Does ShotSpotter miss the mark on gun violence?

Editor’s note: This article is the second in a two-part series on Fayetteville’s ShotSpotter program. Read the first part here.

Before dawn, in the cool fall air of early October in Fayetteville, Lawrence Artis walked alone across the parking lot of Cliffdale Plaza. The strip mall he walked through is located in one of the three high-gun violence areas in which a gunshot detection technology called ShotSpotter had been deployed just four days earlier in Fayetteville, on Sept. 28, 2023. 

Fayetteville police officers patrolling the area received a notification of gunfire from ShotSpotter, which pinged Artis’ location. When the three officers arrived at the coordinates, they discovered Artis, detained him for an initial search, and found a gun in the process. They arrested Artis, a 29-year-old Black man, for possession of a firearm as a felon. 

Handcuffed and with his hands behind his back, Artis allegedly pulled a second gun from his pants pocket as police were conducting a secondary search. He shot himself, police said, sustaining life-threatening injuries. 

Artis was declared dead four days later at a hospital in Chapel Hill, after being airlifted from the scene of his arrest. But the circumstances — and questions — surrounding his death continue to reverberate throughout the city a year later. 

The case of Lawrence Artis 

Though local activists have been raising concerns about Artis’ case for months, the Fayetteville City Council’s Sept. 23 renewal of the city’s contract with SoundThinking, the company that operates ShotSpotter, brought Artis’ case into the limelight again. Community organizers came to the council meeting to protest the contract’s renewal, holding up and passing out signs reading “Justice for Lawrence Artis,” as the council debated the terms of the contract. 

Artis’ case, they argued, is an example of how ShotSpotter exacerbates existing racial disparities in policing. In the U.S., a Black person is five times more likely to be stopped without just cause than a white person. A 2023 study published in The Review of Economics and Statistics, which controlled for factors such as socioeconomic status and crime rate, examined the movement of around 10,000 police officers in 21 of the country’s largest cities. The study found police spent significantly more time in Black neighborhoods when on patrol, despite not needing to. 

Local activists have contended ShotSpotter can become part of a feedback loop that reinforces these disparities by increasing unnecessary and negative interactions between police and the majority-Black and Latino communities where the technology is deployed. 

Shaun McMillan, a local activist and community organizer who has spoken about the issue during city council meetings, called on the council to “immediately halt” the program in the wake of Artis’ death.

“I remind all voters that this is what happens at the intersection of inequality and poverty,” McMillan said in a council public comment period a few days after the incident. “[The issues are] not something you can arrest or kill your way out of.” 

When ShotSpotter came to a vote on Sept. 23 of this year, the Fayetteville City Council narrowly approved the $210,000 contract for another year, under the condition there be an independent evaluation and parameters for success at the end of the year. McMillian criticized the council for not discussing Artis’ case and “their responsibility to prevent the unnecessary loss of life” during the Sept. 23 discussion. 

Fayetteville Police Chief Kemberle Braden maintains the officers had heard gunfire moments prior to receiving the notification, and “ShotSpotter verified what they heard.”

Following the meeting, in an interview with CityView, Chief Braden dismissed concerns about the technology’s potential for over-policing. He contended that ShotSpotter has been a useful tool for the Fayetteville Police Department, allowing police to respond faster to dispatch calls and collect useful evidence, especially at a time when there are over a hundred vacancies in the police department. 

“That proves that ShotSpotter works,” Braden told CityView in regards to Artis’ case. “The officers were across the street. They heard the gunfire, ShotSpotter verified what they heard. 

“They go over there, they deal with Lawrence Artis. He’s in possession of a gun. They take that gun away from him. They didn’t know he had a second gun on him that he pulls out and he shoots himself. With that second shot, where he shot himself, was also caught by ShotSpotter.”

Does ShotSpotter reduce gun violence? 

