City of New Haven image
Existing covered area (in red); proposed new expanded areas (in blue).
Alders fast-tracked a city plan to expand ShotSpotter to the far east and west sides of town, as part of a proposed four-year, $1.67 million deal to try to help police better respond soon after someone fires a gun.
That was the outcome of Monday night’s latest regular monthly meeting of the Board of Alders Finance Committee. The three-hour virtual meeting took place online via Zoom and YouTube Live, and marked the committee’s first meeting since the start of the alders’ new two-year term in January.
The committee alders took no action on a proposed order authorizing the city to enter into a four-agreement with ShotSpotter Inc. in the amount of $1,676,919 to “expand and provide gunfire detection system/software.” That means the matter advances more promptly for a vote by the full Board of Alders.
Of that four-year total, $1.2 million would come from the city’s federal pandemic-relief American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) aid, and the remainder from the police department’s general fund budget.
That $1.2 million ARPA allocation towards ShotSpotter expansion was already approved by the Board of Alders in December as part of a $12 million public safety-tech upgrade spending package put forward by the Elicker Administration.
The committee review Monday night, therefore, was focused less on the federal-city spending breakdown, and more on the details of a new four-year agreement between the city and the acoustic gunshot-detection service that the local police department has worked with since 2009.
“We do feel that it’s very valuable, and we feel that expanding it and adding more square mileage will only help us with our investigations” into homicides, nonfatal shootings, and other gunfire-related incidents that take place across the city, Interim Police Chief Renee Dominguez said.
Fair Haven Alder Ernie Santiago agreed. “It’s something we need in New Haven right now, to expand it,” he said. (Click here to read about the latest evidence that ShotSpotter may just be spending money without helping solve crime)
Monday night's Finance Committee virtual meeting.
Monday night’s no-vote was a procedural move that will allow local legislators to discharge the item from committee and take the matter up for an expedited final debate and vote at the next full Board of Alders meeting on Feb. 22.
If approved, the deal would expand the city’s ShotSpotter coverage from an existing 5.5 square-mile area — concentrated downtown, in the Hill, West River, Edgewood, Dwight, Newhallville, Dixwell, Beaver Hills, and the western half of Fair Haven — to an additional 1.56 square miles of city land, bringing the New Haven’s total coverage by ShotSpotter to 7.06 square miles.
Those proposed new coverage areas would include 0.37 square miles in the eastern half of Fair Haven, 0.75 square miles in Fair Haven Heights and Quinnipiac Meadows, 0.25 square miles in West Hills, and 0.19 square miles in West Rock.
City of New Haven images
Proposed ShotSpotter expansion areas (in blue.)
Dominguez told the alders that ShotSpotter improves police identification of and response time to gunfire incidents around town. She said its acoustic sensors — which are stationed on public buildings and utility poles across the covered areas of the city — and the resulting updates sent to the police department also help officers make gun-related arrests.
She cited three recent examples of ShotSpotter helping police file charges against people for allegedly shooting guns. One such incident took place in August of last year, she said, when ShotSpotter alerted police to a shooting at Washington Avenue and West Street in the Hill. She said police found 19 shell casings on scene, and ultimately arrested four people. “This incident was not called in,” she said. Meaning no one called 911. Police responded only because they got a ShotSpotter alert.
Board of Alders President Tyisha Walker-Myers asked about how effective ShotSpotter is at detecting gunshots, and about how frequently it misidentifies another noise as gunfire — or misses an actual gunshot entirely.
Dominguez replied that, among the 698 ShotSpotter “hits” that the police department received notifications for in 2021, 17 percent wound up not being gunshots. Those instead turned out to be fireworks, car backfires, or other loud popping noises.
She also said that, of the 136 homicides and nonfatal shootings that took place in New Haven last year, only 12 were missed by ShotSpotter. That is, in those 136 gunfire incidents, ShotSpotter sent shot notifications to the police for 124, and missed 12.
In response to East Rock Alder Anna Festa’s request for a refresher on how the gunshot-detection service works, ShotSpotter representative Ron Teachman said the company places acoustic sensors on rooftops and utility poles all around the paid-for coverage areas.
“We’re responsible for the buildout and the infrastructure and the maintenance of hardware and software,” he said.
When someone fires a gun, he said, that system of sensors “detects and locates” the source of the noise. “We’ve got computer algorithms that dismiss almost 95 percent of noises,” such as those that might from from fireworks or jackhammers.
And before ShotSpotter sends a dispatch alert to the police department, the noise is sent to an “incident review center,” where actual human beings sitting in a “windowless” room review the sound to make sure the sensors and algorithms were correct in identifying it as coming from a gun.
He said ShotSpotter guarantees at least a 90 percent accuracy rate in detecting “external unsuppressed gunfire over 25 calibers” in covered areas. That’s not including shots fired inside buildings or cars, he said, as those enclosed areas contain the “acoustic energy” from the gunfire incident, thus muffling it from detection by the outdoor sensors.
Dominguez said that the police department picked Fair Haven, the Heights, Quinnipiac Meadows, West Hills, and West Rock for ShotSpotter expansion based on 2021 police department data on citywide concentrations of homicides, assaults with firearms, and confirmed gunshots incidents.
ShotSpotter rate sheet for proposed city expansion.
The police chief and City Budget Director Michael Gormany said that the four-year contract would go from March 1, 2022 through Feb. 28, 2026.
Once the $1.2 million in federal ARPA aid for this project runs out four years from now, they said, the increased ShotSpotter costs stemming from this expansion would likely move into the city’s general fund.
Gormany said the city currently pays around $336,000 per year for its existing ShotSpotter coverage. After the expansion, that annual cost will increase to around $446,000 per year.
Will ShotSpotter’s acoustic-sensor system interact with the city’s planned new 500 surveillance-camera system? Prospect Hill/Newhallville Alder Steve Winter asked.
No, Dominguez replied. “That’s a cost we’re not able to support right now.”
Click here, here, here and here to read some of the documents submitted by the city to the alders as part of this proposed four-year deal with ShotSpotter. And click on the below video to watch Monday night’s Finance Committee meeting. The ShotSpotter discussion begins at 1:56:00.