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Start Learning Free📋About SoundThinking
Updated July 4, 2026SoundThinking — renamed from ShotSpotter in 2023 — operates rooftop networks of acoustic sensors that use machine-learning classification to detect and locate suspected gunfire and alert police within seconds. Founded in 1996, it is headquartered in Fremont, California, and trades publicly.
Its broader SafetySmart suite includes CrimeTracer (search), CaseBuilder (investigations), ResourceRouter (patrol allocation), SafePointe (weapons detection), and PlateRanger (ALPR, powered by Rekor). Its deployments have become contested city by city — it lost its flagship Chicago contract in 2024, Cambridge, Massachusetts voted to remove it in May 2026, and Detroit narrowly voted to extend in June 2026.
Effectiveness is genuinely disputed. A 2021 Northwestern MacArthur Justice Center study of Chicago found that about 89 percent of alerts led to no gun-crime evidence on arrival, and critics cite over-deployment in Black and brown neighborhoods and officer diversion to dead-end alerts. Importantly, those figures measure alerts without recovered evidence, not a technical misclassification rate; SoundThinking disputes the framing and cites high contractual accuracy guarantees and human review of every alert.
🛠️Products & Tools (1)
Acoustic sensor networks that use machine learning to detect and locate suspected gunfire, plus the SafetySmart software suite.