Assessing the Reliability of ShotSpotter Systems: False Positives and Wasted Resources

October 9, 2012

The ShotSpotter algorithmic system, designed to locate gunshots, has been criticized by police departments for its high false positive rate and waste of resources. Consequently, these systems are increasingly being discontinued due to their unreliability.
Alleged deployer
troy-police-department, syracuse-police-department, san-francisco-police-department, san-antonio-police-department, new-york-city-police-department, fall-river-police-department, chicago-police-department
Alleged developer
shotspotter
Alleged harmed parties
troy-residents, troy-police-department, syracuse-residents, syracuse-police-department, san-francisco-residents, san-francisco-police-department, san-antonio-residents, san-antonio-police-department, new-york-city-residents, new-york-city-police-department, fall-river-residents, fall-river-police-department, chicago-residents, chicago-police-department

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/112

Data source

Incident data is from the AI Incident Database (AIID).

When citing the database as a whole, please use:

McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-21). Virtual Conference.

Pre-print on arXiv · Database snapshots & citation guide

We use weekly snapshots of the AIID for stable reference. For the official suggested citation of a specific incident, use the “Cite this incident” link on each incident page.