In the early days, Showen experimented with microphones perched on a baby grand piano in his living room. He hooked the microphones up to a computer loaded with the algorithm he wrote with two co-founders, Robert Calhoun and Jason Dunham. Armed with a clicker device — the handheld kind commonly used by dog trainers—Showen created noise in different areas of his home to test the software.

Soon, Showen moved the tests outdoors, scattering the lawn with balloons. He popped them one by one to simulate the sound of gunfire. It worked. ShotSpotter attracted its first customer, Redwood City—and soon gained four more. 

At the millennium’s close, ShotSpotter held multiple patents on its gunshot detection technology. Bill Gates nominated the company for a major technological innovation award; the Smithsonian added ShotSpotter technology to the museum’s permanent collection. But Showen, more inventor than entrepreneur, struggled to devise a profitable business plan. The company subsisted on fumes, holding on to a handful of contracts with local municipalities. 

Tragedy, then serendipity, propelled ShotSpotter’s success over the next two decades.

Tragedy, then serendipity, propelled ShotSpotter’s success over the next two decades. The tragedy came on a cloudless day in autumn, 2001, when a pair of hijacked planes crashed into the World Trade Center. In the years that followed, the United States constructed a sprawling security apparatus designed to identify and prevent terrorist acts before they occur. Within that apparatus, law enforcement increasingly turned to private corporations to supply high-tech tools like facial recognition software, drones, automated license plate scanners, and data mining systems.

Not long after September 11, Gary Lauder, the billionaire venture capitalist and grandson of cosmetics giant Estee Lauder, remembered a flyer that caught his eye back in 1999. Lauder, a map enthusiast, had visited the U.S. geological survey in Menlo Park, where he came across a bulletin board post about the application of acoustic wave technology to gunshot detection. Intrigued by the idea, Lauder discovered Showen’s work with ShotSpotter. By 2004, he invested $500,000. Over the next twenty years, he invested more than $20 million. 

Venture capital cash helped the company stay afloat, but the effects of the 2008 financial crisis hit hard. The bread and butter of ShotSpotter’s business—municipal governments—were a significant casualty of the recession. Amid declining revenues and state cutbacks to local aid, municipalities questioned the value of an investment in gunshot detection. In need of a new strategy, ShotSpotter started the hunt for a new CEO. 

In 2010, they found Ralph Clark. Clark touted the right pedigree: MBA from Harvard, stints with Merrill and Goldman and IBM. It didn’t hurt that, beyond the accolades, Clark seemed to be a true believer in the ShotSpotter mission. Later, as CEO, he talked about growing up around gun violence in Oakland, California, and his desire to help find a solution. His bio on the company website would describe him as that “rare technology company CEO who is equally committed to shareholder value and making a meaningful societal impact.”

With Clark on board, ShotSpotter had an inventor, an investor, and a CEO. Now it needed to turn a profit.

__________

When ShotSpotter offered Clark the CEO job, he accepted on one condition: the company had to shift to a subscription-based service. Before Clark got involved, ShotSpotter sold its product outright, bundling sensors, software, and data for a cost of around $250,000 per square mile.

But police surveillance technology funding is largely drawn from municipal budgets, and the high upfront costs crowded out smaller and mid-sized cities. Clark thought ShotSpotter could maximize profits by leasing the company’s product, data, and services on an annual subscription fee basis.

The company would retain ownership of its data, including information about the location of the gunfire, the number of shots fired, and audio recordings. The data could then be bundled together and sold to the federal government or research institutions. 

In line with Clark’s vision, ShotSpotter pivoted to the “Netflix” model it markets today. For a price between $65,000 and $90,000 per square mile per year, ShotSpotter installs its acoustic sensors and provides its services, which includes round-the-clock monitoring of gunfire alerts by human analysts at the company’s Incident Review Center.

Though ShotSpotter provides an option to purchase ownership of the data upfront, only a few cities have done so. Instead, municipalities typically lease the data collected by ShotSpotter, losing access only if they cancel their contract. During the contract period, ShotSpotter explicitly prohibits municipalities from sharing detailed data with “outside entities,” including research institutions or other government agencies.

The contract provision prohibiting law enforcement from sharing data with other entities was crucial to Clark’s plan. But there seemed to be one hitch: “crime data” is ostensibly public information that would be subject to public records requests under statutes like the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). If that data became widely available, then ShotSpotter wouldn’t be able to extract value from it. 

