New Durham ShotSpotter dashboard shows technology's impact

Our Take

WRAL's report on Durham's new ShotSpotter dashboard is worth a watch because it shows exactly how surveillance vendors sell their tech to the public: with a dashboard full of numbers, not independent evidence. A city publishing alert counts and response times looks like accountability, but it's data curated by the police department and the vendor benefiting from the contract, not a neutral audit. That's a distinction that matters when the underlying question — does this system make anyone safer, or just put more microphones and more police attention into certain neighborhoods — never gets answered by the numbers on a city website.

We cover ALPR networks like Flock Safety because the pattern is the same: a company sells a surveillance product to a city council with promises of crime reduction, deploys it disproportionately in specific neighborhoods, and then points to self-reported stats as proof of success. ShotSpotter and Flock cameras increasingly show up in the same city budgets, and often the same disadvantaged neighborhoods, building overlapping layers of automated monitoring that residents never voted on directly. A dashboard showing 'alerts responded to' tells you nothing about false positives, wasted patrol hours, or whether the technology is even necessary compared to community-based approaches.

Credit to WRAL for putting a camera on this rollout and asking Durham officials to explain their own numbers — that kind of local reporting is exactly what keeps these programs from operating in the dark. If you want to see what's already watching your own streets, check our camera map, and if you'd rather push back on this stuff before it lands in your city's budget, our take-action page has a place to start.