Cleveland police want to keep using technology to detect and report gunshots, but not ShotSpotter, the system the city adopted in 2020. 

New legislation introduced in City Council this week would authorize the city to sign a $2 million, three-year contract with Flock Safety for a system that the city says can better assist police in responding to gunfire as well as to street takeovers and vehicle crashes.

The city already uses Flock Safety’s automated license plate readers (LPRs), which are cameras that can alert police when a car they’re looking for passes through its field of vision.

The planned switch comes soon after a report based on a city-funded evaluation of ShotSpotter by professors at Cleveland State University’s Criminology Research Center. The report portrays ShotSpotter as an effective tool that the Cleveland Division of Police is unable to wield well — and in some ways is hampered by — due to how much the force has shrunk in recent years.

The staffing shortage prevents officers from using “the vast majority of functions offered by ShotSpotter effectively,” the report states. “We found that nearly every potential benefit of ShotSpotter was severely limited by a dearth in human resources.”

Cleveland Division of Police lost more officers than any other comparably sized department between 2019 and 2024, according to the report. 

Information from the Flock system can be more easily integrated with images from surveillance cameras and LPRs at the city’s Real Time Crime Center, which will help police “better prioritize calls and ease the demand on resources as we expand our police force,” according to a city spokesperson.

Few arrests and increased response time for other calls

In a 2023 statement announcing the expansion of ShotSpotter to all five police districts, Mayor Justin Bibb said, “We are focused on investing in technology and intelligence to reduce gun homicides in our city.”

But teasing out ShotSpotter’s role in that effort is difficult.

Most gunshots are not reported to 911, and “police would likely not know about 90% of the shots fired” in the city without the technology, according to the CSU report. And because of the alerts, there are more opportunities to treat injured victims and collect evidence such as shell casings. But neither of those happen often.

“Based on [police] data, a total of 53 lives were saved in the course of officers responding to a ShotSpotter alert,” the report states. All but one of those incidents also prompted a 911 call, but those calls came on average four minutes later than the ShotSpotter alert. The report did not speculate on how many of those victims might have died if not for the alert.

Alerts seldom result in arrests. According to ShotSpotter manufacturer SoundThinking, 126 arrests were made “in connection with a ShotSpotter alert in 2023 and 2024.” Cleveland police told the researchers that very few of those arrests were at the scene, and only 10% of alerts resulted in a report by the responding officer.

Stephanie Kent, a CSU criminology professor who co-wrote the report with colleague Rachel Lovell, said it was hard to pin down the numbers of arrests and convictions that directly resulted from ShotSpotter alerts because the information was not tracked consistently throughout the legal process.

“In a perfect world, people in city council would like to know, well, how many individuals have been convicted?” Kent said. “There was no way that we could logistically get that answer for them.”

Part of the problem is that the department “does not consistently relay this information to SoundThinking,” Kent and Lovell wrote, because officers “must complete the same data entry tasks twice” — once in CDP’s record-keeping system and again in ShotSpotter’s.

ShotSpotter also likely increased response times for other police calls, the researchers found.

The system sent an average of 21 gunshot alerts per day in 2023 and 2024. All of those alerts are treated as top priority by police dispatchers. Based on surveys and interviews with officers, the researchers reported that the high volume of ShotSpotter calls increased response times for calls categorized as “Priority 2,”  which includes burglar alarms and some domestic violence incidents.

City says integration will be key to success with new system

The city discussed response times with Flock Safety and is confident the new system won’t come with the same challenges, said Jamil Hairston, spokesperson for the Department of Public Safety.

Audio collected by the Flock system is more easily integrated with images from surveillance cameras and license plate readers monitored at the city’s Real Time Crime Center, according to Hairston. “This integration will quickly verify Priority 1 calls and allow officers to efficiently respond to Priority 2 calls,” he said.

Priority 1 calls are for serious harm to people or property and crimes in progress. Priority 2 calls are for potential harm or damage and crimes that have just occurred.

The Flock system also detects and reports the sounds of vehicle collisions and street takeovers, according to information submitted to city council. Flock’s web site says that its system can also recognize fireworks and “other disruptive community events.”

If council approves the city’s request to sign a contract with Flock, it will cost $195,000 in the first year and $915,750 in both the second and third years for a total of $2,026,500. 

Cleveland spent $449,000 — most of it covered by a grant — on a ShotSpotter pilot program in 2020 and then used federal pandemic relief  money to pay for a $2.75 million expansion and three-year contract in 2022. Council members also appropriated $150,000 for the evaluation by the CSU professors amid doubts about the system’s value and privacy concerns.

The CSU researchers were also asked to gauge community views on ShotSpotter. They found no evidence that the system was ever used to record conversations or detect anything besides gunshots. 

They also found that residents “would prefer the city do something else to improve policing, given the cost of ShotSpotter,” such as hire more police officers and spend more to address the root causes of crime. 

Suggested Reading

ShotSpotter: A primer

On Oct. 10, Cleveland City Council passed legislation that would use about $2.75 million to expand ShotSpotter, a gunshot-detection technology.

City Council will hold hearings on ShotSpotter and Flock’s system

Council Member Mike Polensek, who chairs council’s Safety Committee, said he is coordinating with the CSU professors to present their findings to council sometime after Election Day, Nov. 4. He then will schedule hearings on the Flock contract.

Polensek said he wants to know if the Flock sound detection system can cover the whole city (ShotSpotter covered just 13 of the city’s 84 square miles), and whether it integrates with other technology the police are using.

“We’re told that [the Flock] this system does not talk to Axon,” he said, referring to the manufacturer of Fusus, the software the city uses to monitor cameras in the Real Time Crime Center. (The two companies used to work together but had a falling out earlier this year.)

“I’m in no hurry,” Polensek said. “We want the best technology possible at the best price possible that will have the greatest impact possible. That’s what I’m committed to.”

Read the CSU report: