Trying out ShotSpotter was part of an $800,000 grant from the Bureau of Justice Assistance the Police Department announced in April last year that included a 3-D scanner for crime scenes and a device designed to lift fingerprints from discharged bullet casings.
About $300,000 of that grant money is left over a two-year period, according to the Police Department, which is working with the Bureau of Justice Assistance to reallocate the funds to pre-existing tech programs within the department.
ShotSpotter promised to get police officers to the precise location of gunfire in the South Hosmer Street corridor in a fraction of the time it takes officers to get there based on the reports of 911 callers. But it raised concerns about over-policing and the value of a project that wasn’t addressing underlying problems that lead to gun violence.
Officer Shelbie Boyd, a spokesperson for the Police Department, told The News Tribune on Wednesday that the decision was made in the summer to not move forward with implementing ShotSpotter.
“Ultimately, the department determined that this was not the right time or tool for Tacoma,” Boyd said in response to written questions.
“The decision followed a comprehensive reassessment of department priorities under new leadership,” Boyd said.
A representative for SoundThinking, the company that owns ShotSpotter, told The News Tribune on Thursday that he would check if the company had a comment on the Police Department’s decision.
WHY DID TACOMA POLICE END SHOTSPOTTER PROGRAM EARLY?
The Police Department’s leadership has changed significantly since the ShotSpotter program was announced under the leadership of former Police Chief Avery Moore, who resigned in February. Moore’s deputy chief, Paul Junger, was designated as the project lead but was fired March 31. A financial manager who was assigned to the project is also no longer with the department.
Writing in a community newsletter last month, Tacoma City Council member Olgy Diaz said she was grateful to city administrators and Interim Police Chief Patti Jackson for hearing the concerns she raised on the use of ShotSpotter.
Boyd pointed to three key factors that informed the decision not to proceed with the pilot program: * “Changing crime patterns in the originally proposed deployment area.” * “A shift in operational focus toward long-term, sustainable crime reduction strategies.” * “A need to ensure any adopted technology aligns with both community expectations and the department’s core mission.”
Data from the Police Department’s crime dashboard shows that calls for service and violent crime has decreased in the area where ShotSpotter was going to be activated, roughly 2 square miles from South 72nd to 96th streets and Hosmer Street to Yakima Avenue.
In the last six months, there have been approximately 5,174 calls for service to that area, down from 6,009 calls in the same period in 2024 and 6,156 calls in the same period in 2023, according to the crime dashboard. That’s about a 16 percent reduction in calls for service.
The number of assaults, robberies, arsons and kidnappings also have declined. There were about 121 of those offenses from May 1 to Nov. 4, 2023. That number fell to about 96 in 2024 and 89 in 2025, approximately a 26 percent decrease over two years. ‘We are going to save lives...’
Tacoma residents seemed to have mixed opinions on ShotSpotter. At informational meetings the Police Department organized in August 2024, some residents saw value in improving police response times to shooting incidents. Others were worried about wrongful arrests or skeptical of SoundThinking’s claim of 97 percent accuracy in detecting a gunshot and not other loud noises like a firework.
Elisa Gonzalez, a Tacoma resident since the mid-2000s, went to multiple meetings and was supportive of ShotSpotter. She said she wished it would have been implemented to help save lives and make arrests.
Gonzalez lost her son in a shooting in 2022 in Tacoma’s Eastside neighborhood. At one ShotSpotter meeting covered by KING 5 News, Gonzalez said she felt there was a delay in the police response. If gunshot detection had been active in that neighborhood at the time, could police have gotten him medical care faster and saved his life? Reached by phone Thursday, Gonzalez said that’s something she’s wondered about.
“The seconds and the minutes are just important,” Gonzalez said.
After going to those meetings last year, Gonzalez got the impression ShotSpotter was going to be activated by spring 2025.
In March, Tacoma police leaders and SoundThinking CEO Ralph Clark faced tough questions from the Tacoma City Council about the value of ShotSpotter. Still, police leaders seemed confident the technology would improve police response times. Boyd told The News Tribune then the program would begin in 2025, but that a start date hadn’t been set.
“We are going to save lives with this technology,” Assistant Chief Crystal-Young Haskins told the council members at the time.
TEST RUN OF TECH WAS BEHIND SCHEDULE
The ShotSpotter project appears to have been beset by delays. A 26-page action plan dated in February 2024 included a month-by-month timeline that identified months six to nine as when ShotSpotter would be “implemented.”
Boyd said the first month of the project would have approximately corresponded to the first quarter of 2024, when internal coordination, grant procurement and early planning efforts were underway.
According to the timeline, the Police Department’s research partner, an assistant professor in the School of Criminal Justice at the University of Cincinnati, should have been collecting ShotSpotter activation data by month seven. At the latest, that would have been September last year.
ShotSpotter sensors were installed, according to Boyd, but they were never activated. SoundThinking’s CEO previously told The News Tribune it took about 20-30 sensors in a square mile for ShotSpotter to be deployed. Boyd said the city has removed all of the devices and returned them.
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