Baton Rouge, La., Police Department cancels ShotSpotter contract

The police department in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, recently cancelled its contract with the company that provides auditory gunshot detection technology following required budget cuts for the new year.

While the technology, called ShotSpotter, has been in use by the city’s police department since 2007, Baton Rouge Police Chief TJ Morse said its success rate has declined amid shifting crime hot spots, The Advocate reported.

Additionally, Morse said ShotSpotter only covers a fraction of the city’s 80 square miles, and that relocating the sensors to monitor new, higher crime areas would be expensive in addition to ShotSpotter’s annual cost of $400,000. When challenged with the task of cutting almost $9 million from the department’s 2025 budget, due to shifting tax revenues to other parishes in the area, the decision was made in December to slash ShotSpotter, WBRZ Baton Rouge reported, and the cut was effective Jan. 1.

The city’s district attorney, Hillar Moore, said ShotSpotter has assisted Baton Rouge’s police department with criminal investigations over the years, and he would have rather seen the technology expanded, the Advocate reported. But, its effectiveness has proved questionable: In the month of December 2024, only 42% of the 470 gunshots reported in the city were detected by the technology, according to data obtained by The Advocate from the district attorney’s office.

This statistic is on par with data collected about ShotSpotter’s performance in the city since its rollout in 2007.

“The ShotSpotter technology is good, but it’s limited,” Morse said, according to the Advocate. “It’s bringing us to an area where a gunshot happened and that’s it.”

Baton Rouge isn’t the only city to recently cancel its contract with the technology amid questions about its effectiveness. The city Board of Directors in Little Rock, Arkansas, voted last week against extending its contract with ShotSpotter following disappointment with how the performance of the technology, which cost $290,000 for two years, according to Reason Magazine.

Last May, Houston Mayor John Whitmire also announced plans to cancel the city’s  partnership with ShotSpotter, calling the technology a “gimmick, feel-good program.” Houston has a $3.5 million five-year contract with SoundThinking, the parent company of ShotSpotter, which is set to expire in 2027.