What happened
Durham contracted with SoundThinking for a 12-month pilot of ShotSpotter, a gunfire detection service, in a three-square-mile area with high gun violence. The pilot began on 15 December 2022. The Durham Police Department arranged an arms-length evaluation with Duke University's Wilson Center for Science and Justice, and two economists published it in February 2024. They compared the pilot area with the rest of the city and with the year before. They found that the median response time from alert to arrival was 5.5 minutes, a decline of 1.2 minutes in the target area compared with the rest of the city. Alerts also more than doubled the gunshot notifications that police received. The 73 confirmed shootings that police knew about only through alerts led to 7 arrests. Only 9% of alerts without a 911 call were confirmed as shootings. The evaluators found no evidence that investigations of 911-reported shootings became more productive, and they could not determine an effect on gunshot injuries. One author disclosed that SoundThinking paid his travel to a January 2024 speech.
Sources
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Evaluation report, by an evaluator that the makers or users commissioned.
Cook, Philip J. and Adam Soliman. Evaluation of Durham's ShotSpotter Installation: Results of a 12-Month Pilot Project. Wilson Center for Science and Justice, Duke Law, February 2024. The Durham Police Department arranged the evaluation.
Median response time during the pilot period declined by 1.2 minutes in the target area compared with the rest of the city
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Other, by the makers. Context or contrary evidence.
SoundThinking. SoundThinking's Approach to Fourth of July Safety. Company blog, 29 June 2026.
The resulting image mosaic is analyzed by a machine learning algorithm trained with gunshot and non-gunshot incidents collected over 25 years of real data to filter out incidents that are clearly not gunshots.
Details
AI system
- Workflow
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Acoustic sensors covered a three-square-mile area chosen for its high rate of gun violence. Staff at the SoundThinking Incident Review Center confirmed each alert, which reached the police dispatch system and the nearest patrol cars almost always within 60 seconds. Police treated every gunshot notification as a Priority 2 incident that sends two patrol cars.
Follow-up
- Conditions for replication
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The gunfire occurs outdoors, since the system is not designed to detect gunfire indoors or in vehicles. Officers treat an alert as a lead and weigh the totality of the circumstances before they detain anyone.
Entry details
- Sector
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Policing (gunfire detection).
- Purpose
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SoundThinking built ShotSpotter to detect gunfire with acoustic sensors and alert police to its location. The evaluators say that it is designed to make shootings known to police and to cut the time until an officer arrives.
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Cite this benefit
Peter H. Vartanian. (2026). ShotSpotter sped Durham's police response to gunfire by 1.2 minutes (AIBD-1218). Artificial Intelligence Benefits Database, edition of 2 November 2026. https://petervartanian.xyz/aibd/records/AIBD-1218.html (archived at https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/AADSII, version 9.0)