8:48
Check out this actual tech company pitch. 80% of all gunfire incidents in the US are never called in. So what if a company could triangulate where the shot came from and dispatch a unit 3 minutes sooner than with a 911 call that would empire police that would reduce crime? Are you sold on that? I'm kind of sold on that. Actually, it doesn't even matter if you believe in it because at least 12 million Americans have been living under the surveillance of this system for decades. But the company behind it, Shot Spotter, is probably one of the most controversial government contractors of the century with allegations of illegal lobbying and evidence manipulation. Is this a broken
technology or a broken company? So, I'm traveling to one of the few major cities that has after a years's long battle finally ended their Shot Spotter surveillance. This is a map of every Shot Spotter sensor that existed when the contract was active here in Chicago. We're going to see if there are any still there, but especially what kind of neighborhoods they were installed in. Shot Spotter had noble beginnings. Dr. Robert Shoen, a physicist at SRI International, heard gunfire near his lab, and he figured he could use math to figure out where the shot came from. So, what kind of calculation does this
company do? And is that technology flawed? When your ears catch a sound, like a gunshot, your brain is pretty good at figuring out the direction where the sound came from. But microphones don't have that luxury. Now, if you had two microphones and we know how far apart they are, we can do some math with the delay. For example, assuming mic one hears a sound and then mic 2 catches the same sound but 2.3 seconds later, we can do some math on that. In this case, the 2.3 second delay is telling us that the sound came from somewhere that's about 789 m further away from mic 2 than from mic one. That means that this shot came from somewhere along this curve. Every point in this curve is 789 m further
away from mic 2 than from mic one. Now, if we add a third mic to this mix, that mic is also going to catch that sound with a delay. And it's a different delay from the second microphone. So we can plot another curve and where those two curves meet, well that's where the shot came from. That's how a GPS works by triangulating signals. It's the same way we find where an earthquake came from. But in order to catch those signals, you need the sensors. In this case, those are microphones. Now, this isn't particularly novel. It's not rocket science. So why is it so controversial? Well, the success of this company doesn't come from the technology. It comes from their ability to sell. And boy, did they sell. We are very happy with Shot Spotter.
Shootings and homicides have gone down by more than 40%. We look forward to us scaling up the Shot Spotter technology. $100 million on walkietalkies on a stick. Now, after a change in CEO and a pivot into SAS, we know that their pricing as of 2012 was between 40 and $60,000 per square mile of coverage. Now, this is a great business. It's a subscription, right? Millions of dollars for a city contract. We know that the contract with the city of Chicago was worth $33 million, which in 2020 was a fifth of their entire revenue. Now, if the tech
worked, we wouldn't be out here complaining or freezing, but the tech was deeply flawed. You had something like 90 88% of all alerts not leading to the police finding any gun related events. And the company, of course, will debate this number. We get it right about 97% of the time. And you'll find a bunch of numbers kind of validating or debating these numbers. That wasn't even the biggest problem. Now, making decisions on bad data was the beginning of the end for Shot Spotter and for too many businesses. The Hustle newsletter is dedicated to making sure that does not happen again. Beyond a daily newsletter with deep dives into
the entrepreneurship news of the day, my favorite part is the founder resources. Every newsletter comes with a downloadable resource for entrepreneurs, like this thorough guide on integrating AI into your business or 100 plus side hustle ideas, which are classified by skills and by capital requirement. They're not about breaking the story first. is much more about doing a deep dive of actionable items that can be really useful to entrepreneurs. You can get their daily newsletter and their daily resources for free by subscribing to the Hustle using this QR code here or the link we'll put in the description.
Thanks to Hopspot and the Hustle for supporting our channel. Anytime Shot Spotter triggers an alert, police get dispatched. But these police officers, they're on edge. They're investigating a literal gun incident or at least a potential one. So, this needs to be an armed response. Shot Spotter picked up the sound of the shots and that's why officers Gary and Marmallejo were dispatched, sparking a chain of events that ended with two Chicago police officers being fatally hit by a train that they didn't hear coming. Shot Spotter also brought police to Little Village on March 29th. Within 5 minutes of the 2:36 a.m. alert, Officer Eric Stillman shot and killed 13-year-old Adam Toledo.
