'This is not for Fayetteville': Some unhappy after ShotSpotter's first public session
The first information session for Fayetteville’s new gunshot detection software was met with fiery critiques from residents in attendance Wednesday night, but without an emergency meeting, the city's contract with the company will move forward regardless of any opposition, according to Fayetteville City Council member Mario Benavente.
The session, held at 6 p.m. at Smith Recreation Center on Slater Avenue, was hosted by representatives from ShotSpotter after a Nov. 14 motion by the Fayetteville City Council. The motion required three public information sessions to be held before the council could move forward with ShotSpotter’s tentative one-year contract with the city of Fayetteville and the Fayetteville Police Department for about $200,000.
'Precision policing'
Three ShotSpotter representatives were present at Tuesday’s session, including Ron Teachman, former police chief of South Bend, Indiana, and current director of Public Safety Solutions for ShotSpotter. During ShotSpotter’s 45-minute presentation, Teachman explained how the software works and how it could benefit Fayetteville police.
Teachman began his presentation with an overview of what he believes to be the core problem ShotSpotter aims to solve: inadequate reporting of gun violence in communities. He asked the crowd to imagine someone they care about, like a coworker or family member, waking up to gunfire in their Fayetteville neighborhood and peering through their window.
“What are they hoping to see through the window?” Teachman said. “They’re probably hoping to see the police, but the reality is, they probably won’t.”
Related:ShotSpotter to host three public information sessions in December
Teachman said a ShotSpotter analysis found that in 80% of incidents, people who hear gunshots don’t call 911 to report them. He attributed that issue to four common issues — recognition, redundancy, retaliation and resignation.
Recognition represents instances where people don’t realize they’ve heard a gunshot, while redundancy is the belief that someone else has likely already called 911, Teachman said. Retaliation is the fear that those responsible for the gunshots will find out who talked to the police and seek vengeance, he said. Teachman described resignation as a lack of trust in local police to address the issue and an acceptance of the likelihood of gun violence in the area
He said that underreporting of gun violence continues the cycle of violence, as residents lose faith in the police to keep them safe and are traumatized by the impact on their community, possibly even turning to firearms to protect themselves. Those people will believe police don’t care, he said.
“That goes right to my heart,” he said.
Another problem ShotSpotter was created to solve is the average 911 caller’s inability to pinpoint where gunshots are coming from, Teachman explained. A typical 911 caller is 780 feet, or two football fields, away from a crime scene, he said. This lack of accuracy forces officers to search for crime scenes and can lead them to become victims themselves if they cross paths with a shooter unprepared, according to Teachman.
ShotSpotter has three main goals of detecting, connecting and protecting, Teachman said, adding that the software, known as ShotSpotter Respond, is responsible for determining what happened, when it happened and where it happened. The software does that by using a combination of a heat map analysis and rooftop sensors, the latter of which he compared to cell phone towers.
ShotSpotter will conduct an analysis of crime in Fayetteville and give it to the city of Fayetteville and the Fayetteville Police Department, who will then decide where they want sensors to be placed, Teachman said.
“The coverage area is determined by the customer,” he said.
Teachman described ShotSpotter Respond as working in three different steps. The first step happens when a gunshot occurs, he said. The second step is the detection and location of the gunshot by ShotSpotter Respond. The gunshot registers as an “acoustic event” that hits surrounding sensors at different times that can be measured by ShotSpotter in milliseconds, Teachman explained.
The events are timestamped by the sensors, and computers analyze the time difference between various sensors registering the events in a process Teachman referred to as “triangulation”. A machine filter clears the audio of the majority of noises that don’t resemble gunshots as it is uploaded to the cloud, Teachman said.
The third step is the review and publication of an alert, if necessary, Teachman said. ShotSpotter’s two Incident Review Centers, one in California and one in Washington, D.C., are staffed withtechnicians that Teachman said are trained to recognize the sound of gunshots. Those technicians will listen to the audio recording of the event and look at the “acoustic signature” from the reported gunshot, a graph that will resemble an “inverted Christmas tree” if a true gunshot was recorded, Teachman said. If technicians believe a gunshot was recorded, they will send an alert out to local police and 911 operators.
