Baton Rouge, La., Ends Contract With Gunshot Detection Company

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(TNS) — In Baton Rouge Police Department’s first major belt-tightening measure in 2025, Police Chief Thomas Morse Jr. said he’s ending a $400,000 annual contract with a company that’s provided the city for 18 years with sensor technology that automatically alerts police when and where gunshots are fired.

When ShotSpotter’s acoustic sensors detect a gunshot, the sound is fed through a computer algorithm that determines the approximate location. The technology has given parish law enforcement valuable assistance locating forensic evidence like shell casings, which can help identify suspects’ weapons, District Attorney Hillar Moore said.

In December, for example, 42% of the 470 gunshots reported in Baton Rouge were detected by ShotSpotter, a portion on par with most months since city police started using it in 2007, according to data supplied to The Advocate by the district attorney’s office.

“The ShotSpotter technology is good, but it’s limited,” Morse said, explaining his decision to stop using it. “It’s bringing us to an area where a gunshot happened and that’s it.”

When the Baton Rouge police chief faced the challenge of slashing nearly $9 million from the department’s budget because a parishwide 2% sales tax — revenue totaling about $50 million annually — is being transferred to the new city of St. George on July 1, he opted to kill ShotSpotter.

For Morse, the technology’s increasing cost simply didn’t outweigh its benefits. He said as crime hot spots have shifted over the years, ShotSpotter’s success rate has waned. Presently, the sensors only cover six of Baton Rouge’s 80 square miles, plus two additional areas outside the city in the parish. Relocating the sensors would prove prohibitively expensive, the police chief said.

While Moore understood the Baton Rouge police department’s budgetary constraints, he would have preferred keeping and expanding ShotSpotter’s range if the money was available.

“It’s not solving a crime,” Moore said, “but there are instances where it’s extremely valuable.”

While murder rates in many U.S. cities have been declining, Baton Rouge has struggled with stubbornly high numbers since the pandemic emerged in March 2020.

Given that, Moore said expanding ShotSpotter could save lives with faster police and emergency response times.

“If someone is shot in the lower limb, they have only a few minutes to survive,” he said. “How do you put a price on that?”

How it works

Moore said real-time data from ShotSpotter can provide police officers with crucial information, like whether the gunfire is automatic. That information is often more reliable than eyewitness accounts, and can be critical in cases when witnesses are uncooperative, he said.

SoundThinking, the company that owns ShotSpotter, claimed its system has a 97% accuracy rate and a 0.5% false positive rate.

However, the technology has been criticized by law enforcement officials and criminal justice advocates nationwide. They say its false positives from noises like fireworks can waste police resources and potentially lead to overreactive policing in minority neighborhoods.

Morse doesn’t share the counterproductive viewpoint.

“I don’t know about the over-policing part, because it’s just a report of a gunshot in the area,” he said.

Morse, the police chief, said although the technology has improved since 2007, he wasn’t certain whether ShotSpotter technology was responsible for a single arrest since he became chief in late 2023.

How it emerged in Baton Rouge

During a 2007 trip to Washington, D.C., former Baton Rouge Police Chief Jeff LeDuff and then-Mayor Kip Holden saw ShotSpotter equipment perched on street corners in the nation’s capital.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, it seemed like a perfect resource to help Baton Rouge handle the influx of residents moving from New Orleans, LeDuff said. Flush with cash from federal grants, Baton Rouge police officials soon installed new street crime cameras and ShotSpotter’s sensors throughout the city.

“It was an exciting time in law enforcement, and we were leading the charge,” LeDuff said.

Ex-police chief’s personal story

Then the investment in gunshot sensor technology took a personal turn for the police chief.

On Labor Day weekend in 2010, LeDuff received an early morning call about a shooting at Nicholson Drive and Roosevelt Street, near the outskirts of LSU’s campus. He soon found out the victim was his brother-in-law, Christopher Domingue, who had been fatally shot while riding his bicycle.

On the morning Domingue was killed, no one had been around to call 911, but ShotSpotter sensors alerted an officer who arrived on the scene, in time to see the suspect’s car drive away, LeDuff said. Officers soon located the car at an apartment, where they found the man who would ultimately go to jail after his conviction for killing Domingue.

“Can you imagine being the chief of police and going back to your house every day and your significant other looks at you and says, ‘You know anything about my brother’s death yet’ and you don’t have any answers?’ LeDuff said. “ShotSpotter saved me from that.”

Police department fiscal woes

The ShotSpotter technology joins the police department’s mounted patrol division, with its annual $50,000 cost, as victims of the budget ax.

But the reduction in revenue has also exacerbated staffing woes. The police department was already 100 officers short before the St. George tax transfer, and new officers earn less than $39,000 a year.

“There are 15 to 20 departments right around us that make more starting pay than us,” Morse said.

On Thursday, Mayor Sid Edwards proposed redirecting library funds to boost police salaries. But the budget crunch remains in the police department.

“I have a lot of things that I’ve presented to the Mayor’s Office on ways that I can get to that $9 million,” the police chief said.

His immediate goals are balancing morale, staffing, community relations, and crime prevention.

As for gunshot detection, the chief is looking to move to cheaper, more proven technology like crime cameras with facial- and weapon-recognition software, and license plate readers — both of which are already widespread throughout the city.