"Great addition": APD says ShotSpotter helping with a number of investigations
The short version: KRQE reports Albuquerque PD touting ShotSpotter as a valuable investigative tool, but self-reported wins from police rarely come with independent scrutiny.
Our Take
Whenever a police department calls a surveillance tool a "great addition," that's a press release, not an audit. KRQE's report on APD and ShotSpotter follows a familiar script: officers praise the system, cite vague help with "a number of investigations," and the story moves on without anyone checking arrest rates, false-positive counts, or whether gunfire detection actually reduces crime versus just generating more dispatches and more reasons to stop people in the neighborhoods where these mics get planted.
That pattern matters because ShotSpotter, like Flock's ALPR cameras, is being sold to city councils on faith and anecdote rather than hard outcome data. Other cities, including Chicago, dropped ShotSpotter after audits found it was expensive and ineffective at producing evidence prosecutors could use. Albuquerque residents deserve the same scrutiny before this becomes another permanent fixture of the surveillance stack, sitting alongside license plate readers that are already logging vehicle movements block by block.
Acoustic sensors and camera networks aren't separate stories — they're the same expanding architecture of always-on monitoring, disproportionately deployed in the same communities. Check our map to see what's already watching your streets, and use our take-action guide to push your city council for real transparency before approving the next tool.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of KRQE, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.