Only 2% of the 12,851,700 acoustic events detected by Shotspotter in communities across the U.S. resulted in an alert to law enforcement in 2021, Teachman said. ShotSpotter contractually guarantees police will receive alerts within 60 seconds of the software first detecting a gunshot, he added.
When officers get ShotSpotter alerts on the laptops in their patrol cars, the software provides them access to a plethora of information, Teachman said, emphasizing the phrase “cop to the dot." ShotSpotter alerts on patrol units’ computers will feature a “dot” encircling the area where the software believes the gunshot occurred, with a teardrop symbol displaying the number of shots fired. The software can identify multiple shooters, automatic weapons, high-capacity guns and more, Teachman said. Officers will also be able to access maps displaying all ShotSpotter alerts in a given area over the past 24 hours, the past three days and the past week.
Paul John, the director of Community Engagement for ShotSpotter, said ShotSpotter could play a crucial role in preventing gun violence that could traumatize and hurt residents, especially children.
“We can’t just simply police our way out of the public health crisis that is gun violence,” John said.
The data from ShotSpotter’s alerts can be used to help the community by directing resources to the areas most afflicted by gun violence, John said. He highlighted the company’s Youth Safety and Trauma Response, a program that notifies social workers at schools where students may have been exposed to gun violence.
“We’re trying to build and maintain community support,” John said.
Teachman echoed that message in his closing remarks.
“We’re not talking mass incarceration, folks,” he said. “We’re talking precision policing.”
Questions turn into frustration
At least a dozen residents in attendance had the opportunity to submit questions by writing them down on notecards that were given to the ShotSpotter representatives at the end of the information session. The first question addressed was an inquiry about the price, which Teachman said would not be certain until an area of coverage was established. The next question asked about ShotSpotter’s response times.
“We can’t promise the officer is going to respond within a certain amount of time,” Teachman said.
Another card asked about ShotSpotter’s success in other military towns. After Teachman expressed confusion at the question, a member of the crowd clarified gunshots ring out at Fort Bragg every day and asked how ShotSpotter would be able to differentiate that activity from criminal activity. Teachman said a geofence could be established to instruct the software to ignore activity from the Fort Bragg area and rifle ranges.
Whispers and grumbles could be heard coming from the crowd as ShotSpotter representatives began to flip through the question cards without reading them aloud.
Related:Fayetteville City Council votes to move ahead with controversial gunshot detection software
“They’re filtering,” said Fayetteville City Council member Mario Benavente to several members of the crowd. Benavente represents District 3, where the session was held.
Teachman told the crowd ShotSpotter had seen a 99% renewal rate among its customers over the past three years, including in cities like San Francisco and Oakland, which he described as having strict privacy laws.
As complaints about attendees’ questions not being addressed grew, one resident spoke up.
“It just seems one-sided,” said Cynthia Leeks, a resident of District 3. “It seems like you all are a great company, but this is not for Fayetteville.”
Leeks, 60, said she hears gunshots every night in her neighborhood but didn’t feel ShotSpotter was the right way to address the issue. Others in the crowd agreed as Leeks voiced concerns about wrongful arrests because of ShotSpotter and the potential targeting of residents of color by law enforcement in areas covered by the software.
“I cannot believe the city of Fayetteville has a contract with a company like this,” Leeks said. “I don’t want you coming and arresting Ted down the street who doesn’t have a gun but might be a drug addict.”
Teachman said he couldn’t follow Leeks’ logic with her concerns. Leeks explained that she was worried about the potential of an increased police presence in her community that could do more harm than good, citing concerns about her neighbors being arrested for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
“I’m saddened to hear you’re living in a place with gunshots all the time,” he said.
