Seattle Mayor Harrell’s budget allocates $1 million for a “gunfire detection system” – presumably ShotSpotter, which Harrell’s tried to bring to Seattle for over a decade. As Lauryn Bray’s
* One reason for this is that less than 10% of ShotSpotter reports produce anything prosecutors can potentially use as evidence of crimes. Another reason is that when prosecutors do try to use ShotSpotter as evidence, it’s usually challenged; and since the company fiercely guards its proprietary algorithms, prosecutors wind up having to drop charges – Michael Williams was jailed for a year before prosecutors finally admitted they had insufficient evidence. ** The link above went to an analysis of the study. The study itself, on Edgeworth Analytics site is currently inaccessible. *** One of the ShotSpotter employees at the CPC meeting misleadingly claimed that because ShotSpotter supposedly gives the location of the gunshots, it leads to less intrusive police searches – the exact opposite of what the actual data shows. **** At the CPC meeting, ShotSpotter Director of Community Engagement Dr. Gerard Tate suggested that ShotSpotter data could complement violence interruption programs – but that ignores the reality of budgeting and the $50,000,000. Dr. Tate also talked about sharing ShotSpotter data for social workers … but One in Ten Black Children in America Are Separated From Their Parents by the Child-Welfare System. A New Book Argues That’s No Accident (a discussion of Dorothy Roberts’ book Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families–and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World) or Roberts’ shorter work such as The Reproductive Violence of Family Policing & Separation and Abolish Family Policing, Too, highlights the perils of that approach.