While many cities across the country have dropped the program — citing its ineffectiveness at reducing gun violence as a reason — other municipalities have continued to renew their contracts with ShotSpotter. 

In Durham, city officials brought in researchers to study the city’s ShotSpotter data in the first year of its use; they found the gunshot technology led to a 1.2-minute reduction in median police response time. However, the researchers were unable to draw conclusions from the data about whether ShotSpotter reduced gun violence overall. They determined that 91% of the time, Durham police were unable to find evidence of a crime after being directed by a ShotSpotter alert. Researchers found that ShotSpotter issued alerts for 26 out of 52 documented serious gunshot incidents in Durham during the trial period. 

Braden said the data he presented on ShotSpotter at the Sept. 23 Fayetteville City Council meeting was compiled partially from numbers directly provided by SoundThinking. According to Braden’s presentation, from Sept. 29, 2023, to July 31 of this year:

• ShotSpotter, when reporting gunshots not also reported with a 911 call, led to five guns being recovered and 11 arrests. When accounting for gunshots picked up by both ShotSpotter and a 911 call, 15 guns were recovered and 22 arrests were made. 
• Of the 569 ShotSpotter alerts recorded, 462 did not have a corresponding 911 call reporting gunfire. In comparison, 107 of the alerts had a corresponding 911 call reporting gunfire.
• Police had found 562 shell casings after investigating ShotSpotter alerts.
• From the alerts ShotSpotter had issued, the technology had detected a total of 1,920 individual shots fired.
• Police were able to develop 22 leads from ShotSpotter alerts that did not correspond with a 911 call. They were able to develop 24 leads from alerts that also had 911 calls.

Adam Soliman, an assistant professor of economics at Clemson University, is one of the researchers who authored the study reviewing ShotSpotter in Durham. Soliman told CityView, based on his research, that ShotSpotter has both costs and benefits to consider — and it’s up to a community to determine what to prioritize. 

“You kind of just have to take what you believe is the more critical thing,” Soliman said. “So is helping police solve investigations something very important to your community? Is not having more police around maybe something that people want? Is it picking up notifications that wouldn’t have been there with the potential that it could save a life? Is it the financial cost?” 

The Durham study also included a community feedback report conducted by the Wilson Center for Science and Justice at Duke’s School of Law. That report found the ShotSpotter area’s research participants “had not observed any impact on gun crime since ShotSpotter was implemented, nor did they believe ShotSpotter could help to reduce gun crime.”

Some residents in Fayetteville have expressed on social media their support for the use of ShotSpotter, saying it makes them feel safer. For example, the Massey Hill Community Watch Group described ShotSpotter as a “life-saving technology” in a recent Facebook post. 

Other recent studies suggest ShotSpotter is ineffective at reducing gun violence. For example, a 2021 study published in the Journal of Urban Health, which looked at ShotSpotter’s use in 68 large metropolitan cities from 1999 to 2016, found it had “no significant impact on firearm-related homicides or arrest outcomes.” Another report by the Chicago inspector general found that, in Chicago, ShotSpotter alerts were inaccurate 9 out of 10 times, leading to 40,000 unnecessary police dispatches for gun-related incidents that never happened.

What else the data says 

A frequent criticism of ShotSpotter is that its sensor areas are concentrated in predominantly Black and Latino, low-income communities — a concern confirmed in recent investigations into sensor data. A VICE Motherboard investigation from 2021 found that ShotSpotter sensors in four major U.S. cities — Chicago, Kansas City, Cleveland and Atlanta — are “placed almost exclusively in majority Black and brown neighborhoods.” A WIRED analysis of leaked ShotSpotter sensor data, published in early 2024, similarly found 70% of residents who live in neighborhoods with SoundThinking sensors identify as Black or Latino. There are ShotSpotter sensors in 84 metropolitan areas and 34 states or territories in the U.S., according to the leaked data. 

