ShotSpotter expansion is not a violent crime solution
The members of our City Council are aware of that, and know that they need to act accordingly.
That's one takeaway from the council's nearly unanimous vote last week to expand the ShotSpotter gunfire detection program in Houston, at a cost of $3.5 million over the next five years.
But did City Council accomplish anything with this vote, other than sending a rather expensive message? One could be forgiven for wondering, given that city council members themselves seemed less than enthusiastic about the program.
“It is one tool in the toolbox requested by Houston police,” said Mayor Sylvester Turner, arguing in favor of ShotSpotter's expansion.
“We need to throw all we have at crime right now,” said Councilmember Abbie Kamin of District C, pointing out that the program could yield data that will helpfully guide future decision-making.
“I'm going to hold my nose and vote in favor of this,” said at-large Councilmember Mike Knox, after expressing qualms about doing so.
ShotSpotter has been used in a small area of south Houston as part of a pilot program since 2020. Houston police credit it with helping them make 54 arrests between December 2020 and September 2021, leading to 60 charges. That's out of 2,330 alerts that ShotSpotter technicians determined were gunfire and relayed to HPD during this period.
Doug Griffith, the president of the Houston Police Officers Union, describes the program as “a good tool” that enables police to arrive at a scene and render aid more quickly than a traditional dispatch call would.
“What happens is, when shots are fired — and it’s very accurate, it can detect between gunfire and fireworks, for the most part — the officers would get an alert on their phone within probably 15 to 30 seconds,” he told me.
The program got a real workout on New Year’s Eve, Griffith added, when many Houstonians heard the traditional Texas serenade of fireworks and celebratory gunfire as well as non-celebratory gunfire and other forms of cacophony. As an officer on patrol that evening, he saw ShotSpotter’s utility in real time, as his phone kept pinging.
Although the information ShotSpotter provides is necessarily limited, Griffith said the program also provides some data that a dispatch call can’t. Specifically, ShotSpotter alerts are accompanied by an audio snippet of the noise detected.
“It’s actually beneficial for the officer, because you can tell if it’s just one or two shots versus 15 rounds, which would be a higher-capacity magazine,” Griffith explained.
At-large Councilmember Letitia Plummer, the only member to vote against the expansion, pointed out that other information is lost, when you take witnesses and bystanders out of the equation.
“When someone calls in a report it’s, ‘I’m at so-and-so address,’ or ‘I saw a man wearing a blue shirt,’ or ‘I saw a getaway car,’--you know, the details are there,” she said. Now officers are going into potentially dangerous situations with little more than what the technology is telling them, she added.
A recent sad incident in southwest Houston illustrates ShotSpotter’s potential utility, but also its limitations. In the early hours of New Year’s Day, 4-yearold Arianna Delane — a grandniece of George Floyd, as it happens — was injured while she slept when shots were fired into her family’s apartment.
In this case, officers did respond quickly, thanks to ShotSpotter — but fruitlessly. They arrived at the complex within minutes, but were unable to find any shell casings on the ground, or any observer who could elaborate on what happened. And so, they left.
Meanwhile, Delane’s family had already left the apartment to drive the little girl to the hospital. They had called 911 before doing so, but those calls didn’t elicit a response until hours later, perhaps because they were wrongly coded as low-priority. HPD is investigating the delayed response, according to Police Chief Troy Finner.
In other cities where ShotSpotter microphones have been deployed, there have been adverse consequences. Last March, for example, ShotSpotter alerted
Chicago police to a bout of gunfire in that city’s Little Village neighborhood. The result was a tragic confrontation that left 13-year-old Adam Toledo dead and the community in an uproar. Although the boy had been holding a handgun when officers arrived, bodycam footage appears to show that he dropped it and showed his empty hands to the officer.
An August 2021 report from Chicago’s inspector general found the program “has changed the way some CPD members perceive and interact with individuals present in areas where ShotSpotter alerts are frequent.”
That latter point is a particular concern for Plummer, who fears that the deployment of ShotSpotter technology could fray relationships between police and the communities they serve, particularly communities of color — putting both police and those residents at risk.
She emphasized that she shares the concerns everyone else on city council has about rising crime in the city.
“I acknowledge that we’re all kind of grasping for some level of solution, but what I don’t want to happen is I don’t want us to make decisions based on fear.” Plummer said. “We have to make sure whatever we implement, when it comes to technology, protects our police and protects our community and doesn’t do anything to cause dissension between the two.”
Whether ShotSpotter will have that effect in Houston is, as yet, an open question.