ShotSpotter sensors may not pick up drive-by shootings in Durham

Our Take

Credit to WRAL for doing the unglamorous work of following up after the sirens stop: they asked why a system Durham pays good money for didn't do the one thing it's supposed to do. ShotSpotter has spent years marketing itself as a life-saving acoustic dragnet, but reports like this keep piling up in cities across the country where it stayed silent during real gunfire. That's not a minor bug — it's the core product failing at the exact moment it matters.

This matters beyond one missed alert. Cities buy these systems as part of a broader surveillance bundle — microphones, gunshot algorithms, and increasingly ALPR camera networks like Flock Safety — all sold on the same pitch: trust us, this makes you safer, just give up a little more data and a little more oversight. When the tech underperforms, the sales pitch doesn't get retired, it gets renewed, often with little public accounting of what actually happened versus what was promised.

Residents deserve real numbers on detection rates, false negatives, and cost, not vendor talking points repeated by city officials. If you want to see what's already been deployed near you, check our camera map, and if you want to push back on unaccountable surveillance contracts in your own city, our take-action page is a good place to start.