ShotSpotter had a solution. Under FOIA and other state transparency statutes, exemptions are commonly made for “trade secrets” or “proprietary information”—usually, information that provides a company with some competitive advantage and isn’t intended for wide dissemination.

Records suggest that ShotSpotter discourages compliance with provisions of open records statutes . . .

Records suggest that ShotSpotter discourages compliance with provisions of open records statutes by citing these trade secrets and proprietary data exemptions. In 2015, the company released a nationwide memo instructing agencies to either decline the request or, alternatively, limit responses to “redacted” data that “would not harm” ShotSpotter’s business. 

Jennifer Doleac, an economics professor who studies gun violence, is one researcher who tried to get ShotSpotter data through public records requests—only to be denied on grounds that the data is a “trade secret.”  When Doleac went directly to Clark to request the data, he told her that it would cost $50,000 per city.

Doleac declined, citing her limited budget as an academic. But she continued to submit public records requests for ShotSpotter data around the country, compiling successful requests on a website for her criminal justice initiative, the Justice Tech Lab. In the spring of 2014, she received a terse letter from Clark: “To put a fine point on the matter, SST’s ShotSpotter information is not crime data,” he wrote.

ShotSpotter has similarly sought to protect its underlying algorithm. Because ShotSpotter’s algorithm has never been independently peer-reviewed, criminal defendants often seek access to the underlying code, which an expert then probes for methodological biases or other flaws.

The tests may be necessary to challenge the reliability of evidence produced by the algorithm or to cross-examine that evidence at trial. In one California case, the defendant, Michael Reed, requested ShotSpotter’s source code to determine if the technology violated local wiretapping laws by secretly recording conversations spoken at normal speech decibels. ShotSpotter refused to comply.

The reason? Trade secrets. 

Legal experts argue that the “trade secrets” claims levied by police technology companies like ShotSpotter pushes the law past its traditional boundaries. “The law is moving from trade secrecy to trade seclusion,” write Charles Grave and Sonia Katyal. This, in turn, allows companies to evade public and judicial scrutiny of the technology they supply to the police. 

Trade secret protections are intended to promote innovation and protect companies against the theft of their intellectual property by business competitors. But criminal defendants are unlikely “market competitors,” and courts can make arrangements to ensure that sensitive information is kept confidential.

Meanwhile, data about patterns of gunfire and police deployment in response to ShotSpotter alerts would, if anything, foster innovation—not stifle it. Through public engagement with that data, the policing tool under scrutiny can be improved or new solutions could be developed.

Clark, naturally, sees it differently. “We don’t want the data to be given away so that other people could derive value from the process,” Clark told the ABA Journal in 2016. That, he said, would be like “taking someone else’s Netflix subscription.”

__________

On April 18, 2017, Kori Ali Muhammad walked up to a Pacific Gas & Electric pickup truck parked on a city block in North Fresno, California, and shot the employee sitting in the passenger seat. Over the next minute or so, Muhammad ran through the streets with a .357-caliber revolver, firing 16 more shots and killing three people.

The Fresno police credited ShotSpotter with their quick response. “He was in custody within 4 minutes and 13 seconds,” said Police Chief Jerry Dyer. At a press conference, Dyer played audio clips recorded by ShotSpotter during the shooting. “Kori Muhammad would be outstanding today if it wasn’t for shots-fired detection,” he told the media. “Gunfire Sensors Credited with Quick Arrest in Fresno Rampage,” blared a headline from the Associated Press the next day. 

The Fresno shooting underscored the success of Clark’s subscription-based model: only a few years before, the upfront costs of the technology would have been too expensive for a mid-sized city like Fresno. In the six years since Clark’s arrival, the company’s reach had expanded from a few dozen cities to more than ninety, and an initial public offering lurked on the horizon. 

But ShotSpotter’s claims also faced increased scrutiny. Then, as now, scant research supported ShotSpotter’s accuracy claims or its purported deterrent effects—in part because the company keeps such a tight lid on its data. A few media outlets began to conduct their own analyses, but none cast ShotSpotter in a positive light.

Then, as now, scant research supported ShotSpotter’s accuracy claims or its purported deterrent effects—in part because the company keeps such a tight lid on its data.

A podcast for the Center for Investigative Reporting reviewed 3,000 alerts over a two-and-a-half-year period in San Francisco, finding that 20% of those alerts sent police to the wrong location, while two-thirds resulted in no evidence of a shooting. Meanwhile, a 2016 report by Forbes analyzed ShotSpotter metadata across seven cities, concluding that police were unable to find evidence of gunfire 30%-70% of the time. 

