surveillance

Should Pittsburgh Continue Funding and Using ShotSpotter?

Posted on November 23, 2025 by Special Reports 0
A ShotSpotter sensor mounted to a telephone pole at Susquehanna and Rosedale streets in Homewood. Photo by Bobbie Fan.

Pittsburgh has spent almost $8.5 million on a gunshot-detection system called ShotSpotter over the past 10 years. The city’s contract with SoundThinking, ShotSpotter’s California-based parent company, is set to expire at the end of 2025.

Supporters claim ShotSpotter allows police to arrive at crime scenes sooner, which leads to more arrests in gun-related crimes and gunshot victims getting help faster. Critics question its effectiveness and raise concerns about mass surveillance in Black neighborhoods and increasing bias in policing.

With Pittsburgh City Council preparing to discuss whether to renew the ShotSpotter contract, we analyzed an August 2025 audit of the system by City Controller Rachael Heisler’s office. Despite the report’s positive tone, a closer look prompted several disturbing questions.

How (and why) is ShotSpotter being compared to 911 emergency services?

Ms. Heisler’s report fails to address whether ShotSpotter has reduced gun violence, instead evaluating the system against 911. The report’s first result is that “ShotSpotter alerts tend to be just as productive as 911 calls.” Considering ShotSpotter’s $1.2 million per year price tag, shouldn’t the results be more solidly favorable compared to a service the city is not paying for?

In Pennsylvania, the 911 system is run by counties and funded with a statewide $1.95 surcharge on monthly phone bills or, for pre-paid phones, at the point of sale.

How often does ShotSpotter cause Pittsburgh police to respond to false alarms?

Ms. Heisler’s report did not include documentation of ShotSpotter’s false alarm rate, but the system has been known to classify fireworks or other loud sounds as gunfire. This increases the likelihood of wasting emergency resources. Pittsburgh’s police scanner logs reveal multiple examples of false alarms from sources including roofing work; gas explosions; and tires, balloons, or plastic soda bottles popping.

Why have 911 calls in Pittsburgh dropped by 50%?

The biggest mystery comes from the report’s assertion that, “Following the deployment of ShotSpotter, 911 calls decreased dramatically, a 50% drop from 2014.” The report does not list decreasing 911 calls as a goal of using ShotSpotter, but it does refer to the decrease as a “result.”

It seems unlikely that the reasons for 911 calls have undergone an equally dramatic decline. So it’s hard to see this finding in a positive light.

One clue lies in the report’s comparison of 911 and ShotSpotter response times. Charts 9 and 10 on page 16 show ShotSpotter significantly outperforming 911 in this area, although ShotSpotter’s response times got longer each year.

A pair of audits released by Ms. Heisler’s office and Allegheny County Controller Corey O’Connor’s office in September pointed out slowing response times for police and emergency medical services. They recommended increased staffing for the county’s 911 call center and improvements to programs that ensure first responders’ well-being.

While Ms. Heisler’s ShotSpotter report suggests the technology is cutting police response times, a study from the University of California Santa Barbara Economics Department concluded that ShotSpotter dispatches take away from the time police have to respond to 911 calls—effectively worsening their response times to calls of distress made by residents.

These are questions that should be answered before Pittsburgh commits to another long and expensive contract for ShotSpotter.

Questionable benefits, documented harms

According to SoundThinking’s website, more than 180 cities have purchased ShotSpotter. While some cities, like Pittsburgh, have stuck with the technology, others canceled their ShotSpotter contracts or chose not to renew them because of cost, a low confirmation of shootings, and a lack of effect on gun violence.

The most pressing concern about ShotSpotter is that it deepens racial bias in policing. In 2024, Chicago ended its relationship with ShotSpotter after years of controversy and high-profile tragedies. In 2021, a 13-year-old boy named Adam Toledo was chased, shot and killed by a Chicago police officer responding to a ShotSpotter alert. A lawsuit filed against the City of Chicago around misuses of ShotSpotter names Danny Ortiz, a 36-year-old father who was arrested and jailed by police who searched him while responding to a ShotSpotter alert.

