Gunshot Detection "Shot Spotter" - GOOD Magazine

Our Take

Credit to GOOD Magazine (producer Eve Marson, editor Jeff Conrad) for getting boots-on-the-ground footage of Richmond's acoustic sensor network back when this tech was still being introduced as a straightforward crime-fighting win. The pitch is simple: microphones triangulate gunfire, dispatchers get instant coordinates, cops arrive faster. What the segment doesn't get into is everything that's come out since — independent audits in multiple cities finding ShotSpotter (now SoundThinking) generates a high rate of false positives, sends officers into neighborhoods primed for high-alert encounters based on noises that turn out to be fireworks or backfire, and rarely produces evidence that holds up when actually challenged in court.

This matters because acoustic sensors don't operate in a vacuum. Cities that install ShotSpotter are usually the same cities layering in Flock Safety ALPR cameras, license-plate cross-referencing, and predictive-style dispatch — building an always-listening, always-watching grid with almost no public vote on whether residents actually want it. A microphone that can't tell a shooting from a firecracker but still triggers an armed response is a public-safety tool with a serious asterisk, and yet these systems keep expanding on vendor promises rather than independent evidence.

If you want to see whether your city has gone all-in on this kind of infrastructure, check our camera map for Flock deployments near you, and if you'd rather push back than just watch it happen, our take-action page has steps for raising this at your next city council meeting.