A gunfire location and detection system long used by the New York Police Department and other law enforcement agencies nationwide is sending police officers to respond to loud noises that don’t turn out to be confirmed shootings 87 percent of the time, a city audit released Thursday has found. The low rate of confirmed shootings through ShotSpotter means police officers spent thousands of working hours responding to unfounded reports of gunfire, said New York City Comptroller Brad Lander, whose office conducted the audit, the Associated Press reports. “The evidence shows that NYPD is wasting precious time and money on this technology and needs to do a better job managing its resources,” he said in a statement. “Chasing down car backfires and construction noise does not make us safer.”
The NYPD paid the company more than $45 million between 2014 and 2023, according to the comptroller’s office. A three-year renewal reached in 2021 would bring the total contract amount to nearly $55 million when it expires in December. The system utilizes more than 2,000 acoustic sensors to detect gunshot activity citywide. A spokesperson for the NYPD referred to the department’s response, included at the end of the audit. The seven-page reply says, among other things, that the comptroller analysis fails to acknowledge that officers responding to ShotSpotter alerts serve as a form of crime deterrent simply by investigating the scnees and that it's difficult to determine exactly how many ShotSpotter reports result in a “confirmed shooting,” because those are only ones in which shell casings, firearms, property damage, videos, witnesses, victims or other forms of evidence are also identified.
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