In Pittsburgh, ShotSpotter has been deployed in every Black neighborhood. As the American Civil Liberties Union pointed out in a 2021 report, this creates a situation where “the police will detect more incidents (real or false) in places where the sensors are located. That can distort gunfire statistics and create a circular statistical justification for over-policing in communities of color.”

The risk of ShotSpotter misclassifying loud sounds is compounded by the risk of the loss of life in police-based violence—to which Pittsburgh is no stranger.

Furthermore, as a for-profit company, SoundThinking has an incentive to collaborate with its law enforcement clients. This creates an environment ripe for other abuses and lack of accountability.

This was the case with 65-year-old Michael Williams, who was wrongfully charged with murder after Chicago police asked a ShotSpotter analyst to move the location of an alert to match the crime scene. Though the charges were dropped, Mr. Williams spent 11 months in jail and contracted COVID-19 twice during that time.

In 2016, Silvon Simmons was shot at by a Rochester, NY, police officer in a case of mistaken identity. The officer claimed that Mr. Simmons shot at him instead. The trial against Mr. Simmons revolved around ShotSpotter alerts as evidence, which ShotSpotter analysts reclassified at the requests of the police department.

In 2020, Pittsburgh repealed its predictive policing following calls by Black activists to end the surveillance of Black people. In passing legislation regulating the use of predictive policing and facial recognition by the police, Mr. O’Connor—who was District 5’s city council representative at the time—spoke to the technology’s role in perpetuating bias.

“We have seen how this hurts people of color and people in low-income areas,” he told Pittsburgh CityPaper. Much of the same argument applies to the ShotSpotter system. But Ms. Heisler’s analysis glosses over these problems.

“The [city] controller’s analysis is the latest example of a city searching for any excuse it can find to retain ShotSpotter rather than invest in community programs that address the root causes of gun violence,” Ed Vogel, a researcher with Lucy Parsons Labs, said on Nov. 15. “This is an insult to every Pittsburgh resident whose life has been impacted by gun violence.”

Pittsburgh has multiple projects aiming to prevent gun violence, and Mayor Ed Gainey’s Plan for Peace includes a commitment to a public health model and community partnerships to accomplish this.

Tell City Council what you think

Pittsburgh’s budget hearings are well under way; the one on public safety happened on Nov. 18. The public will have a chance to comment on the budget again at a Dec. 11 public hearing. As of this writing, no date has been set for the council’s vote on renewing ShotSpotter’s contract.

Marchers Call Out CMU, Pitt for Developing Harmful Technologies

Posted on November 1, 2022 by Special Reports 0
Protesters march down Forbes Avenue at Craig Street. Photo by Ray Gerard

On September 26, Against Carceral Tech held a “Tour of Harm” that wound through the campuses of Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh. About 60 people carried signs and chanted, stopping at sites with ties to research that aids development of technology used for policing and military applications.

ACT organized the march to raise awareness of the relationship between local academic institutions and state violence. Speakers called on the City of Pittsburgh and CMU to ban the use of facial recognition. Some shared their experiences of the universities mistreating students in tech fields.

This technology has the potential to harm communities near Hazelwood Green, where both CMU and Pitt have a growing presence.

Facial recognition is a “perpetual lineup”

In July, CMU drafted a policy that would have allowed the university to use facial recognition during criminal investigations. Civil liberties advocates and researchers have warned that this technology threatens privacy and contributes to mass incarceration.

For example, as Brandi Fisher of Alliance for Police Accountability (APA) shared during her speech: “17 people died in the past 18 months—not years—in Allegheny County Jail.”

The danger does not affect communities equally. According to “Reimagining Public Safety in Pittsburgh and Allegheny County,” a report released by APA, “67% of people currently incarcerated in the Allegheny County Jail are Black despite Black people only making up 13% of the county’s population.”

