“At this time, there is no contract and there is no plan to continue with the company,” a department spokesperson wrote in an email. San Diego and ShotSpotter have reached an agreement that allows the company to keep its sensors on city property. “However, as of September 2021, the device is disabled, cannot collect data and is not operational.”
But emails to the 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 these emails, ShotSpotter support staff routinely refers to SDPD as “ShotSpotter Customer.”
These weren’t just mass marketing emails that all past and present customers are frequently exposed to. Emails we obtained indicate that in October 2021, after the contract expired, ShotSpotter also provided an “investigative management summary” of a shooting in San Diego to an SDPD officer at SDPD’s request, including the exact location and number discovered Shots.
ShotSpotter also sent SDPD emails to inform the department of routine scheduled maintenance in October 2022 and how the company plans to handle the “extremely high volume of fireworks activity” around New Year’s Day in 2023.
“Despite our efforts, occasionally we may accidentally miss a shot,” wrote Dinh Nguyen, a technical support engineer at ShotSpotter, in an email to SDPD in December 2022. “There may also be delays in the release of Incidents come.”
ShotSpotter is not on a list of surveillance technologies that SDPD is required to regularly release under a comprehensive surveillance ordinance passed by the San Diego City Council in August 2022 and amended in January of this year.
A San Diego city council member whose district includes several neighborhoods where ShotSpotter sensors were installed in 2016 said through a spokesman that “his office is aware of the ShotSpotter situation.” In July 2021, then-Fourth District Councilman asked the city to remove sensors from his district, which helped thwart the contract extension.
“A request to remove such [sensors] has been forwarded to the San Diego Police Department and the Mayor’s Office,” a spokesperson for current County Councilman Henry L. Foster III (who was sworn in in April) wrote in an email to the San Diego Police Department and the Mayor’s Office Weekly and WIRED. “Equipment that is not approved under the monitoring ordinance should not be installed and/or placed into service 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 removed a planned vote on a four-year extension for ShotSpotter from its agenda, effectively nixing the city’s agreement with the company. Although Gloria’s office said in statements at the time that it would bring the extension up again with the City Council, there is no indication that this was the case.
Based on a map published by WIRED of the secret locations of all ShotSpotter sensors in the country, there are still about 30 active sensors in San Diego, most of which are near UC San Diego’s La Jolla campus and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.