By Erica C. Barnett

Mayor Bruce Harrell announced on Friday afternoon that he has abandoned plans to install acoustic gunshot locators—colloquially known as Shotspotter, for the largest company selling such systems—”[n]ow that more specific cost estimates have been received.” The news, buried in the sixth paragraph of a late-Friday press release, ends more than a decade of efforts to install the recording devices in neighborhoods around Seattle (for now.)

According to a spokesperson for Harrell’s office, the cost to implement the full “Crime Prevention Technology Pilot,” which also includes CCTV camera surveillance and deployment of automatic license detectors on most police cars, was $2.5 million; the gunshot locator system made up about $800,000 of that total.

“In receiving updated cost estimates and aligning more closely to the allocated budget, the implementation package for the first year of the pilot will only include CCTV and RTCC to remain within the authorized budget,” the spokesperson said. Conveniently, nixing the gunshot surveillance system will get the total cost for the pilot down to the amount budgeted for the entire pilot program—around $1.8 million.

The city still plans to install CCTV cameras in three neighborhoods where police already do regular “emphasis patrols” —Aurora Ave. N, Third Avenue downtown, and the Chinatown-International District—and connect them to the city’s “real-time crime center.” Research suggests that while surveillance cameras may reduce crime within direct view of the cameras, that “deterrence effect” is offset by a “displacement effect” when people simply move a short distance away.

PubliCola is supported entirely by readers like you.
CLICK BELOW to become a one-time or monthly contributor.

Support PubliCola

Shotspotter and similar systems, which have been around since the 1990s, are not new or particularly innovative technology. They use microphones, recording devices, GPS, and cell networks to detect and record sounds that resemble gunfire, identify their approximate location, and transmit them to “acoustic experts” who listen to the sounds, filter out false alarms, and alert police. False alarms are common; in Chicago, which recently ended its contract with the company that manufactures Shotspotter, fewer than one out of ever 10 dispatches from Shotspotter alerts produced any evidence of a gun-related crime.

Critics have argued that gunfire detection systems can result in overpolicing in communities of color, put police on high alert whenever they’re in neighborhoods under gunshot surveillance, and waste time and resources on false alarms. Evidence from cities that have deployed Shotspotter and similar systems shows that although they slightly increase police response speeds, faster responses don’t result in more arrests or a reduction in crime.

Harrell has supported acoustic gunshot detectors since at least 2012, when he backed then-mayor Mike McGinn’s plan to install a gunshot detection system, calling it an “effective technology.”