ShotSpotter See and Hear How it works
The short version: SoundThinking's own promo reel sells ShotSpotter's gunshot-detection network as a public safety win, but skips the accuracy disputes and surveillance creep that come with it.
Our Take
Let's be clear about what this is: a marketing video, produced by SoundThinking, the company that sells ShotSpotter. Of course the mayors and police chiefs on camera say nice things — they're customers in a promotional reel, not independent evaluators. That's worth keeping in mind before you take any of it as a neutral explainer on "how it works."
What the video won't tell you is that cities like Chicago, Atlanta, and others have publicly questioned or dropped ShotSpotter over high false-positive rates, inspector general reports finding it rarely leads to evidence of a gun crime, and its role in aggressive stop-and-frisk-style deployments in the same neighborhoods already saturated with cameras and license plate readers. Acoustic sensors don't operate in a vacuum — they're one more data layer feeding the same police tech stacks that include Flock ALPR cameras, tying location data, movement patterns, and now "gunshot" alerts into a single surveillance picture of a community, usually without residents ever voting on it.
DeFlock exists because these systems get sold with slick videos and confident soundbites, while the actual civil liberties trade-offs get buried. If your city is weighing a ShotSpotter or Flock contract, check our map to see what's already been deployed near you, and hit take action to push back before the next system gets rubber-stamped.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of SoundThinking, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.