In the face of growing criticism, anecdotal “success stories,” like the one on display at the Fresno press conference, were a marketing boon. According to Guariglia, this is part and parcel of a larger trend in surveillance technology: “Police are becoming both customers and marketers for a lot of surveillance equipment right now,” he said.  

One example of this broader phenomenon involves Ring, the Amazon-owned home surveillance company. In 2019, Vice revealed the details of an agreement between Ring and a police department in Florida.

According to the agreement, Ring required the department to assign officers to dedicated Ring positions, including press coordinator and community relations manager. Ring also established a program to encourage police promotion of its app, Neighbors, in exchange for credits toward free Ring cameras for residents.

The hyper-localized nature of policing makes this strategy particularly effective. While city councils typically allocate the budget, police departments retain significant influence over how to use the money—and public officials are often hesitant to second-guess those decisions.

And, aside from a handful of large cities, most police departments lack the expertise or infrastructure needed to systematically review their own data and evaluate the impact of a given technology on public safety. 

Police, traditionally revered as “experts,” in fact know very little about the technology they use today. Instead, they tend to trust private companies to tell them how a product works. And, like most consumers, they often rely on peer recommendations and positive word-of-mouth to make buying decisions. This puts corporations like ShotSpotter in a powerful position to influence buying based on strategic relationships with law enforcement. 

ShotSpotter has leveraged that advantage by cultivating a “revolving door” of former law enforcement and government types within its ranks.

Consider one prominent example: In 2013, Clark recruited David Chipman, a former senior agent at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (BATFE), to join the ShotSpotter sales team. After Chipman left the company, in 2016, he told Forbes: “I felt like I contributed what I could, which was help bring the technology to a level of legitimacy within law enforcement.” 

Last spring, President Biden nominated Chipman to head BATFE. A few months later, the President cajoled local officials to use American Rescue Plan funds to buy gunshot detection technology, “to better see and stop gun violence in their communities.”  

Other current and former ShotSpotter employees are “retired command staff” or ex-police chiefs. William Bratton, former Commissioner of the New York City Police Department and perhaps the most famous police officer in America, serves on  ShotSpotter’s board of directors.

More recently, ShotSpotter opened a satellite office in Washington, D.C. The new office, Clark told analysts, would allow the company to be “closer to national law enforcement opinion leaders and decision makers.”  

At times, ShotSpotter’s relationship with law enforcement has appeared questionably close.

At times, ShotSpotter’s relationship with law enforcement has appeared questionably close. According to emails obtained by Forbes, ShotSpotter has worked with longtime customers like East Palo Alto to generate positive media attention, staging press conferences or publishing studies that show a decrease in crime.

The partnership provided a mutual benefit: East Palo Alto recommended ShotSpotter’s product, and ShotSpotter gave East Palo alto a discount on its subscription. 

These relationships and arrangements, Guariglia told me, make it difficult to gauge the usefulness of police technology products. “When police are touting a piece of technology, it’s often unclear if they believe it will do anything or if they have a relationship with the company in which everyone benefits from them touting that piece of technology,” he said. 

Even if there’s no direct quid quo pro, police and local officials may end up serving the profit goals of surveillance tech corporations because their interests align in other ways.

ShotSpotter has leveraged the prospect of federal grant money and other funding sources as a way for local police and politicians to afford the product without draining local budget coffers. According to a report by NBC News, the company offered, in at least three instances, to prepare a police department’s federal grant application for gunshot detection technology. 

The prospect of federal funds allows local officials to “throw money” at technology that can spin a positive narrative about their efforts to reduce gun violence, Guariglia said. “Police departments are very eager to be proactive. They want to show that they’re doing something,” he told me.  “The absolute easiest thing they can do is throw money at technology and tout that as what they’re doing as a new initiative to make people feel safer.”

“The absolute easiest thing they can do is throw money at technology and tout that as what they’re doing as a new initiative to make people feel safer.”

Tragedies create problems, technology can solve them. That seemed to be the story ShotSpotter was telling—and Wall Street was ready to buy. On June 7, 2017, barely two months after the Fresno press conference, ShotSpotter commenced trading for an initial public offering.

From there, the momentum kept rolling. At the end of 2020, a Trump law enforcement commission encouraged increased funds for gunshot detection systems like ShotSpotter. By 2021, the company’s share price had more than doubled its initial offering. 

After more than two decades, ShotSpotter’s profile was finally on the rise. Back in Chicago, Alyx Goodwin was taking notice. 

