Minneapolis City Council considers smaller expansion of ShotSpotter gunshot detection system

Police officials have agreed to limit their expansion plan for ShotSpotter, the technology long used in Minneapolis to pinpoint where guns are fired, as a compromise following concerns by some progressive City Council members who remain skeptical of its efficacy.

Minneapolis police were seeking to increase its nearly 7-mile network of acoustic sensors to broader swaths of the South Side, including the Whittier, Loring Park and LynLake neighborhoods, where violent crime trends have shifted since 2020. Last month, Community Safety Commissioner Todd Barnette and Chief Brian O’Hara asked a City Council committee to renew the contract through March 21, 2027, at a cost of just under $1 million.

“ShotSpotter does save lives,” said Barnette, who compared the popular gunshot detection system to home smoke detectors. The system acts as a first line of defense, he said, by alerting emergency dispatchers within 60 seconds of a microphone’s activation, helping officers reach a critical incident — and any gunshot victims — faster. Often times, police are dispatched to a scene via ShotSpotter before a 911 call comes in.

Yet, ShotSpotter has become controversial in recent years as concerns mounted about potential civil liberties violations involving the surveillance equipment. Critics claim the system is unreliable, does not reduce crime or improve clearance rates, and leads to discriminatory policing of minority residents.

Amid pushback from Council Members Robin Wonsley and Jeremiah Ellison, who said they were uncomfortable extending the contract for another three years without more comprehensive data on the service and its broader impact in Minneapolis, police officials proposed an alternative: limit the contract to a two-year term and scale back the expansion plan from 2 miles to just 0.6 — covering parts of Loring Park and Whittier, which contain some of the city’s worst emergent hot spots.

At least seven homicides have occurred in that radius since 2022.

“I think this is a very data-informed decision,” Council Member Katie Cashman, whose Ward 7 will include some of those new sensors, said during an Administrative and Enterprise and Oversight Committee meeting Monday.

Ellison also praised the more moderate expansion plan that would help the council lean into increased evaluation and oversight sought through an external audit. The city is seeking a third-party academic to study Minneapolis’ use of ShotSpotter and produce a report on its efficacy by March 2026, before the new contract is set to expire.

But Council Member Linea Palmisano lodged a passionate defense of the original plan, pointing to two recent homicides that fell within that expanded geographic coverage area where ShotSpotter could’ve soon been. Not anymore.

“Isn’t this program worth it if it leads to just one person receiving life-saving medical care sooner?” she asked. “It is to me.”

Palmisano moved to forward the original plan to the full council without recommendation, but that motion failed on 2-4 vote. The committee ultimately voted 4 to 2 to sign off on the revised expansion terms, which still requires approval by the full body on Sept. 19.

The price tag to install and operate this narrower expansion of ShotSpotter through spring 2026 would be about $452,000 — less than half of the original proposal. However, if after this amendment, the city chooses to retain that system past 2026, the price per square mile will climb significantly.

A 2019 contract extension with SoundThinking, the Fremont, Calif.-based tech company that developed ShotSpotter, had approved service in Minneapolis until 2027. But a clerical error on city paperwork only recognized the term and funding of that contract through March 21, 2024.

In an interview following the vote, O’Hara said that he was thankful the technology would remain in Minneapolis for at least two more years, particularly when police staffing remains at historic lows and most gunfire metrics still hover above pre-pandemic levels.

He noted that 270 people have been shot in the city this year, roughly 71 more than at this point in 2019. “We’re trying to get back to normal at a time when we don’t have nearly as many cops as we need,” O’Hara said. “So [investing in] something that’s essentially the cost of two officers a year, with benefits, I think is a no-brainer.”

But, he acknowledged, “it’s not meant to be a panacea.”

Triggered by loud percussive sounds, the surveillance network captures audio clearly enough to triangulate the location of gunshots down to the exact block, determine how many rounds were fired and whether there were multiple shooters. ShotSpotter does not, however, purport to reduce overall gun violence.

Yet, a growing body of research questioning the system’s reliability in recent years has intensified scrutiny by activists and academics when those contract renewals came before local government bodies.

Critical reports by Chicago’s Office of Inspector General and the New York City Comptroller accused ShotSpotter of being a resource drain, often sending officers chasing alerts where no evidence of a shooting exists. In New York, the audit found that it also failed to detect more than 200 real incidents of gunfire in 2022 around Manhattan.

In Minneapolis, an examination of 4,100 police responses to ShotSpotter activations throughout 2022 shows about 70% with dispositions indicating police didn’t encounter anything – no victims, shell casings or physical evidence of a shooting – upon arrival, according to a Star Tribune analysis of 911 dispatch data.

Although police officials concede the technology isn’t perfect, they reject allegations that it results in cops chasing false reports. Before implementing ShotSpotter in late 2006, Minneapolis police flooded a given neighborhood with squad cars after a reported shooting to scour for signs of evidence. Today, the tool sends a much more targeted address directly to an app on their phones, so they expend fewer overall resources.

“It’s not a wild-goose chase,” Fourth Precinct Inspector Charlie Adams said during a recent interview. “If we did not have it, it would be a wild-goose chase.”

Jeff Hargarten contributed to this story.