In Fayetteville, ShotSpotter is deployed in three one-mile radius zones: around Cliffdale and Reilly Roads in west Fayetteville, in the Murchison Road corridor, and in the Massey Hill neighborhood. The locations were chosen based on shots-fired service calls and other gun violence metrics, according to the police department.

In September 2023, Fayetteville’s Economic and Community Development Department presented a site analysis on ShotSpotter sites; according to the department, the Murchison Road Corridor and Massey Hill area had poverty rates significantly higher than the city, at around 32% and 48%, respectively. In comparison, the city of Fayetteville’s rate was around 20%, according to the presentation.

The department also found that crimes “involving drugs and weapons trended above the city’s average” in those areas. The Cliffdale study area, on the other hand, had poverty rates slightly below the city average, and slightly higher rates of property crimes and crimes against persons than the city’s average. (While the Economic and Community Development Department did not provide racial demographics for these areas, the Murchison Road corridor contains historically Black neighborhoods.)

CityView analyzed the racial demographics of the census tracts of the streets where the police department said they received the most ShotSpotter alerts in the first year. In eight of the nine locations CityView analyzed, census data showed residents were predominantly Black. Overall, about 35% of Fayetteville’s non-Hispanic population is white and about 41% is Black.

Artis’ case revisited

In September 2023, immediately following the incident involving Artis, his case was referred to the State Bureau of Investigations. In an email shared with CityView, Cumberland County’s District Attorney Billy West confirmed, in response to a query from City Council Member Mario Benavente, that the SBI completed the investigation and his office did not pursue charges against the officers involved.

The city council had initially expressed interest in seeking police body camera footage of the incident after it happened, voting on Oct. 9, 2023, to begin the process of petitioning the court to release the footage. The motion is inconsistently described in the meeting minutes, and was stated in different ways during the meeting.

Benavente filed the original motion, which was for city “staff to take the appropriate measures in seeking out release of bodycam footage as it related to an incident involving the shooting of Mr. Artis.” Shortly after Benavente proposed the motion, Mayor Mitch Colvin restated it, saying “that council will consider authorizing the city attorney, manager’s office, relevant parties, to prepare the paperwork to request the court’s petition.” 

The petition was ultimately never sent, nor were the documents presented to the council. City staff say the motion’s language didn’t explicitly authorize filing the petition. 

“The Fayetteville City Council never directed the City Attorney to petition the court for the release of body camera footage associated with Mr. Lawrence Artis,” Marketing and Communications Director Lore Bymer told CityView in an email. Benavente disagreed, arguing the intent was clear and criticized staff for relying on a “technicality” in not acting to seek the release. 

“No matter if Lawrence Artis is the most flexible person on the planet, and he was able to do this, there is still a major mistake that the police made,” Benevante told CityView, referring to the second firearm not discovered in the police’s initial search of Artis.

Benavente, a criminal defense attorney, noted that ShotSpotter use as evidence in other cases has resulted in false convictions, such as in Chicago, where a Black man served 11 months in prison based on a ShotSpotter alert before his case was ultimately dismissed for insufficient evidence.

Soliman, who analyzed Durham’s ShotSpotter data, spoke to the importance of studying the technology’s pros and cons.

“The technology certainly has the potential to improve policing,” Soliman said. “We’ve seen evidence that it does right on the response times, getting arrests, finding incidents that we wouldn’t have found otherwise.”

But he says there is also a potential for loss of life, like in Artis’ case, or negative police interactions.

“It’s clear that there are benefits to it and there are costs, both financial and opportunity,” Soliman said. 

At the end of Fayetteville’s contract, in a year’s time, the city will conduct an independent analysis of the data — and vote again on whether ShotSpotter is the right fit for Fayetteville.

Contact Evey Weisblat at eweisblat@cityviewnc.com or 216-527-3608. This story was made possible by donations from readers like you to CityView News Fund, a 501(c)(3) charitable organization committed to an informed democracy in Fayetteville and Cumberland County.