ShotSpotter tech is overwhelmingly inaccurate, NYPD audit shows
The short version: WCCO-CBS Minnesota reports a new NYPD audit found ShotSpotter's gunshot-detection alerts are wrong far more often than the company admits, raising fresh doubts about taxpayer-funded surveillance tech that polices itself.
Our Take
Credit to WCCO - CBS Minnesota for digging into an NYPD audit that punctures the sales pitch behind ShotSpotter. This is the same playbook we see with Flock Safety: a vendor sells cities on a black-box accuracy rate, city officials repeat it as gospel, and nobody outside the company gets to check the math until an inspector general or local journalist forces the issue. When the audit numbers come back this far off, it's not a rounding error — it's a trust problem baked into how these systems get procured in the first place.
ShotSpotter and Flock's ALPR network are cousins in the same surveillance family: both rely on opaque algorithms, both get pitched to city councils as low-risk crime-fighting tools, and both send officers rolling on alerts that may be based on bad data. False positives aren't just embarrassing stats in an audit — they mean police showing up hot to a location based on a false alarm, with real consequences for the people who happen to be standing there. If a city won't independently verify one surveillance vendor's accuracy claims, what makes you think they're verifying Flock's?
This is exactly why we built our camera map — so residents don't have to take a vendor's word for what's watching them. If your city is quietly expanding ALPR or acoustic gunshot detection without public audits, here's how to push back before the next inaccurate system becomes permanent infrastructure.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of WCCO - CBS Minnesota, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.