Detroit weighs ShotSpotter exit as council questions $2.06M extension

The Detroit Police Department wants a 9-month, nearly $2.06 million contract extension with SoundThinking to keep ShotSpotter running while the city finishes evaluating replacement options. The city council committee reviewing that request is not sure that is where the money should go.

DPD's extension proposal was introduced to City Council on May 12 and referred to the Public Health and Safety Standing Committee. All three committee members have expressed skepticism. The extension would hold the existing system in place as the city works through three competing bids that closed March 31. Those bids came from SoundThinking, which operates ShotSpotter; Eagle Protection Agency; and Motorola Solutions.

At a June 1 committee hearing, Council Member Denzel McCampbell pressed the spending logic.

"When we are seeing a contract extension, when we are seeing more revenue or more dollars needed for that, that is the quest that we have to answer: Should that go to something else to help the preventive side?" McCampbell said. He pointed to the city's Community Violence Intervention programs as a competing use of those funds.

ShotSpotter uses acoustic sensors placed outdoors to identify shots fired and relay the location to police. ShotSpotter has been used in Detroit since 2020, with the city's current contract signed in 2022. The request for proposals also called for expanding gunshot detection into two new precincts in downtown and southwest Detroit, regardless of which vendor is chosen.

SoundThinking credits the technology with a 27% reduction in fatal shootings and a 43% reduction in shots fired in the city since the program launched in 2020, based on data through 2022. DPD Chief Todd Bettison said the system produced 256 arrests in 2025 and has been "a key to allowing us to find the evidence and also get guns that are used to shoot off the streets in the city."

The research record is less consistent. A study that analyzed data from the City of Detroit Open Data Portal and a Freedom of Information Act request to DPD found that ShotSpotter deterred gunshot reporting but showed no measurable impact on officer response times, non-fatal shooting rates, or homicide arrest rates. Co-author Divya Ramjee, an assistant professor at Rochester Institute of Technology, said limited city data transparency kept the study from reaching firmer conclusions.

"We know that they are in the community and that they'll alert for a gunshot, but we don't know, 'Is it actually doing anything to help us?'" Ramjee said. "We don't have anything as people in the regular general public to understand if that's going to help us or not."

Privacy concerns run alongside the efficacy debate. Gabrielle Dresner, a policy strategist at the ACLU of Michigan, said targeted sensor deployment tends to compound surveillance pressure in neighborhoods that already see elevated policing. SoundThinking maintains that raw audio that does not result in a confirmed gunshot is automatically deleted within 30 hours.

The committee has not set a vote date on the extension request. The three competing bids remain under city review.