ShotSpotter fires back at Winston-Salem plan to drop service (2024)

ShotSpotter is mounting an intense lobbying effort to persuade Winston-Salem’s city leaders to keep the service going following an early-August announcement by the Winston-Salem Police Department that ShotSpotter would end here when its contract with the company that provides the service expires in September.

SoundThinking Inc., the company behind the gunfire-detection system, said it is sending letters to Mayor Allen Joines, city council members and other city officials in which Ralph A. Clark, the company’s president, argues that an independent study showed ShotSpotter “saves lives, helps deter violence, helps solve crimes and saves cities money.”

Besides the mayor, the letter’s recipients include City Manager Pat Pate, Police Chief William Penn and all eight members of the Winston-Salem City Council.

ShotSpotter is an acoustic gunshot-detection system that relies on sensors to detect the location of gunfire. After the automatic system picks up a likely sound, ShotSpotter personnel review the information for accuracy, and if determined to be gunfire, relay the information to police.

The system has come under fire — so to speak — from groups like Hate Out of Winston who object to the placement of the systems in Black neighborhoods.

In Winston-Salem, ShotSpotter covers a three-square-mile area that’s northeast of downtown, to the south of Smith Reynolds Airport and intersected by U.S. 52. It’s a majority-Black neighborhood chosen by the city because of the high incidence of gunfire violence in the area.

But in dropping the program, city police have focused on the exhaustion of the grant funds that paid for three years of ShotSpotter, as well as the comparatively small size of the coverage area.

“The program is very helpful and workable, but it only dealt with a small portion of the city,” the mayor said. To expand the program, Joines said, it would require a big expense that the city budget just can’t handle.

ShotSpotter cost the city $625,000 to operate over a three-year period, but all that money came from a 2019 grant that paid out for the program over three years. Joines said that when the police department submitted its budget request leading up to the passage of the 2024-25 budget, money for ShotSpotter wasn’t on the list.

“I talked to police about it quite a bit,” Joines said. “It came down to a matter of economics. We will continue to utilize our Real Time Crime Center, get those cameras tied in it.”

The city’s Real Time Crime Center uses independently-owned camera feeds from businesses and the like that are shared with the police department to help police keep an extra set of eyes on the street. The system also lets businesses and individuals share their camera locations with police, so that if needed for a crime investigation, police can look at what the camera has captured.

The city manager said that the police department budget for the coming year includes $225,000 for a pilot program to send out drones in police response. Pate called the drone concept one that is “moving around many areas of the country.”

The Forsyth County Sheriff’s Office also has such a program.

Pate said the concerns raised by groups like Hate Out of Winston around the presence of ShotSpotter in Black neighborhoods played no role in the city’s decision.

“The police department wants to provide solutions for as many people as they can, and this program was impacting only a small area,” Pate said.

SoundThinking is stressing the results of an independent study of the city’s ShotSpotter technology that was carried out by researchers at the Center for Crime Science and Violence Prevention at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville in 2024. That study said police response times were “substantially faster” in the ShotSpotter area, and that area had a significant reduction in firearm crime and aggravated assaults since the system was put in.

SoundThinking’s letter to city officials also includes a transcript and link to a video on YouTube in which a Winston-Salem police officer recounts an incident in which he was able to quickly locate a shooting victim and start medical help that the victim wouldn’t have gotten in time had police not had the kind of specific information that ShotSpotter provided.

The company is also citing a shooting incident on May 31, 2023, in which ShotSpotter led police to find a 7-year-old child critically injured from a shooting, and were thus able to get the child taken quickly to a hospital for surgery that led to the start of the child’s recovery.

In another case on June 23, 2023, the company said, a man who had been shot in both legs was found with ShotSpotter and taken to a hospital for treatment.

SoundThinking, citing the study by the Illinois university, said the Winston-Salem community has saved some $9 million annually by using ShotSpotter, basing that figure on calculations of the cost to society of the violence the system is credited with preventing. The company said the system helps police gather evidence such as shell casings that can be used in prosecution, and that ShotSpotter can be a “force multiplier” to other technology such as the use of drones.

SoundThinking also took to Facebook to drum up support for ShotSpotter, inviting people to sound their support and sharing the results with the city.

But Council Member Annette Scippio said she would defer to the police department on deciding where to invest in crime prevention:

ShotSpotter “seems like a good tool, but they have to deal with their budget and costs,” Scippio said. “I wish we had all the money that could go to different things we want to do. I’m happy that (the police) go for grants to have services because we need that kind of support. We can’t do it alone on our tax base.”