Boston crime prevention tool “ShotSpotter” responds to criticism – Boston 25 News

The city of Boston, like every other major city in the United States, is working hard to reduce violent crime and murder rates.

In Boston, police responded to more than 80 shootings by mid-August 2024.

In most of these cases, the police were not alerted by an emergency call but via the ShotSpotter system.

Boston police have been using this crime-fighting tool since 2007. However, ShotSpotter has become the target of critics who call it ineffective and an example of excessive police presence in minority neighborhoods.

Citing its own study, the ACLU Massachusetts is calling on the city of Boston to end its cooperation with ShotSpotter.

Recently, representatives from ShotSpotter visited Boston to talk about why they think the critics are wrong.

ShotSpotter is offered by the private, for-profit company Sound Thinking.

The system relies on sensors hidden throughout the city that detect gunshots and then alerts police to the location of the shot. The company says the alert can take less than 60 seconds.

But the ACLU Massachusetts warns city authorities that ShotSpotter is unreliable in verifying Boston police data.

From 2020 to 2022, the ACLU found that 70% of Boston's ShotSpotter alerts were not gunshots at all, but false alarms.

“That's completely false,” SoundThinking CEO Ralph Clark told me. “What they should really be saying is that 70% of cases may not result in physical, forensic evidence of a shooting, a victim or a perpetrator. That's not to say there were no shots fired. In fact, there's plenty of digital evidence that shots were fired because we actually record the sound of the shots.”

CEO Clark says ShotSpotter is contractually obligated to maintain a 90% accuracy rate.

He claims that ShotSpotter’s accuracy rate is 97% company-wide.

“The ACLU is somewhat misrepresenting this in this regard,” Clark said.

But it’s not just ShotSpotter’s accuracy that worries critics.

They claim that the use of ShotSpotter is unfair to minority communities because the ShotSpotter devices are located there, which could lead to more police calls and excessive police presence.

The ACLU said in a statement: “ShotSpotter is an unreliable technology that poses a significant threat to the civil rights and civil liberties, almost exclusively to the black and brown people who live in the neighborhoods subject to its constant surveillance.”

“We have to go where there is gun violence,” CEO Clark responded. “Race is not a factor for us at all. It doesn't show up in the data.”

According to the ACLU, most of ShotSpotter's Boston devices are located in Dorchester and Roxbury.

Both Massachusetts Senators Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey and Representative Ayanna Pressley are calling on the Department of Homeland Security to review federal grants to ShotSpotter, saying the funding violates the 1964 Civil Rights Act against discrimination.

In Boston, former police chief Bill Bratton, a member of the ShotSpotter board, says he agrees with current Boston Police Chief Michael Cox that the ShotSpotter system protects neighborhoods from gun violence.

“They deploy the system where it can have the greatest benefit,” Bratton told me. “We don't dictate where the system should be deployed; the police do that. So we're effectively responding to police awareness of where it can have the greatest benefit.”

Boston Mayor Michelle Wu has called for an extension of the ShotSpotter contract because it saves lives.

It looks like Boston will be using the ShotSpotter system for at least the next three years.

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