About 15 protesters gathered in front of Fayetteville City Hall on Wednesday to protest the city’s contract with ShotSpotter, a controversial gunshot detection system.
The protest, organized and led by members of the Party for Socialism and Liberation, called for the city’s divestment from ShotSpotter.
Fayetteville kicked off a year-long pilot of the technology in September 2023. A year later, Fayetteville City Council members voted 6-4 to renew a contract with ShotSpotter for one year, a cost totaling $210,000. The use of the technology has drawn criticism — both nationally and in Fayetteville — about its cost, effectiveness and potential for racial bias.
City council members are expected to consider renewing the ShotSpotter contract in September. As elected officials look to again discuss ShotSpotter’s effectiveness in Fayetteville, community activists are demanding that the city end its use of the software, and instead invest the money in resources like job and youth violence interruption programs and for Fayetteville’s homeless population.
“Impulsive sounds”
ShotSpotter, a technology owned by SoundThinking Inc., is used to detect the sound of gunfire within a defined area using a system of acoustic sensors, usually attached to infrastructure like lightpoles and on the sides of buildings.
ShotSpotter technology picks up on “impulsive sounds that may represent gunfire,” according to the company’s website. SoundThinking states that these sounds are run through an algorithm that classifies them as potential gunfire, after which the sounds are reviewed by acoustics experts at an offsite incident review center. After a sound is reviewed, an alert is sent to local law enforcement about potential gunfire.
In Fayetteville, the system was set up in three areas throughout the city in 2023, each covering about a one-mile radius, at Cliffdale and Rielly Roads, the Massey Hill neighborhood and along the Murchison Road corridor.
In 2024, city council members debated whether to end the contract or renew it for one to three more years — ultimately voting to renew it for another year. The council’s vote also included a provision for an independent analysis of the technology’s data. City staff said Fayetteville engaged the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute to carry out a qualitative analysis of the ShotSpotter zones and the city is working with the Wilson Center at Duke to evaluate ShotSpotter data, CityView reported in January.
Kem Braden, former chief of the Fayetteville Police Department, told city council members in 2024 that ShotSpotter helped the police force identify leads and allocate resources and officers at a time when the department was short-staffed. At the time, he said the technology was highly accurate and allowed police to respond faster to emergencies and homicides.
While the software may be renewed in Fayetteville, other North Carolina cities, like Durham and Winston-Salem, have ditched the technology in recent years. Charlotte canceled its contract in 2016 because they felt “return on investment was not high enough to justify a renewal,” according to the Charlotte Observer. Durham and Winston-Salem officials made similar arguments, questioning the cost of the system compared to the data that law enforcement was able to collect.
Not a line item
Holding picket signs and banners that read “Solutions, not surveillance” and “Cancel ShotSpotter, invest in the people,” several members of the Party for Socialism and Liberation and other community activists on Wednesday spoke out against the gunshot detection system.
Kristen Starks, an organizer for the Party for Socialism and Liberation, said she believes the software is ineffective, discriminatory and harmful to Fayetteville residents.
“ShotSpotter is only one manifestation of a greater issue: The prioritization of policing, surveillance and criminalization over meeting the needs of the people,” Stark said. She said poverty, inequality and lack of opportunity are the real root of crime and violence in the city.
“For two years now, despite pushback from the community, ShotSpotter has been implemented in three, low-income, predominantly Black and Brown communities in Fayetteville,” Starks said, a bullhorn carrying her voice down Hay Street.
The Fayetteville Police Department has said the three locations were chosen based on shots-fired service calls and other gun violence metrics.
Earlier this year, CityView reviewed the racial demographics for areas in which law enforcement reported receiving the most ShotSpotter alerts. While Fayetteville’s Black population sits at around 40%, the analysis found that eight of the nine locations were predominantly Black. These areas also have higher poverty rates than the city overall, according to a 2023 Economic and Community Development Department analysis.
Starks said ShotSpotter provides a pretext for police to harass residents, citing the death of Lawrence Artis, a 29-year-old Black man who died while in police custody in October 2023, after local law enforcement received a ShotSpotter alert at his location.
Lisette Rodriguez, founder of Fayetteville Freedom for All, said the group has worked to urge local officials to provide more community resources for the people of Fayetteville, advocating for the establishment of Fayetteville’s Office of Community Safety (OCS).
The OCS aims to coordinate non-enforcement responses to public safety issues in the city. The department operates within a four-pillar system “to reduce the risk of violent interactions between law enforcement and the public,” according to the OCS website. The four pillars include violence interruption, mental health response, youth opportunity, and homelessness risk reduction strategies.
At a community engagement meeting in June, John Jones, the new director of OCS, said that the department is looking for ways to implement a mental health response system, which will help divert individuals who are experiencing a mental health crisis from having interactions with law enforcement officers.
Rodriguez told the crowd she believes the establishment of the OCS in Fayetteville has been a success, but progress for the organization has been slow.
“When Durham started their Office of Community Safety, they had a pilot program for a mental health response team in six months from the time they voted to the time they had boots on the ground,” Rodriguez said. “We are two, two-and-a-half years into the Office of Community Safety and we just hired a director. I have yet to see anything about a mental health response team.”
Protesters on Wednesday presented a letter directed at Fayetteville City Council, demanding that the ShotSpotter contract be canceled and that an independent analysis of the system’s data be released to the public. The letter also called for the city to fund additional community projects around education and youth programming, child care and affordable housing.
“Remember that we’re not just another line item,” said Shaun McMillan, another speaker at the protest. “We are your neighbors.”
