Detroit Police Chief Todd Bettison went before the Detroit City Council last week to make the case for renewing the city’s ShotSpotter contract, crediting the gunshot detection technology with 256 arrests and the potential rescue of 114 shooting victims last year alone.
“ShotSpotter tells the truth. ShotSpotter notifies us where the scene is,” Bettison told council members during a March 23 budget briefing. “It helps us close cases.”
The pitch comes as the city’s current contract with ShotSpotter approaches its June 30 expiration. The technology, deployed across more than 23 square miles of Detroit, has faced persistent questions about its cost, accuracy, and effectiveness from some residents and members of the Detroit Board of Police Commissioners. Whether the council renews it, and on what terms, will be one of the more consequential public safety votes it takes this spring.
Two-Minute Response, No 911 Required
Bettison’s core argument is simple: people who get shot often don’t call for help, and neither does anyone nearby. The ShotSpotter system fills that gap by detecting and triangulating gunfire acoustically, alerting officers in real time without requiring a 911 call.
“Oftentimes, nobody called 911 and I’ve got somebody bleeding out,” he told the council.
Once an alert comes in, he said, officers respond within two minutes. That speed, according to Bettison, is what converts a potential homicide into a survivable shooting. The 114 shooting victims the department credits to ShotSpotter-assisted response represent people who might not have received timely medical attention otherwise.
“The officers are there and able to render aid and get that person to the hospital,” he said. “Without it, I wouldn’t have the closure rate that I have and a lot of families wouldn’t have the justice they deserve.”
Bettison also connected ShotSpotter to Detroit’s recent decline in homicides, framing it as an integral part of the department’s broader strategy rather than a standalone tool.
The Price Tag and the Politics
Council Member Latisha Johnson raised the question that has hung over the program since its expansion. She noted that the most recent contract vote to expand ShotSpotter coverage was “very close” and pressed Bettison on how the department actually measures whether the technology is doing what it promises.
That contract was worth $7 million. Bettison acknowledged the cost is real and significant, but argued it has to be weighed against the value of lives saved and cases closed.
The closeness of that prior vote signals that council members are not uniformly sold. Johnson’s question about measurement methodology gets at a legitimate challenge with any technology-driven policing tool: the difference between correlation and causation is hard to establish when multiple variables are shifting at once. Homicides may be down. ShotSpotter is in use. But attributing the drop specifically to the technology requires a more rigorous accounting than arrest totals alone can provide.
Bettison did not provide a detailed statistical methodology during the hearing, though he made clear the department views the numbers it does have as evidence of effectiveness.
Residents Split
Two residents offered public comment on ShotSpotter during the hearing. Their views diverged.
Taura Brown told council members she does not support the program.
“The process to get information about it is not transparent,” Brown said. “It doesn’t appear to serve the people and the purpose it was intended to serve.”
Brown’s concerns reflect a broader critique that has followed ShotSpotter in Detroit and in other cities where it operates. Critics argue the company has not made its accuracy data independently verifiable, that false alerts waste police resources, and that the technology can end up concentrating police presence in Black and low-income neighborhoods in ways that raise civil liberties concerns.
Bettison pushed back on the idea that residents are broadly skeptical. He said the department hears from people in neighborhoods without ShotSpotter coverage asking why they don’t have access to it.
“For residents who don’t have ShotSpotter in their neighborhood, I hear from those residents, ‘Why don’t we have ShotSpotter? We want ShotSpotter,’” he said.
Both things can be true at once. Residents in high-violence areas may genuinely want faster police response to gunfire. Other residents, including those with concerns about surveillance and police accountability, may view the technology differently. The council’s job is to weigh those perspectives against each other and against the data the department provides.
Mental Health Response Gets a Push Too
ShotSpotter was not the only program Bettison highlighted during the more than two-hour budget session. He also outlined plans to expand the department’s mental health co-response unit, which pairs officers with behavioral health specialists to handle calls that don’t require a traditional law enforcement response.
The program currently does not offer full-time coverage, a gap Bettison said the department intends to close. The goal is 24-hour, seven-day access to specially trained officers who respond alongside behavioral health professionals.
The expansion matters for multiple reasons. Mental health-related calls are a significant driver of police response volume. When those calls go to patrol officers without specialized training, the outcomes are often worse for everyone involved. Co-response models in other cities have reduced use of force incidents and produced better results for individuals in crisis, though implementation quality varies considerably.
The budget hearing did not produce specific dollar figures for the mental health co-response expansion, but Bettison’s public commitment to around-the-clock coverage sets a benchmark the council and the public can hold the department to.
What Comes Next
The ShotSpotter contract renewal is the sharper near-term decision. The June 30 deadline gives the council roughly three months to ask hard questions, request more data, and decide whether the investment continues at its current scale, expands, contracts, or ends.
Council Member Johnson’s question about measurement methodology was the right one to ask. Before the council votes, the department should be able to show not just arrest totals but a breakdown of how many ShotSpotter alerts led to productive police responses versus false positives, how the two-minute response claim holds up across different times of day and areas of the coverage zone, and what the cost-per-arrest or cost-per-life-saved calculation actually looks like compared to other uses of the same $7 million.
That kind of accounting doesn’t have to be an argument against ShotSpotter. If the numbers hold up under scrutiny, they strengthen the case for renewal. If they don’t, the council needs to know that before it votes.
Bettison’s advocacy was straightforward: this technology saves lives, closes cases, and residents want it. That argument may be correct. But “tells the truth” is a strong claim for any technology, and the council’s responsibility is to test it.
Brown and the other resident who commented during the hearing represent a constituency with legitimate concerns about transparency and accountability in how the department uses data and surveillance tools. Their concerns deserve a substantive response from the department, not just a rebuttal.
The budget process is where those conversations happen in real time, with real consequences. The next few weeks will show whether the council has the appetite to push for more detailed answers before the contract clock runs out.
