“At this time, there is no contract and there are no plans to move forward with the company,” a department spokesperson wrote in an email. San Diego and ShotSpotter signed an agreement that allows the company to leave its sensors on city properties. “However, as of September 2021, the equipment is disabled, cannot collect any data, and is not functional.”
But send emails to Weekly and WIRED obtained through a California Public Records Act request show that ShotSpotter remained in contact with SDPD for more than 15 months after the city’s contract expired in September 2021. In those emails, staff SDPD is commonly referred to as a “ShotSpotter Customer” by ShotSpotter Support.
These were not just mass marketing emails that all past and present customers are frequently subjected to. Emails we obtained show that in October 2021, after the contract expired, ShotSpotter also provided an SDPD officer with an “investigative summary” about a shooting in San Diego, including the precise location and number of bullets detected. , at the request of the SDPD. .
ShotSpotter also sent emails to the SDPD updating the department about routine scheduled maintenance in October 2022 and how the company planned to address the “extremely high volume of fireworks activity” around New Year’s Day in 2023.
“Despite our efforts, we may occasionally miss a shot by mistake,” Dinh Nguyen, ShotSpotter technical support engineer, wrote in a December 2022 email to SDPD. “You may also experience some delays in publishing incidents.”
ShotSpotter is not activated a list of surveillance technologies The SDPD is required to publish frequently as part of a broad surveillance ordinance approved by the San Diego City Council in August 2022 and modified in January of this year.
A San Diego councilman whose district includes several of the neighborhoods where ShotSpotter sensors were installed. installed in 2016 He said his “office is aware of the ShotSpotter situation” through a spokesperson. In July 2021, the then-District Four councilman asked the city to remove the sensors from his district, helping to thwart the contract renewal.
“A request to remove such [sensors] has been forwarded to the San Diego Police Department and the mayor’s office,” a spokesperson for current District Four Councilman Henry L. Foster III (who was sworn in in April) wrote in an email to the Weekly and WIRING. “Devices that have not been approved in accordance with the Surveillance Ordinance must not be installed or operated by the City of San Diego or any third party.”
San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria’s office did not respond to requests for comment.
In 2021, the San Diego City Council took a scheduled vote in a four-year extension to ShotSpotter of its schedule, effectively ending the city’s agreement with the company. Although Gloria’s office said in statements at the time that she would raise the extension again at City Hall, there is no indication that was the case.
According to a map of the secret locations of every ShotSpotter sensor in the country published by WIRED, there are still about 30 active sensors in San Diego, most of which are clustered near UC San Diego’s La Jolla campus and the Scripps Institute of Oceanography.