__________

On a humid day near the end of July, 2021, the Stop ShotSpotter campaign returned to the site where police fatally shot Toledo in Little Village. The roughly seventy protestors at the event carried signs calling for the city to end the contract. Goodwin, clad in black shorts and a lemon-yellow “Defund the Police” shirt, carried a megaphone under her arm as she spoke to the crowd. “People want jobs, they want trauma-informed health care, quality public schools. While ignoring these needs, the city chooses to invest in police surveillance,” she said.

Two months before the protest, in May, the release of a damning report about ShotSpotter deployments in Chicago energized the campaign.

The study, released by the MacArthur Justice Center, used data provided by the City of Chicago to examine police deployments triggered by ShotSpotter alerts over a 21-month period. The analysis found that 89% of ShotSpotter deployments resulted in no evidence of a gun related-crime, while 86% turned up no report of any crime at all. In total, the report said, ShotSpotter alerts led to more than 40,000 dead-end deployments in under two years. 

ShotSpotter pushed back. The company hired a data analytics firm, Edgeworth, to debunk the claims made in the report. Edgeworth quibbled with the data set used in the MacArthur Center report, which included records of the initial police response to an alert, but not subsequent investigations after officers cleared the scene. “The lack of physical evidence of a gunfire event, such as a victim, shell casings, or bullet holes, does not mean a gunfire event didn’t take place,” ShotSpotter wrote in a statement to Vice. 

The company also doubled-down on claims that its technology is 97% accurate, touting a separate audit it commissioned, also by Edgeworth. While Edgeworth validated the accuracy rate, it used the same questionable methodology employed by ShotSpotter to arrive at the number. Under that approach, ShotSpotter calculates its accuracy rate based on customer feedback. “Obviously, there is not a 97% accuracy rate,” Goodwin told me.  “That accuracy rate is simply because Chicago PD is not reporting back to ShotSpotter that it is wrong.” 

Tragedies create problems, technology can solve them. That seemed to be the story ShotSpotter was telling—and Wall Street was ready to buy.

Critics also point to another problem: the formula only deems an alert a “false positive” if law enforcement can confirm the sound was something else—by, for example, seeing fireworks at the scene. That leaves out the significant number of alerts that do not result in evidence of gunfire and the origin cannot otherwise be identified. 

Three days before the protest in Little Village, Vice magazine reported on ShotSpotter analysts amending reports at the request of police departments. In one instance, in Rochester, New York, a police officer searching for a suspicious vehicle approached the wrong car in a residential driveway. As the officer pointed his spotlight toward the vehicle, Silvon Simmons—blinded by the light and unaware the person approaching him was a cop—ran toward his neighbor’s backyard. The officer chased him, firing four shots. Three hit Simmonds. The officer said that Simmonds fired first, but he denied the claim. Police found no physical evidence of a shot fired by Simmons, but they charged Simmons with several criminal offenses related to the encounter. 

The key evidence against Simmons came from ShotSpotter. Initially, ShotSpotter sensors in Rochester classified the gunfire as helicopter noise. Then, at the request of the police department, ShotSpotter reclassified the sounds to three gunshots. After another request from the department, ShotSpotter bumped the number up to four. But if Simmons fired first, as the officer claimed, wouldn’t there be five shots total? For the third time, Rochester police requested a reanalysis. Once again, ShotSpotter found a fifth shot.

Meanwhile, Simmons’ public defender, Elizabeth Riley, requested records of original audio files and other documents from ShotSpotter. According to court documents, ShotSpotter indicated that it would charge $600.00 an hour for record production and $5250 for a “forensic report”—costs that went well beyond the budget of the Monroe County public defender’s office. 

Vice’s reporting renewed criticism of ShotSpotter and increased visibility of the campaign in Chicago, which Vice called the “battleground” over ShotSpotter’s use. Three days later, at the rally in Little Village, Goodwin felt energized. The ShotSpotter contract was set to expire on August 19, leaving roughly three weeks until the deadline. 

But the campaign needed the support of the city council members, who had the power to “cancel the contract” by refusing to appropriate new funds during the local budget cycle.  After gathering for the press conference near the site where Toledo was shot, the group began to walk toward the office of Alderman Mike Rodriguez, where they planned to urge his support for the campaign. They marched together under the hot sun, carrying signs that read “#CanceltheContract”. If Chicago was the battleground against ShotSpotter, then this marked the eve of war. 