“We are supposedly a welcoming city, but this technology is not welcoming,” said Laura Perkins of Casa San Jose, an organization that works with the immigrant community. “Facial recognition has much higher levels of inaccuracy with people with darker skin—that is a fact. In Pennsylvania, many immigrants don’t have access to driver’s licenses. When they are targeted by the software, they won’t be able to even prove their identity.”

CMU quickly shelved its facial recognition policy after community pushback. In 2020, Pittsburgh City Council passed legislation that requires city council approval of such technologies before the city acquires or uses them, except in “an emergency situation.” The legislation does not cover JNET, a system with facial recognition capabilities that any Pennsylvania law enforcement agency can use.

Predictive policing targets Pittsburgh communities

Another form of surveillance technology, predictive policing, has a hyperlocal connection. In 2015, CMU’s Metro21 initiative received a $600,000 grant from The Richard King Mellon Foundation, one of Hazelwood Green’s owners. According to the foundation’s annual report that year, the grant funded two Metro21 projects, one of which covered two years of support for a predictive policing model based on CrimeScan. A pilot program using data to identify people at risk of committing or being victimized by crime was ultimately scrapped in Chicago.

Rather than targeting individuals, Pittsburgh’s system uses algorithms to target locations based on large amounts of data that predict high-crime areas. CrimeScan relies on a “broken windows” approach, which holds that small crimes like disorderly conduct or damaging property encourage more serious crimes.

Proponents of the technology, including the city’s former police chief Cameron McLay, say it improves quality of life and removes human biases from the equation. But critics argue it can actually reinforce the biases of its creators. And they point to a lack of accountability for harmful decisions that can be blamed on a computer.

CMU researchers developed Pittsburgh’s CrimeScan program in partnership with Police Chief McLay. In August 2016, they quietly began a pilot in Homewood, then expanded it citywide in May 2017.

If that process does not sound transparent to the public, it wasn’t meant to be. A Memorandum of Understanding between the City of Pittsburgh and CMU (the first such agreement between a city and a university) allowed them to bypass city procurement processes for joint projects. In a 2018 interview, then-Mayor Bill Peduto boasted, “I don’t have to put out an RFP. I can just pick up the phone, call the university, and say, ‘I need your team to develop this for me.’”

State violence begins at home—and it doesn’t end there

In other parts of the world, governments and corporations are moving full steam ahead with surveillance technology. This has human rights watchers and some of the corporations’ own employees sounding an alarm.

Ian Hoppes of No Tech for Apartheid spoke about Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion contract secured by Google and Amazon to provide cloud services to the Israeli government and military. Mr. Hoppes said Project Nimbus allows more surveillance of Palestinians and expansion of Israeli settlements on Palestinian land. Both Google and Amazon have sought contracts with the US. Department of Defense, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and state and local police departments.

“This technology and other forms of oppression will likely come home to roost in the U.S.,” Mr. Hoppes said. But employees and students at affiliated universities fear speaking out because they face retaliation from their institutions.

University students silenced by bureaucracy and poverty

Pat Healy, an information science PhD student at Pitt, said it wasn’t obvious to him when he first started out, but his work “could be purposed for military applications.”

“My funding came with strings—from DARPA,” Mr. Healy said.

Franky Spektor, a CMU graduate student, told the crowd, “CMU is so deeply entrenched in bureaucracy we barely have a voice as it is, so we need to speak up and be loud, and make sure they hear us, before the city and CMU use this technology even more and take away our voices and our rights.”

Ms. Spektor said she knows of students who, while working many hours in their fields, also sell their plasma just to cover their basic needs. Their financial dependence makes it especially hard to challenge questionable university projects or policies and risk losing funding.

Bonnie Fan, a CMU graduate and Against Carceral Tech organizer, emphasized the importance of solidarity to protect both students and broader communities.

“I learned that [CMU] does not care about me or you or any of its workers or students and learned that instead it was my fellow students and community members organizing outside of campus to show up for me and show up for all of us,” Ms. Fan said.

A condensed version of this article originally appeared in The Homepage.

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