It's Morning Edition on 90.7 WFAE and WFAE.org I'm Marshall Terry. In the past decade several North Carolina cities, including Charlotte, have stopped using the gunshot detection technology known as ShotSpotter. They argue data does not support claims by the company behind the technology that it reduces gun violence. Meanwhile, several other cities in North Carolina continue to use ShotSpotter. One of them is Fayetteville, where activists have raised concerns about the role it may have played in a man’s death in 2023. The Assembly recently took a closer look at ShotSpotter in North Carolina. Michael Hewlett is one of the reporters who wrote that story and he joins me now.
Marshall Terry: To start, can you give me a brief overview of just how ShotSpotter works?
Michael Hewlett: ShotSpotter operates by placing the acoustic sensors throughout a particular area, and those sensors are supposed to detect gunshots so that ideally if gunshots are heard, the sensors send an alert to an incident review center where there are staff that assesses whether or not those are gunshots, and then those alerts are sent to the law enforcement agency and then the law enforcement agency dispatches officers to the exact location where they can investigate.
Terry: Let’s go to Fayetteville now and the death of this man, Lawrence Artis, that I mentioned. What happened exactly there?
Hewlett: In 2023, Lawrence Artis, a black man in his twenties, he is walking through a parking lot, law enforcement gets a ShotSpotter alert that gunshots have been fired in that particular area where Lawrence Artis was walking. Three police officers in Fayetteville get there. They search Mr. Artis, they find a gun, they handcuff him, put him into the patrol car. They were going to let him go, and then they ran his record and found out he was a felon, and so they brought him back out of the police car. He's still handcuffed. They're going to arrest him for possessing a firearm while a convicted felon. According to the police, and according to the autopsy report, there was a second gun that police officers missed, and while handcuffed, Mr. Artis managed to grab that gun and fire it, and shoot himself in the head. Activists blame ShotSpotter for Mr. Artis's death. If ShotSpotter hadn't put out an alert police officers wouldn't have gone and encountered Mr. Artis, and if they had not encountered Mr. Artis, Mr. Artis might still be alive.
Terry: Charlotte is one of the cities that has been using ShotSpotter for a while. I remember when the city first began using it during the 2012 Democratic National Convention, but it stopped using it four years later. Why did Charlotte and also other cities for that matter that were using it, stop?
Hewlett: There's a thread between Charlotte, Durham and Winston-Salem all of whom stopped using ShotSpotter, and it boils down to they didn't believe it worked. Charlotte specifically said that the amount of money they were putting into it wasn't worth it for the benefit that they were getting out of it, and a lot of it was that they didn't see it reducing gun violence. They didn't see it leading to a lot of arrests. They didn't see it leading to situations where they could find evidence of gunfire when they were alerted.
Terry: Now, how does the company behind ShotSpotter, SoundThinking, defend its product?
Hewlett: They say that many of the critics are omitting a lot of facts or being disingenuous. They say, for example, one of the main arguments against ShotSpotter is that a lot of times when officers respond to a ShotSpotter alert, they don't find any evidence of gunfire—they don't find any shell casings, anything like that. SoundThinking officials say, well, that doesn't mean that gunfire didn't happen. It may be that they come back the next day and find the shell casings that they missed the night before. They couldn't provide any concrete examples of that happening, but that's what they say. And then they point to studies, they point to a study in Winston-Salem that was done by researchers that found that, for example, in the area that ShotSpotter operated as compared to another area that gun violence was reduced or assault was reduced by about 24%
Terry: Let's wrap it up by going back to the death of Lawrence Artis in Fayetteville, which again is still using the ShotSpotter technology. It's been about 15 months since Artis's death. What's the latest with that?
Hewlett: For one, the autopsy finally came out, which ruled Artis's death as a suicide and laid out something similar to what I had laid out earlier, that he had grabbed the second gun and had managed to shoot himself in the head. The three officers were never charged in the case. Family members and other community activists still have a lot of questions about how the Artist died. The Fayetteville City Council renewed their contract with SoundThinking for one more year. There was a lot of debate among city council members about whether to renew it. Part of the thing that they're going to do is they're going to hire someone independent to evaluate it. They're hoping to use Duke University, which also evaluated ShotSpotter for Durham to evaluate the program for Fayetteville, and then after a year, Fayetteville City Council will then consider whether to renew it even for another year after that.
