LAS VEGAS (AP) - Las Vegas police didn’t need to rely on someone dialing 911 to learn of a fatal shooting in front of a hookah lounge in the early hours of Feb. 20.
A gunshot audio detection system called ShotSpotter alerted Metropolitan Police Department dispatchers in less than a minute to the sounds of gunfire in a parking lot on West Flamingo Road. Officers acting on that ShotSpotter alert found a man dead at the scene and later arrested two suspects.
“ShotSpotter allows us to respond quicker and apprehend suspects,” Lt. Bill Steinmetz, supervisor of the police virtual crime fighting center that uses the program, told the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
ShotSpotter technology relies on sensors throughout the Las Vegas area to detect the sounds of possible gunshots. Audio is analyzed by a computer and ShotSpotter employees to discern if the sound was, in fact, gunfire. If it was, dispatchers in Las Vegas are given an address of where the gunshots came from.
Police said the program has been so successful that it was expanded in the Las Vegas Valley by 300% in late 2019. It now covers some 24 square miles (62.2 square kilometers) in Clark County.
But while police say the ShotSpotter accuracy rate was 96% in 2020, some question that figure.
Dave Maass, a visiting professor of media technology at the University of Nevada, Reno said there are also concerns about whether ShotSpotter violates privacy rights.
If an error is made in a ShotSpotter alert, he fears it could escalate confrontations with police unnecessarily.
“When the police get an alert from ShotSpotter, they might actually assume this is a violent situation with an active shooter, so they are going to go in ready to deal with a shooting situation,” Maass said. “If a car backfires … (if) there are fireworks, we are potentially putting people into a life-or-death situation.”
2017 PILOT PROGRAM
Clark County Commission Chairwoman Marilyn Kirkpatrick said ShotSpotter was deployed in 2017 in a 6-square-mile (15.5-square-kilometer) area covering a portion of her district near Nellis Air Force Base.
The pilot program was funded through a $500,000 grant. The coverage area included two Las Vegas police area commands.
Kirkpatrick said the neighborhoods where ShotSpotter was deployed had “fairly high crime with lots of homicides” at the time. She said community policing efforts, combined with technology like ShotSpotter, have made those communities safer.
“I think it has worked out really well for us,” Kirkpatrick said.
Clark County spent $1.7 million on the program in fiscal year 2020 and $1.4 million so far in fiscal year 2021, according to county spokesman Erik Pappa.
Steinmetz said ShotSpotter’s accuracy in Las Vegas police jurisdiction in 2020 was 96%. He believes ShotSpotter also played a role in helping reduce violent crime by 4.5% in the same year.
He provided examples of arrests made for gun crimes that weren’t initially reported to police via 911, including a homicide case and a drive-by shooting in which a woman was grazed by a bullet while holding a baby.
“It not only helps us catch people,” Steinmetz said. “It also helps us identify victims.”
The sensors are installed in locations “identified as persistent hotspots” for crime, the department told the Review-Journal in an email.
“These hotspots are areas plagued with high crime and large numbers of shootings and violence that often goes unreported,” Metro wrote. “The deployment locations are now spread throughout the entire Las Vegas valley (to include a small portion of North Las Vegas) and are located in eight of our 10 area commands.”
Steinmetz said sensor placements “were approved by citizens in the area as well as the location they go on.”
PRIVACY, ACCURACY CONCERNS
At UNR, Maass’ journalism students partner with the nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation to conduct research about the increased use of technology in law enforcement, such as facial recognition, license plate readers, gunshot detection systems, body cameras and drones.
The foundation describes itself as the leading nonprofit “defending civil liberties in the digital world.”
Maass said the public doesn’t have a lot of access to how ShotSpotter’s accuracy rates are determined.
He said a ShotSpotter employee once testified in court that the publicly traded company’s marketing department produced accuracy numbers.
In a news account from Voice of San Diego, it was reported that police there are closely monitoring the accuracy claims of the technology.
The Associated Press reported in February 2019 on a National Institute of Justice field test that found ShotSpotter accurately detected 80% of the shots fired in Bridgeport, Connecticut.
“ShotSpotter seems to have a pretty high error rate, and it might be set off by fireworks, a car backfire,” Maass said. “Who knows what is setting it off because we don’t really have good access to that kind of information.”
Las Vegas police said ShotSpotter does not record people talking, but Maass called it “unclear how much audio is recorded” by monitors “sitting there listening all the time.”
“It has been acknowledged that ShotSpotter does passively listen to voices and hear voices,” Maass said. “It may delete it pretty quickly, but the fact remains this technology can record people.”
Maass said ShotSpotter public marketing material and questions about error rates made him “skeptical of what police are saying about ShotSpotter and what ShotSpotter is saying.”
ShotSpotter spokesman Sam Klepper said the program is being used in roughly 110 cities across the U.S. and in some international locations. He placed system accuracy over the past two years at 97%.
Klepper also said the technology used by the company has improved over the years as technology has improved with it.
“We continually invest in the system to improve detection and location of gunshots,” he said.
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