In this very spot 5 years ago, a 13-year-old kid, Adam Toledo, was shot and killed on an alert that came from a shot spotter report. Now, the tech wasn't at fault here. There were actual shots fired, and the tech did what it was supposed to do. The policeman who shot him went through trial, but didn't end up facing any charges. This caused a massive outcry in the city, and it was the beginning of the end for the shock spot technology. And then another case, Michael Williams, a 65-year-old man who was wrongly imprisoned for a year. And the biggest piece of evidence that tied him to the case was a report from Shot Spotter. Now, his charges were eventually dropped, but the
Associated Press dug a little deeper and found something much, much darker about that case. Shot Spotter does not allow for their technology to be tested, and judges have not approved the testing of that technology. That is a real problem that defendants have when prosecutors rely on Shot Spotter to convict them. Yeah, check those out. I don't know if they're No, no, those are probably like 5G antennas, I think. By the way, you might have guessed that Shot Spotter did not get deployed across every neighborhood in the city. They picked 12 out of 22 districts that in theory had the highest crime rates, but also districts that were predominantly
black and Latino. These are communities that were already suffered from overpolicing. This neighborhood where I'm standing, this is just south of Little Italy. This neighborhood did not get Shot Spotter at all during the time that it was live. But that is not the smoking gun either. Quote, "Shot Spotter employees can and often do change the source of sounds picked up by its sensors after listening to audio recordings, introducing the possibility of human bias into the gunshot detection algorithm. Employees can and do modify the location or the number of shots fired at the request of police according to court records." What the [__] And that is not the only case. In a 2016 murder trial in Rochester, New York, a Shots sputter
expert admitted under oath that he had reclassified a sound from a helicopter to a gunshot at the request of the police. According to him, those changes happened quote all the time. We trust our law enforcement customers to be really upfront and honest with us. Now, a Vice investigation also found that a sound getting manually changed or reclassified was the reason why Michael Williams was imprisoned. Vice had to fight a $300 million defamation lawsuit from this article, but the prosecutor ultimately concluded that, again, I'm quoting, "The Shot Spotter output in this case was dramatically transformed from data that did not support criminal charges of any kind to data that now forms the centerpiece of the prosecutor's murder case against Mr.
Williams." Either one of those cases should be enough to end a company's run. So, why didn't it? Why is it still running everywhere else? This is St. Louis, Missouri. I'm here for an entirely different video. I'll tell you about that later. But this city was the focus of another research paper that is a bit of a clue into what's happening. So, what this study found is that there's a 30% decrease in violent assaults using or not using guns. However, there was no decrease in the amount of crime in the neighborhood or a change in the number of arrests. So, what's the conclusion? It's uncertain, right? What's not uncertain is
who paid for the study. That'd be Shot Spotter. and the CEO happens to sit on the board of the organization that did it. So yeah, if there's something that we do know is how much Shpart spends in PR and lobbying and marketing cuz convincing city officials to keep this technology around despite all this mess, all this controversy, it's not easy and they've overstepped a couple of times. For example, in 2014, they were caught illegally lobbying the Oakland City Council to sign their $250,000 a year contract. By 2021, their lobbying budget was already in the hundreds of thousands of dollars as they were trying to convince Congress to pass federal regulation to fight violent crime, which
usually comes with grants that would be given to companies like Shot Spotter. By then, their PR budget was around $400,000 a year. That is why once a city signs up with Shot Spotter, it's so hard to get rid of it. To admit Shot Spotter failed is to admit millions of tax dollars have been wasted. And which politician wants that on their record? The Shot Spotter is a very uh essential tool for any police department. This gives us datadriven policing in real time. I think of a tool that every mayor and every city truly needs. It took Chicago months of legal fights to finally get this tech out. And a similar fight awaits any city that chooses to finally sever ties. Cities
are spending millions of tax dollars not only to have the tech running, but dispatching police units to these false alarms. City Controller Brad Lander is not a fan of the NYPD's Shot Spotter system. He says his audit of the technology shows it is not reliable in detecting gunshots and it is not worth its $45 million price tag. The city of Chicago's inspector general found the tool to be inexact, largely ineffective, wasting time and resources. The Stop Shots Water Coalition had been fighting the technology for years. And despite that, Mayor Lori Lightoot extended the contract here in Chicago twice before leaving office. But the current mayor of Chicago ran on a platform to get rid of the Shot
Spotter technology. And when he got elected, he did in February 2024. Even after that, the city council tried one last attempt to get it back, but it didn't pass the veto requirement for the mayor. In September 2024, the technology finally went offline in Chicago. And by then, the city had spent almost $50 million in the Shot Spotter technology alone without any signs of a reduction in crime or homicide rates. We've been driving around all the neighborhoods where Shot Spotter operated, and we haven't been able to find a single tower. There are these Oh, wait. I think it's one of the sensors. That's another one right there. Why are they all still here? They got rid of this thing a year ago.
It's not clear why they're still there, but they're just adding up to all this baggage piling up against Shot Spotter. Charlotte, Fall River, Massachusetts, San Antonio, Texas, they've all reportedly ended their contracts recently, while cities like Atlanta and Portland saw the evidence and blocked it. Shock spotters stock is plummeting, currently at about onetenth of its highest point in time. So is this a broken technology or a broken company? We saw that triangulation is not rocket science but aggressive expansion, illegal lobbying, artificially enhancing results in the interest of profit has real live consequences for people. Also, what happens when Sean spotter gets mixed up with face recognition or with AI that's not completely smart or
bulletproof yet? It feels like we are steps away from being guinea pigs to those kind of experiments. Now, if you enjoyed this video, you should watch our video on the richest versus the poorest town in America. There's a loophole that made both of these towns exist, and I don't think anybody's pointed it out before. Catch you on the next one.
