpotter a “godsend” for the Aldine area.
Chicago’s former Inspector General Joe Ferguson said Houston’s statistics are “in the same universe” as those in other parts of the country that use the technology.
The author of a 2021 report by Chicago’s Office of Inspector General, Ferguson found that ShotSpotter alerts rarely led to evidence of a gun-related crime and could result in biased policing behaviors. He cautioned Houston officials against making premature conclusions based on ShotSpotter data.
“What was found in Chicago and has been found in other places is the false positive rate is over 50 percent,” Ferguson said. “And people don’t understand that. People assume things are worse than they are. That spawns fear, and fear spawns overreaction, both as a political matter and in terms of response in the field and on the street.”
At the same time, Ferguson applauded Houston’s incremental approach to implementing the program. “The way that Houston is going about it is the way that these things should be approached. It started with a pilot program, it is focused, it generates the data, and the data is subjected to analysis and made publicly available,” he said. “But the results that they’ve gotten so far aren’t significantly better than what has been reported nationally.”
ShotSpotter officials disputed the findings in the Chicago OIG report, saying in its statement that “it is wrong to call an alert without immediate evidence of a crime ‘a false alert,’ and the OIG report did not specifically suggest that ShotSpotter alerts are not indicative of actual gunfire.”
Despite skepticism from some researchers and advocates, some Houston officials are eager to take advantage of the law enforcement tool. Outside the two existing zones, a number of council members are considering purchasing additional ShotSpotter services in neighborhoods that are demanding the technology.
District A Councilmember Amy Peck already has allocated a portion of her Council District Service Fund to buy one square mile of ShotSpotter utilization. District J Councilmember Edward Pollard is speaking with several management districts about sharing the cost of a potential purchase.
“I’m hopeful that it will be very beneficial so that we can combat some of these gunshots that we’re hearing constantly in my district,” Peck said. “But it is very expensive, and we are going to be looking at the data to make sure that it’s something that we want to continue.”
District C Councilmember Abbie Kamin, who chairs council’s Public Safety and Homeland Security Committee, called the number of alerts “startling.” She said she wants to enable all districts who wish to participate to be a part of the ShotSpotter program.
“I think the fact of the matter is we have a gun violence epidemic, and it’s far larger in scale than many people realize and even HPD realizes,” Kamin said. “Without this technology, we wouldn’t even know the scale to which we’re dealing with it.”
Ferguson, on the other hand, said that judging from other cities’ experience, a ShotSpotter utilization model based on neighborhood interests or complaints has seldom resulted in sound decisions. “What happens is we’re implementing a technology on the basis of under-informed and politically tinged decisions by people who actually themselves don’t understand the value of this thing,” Ferguson said. “It may make the councilman feel like he’s responded to constituents. It may make the constituents feel better. But that’s not a rigorous way of going about this.”