In September 2024, the Chicago Police Department (CPD) removed over 2,000 live gunshot alert systems from ShotSpotter (later renamed to SoundThinking). For the first time in six years, no live sound feed was being sent to police stations of presumed gunshots in the area. Chicago is not the only city that has recently severed ties with the company; Houston’s, Seattle’s, and San Antonio’s police departments have made similar shifts after questioning the efficacy and productivity of the technology. Despite widespread disassociation, the New Jersey Department of Law and Public Safety recently approved a $1M grant to begin installing sensors across the state, expanding the gunshot detection system, which has been in use in the state since 2011. The grant was accepted unanimously by the Newark City Council on September 7, 2024.
ShotSpotter, which is still used in over 100 US cities, is placed as a sensing tool in areas with high crime rates. Officers are sent an alert if sensors detect a loud sound, notifying them of the exact location of a presumed gunshot. Over the years, the technology has run into several failures, including not actually identifying gunshots and a larger problem, according to ACLU Wisconsin, of “[entrenching] racially biased policing and surveillance.”
The data proves the same. A report released by Brooklyn Defenders in December 2024, identifying ShotSpotter use for the New York Police Department (NYPD) found that “Black and Latine residents make up two-thirds of the New Yorkers who live in areas surveilled by ShotSpotter.” They add that over the last nine years, the NYPD has wasted $54 million. Because of the placement of alerts, neighborhoods with predominantly “Black residents are 3.5 times more likely to have an officer deployed based on an unconfirmed alert than a neighborhood with predominantly white residents.”
While biased policing can come down to simple civil rights, the technology creates a larger, entirely unnoticed violation of the Fourth Amendment, which protects against unwarranted searches and seizures. For New Jersey, the investment in the sensing tool might also be a violation of the New Jersey Constitution, which adds further seizure protections in Article 1 Paragraph 7 by stating “the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated; and no warrant shall issue except upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched and the papers and things to be seized.”
While Stop and Frisk, the right of an officer to stop and search a “suspicious person,” is constitutionally permitted under Terry v. Ohio (1968), the definition of Stop and Frisk in New Jersey requires a more substantiated reason for “probable cause.” In State v. Nazier D. Goldsmith (2022), the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled that law enforcement officers need more than a hunch and a vague claim they are policing ‘a high crime area’ to stop someone they suspect committed a crime. The Terry case also creates a distinction between a search and a frisk. A search was also deemed an invasive tool that might check inside the pockets of the person for an arm; a frisk can only feel the external contours of a gun.
The hunch of a law enforcement officer makes the location of ShotSpotter audio sensors in already over policed areas subject to additional Stop and Frisk. ShotSpotter is then used as a tool to violate the stipulation that the “initial investigatory stop is lawful.” ShotSpotter does not provide the probable cause necessary for a Stop and Frisk to be in place or what is known as a Terry Stop. Simply being the area of a supposed crime does not need an invasive search or investigation. Stop and Frisk most recently came into controversy in 2011 for the Floyd v. City of New York case, where the Court held the NYPD’s use of stop-and-frisk was a violation of the Fourth Amendment “because it rendered stop and frisks more frequent for Black and Hispanic individuals.” The same basis can be applied to ShotSpotter, which disproportionately affects the same demographics.
A 2021 study conducted by Northwestern University School of Law found that 89 percent of ShotSpotter alerts in Chicago did not end up in police finding a gun-related crime. Not only does it prove to be ineffective in curbing crime, but it also creates a false system of reasonable suspicion for searches of crimes that would have previously gone unnoticed. A leaked prosecutor report by the Illinois State Attorney’s Office showed that almost a third of arrests coming from a ShotSpotter alert had nothing to do with a gun. The logic means that a third of ShotSpotter arrests did not arise from reasonable suspicion. Police officers cannot build a “reasonable suspicion” based on unreliable sensing data, which is not deployed equally in all parts of a city. Officers cannot say, “I know this neighborhood has a lot of crime; we can search it at any moment with technology that we have strategically only placed in this neighborhood.”
An investigation conducted by WIRED, based on leaked ShotSpotter data, showed that nearly 70 percent of people living in an area with a ShotSpotter sensor, as identified in American Census data, are either Black or Latino, and a majority also identified as non-white with an income of less than $50,000. Police departments use “high crime” as a merit for the implementation of a sensor; however, if the only crimes being detected are in censored areas, the crime upticks by association. Arrests made by ShotSpotter are under the suspicion that Black and Latino people will commit crimes, and not under the assumption that a crime has happened in the area. Whether or not a person committed a crime is irrelevant. The reason why they were stopped is.
In Milwaukee, which has used ShotSpotter since 2010, the sensors are present only in the North and South sides of the city, the predominantly Black and Latino neighborhoods; there are no sensors found in majority-white neighborhoods. This predicates that illegal stop-and-frisk would rise, disproportionately targeting Black and Brown people.
ShotSpotter has come under several legal suits over the years for the same probable cause, creating precedent for the same to occur in New Jersey; in the case of Williams v. City of Chicago (2023), ShotSpotter is being sued for “surveillance technology placed in predominantly Black and Hispanic communities in the South and West sides of Chicago.” The case concerns Michael Williams, a 63-year-old man who was wrongly accused of murder based on an unreliable ShotSpotter alert.
These same sensors have led to “multiple instances of wrongful detainment and unfounded charges.” In New Jersey, this means increased chances of violating the Stop and Frisk policies. The technology will also create loopholes to overpolice Black and Brown areas under the label of “high crime areas” and will inevitably create a system in which detainment will rely on pedestrians who happen to be in an area of a ShotSpotter alert in New Jersey.
Supporters of ShotSpotter and its legal framework as a viable solution to identify crime fall short in understanding that the 4th amendment and its violations do not operate in a colorless world. “Deeming race irrelevant in law does not make it so in life,” said Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Onyika Brown Jackson. A colorblind constitution does not exist, and ShotSpotter policing technology creates a Fourth Amendment seizure that is reliant on an officer’s suspicion and can be used in searching and arresting a person. A significant portion of this is based on the understanding that unreliable software should not be considered a probable cause.
Many lower-level courts have proclaimed that it is irrational to consider race questions in the seizure of a person. However, ShotSpotter, a privacy-invading tool that is based on crime and race, which are historically interchangeable because of the same policing systems like in the Floyd case, offers rationality for Courts to consider race in assessing an unconstitutional seizure.
Courts assume that the existence of race in a case of seizure of a person might violate the supposed race neutrality of the law; however, it goes beyond the “we do not see color” notion, given that the law is often created and, more often than not, violated based on color. This means two things for the future of ShotSpotter. In its current form, ShotSpotter prompts police departments in New Jersey to stop and Frisk individuals, often those who are Black or Brown, near the sensor area.
The future could involve placing sensors at every block in a city, ensuring that their alerts are not affected by factors such as race or location — a reality that is not socially, economically, or legally feasible. If not for this ShotSpotter dystopia, solution two means disassociating with sensor technology. Officers already enter neighborhoods that are “high crime;” there is no use for adding a fabricated reason in which police might, and historically have, implicated people not involved with an alert.