__________

About a week later, Goodwin was sitting on her bed at home when she received an email from a local journalist: “Have you seen this?” Only two days before, Goodwin had gone on a podcast to talk about the ShotSpotter campaign ahead of the August 19, 2021 deadline.  Now, as she opened the email from the podcast’s producer, she stared in surprise. The contract was extended to 2023, the producer wrote.

Goodwin started sending the updated contract information out to her network: people in the campaign, city council members, local news journalists.  No one knew why or how the contract extended for another two years.  “That became a small story within itself—within the larger story about ShotSpotter—that these deals happened behind closed doors and that nobody had any answers all the sudden. Just a real lack of transparency about police funding in the city,” she said.

Goodwin later found out that the contract had been quietly renewed by the Office of Public Safety Administration in December—without any public input. The Public Safety Administration said that it renewed the contract because ShotSpotter fulfilled the requirements. The three metrics required ShotSpotter to provide a precise gunshot location, notify police within sixty seconds, and be up and running 99.99% of the time. None of the requirements measured impact on the community or public safety. 

When the campaign started, the activists thought it would be a quick, hard-run fight up to the August 19, 2021 deadline.  Now they faced a potential two year waiting period, and an inevitable loss of momentum.

Now they faced a potential two year waiting period, and an inevitable loss of momentum.

But it was budget season in Chicago, and the organizers knew that the contract could be canceled if the city council refused to appropriate funding for it.  “We felt like we still had opportunities to cut the funding from the budget process,” she told me. 

The campaign pushed for a joint committee hearing on ShotSpotter between the Public Safety Committee and Budget Committee before the 2022 budget approval.  The joint hearing would allow the organizers to make their case against a ShotSpotter appropriation before the entire council voted on the budget that fall.   

It never happened—at least, not before the budget vote. “The committee chairs for budget and public safety just put it off, put it off, put it off. Never held the hearing we needed to happen before the budget,” said Goodwin.  Instead, the Public Safety Chair—Chris Taliaferro, a former Chicago police sergeant—scheduled a hearing on all technologies used by the police. 

Goodwin told me that Taliaferro initially scheduled a date for the hearing, but then cancelled it at the last minute—because he wanted ShotSpotter to be able to come and testify. After that, the organizers didn’t hear anything for two more weeks. 

When the hearing date was rescheduled, Taliaferro notified the organizers only two days ahead of time.  “Obviously I can’t put this accusation on him, but it sure felt like he was feeding us bad information about when the hearing was going to be scheduled,” Goodwin said. 

The hearing, Goodwin said, lasted more than three hours and exclusively involved debate on ShotSpotter.  Ralph Clark showed up to testify, and Goodwin said that city council people peppered ShotSpotter with “tough questions” about the technology.

Clark, for his part, did little to change Goodwin’s mind. “He makes a million dollars a year. Which is wild to me, considering the neighborhoods ShotSpotter is deployed in,” she said. “There are ShotSpotters all through our neighborhoods. We are never going to see a million dollars. Yet, Ralph Clark is making a money off places he’s never even been to.”

“There are ShotSpotters all through our neighborhoods. We are never going to see a million dollars. Yet, Ralph Clark is making a money off places he’s never even been to.”

By the time of the hearing, the 2022 city budget had already passed—with the ShotSpotter funding in it. The organizers would have to wait until the next year to challenge ShotSpotter’s use in Chicago.  But, in the aftermath of the hearing, Goodwin felt positive about where things might be headed next. “You don’t have a three-and-a-half hour hearing on something that works very well, you know?”  

__________

If ShotSpotter doesn’t work that well, why do police and local government officials all over the country keep lining up to use it? Oddly enough, the answer might begin with Lewis F. Powell, Jr., the former big-tobacco lawyer turned Associate Justice of the Supreme Court. 

In 1971, Powell, then just two months shy of a Supreme Court nomination, penned a secret memo to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce titled “Attack on American Free Enterprise System.”  The decade before, anti-war protestors pointed their anger toward defense contractors like Honeywell, an energy conglomerate that manufactured cluster bombs for the Pentagon. Ralph Nader, then a veritable progressive celebrity, led the crusade for consumer protection reforms. In response, Congress went on a regulatory spree. Anti-capitalist forces were waging war on corporate America—and they were winning. 

Powell galvanized American businessmen to stage a counterattack. The greatest threats to corporate America, he argued, were not fringe activists on the left, but, instead, “respectable elements of society”—media, politicians, intellectuals, scientists, universities. To win the war, he wrote, businesses needed to launch a long-term campaign to influence not only policymaking, but also public opinion. 

