It’s Morning Edition on 90.7 WFAE and WFAE.org I’m Marshall Terry. In the past decade several North Carolina cities, including Charlotte, have stopped using the gunshot detection technology known as ShotSpotter. They argue data does not support claims by the company behind the technology that it reduces gun violence. Meanwhile, several other cities in North Carolina continue to use ShotSpotter. One of them is Fayetteville, where activists have raised concerns about the role it may have played in a man’s death in 2023. The Assembly recently took a closer look at ShotSpotter in North Carolina. Michael Hewlett is one of the reporters who wrote that story and he joins me now.
Marshall Terry: To start, can you give me a brief overview of just how ShotSpotter works?
Michael Hewlett: ShotSpotter operates by placing the acoustic sensors throughout a particular area, and those sensors are supposed to detect gunshots so that ideally if gunshots are heard, the sensors send an alert to an incident review center where there are staff that assesses whether or not those are gunshots, and then those alerts are sent to the law enforcement agency and then the law enforcement agency dispatches officers to the exact location where they can investigate…