ShotSpotter Keeps Listening for Gunfire After Contracts Expire

“At this time, there is no contract and there is no plan to move forward with the company,” a spokesperson for the department wrote in an email. San Diego and ShotSpotter entered into an agreement that allows the company to leave its sensors on city property. “However, as of September 2021, the equipment is deactivated, cannot collect any data, and is inoperable.”

But emails the Weekly and WIRED obtained via a California Public Records Act request show that ShotSpotter stayed in touch with SDPD for more than 15 months after the city’s contract expired in September 2021. In those emails, ShotSpotter support staff routinely address SDPD as a “ShotSpotter Customer.”

These weren’t just mass marketing emails that all customers past and present are frequently subjected to. The emails we obtained show that in October 2021, after the contract had lapsed, ShotSpotter also provided an SDPD officer with an “investigative lead summary” about a shooting in San Diego, including the precise location and the number of rounds detected, upon SDPD’s request.

ShotSpotter also sent SDPD emails updating the department about routine scheduled maintenance in October 2022 and how the company planned to address the “extremely high volume of fireworks activities” around New Year’s Day in 2023.

“Despite our efforts, we may occasionally miss a gunshot in error,” wrote Dinh Nguyen, a technical support engineer at ShotSpotter, in a December 2022 email to SDPD. “You may also experience some delays in the publication of incidents.”

ShotSpotter is not on a list of surveillance technologies the SDPD is required to frequently publish as a part of a sweeping surveillance ordinance passed by the San Diego City Council in August 2022 and amended in January of this year.

A San Diego councilmember whose district includes several of the neighborhoods where ShotSpotter sensors were installed in 2016 said that their “office is aware of the ShotSpotter situation” via a spokesperson. In July 2021, the then-District Four councilmember requested the city remove sensors from his district, which helped scuttle the contract renewal.

“A request to remove such [sensors] has been forwarded to the San Diego Police Department and the mayor’s office,” a spokesperson for current District Four councilmember Henry L. Foster III (who was sworn in in April) wrote in an email to the Weekly and WIRED. “Devices that have not been approved in accordance with the Surveillance Ordinance should not be installed and or operational by the City of San Diego or third party.”

San Diego mayor Todd Gloria’s office did not respond to requests for comment.

In 2021, San Diego’s city council pulled a scheduled vote on a four-year extension to ShotSpotter from its agenda, effectively sunsetting the city’s agreement with the company. Although Gloria’s office said in statements at the time that it would bring the extension back up in the city council, there is no indication that it did.

Based on a map of the secret locations of every ShotSpotter sensor in the country published by WIRED, there are still about 30 active sensors in San Diego, most of which are clustered near UC San Diego’s La Jolla campus and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.