Powell’s memo has been described as a “blueprint for corporate domination.” It might as well be called a prophecy. In subsequent decades, corporations in the United States pumped money and lobbyists into every nook and cranny of American life. They killed labor movements, rolled back taxes, convinced everyone that regulation is bad, launched hundreds of think tanks, and kept their friends close but their politicians closer.

Today, the result is a deep, pervasive form of what social scientists call “regulatory capture”: the phenomenon by which regulators, charged with protecting the public interest, instead cater to the very industries they regulate. These industries leverage titanic sums of money and political power as they seek to influence every detail of regulation, politics, culture, and thought itself. 

ShotSpotter isn’t Amazon or Facebook; Ralph Clark isn’t Elon Musk or Peter Thiel. But corporations today don’t need billions to benefit from the legacy and tools of regulatory capture. ShotSpotter has done it by leveraging relationships with law enforcement, enticing local officials with promises of federal cash, and shrouding its technology in secrecy under the guise of trade secrets.

All the while, it has capitalized on the narrative that police need the innovative technology of the private sector to combat the complexity of modern crime—even as policed communities in places like Chicago call for alternative solutions. 

When I spoke to Guariglia, we talked about another area of influence that ShotSpotter has tapped into: think tanks and academia. Academic research institutions have policymaking authority because they are viewed as independent, neutral institutions. But academic research requires money — money that corporations are willing to provide.

That money can come at a cost, however, as corporate interests increasingly push for research agendas that promote their values or desired policy outcomes. “They fund research that they think will benefit their sales and justify — morally, legally, ethically—the creation and consumption of their technology,” Guariglia told me.  

“They fund research that they think will benefit their sales and justify — morally, legally, ethically—the creation and consumption of their technology.”

Earlier this year, ShotSpotter provided initial funding for the Public Safety Research Center (PSRC), a new academic research institute at the University of Cincinnati. William Bratton, the former New York Police commissioner and member of ShotSpotter board of directors, also sits on the advisory board of the PSRC.

The first paper produced by the PSRC was a White Paper titled “Precision Policing 2.0: A Framework for the Future of Policing” and co-authored by Bratton. Coincidentally, “precision policing”—an increasingly popular slogan that involves data analysis and community policing techniques—forms the basis of ShotSpotter’s company “policing philosophy.”

“Especially in an era where everyone is so eager to find solutions for crime, there is going to be huge, inflated checks going around—to find legitimacy for certain technologies,” Guariglia explained. “So, it’s not a surprise that ShotSpotter, having had the year they’ve had, is now looking for academic legitimacy to justify their tech.”

On the other end of the spectrum, ShotSpotter has sought to delegitimize their most outspoken critic: the media. In October, ShotSpotter filed suit against Vice Media in Delaware Superior Court, seeking $300 million in damages. The suit revolves around Vice’s claims that an analyst changed the location of a shot at the request of the police.

Critics of ShotSpotter have argued that the suit is what some lawyers call a “Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation,” or “SLAPP.” SLAPP suits are filed against organizations or media outlets that speak out against a company’s interests—usually, to intimidate those who might speak out in the future. 

Alyx Goodwin isn’t intimidated. 

Since the budget fight last year, Goodwin and her coalition have been working to launch a national campaign against ShotSpotter with organizers in other cities, including Houston, New York, and Louisville. “That’s what we’ve been doing since the hearing. Trying to build out with other cities and build a national campaign that has a local strategy, a federal strategy, and corporate strategy,” she told me. 

While the coalition’s national campaign plans are still in development, Goodwin told me that part of the corporate strategy will likely include investor education action. “The idea is that we want to do some investor education around the issue of not only ShotSpotter but gunshot detection technology,” she said. “Because it is a risky investment, especially knowing that the technology does not work or yield the kind of results that communities are looking for. We need analysts and industry folks to know that.” she told me.  

ShotSpotter continues to deploy officers in twelve police districts in Chicago—the districts where Goodwin and members of the campaign live. But Goodwin knows that you can lose the battle and win the war. For now, she’s looking on the bright side: “We made enough noise to make them have to come to Chicago.”

From The [F]law:

• Tala Alfoqaha, Marketplace of Violence: Bidding for Brutality Among Minnesota’s Police.

From The Systemic Justice Journal:

• Sasha Peters, Surveillance Capitalism: How Targeted Ads Solidify the Gender Binary.
• Isabel Patkowski, The Wrong Hands: How the Firearms Industry Captured the Gun Control Movement.