Higher cost with less accuracy: What’s happening with Shotspotter in Durham? | Opinion
Surprise, surprise. ShotSpotter, the controversial technology that Durham approved last summer, has been riddled with issues in the few months since it was installed in Dec. 2022.
On Tuesday, WRAL’s investigative team released a report on 350 pages-worth of emails between Durham city leaders and ShotSpotter’s executive team, revealing that the Durham police department had its own concerns about the program.
For one, the city’s understaffed police department had concerns about how an influx of new data would increase the Forensic Services team’s current backlog of “fired cartridges” to be processed. The city also had to create a new job position for an analyst who would specifically review ShotSpotter data. Ultimately, what was supposed to be a “free” 3-month trial of the service will cost the city almost $200,000 through the year, WRAL reports.
On top of the logistical concerns, it seems that city leaders and ShotSpotter executives have different goals for the technology. The report showed executives trying to “aggressively” sell add-ons for the program to the city, but a telling moment occurred where Police Chief Patrice Andrews received an email from ShotSpotter executives she wasn’t supposed to get.
In an email between ShotSpotter employees, one executive asked if the other employee had an email for “she/her/hers,” referring to Andrews. The police chief assumed the ShotSpotter executive was mocking the fact that she has her pronouns listed in her email signature — something that many other Durham leaders have, as well.
“I feel as though I have been made a target because my team and I will not allow ShotSpotter to come in and dictate how the City of Durham deploys and analyzes your technology,” Andrews responded to the executives.
Surely, with all this trouble, the product would work. Right?
Not exactly. A drive-by shooting on New Year’s Day that injured 5 people was not detected by ShotSpotter. In fact, the program registered about 1,000 “gun shots” in a three-mile radius in January, sent roughly 200 alerts to the police department, and still failed to detect two fatal gunshot incidents in February.
Other cities in North Carolina are making it work without ShotSpotter. Raleigh Police Chief Estella Patterson said earlier this year that she isn’t currently considering the software, because she’s focused on preventing gun violence before it happens. Winston-Salem has had some success in the year and a half since its program was implemented: out of nearly 1,400 alerts, 47 firearms were retrieved. Still, that isn’t exactly a high success rate.
Technology is not going to save us from gun violence. Technology is an imperfect solution to a problem that stems from an excessive amount of guns in circulation, a culture that devalues Black and Brown children and gives up on them before they’re 18 and a style of policing that is focused on controlling the symptoms of this reality without addressing the causes of it.
If the city can definitively say that within two months of this program’s implementation that it isn’t working the way they planned, it’s possible it won’t work well after the third month, or the fourth, or the fifth. At some point, Durham’s leaders are going to have to admit that this ShotSpotter trial wasn’t the best idea, or they must admit that it’s going to be more costly and less effective than it was ever supposed to be.
This story was originally published March 1, 2023 at 12:46 PM.
