Seattle's ShotSpotter Program Faces Final Hearing Before Council Vote on Installing Controversial Gunfire Detection Tech

by Lauryn Bray

On Feb. 29, Mayor Bruce Harrell will conclude a 24-day public comment period regarding the installation of ShotSpotter, a controversial technology Harrell has endorsed as part of a wider program of electronic surveillance to make up for dwindling numbers of street cops.

ShotSpotter is a police surveillance technology that detects gunshots, according to manufacturer SoundThinking. However, cities across the country that have tried Shotspotter are abandoning it.

This will be the second and final hearing before the newly elected and more politically moderate City Council votes to finalize a plan for implementation. The technology will cost the City about $70,000 per year per square mile to maintain.

The previous City Council narrowly approved using ShotSpotter, which is designed to detect and report gunfire, by a 5-4 vote when an amendment failed that would have diverted ShotSpotter funding to build a Tiny Home Village.

"This technology simply doesn't work," former Councilmember Lisa Herbold said before the vote. "In fact, the research shows that it hurts police response times by repeatedly sending officers to mistaken alerts, pulling them away from doing work elsewhere." The former District 1 councilmember and chair of the council's Public Safety and Human Services Committee was replaced by Councilmember Rob Saka this year.

"Whether or not the obligations under the Surveillance Ordinance are enough to bar implementation of the budget funding, I think, depends on whether the community mobilizes against the technology," said Herbold in an email to the Emerald late last year.

"The Surveillance Ordinance requires a majority vote of the council to approve the technology. Unlike when ShotSpotter came up in the budget deliberations in the fall of 2022, this year's budget deliberations had very few people coming out to testify in opposition," Herbold said. "So, it's really dependent on an effective call to action for the opponents next year, and best if its opponents represent affected communities." The first public hearing was held on Feb. 12 and is available to watch on YouTube.

Herbold previously cited nine cities that have ended their contracts with ShotSpotter: San Antonio, Texas; Fall River, Massachusetts; Portland, Oregon; Atlanta, Georgia; Chicago, Illinois; New Orleans, Louisiana; Dayton, Ohio; Charlotte, North Carolina; and Trenton, New Jersey. Fall River's Chief of Police Paul Gauvin explained his decision to discontinue use of the software, "It's a costly system that isn't working to the effectiveness that we need it to work in order to justify the cost."

When San Antonio decided to end their contract with ShotSpotter, Chief of Police William McManus said, "We made a better-than-good-faith effort trying to make it work," and that instead of renewing the contract with ShotSpotter, "we're going to use that money to provide more community engagement, which ShotSpotter can't provide."

The Washington ACLU raised concern over the potential invasion of privacy and unequal treatment of minority communities.

"It is disappointing that the City is trying to rush ineffective and dangerous gunshot detection technology to Seattle's streets, along with closed-circuit TV and real-time crime center technologies that have the potential to violate privacy and undermine civil liberties," said Shruti "Tee" Sannon, Ph.D., ACLU-WA technology policy program director, on their website. "Such extensive surveillance systems chill free speech, deter free association, fuel racial disparity in policing, and provide a false sense of security at the cost of privacy and race equity."

"Given these risks, it is crucial that communities that are disproportionately impacted by these technologies have their voices and concerns heard. We are deeply concerned that the City has provided less than a month and only two hearings for public comment. We call on the City to slow down and meaningfully engage the public in the surveillance ordinance's mandated review process."

In 2022, Harrell attempted to usher in a ShotSpotter system through his 2023—2024 budget proposal where he planned to carve out increased funding for the Seattle Police Department (SPD) and the implementation of ShotSpotter. However, because of noncompliance with Seattle's Surveillance Ordinance 125679, the proposed budget was amended to exclude ShotSpotter funding until the demands of the ordinance could be met.

In order to comply with the Surveillance Ordinance, a Surveillance Impact Report (SIR) outlining privacy implications must be submitted by a City department. Following this, there must be at least one community meeting led by comments and inquiries submitted to the City Council in response to the SIR. The council must then review and vote on the acquisition and deployment of the surveillance technology. If the council votes to approve the technology, there are to be regular, detailed reports on its use and community equity impact.

So far, a SIR for ShotSpotter, referred to as an acoustic gunshot location system in the report, has been made available on the City's website. There are also SIRs for the real-time crime center and for closed-circuit television camera systems.

Harrell had been working on getting ShotSpotter installed in Seattle for a decade. He sat on Seattle's City Council from 2008 to 2020 before he was elected mayor in 2021 and tried several times to get the city on board with it. An article from KIRO 7 from 2012, when Harrell was chair of the Public Safety Committee, states that Harrell had originally advocated for SPD to test the technology out in a pilot program, but former Deputy Chief of Police Clark Kimerer pushed back against this.

Ralph Clark, CEO of SoundThinking, and Harrell have known each other for over 40 years. In October 2022, the Emerald's Watchdragon reporter Carolyn Bick found that Clark and ShotSpotter's director of customer success Alfred Lewers both donated to Harrell's campaign.

KIRO 7 asked Clark about this to which he responded in a statement: "The donations made to Mayor Harrell's campaign in 2013 and 2014 were of relatively low quantities and simply reflected my personal and genuine support of Bruce as someone I have known over four decades. SoundThinking as a company and myself as a public company CEO since 2017 is not currently funding any of Mayor Harrell's or any other local elected campaign efforts."

The hearing for public comment on the crime prevention technology pilot program will take place Tuesday, Feb. 27, from 6 p.m. to 7 p.m. at the Bitter Lake Community Center. Public comment can also be submitted to the council via an online form as well as by mail to Attn: Surveillance & Privacy Program, Seattle IT, PO Box 94709, Seattle, WA 98124.

Editors' Note: This article was updated on Feb. 23, 2024, to correct the location of the public comment hearing on Tuesday, Feb. 27.

This article was updated on Feb. 27 to correct information about the public comment period.

📸 Featured Image: On Jan. 2, 2024, the winning candidates from November's General Election were sworn in as Seattle City Councilmembers. (Photo: Phil Manzano)