Police across the country have misused and altered data from a citywide surveillance system used to detect gunfire that many departments rely on as evidence in court cases, according to a report from Motherboard.
ShotSpotter uses commercial microphones planted in neighborhoods to detect the sound of gunfire and its location to alert police. Recent court filings revealed testimony from the private company’s employees admitting they altered location data at the behest of police departments -- including Chicago Police -- “on a semi-regular basis.”
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Last May, during the George Floyd protests, ShotSpotter technology in Chicago detected a loud noise on South Lake Shore Drive classified as fireworks. An employee accessed the file and “reclassified” it as a gunshot, Motherboard said. Months later, a second analyst changed the location to South Stony Island Drive, where police claimed they last spotted a suspect’s car, the investigative outlet said.
“Through this human-involved method, the ShotSpotter [record] was dramatically transformed from data that did not support criminal charges of any kind to data that now forms the centerpiece of the prosecution’s murder case,” an attorney wrote in a motion filed in court.
ShotSpotter alerts Chicago police to more than 20,000 sound-prompted incidents every year. But instead of defending the altered evidence from ShotSpotter, Chicago prosecutors dropped the case.
More than 100 other cities across the U.S. employ the technology, including St. Louis.
Motherboard concluded ShotSpotter employees regularly alter the technology’s data at the request of law enforcement, claiming the officers are scraping for evidence to support their case narratives.
Critics are calling on an internal review and audit of the system.
“Nobody outside of ShotSpotter has ever been able to look under the hood and audit this technology,” said attorney Jonathan Manes. “We wouldn’t let forensic crime labs use a DNA test that hadn’t been vetted and audited.”
In 2016, Rochester, New York police shot and killed a passenger in a vehicle in the back. Police charged the driver for firing at officers first, citing ShotSpotter evidence. In court, a ShotSpotter employee testified he had been “asked by the Rochester Police Department to essentially search and see if there were more shots fired than ShotSpotter picked up.” A jury eventually acquitted the driver on an attempted murder charge.
An employee testified that he altered files in a separate trial after being contacted by Chicago police, Motherboard said.
“An hour or so after the incident occurred, we were contacted by Chicago PD and asked to search for—essentially, search for additional audio clips,” the employee said according to transcripts Motherboard reviewed, adding it happened “on a semi-regular basis” with all of their customers. The employee changed the data to show five additional gunshots that the microphone sensors had not detected.
The company told Motherboard its 97% accuracy rate -- which has increased over time -- was calculated by its sales department and not its engineers.
Despite its claims, new research suggests the microphone system hasn’t led to any identifiable decrease in gun crimes in any of the cities where it’s deployed. Moreover, ShotSpotter sensors are generally planted in Black and brown neighborhoods and not white areas, despite the equal concern of gun crime.
ShotSpotter “has little deterrent impact on gun-related violent crime in St. Louis” and does “not provide consistent reductions in police response time,” one study said. ShotSpotter disagrees.
Chicago, the second-biggest client after New York City, has spent $33 million on this gunfire-identifying technology. The city will review its contract options and whether to continue the service in August.
Civil rights groups want cities to cancel their contracts with ShotSpotter. In March, a ShotSpotter notification dispatched officers to the Little Village, where they shot and killed an unarmed teenager, 13-year-old Adam Toledo.
“These tools are sending more police into Black and Latinx neighborhoods,” Chicago organizer Alyx Goodwin told Motherboard. “Every ShotSpotter alert is putting Black and Latinx people at risk of interactions with police. That’s what happened to Adam Toledo.”
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