Increasingly, though, Pittsburgh police pinpoint the locations of shots with the help of acoustic sensors provided by the California company ShotSpotter under a $1.2-million-a-year contract. In 2021, the bureau received data on 2,874 incidents in which one or more bullets were fired via the ShotSpotter sensor system now arrayed across one-third of the city.
“ShotSpotter is really the best means of getting any kind of gauge of what actual gun violence looks like in the city in terms of shots fired,” said Heath Johnson, a bureau crime analyst.
The use of ShotSpotter’s sensors, algorithms and human reviewers to “save lives, solve cases and deter crime” — as its website claims, and as some city leaders echo — has raised questions, locally and nationally, about the fairness of computer-driven justice. Civil libertarians contend that arrests and convictions based on technology that is likely opaque to juries could tilt the scales against defendants who are, constitutionally, presumed innocent.
Those concerns have become part of a case now before the state Supreme Court in which a lawyer for an incarcerated Pittsburgh man argues that ShotSpotter data was inappropriately allowed as evidence in his trial. The Innocence Project and the American Civil Liberties Union have filed briefs in the case, arguing in their filings that ShotSpotter is part of “a larger pattern of flawed science polluting our criminal legal system.”
“You’re seeing GPS, you’re seeing facial recognition, you’re seeing cell phone location, in addition to ShotSpotter,” said Justin Romano, a Downtown-based lawyer who is challenging Angelo Weeden’s conviction for aggravated assault, following a trial that included ShotSpotter-generated evidence. “The defense is fighting a battle with at least one hand tied behind its back if it’s facing this evidence with no means of questioning it.”
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