Duke study on ShotSpotter shows some promising metrics, yet lingering community skepticism
WRAL Investigates' Sarah Krueger spoke with Duke University researchers ahead of their Thursday afternoon presentation to the Durham City Council on the effectiveness of ShotSpotter.
Posted — UpdatedWRAL Investigates' Sarah Krueger spoke with the researchers ahead of their Thursday afternoon presentation to the Durham City Council.
"It's a difference between qualitative and quantitative," explained Phil Cook, Professor Emeritus of Public Policy and Economics at Duke, who was also one of the lead researchers.
Cook, whose academic focus is on gun violence, explained the Wilson Center worked closely with the Durham Police Department to perform data analysis of the information collected during the City's one-year pilot program of the technology, which ended in December. ShotSpotter uses sensors, placed in a three-square-mile radius near downtown, to detect gunshots and notify police.
"I think it's reasonable to say that ShotSpotter performed as advertised," Cook said. "It actually notified the police of many more gunshots than police would've known about from just the 911 calls they were getting."
Data from the Durham Police Department shows about three quarters of the roughly 1400 ShotSpotter alerts in the year did not have an associated 911 call.
Cook said the Duke research was unable to conclude if ShotSpotter resulted in a reduction in violent crime. He says it did show that the ShotSpotter alerts improved officer response time, allowed officers to collect "a lot more evidence than they would have otherwise," and led to an "increase in the number of arrests that were made at the scene of the gunfire."
The report provides this example:
In one situation, Cook says the technology likely saved a life. The report details the incident:
"I think [ShotSpotter] succeeded in the sense that it did push the needle in making gun violence investigations somewhat more productive," Cook said. "We don't offer a conclusion, despite that degree of success, of whether it was worthwhile, because of course on the other side of the ledger there are costs."
Cook said those costs include financial costs (a three-year contract with ShotSpotter is estimated to cost $658,500) and time costs, since officers were called to so many more shooting scenes they would otherwise have not known about.
"The reason we did this is because we thought if we're going to look at how ShotSpotter is performing, it's also really important to know how is the community feeling about it," she said. "It's something that no other researchers had really done previously."
Durham Police Chief Patrice Andrews said it's significant that nearly 80 percent of the shooting reports to police were initiated by ShotSpotter.
"I do want to just publicly commend my entire team that worked this year on probably one of the most groundbreaking pilots for this technology," Andrews said.
"Reasons for that seemed to stem more from a lack of trust with policing as an institution and pre-existing skepticism and distrust," she explained.
Ten of the respondents were on the fence, wanting more information about it.
While the Wilson Center reports do not offer city council a recommendation on whether to reinstate the technology in the City, they hope it will be helpful information for Council members, the Durham community, and beyond.
Six other cities in North Carolina currently have ShotSpotter, including Fayetteville, Wilmington, Rocky Mount, Goldsboro, Winston-Salem and Greenville.
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