Detroit weighs ShotSpotter exit as council questions $2.06M extension

The Detroit Police Department wants a nine-month, roughly $2.06 million extension with California-based SoundThinking to keep ShotSpotter running while the city finishes evaluating replacements. The current contract, signed in 2022 and worth $7 million, expires June 30. The council committee reviewing the request is not convinced the money belongs there.

The extension came to City Council on May 12 and was referred to the Public Health and Safety Standing Committee, where all three members have raised concerns. It would hold the existing system in place while the city works through three bids that closed March 31, from SoundThinking (which operates ShotSpotter), Eagle Protection Agency, and Motorola Solutions. The request for proposals also seeks to expand gunshot detection into downtown and southwest Detroit, regardless of vendor.

Council Member Denzel McCampbell pressed the spending logic at a committee hearing.

"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, pointing to community violence intervention work as a competing use.

ShotSpotter uses outdoor acoustic sensors to flag shots fired and relay a location to police. The system has run in Detroit since 2020 and now covers more than 23 square miles. Police Chief Todd Bettison has defended it firmly. "ShotSpotter tells the truth. ShotSpotter notifies us where the scene is. It helps us close cases," he told council. He said the technology led to 256 arrests last year, though he cited 78 arrests at a separate May meeting. Bettison also argued the alerts save lives in cases where no one calls 911, with officers arriving to render aid.

The research record is thinner. A study by Tian An Wong of the University of Michigan-Dearborn and Divya Ramjee of the Rochester Institute of Technology analyzed Detroit's Open Data Portal and DPD records obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests. In the first deployment, 911 gunshot calls dropped 47 percent before returning to prior levels within about a year. Of 5,853 alerts in that period, two led to an arrest and 798 led to a recovered firearm. The authors found no difference in officer response times and noted DPD has not released data on the technology's effectiveness during its early years.

The committee has not set a vote. The three competing bids remain under review.