BROOKLYN, NY – Brooklyn Defender Services (BDS) in an 18-page December 2024 report, notes ShotSpotter technology has failed to reduce gun violence and actually increased surveillance and policing of Black and Hispanic communities here.
The Brooklyn Defender Services reports, “Since 2015, New York City has spent over $54 million on ShotSpotter, a surveillance technology that is claimed to improve the identification of gunfire incidents through the use of an array of microphones and sensors located throughout the city.
“Our analysis of nine years of previously undisclosed data reveals this expensive technology is unreliable and fails to make New Yorkers safer.”
Brooklyn Defender Services notes, “When the NYPD investigated a ShotSpotter alert over a nine year span, over 83 percent of the time they found nothing to confirm that gunfire occurred. This means that NYC spent over $45 million of the ShotSpotter contract on alerts that result in nothing. Less than one percent of the ShotSpotter alerts led to a firearm being recovered.”
Brooklyn Defender Services added, “ShotSpotter alerts deploy officers to NYC neighborhoods over 22 times a day” where “Black and Latine New Yorkers bear the overwhelming brunt of ShotSpotter-related police deployments.”
The group added two-thirds of “New Yorkers who live in areas are surveilled by ShotSpotter” although “Black residents in the city live in the same police precinct as 93 percent more unconfirmed alerts than the citywide average.”
Brooklyn Defender Services reports these technologies “are marketed as simple ways to increase NYPD efficiency” but “ fundamentally alter the landscape of policing and surveillance, disproportionately burdening communities that are already facing the brunt of police interaction and violence.”
Brooklyn Defender Services concluded because of “the tool’s lack of reliability and high cost, it is clear that NYC should not renew its contract for this technology.”
Instead, BDS insists “the city should use this investment on efforts that actually make our communities safer: education, health, poverty reduction, cure-violence and community-based programs, and other resources.”
