Is ShotSpotter worth it? Sacramento may spend millions on questionable tech | Opinion
City of Sacramento staff appear to be quietly fast-tracking the contract for questionable gunfire-detection technology that will cost a cool $2.6 million to renew, a steep price considering the checkered past of this service.
Sacramento’s contract with the Fremont-based SoundThinking, which supplies the ShotSpotter program, expired on June 14, 2025. The company claims its acoustic surveillance technology can identify the sound signature of gunshots and dispatch police accordingly.
The technology is considered by many experts, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the American Civil Liberties Union, to be notoriously unreliable. Cities such as Seattle, Atlanta, San Antonio, Baton Rouge, Little Rock, Houston and Chicago have already cancelled their contracts with the service
“Last February, Police Chief Kathy Lester reported publicly that the ShotSpotter unit of 12 police officers was already eliminated and reassigned to other areas,” said Keyan Bliss, a former Police Review commissioner who is now the senior manager of policy and organizing with the Anti Police-Terror Project.
“Given the mounting budget deficits coupled with this grossly inefficient program, this is a perfect time to allow ShotSpotter to expire without any further losses to the city,” Bliss said.
Yet it appears someone in City Hall is attempting to push through the renewal of the ShotSpotter program with minimal notice: By placing it on the council’s consent calendar, staff lumped the issue in with 15 other items — and the council just needs to make one up-or-down vote on them all without the requirement of discussion.
That’s an agenda status typically reserved for routine and non-controversial items, not a $2.6 million law enforcement contract in a budget deficit year.
The city’s expired contract with ShotSpotter should remain just that — expired. Sacramento City council members need to pull this item from the docket and table this matter until it’s clear this is the highest use of a lot of money… and that seems doubtful.
ShotSpotter — or a spotty longshot?
ShotSpotter has been in use in Sacramento since 2015, and in their report to the council, the police department admitted there are just three locations in the city currently employing the technology. They have refused to divulge exactly where, and will only state that there are ShotSpotter systems in place in north, south, and east Sacramento neighborhoods where there is “a consistently high volume of gunfire incidents.”
The technology claims to work by triangulating the sound of gunshots through the use of acoustic sensors, which then notify law enforcement in real-time.
“The three ShotSpotter systems throughout Sacramento have proven to be valuable assets when responding to and investigating gun violence,” wrote the police department in its report to council. “Since the first deployment of the technology, the SPD has learned that most ShotSpotter activations do not have a corresponding call for service from the community, with only about 11% of 2024 activations having an associated call from the public.”
But the AI-driven technology is unreliable. The technology is not great at discerning the sound of gunshots versus, say, fireworks or a car backfiring.
Other cities have reported the tech can often overwhelm dispatch centers with false reports of gunfire. At best, ShotSpotter’s acoustic triangulation does seem to help law enforcement triangulate where shell casings, bullet holes and other evidence may be at a verified scene.
But ShotSpotter’s own contract states the technology does not prevent gun violence, and the company has never published results of its own validation testing, according to the website, CancelShotSpotter.com. The site is run by Campaign Zero, which seeks to reduce police violence by advocating for best practices in police departments.
“I voted ‘No’ to renew the ShotSpotter contract in 2023,” said District 8 Councilmember Mai Vang via a text message. “We are a city that prides itself on data, yet this technology and its research run counter to that commitment.”
And yet, the multi-million-dollar contract with SoundThinking continues to be renewed without question by the city of Sacramento.
Unreliable tech, innocent man jailed
An investigation into the company by the Associated Press in 2022 found that ShotSpotter technology can miss live gunfire occurring right under its microphones, “or misclassify the sounds of fireworks or cars backfiring as gunshots.”
“Forensic reports prepared by ShotSpotter’s employees have been used in court to improperly claim that a defendant shot at police, or provide questionable counts of the number of shots allegedly fired by defendants. Judges in a number of cases have thrown out the evidence,” the AP found.
“The evidence that we’ve produced suggests that the technology does not reduce firearm violence in the long-term, and the implementation of the technology does not lead to increased murder or weapons related arrests,” said Mitch Doucette to the Associated Press; Doucette led a study of the program in 2021.
In at least one case where ShotSpotter was used as evidence in a criminal case, a 63-year-old man was in Cook County Jail for more than a year, falsely accused of murder. (A judge eventually dismissed his case for lack of evidence at the request of prosecutors.)
The city of Chicago cut ties with the program last year. In its official statement, city officials said that they would seek instead to ”deploy (city) resources on the most effective strategies and tactics proven to accelerate the current downward trend in violent crime,” and that “doing this work, in consultation with community, violence prevention organizations and law enforcement provides a pathway to a better, stronger, safer Chicago for all.”
The Sacramento Community Police Review Commission issued a recommendation back in March of 2023 to do the same. It was ignored.
“This is an expensive technology found to be statistically ineffective,” Vang wrote. “Our Sacramento Police Review Commission has recommended we terminate the ShotSpotter program year after year. It’s time we honor their recommendation.”
High cost, low value
Data independently gathered by Bliss shows that, from the reports of gunfire directly attributed to ShotSpotter, only 4% resulted in arrests and 8.5% resulted in firearms seized. And, 73% of 6,737 ShotSpotter activations or alerts in Sacramento from June 2015 to May 2022 resulted in no reports.
But the ShotSpotter program is not only costly to contract with and uses unreliable technology, but it is also costly to maintain.
When the program was staffed, the labor cost was estimated to be as high as $2.9 million yearly, according to the city’s Fiscal Year 2021-22 budgeted compensation data. Yet, in the three years from January 2019 to May 2022, the Sacramento Police Department reported seizing only 67 firearms and making 58 arrests.
That amounts to an average cost for Sacramento residents of $22,818 per firearm seized and $26,359 per arrest — not including labor costs.
“Since 2015, ShotSpotter has cost Sacramento taxpayers over $4 million just to maintain,” Bliss said. “As the police budget only partially supports annual maintenance using $315K from Multi-Year Operating Project resources, every year the city must close the $195,000 funding gap using asset forfeitures and one-time grant funding.”
So why is this back on Sacramento’s city council agenda — and in such a sneaky fashion?
The city doesn’t need to do anything here but let this bad program die a quiet death.
This story was originally published July 22, 2025 at 5:00 AM.