“Don’t be sad,” Leeks interrupted. “I love it.”
Teachman compared the use of ShotSpotter by police to the use of smoke detectors by firefighters, noting that smoke detectors automatically alert the closest fire department of a potential fire. Leeks shook her head at the analogy.
The information session closed with Leeks’ commentary because the room was only booked for an hour, but Benavente told those in attendance to stay behind for a presentation by Campaign Zero, a nonprofit in opposition to ShotSpotter.
Group in opposition gives presentation
Two representatives from Campaign Zero, Abby Magaraci and Robin Mwai, gave a roughly 20-minute presentation on the group’s concerns about ShotSpotter. Mwai said she had flown in from New York on a day’s notice.
“A lot of the facts are inflated,” Magaraci said. “You’re just not being told the whole truth.”
ShotSpotter does not prevent gun violence, Magaraci said, and instead encourages potentially dangerous interactions with law enforcement. Moreover, she added, the software presents major privacy concerns.
“They’re essentially microphones in your neighborhood,” she said.
Related:Controversial ShotSpotter technology, which detects gunshots, is coming to Fayetteville
Magaraci noted that ShotSpotter contracts with clients contain a clause stating the company would not back its technology on July 4 because of noise from fireworks. She also said that in response to a subpoena in Cook County, Illinois, ShotSpotter said it has no official training materials for its audio technicians and requires a minimum of a year of professional experience for job applicants.
“We are really just giving you all the information,” Mwai said.
Mwai and Magaraci also said that the software could even lead to fatal interactions with police, highlighting the case of Adam Toledo, a 13-year-old who was shot and killed by Chicago police in March 2021 after officers encountered him while they were responding to a ShotSpotter alert. Toledo was unarmed, Mwai said.
The Campaign Zero presenters also said ShotSpotter’s assertion that 80% of shootings go unreported was false. The ShotSpotter Respond software assumes every alert is a separate event, Mwai explained, so gunshots nine seconds apart would be represented as two separate shootings, which would skew their data.
Magaraci said she worked as a 911 operator in Denver when the city was using ShotSpotter and, because the software rarely worked, it was referred to by her colleagues as “entertainment."
“It was a costly entertainment,” she said.
ShotSpotter does not share the data from its software and prohibits its clients from sharing that data with the media and outside groups, Magaraci said, a fact that was confirmed by a ShotSpotter vice president in a story by NBC in February.
Benavente said parts of the contract pointed out by Mwai and Magaraci were concerning to him.
“Wouldn’t it be great if we enhanced the boilerplate language of this contract?” Benavente said. “My colleagues, unfortunately, failed to do so.”
Benavente explained to the crowd that the ShotSpotter contract would move ahead after the final public information session was completed on Friday.
“The contract’s essentially already signed,” he said.
The only alternative, Benavente said, would be an emergency City Council meeting, which has to be requested by at least two council members. He said he would be interested in requesting such a meeting, and encouraged those in attendance to contact their elected representatives.
“We’re used to just saying, the police want it, give it to them,” Benavente said.
Benavente said he would prefer to focus on proactive solutions instead of reactionary solutions like ShotSpotter.
“We’re manufacturing probable cause,” he said, referring to ShotSpotter.
Susannah Wagner, 27, who attended the meeting, said she was worried the use of ShotSpotter would give certain parts of Fayetteville a bad reputation.
“I don’t like to see this area be pigeonholed,” she said. “I just want people to celebrate the diversity that Fayetteville has to offer.”
Wagner said she was also concerned about the lack of independent verification of ShotSpotter’s claims.
“ShotSpotter’s information is behind closed doors,” she said. “I am very concerned about the ShotSpotter technology.”
The second information session was Thursday at Kiwanis Recreation Center and the final information session was Friday via Zoom.
Public safety reporter Lexi Solomon can be reached at ABSolomon@gannett.com.
This article originally appeared on The Fayetteville Observer: Fayetteville residents voice concerns at ShotSpotter information session
