ShotSpotter Acoustic Gunshot Detection, In Service Since 2006
MPD has run ShotSpotter acoustic sensors since 2006, six years before Chicago started, and told the Council in 2018 that they covered 17 square miles across six of the District's seven police districts. Chicago dropped the same system in September 2024 after its Inspector General reviewed it; no equivalent D.C. review could be found, and the sensors stayed, with MPD publishing quarterly alert data through mid-2026. A June 2025 investigation found MPD could not say where its sensors are, could not describe the system's benefits, and dispatches its alerts at the same low priority as traffic complaints. A 2025 meta-analysis of the technology found no significant relationship between gunshot detection and crime.
MPD paid at least $5.16M to SoundThinking from 2016 onward and could produce neither a total since 2005 nor a current sensor map (Washington City Paper / Investigative Reporting Workshop, 12 June 2025). The same investigation put at least 43% of alerts in Ward 8 and about 32% in Ward 7, the other six wards about 24% combined, with virtually no sensors in the majority-White Wards 2 and 3. No evaluation of D.C.'s own deployment by the D.C. Auditor, the Office of the Inspector General or the Council was found; no D.C. confirmed-shooting rate or case-clearance figure exists in the public record.
🎓 Lesson
Chicago's exit was produced by an audit, not by the hardware. D.C. bought the same sensors and inherited the same criticisms, but never commissioned the study that would settle them — so the decisive variable is whether a city builds an evaluation, not whether it buys the technology.
Evidence📰 Media
Scale🏙️ City-wide
CostAt least $5.16M paid to SoundThinking since 2016; no current contract value or term is public
FundingDistrict of Columbia (MPD budget); the 2005 Seventh District pilot was supported by the FBI
Sources
↗ MPD — ShotSpotter Data, Disclaimer and Dictionary (operator)Primary/operator, and the source for the start year: 'MPD began implementing the ShotSpotter system in 2006 and has added sensors and upgraded components of the system at various times.' The page carries quarterly CSV releases running from 2014 through Q2 2026 — the strongest single piece of evidence that the deployment is still live. It also flags that Fall 2018 to Spring 2019 coverage adjustments and a Fall/Winter 2019 auto-acknowledge change altered the data, so alert counts are not comparable across those years.
↗ Open Data DC / data.gov — Shot Spotter Gun Shots (dataset, publisher City of Washington, DC)Official, last modified 24 April 2026 — the second independent confirmation of a live 2026 deployment. Establishes that coverage is partial, not citywide: the data cover 'six coverage areas' chosen for 'high population density areas with frequent sounds of gunshots incidents' and the dataset 'does not cover all of Washington, DC.' Coordinates are rounded to three decimal places for privacy, roughly 100 m resolution.
↗ Washington City Paper / Investigative Reporting Workshop — D.C. Police Spend Millions on a Surveillance System That Detects Gunshots (12 June 2025)The only sustained D.C.-specific scrutiny found, and the source for every D.C. figure in the impact field. Sentence-level: 'In 2005, the District first established ShotSpotter in the Seventh District, which encompasses most of Wards 7 and 8, with support from the Federal Bureau of Investigation.' / 'MPD has paid at least $5.16 million to SoundThinking since 2016.' / 'MPD contracts for a coverage area, but MPD does not have sensor placement information.' / 'Officers treat ShotSpotter alerts as low-priority calls—the same classification as traffic complaints.' / 'At least 43 percent of ShotSpotter alerts originated in Ward 8, and about 32 percent originated in Ward 7.' A 2021 contract listed at least 335 sensor coordinates. Reporters cross-referenced MPD crime data against alert data for January 2014 to January 2025 and confirmed at least three shootings the system did not detect.
↗ Carr & Doleac — The Geography, Incidence, and Underreporting of Gun Violence: New Evidence Using ShotSpotter Data, Brookings (2016)The counterweight, and the only academic work using D.C.'s own sensor data. Covers Washington, D.C. AND Oakland jointly: 'only 12% of gunfire incidents result in a 911 call to report gunshots, and only 2-7% of incidents result in a reported assault with a dangerous weapon.' Measures how much gunfire the 911 record misses, not whether the sensors reduce crime; the two-city pooling means the figures cannot be reported as D.C.-only. A widely repeated D.C.-specific '2.3%' variant appears only in secondary summaries and was not used.
📎 Cite this project
1001 Smart Cities (2026). “ShotSpotter Acoustic Gunshot Detection, In Service Since 2006” — Washington D.C., United States. The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/projects/washington-dc-shotspotter/ (last verified 2026-07-26). Data: CC BY 4.0.
The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.
