Everyone Deserves to Feel Safe in their Own Community

SoundThinking™ Provides Over 150 U.S. Cities with the Resources They Need to Stay Safe

Did You Know that Over 80% of Shootings Go Unreported?

On average less than 12% of shootings are reported to 9-1-1. As a result, eight out of ten times when someone fires a gun in your neighborhood, the police never show up, simply because they don’t know about it.

When Gun Crimes Go Unreported

When gun crime isn’t reported, perpetrators grow emboldened, putting everyone else in the community at risk.

Unaddressed gunfire drives homicides and injuries, but there are other costs to the community as well:

Victims don’t get treated fast enough

Residents feel unsafe at home

Community jobs are lost

The cycle of gun violence continues

*Source: The Effect of Gun Violence on Local Economies, Urban Institute, November 2016.

At the Forefront of Community Safety

Our mission is to reduce gun violence and improve the police-community relationship. Communities like yours are proactively addressing gun violence with our SafetySmart Platform.

3.6 min

reduction in GSW victims transport time

Surgeon: Having a machine listen for gunshots helped us save lives

101

victims found and aided by police in Oakland when no one called 911

City of Oakland Privacy Advisory Commission Meeting Agenda

29%

reduction in gun violence injuries, Greenville, NC

Greenville Success Story

Communities Count on SoundThinking’s SafetySmart Platform

I feel reassured having a system in place that can detect exactly where gun fire is, so the authorities can respond quickly.

Data for Good

We understand that there are many key stakeholders involved in upholding community safety. With SoundThinking’s Data for Good initiative, we partner closely with critical institutions in a given community to provide them with data on where shootings occur, so they can focus on areas and individuals that are most in need.

Addressing Youth Gun Violence

At the African American Mayors Association (AAMA) 2022 Annual Conference, SoundThinking’s Community Impact and Engagement Directors Gerard Tate and Paul John sat down with the Mayor of Baltimore and other thought leaders from across the country to talk about how to curb youth gun violence. Here were some major takeaways.

Gun violence is a community issue, not a police issue. So we’re taking that same data and pushing it to our service providers. And for anyone else who is involved in dealing with the root causes of crime, we’re willing to share that data with them as well. We’re no longer holding onto the data. We’re making it public. And we are asking the community to do their part in helping us reduce gun violence in our city.

Anthony Smith, Executive Director, Cities UnitedAAMA Panel, April 2022

To learn more about our Community Safety initiatives, visit our Data for Good page.

Community Sentiment on ShotSpotter

Review sentiment survey results from additional cities here.

Meet Our Community Engagement Team

Commitment to Privacy

We take the community’s privacy seriously and are proud to share that we received unanimous approval from the privacy commissions in San Francisco and Oakland. The city of Oakland has the “strongest surveillance oversight law in the country.” We also enlisted the NYU School of Law Policing Project to conduct a thorough privacy assessment and ensure we are meeting best practices. After completing the assessment, the Policing Project reported:

“Although ultimately concluding that the risk of voice surveillance was extremely low in practice, we offered SST a variety of recommendations on how to make its gunshot detection product even more privacy protective. As detailed in our report, SST has adopted nearly all of our recommendations verbatim, with only slight modifications or qualifications based on how ShotSpotter functions.”

“Throughout this process, SST has consistently demonstrated commendable commitment to modifying its technology to balance its public safety protections for individual privacy…We hope others follow SST’s leadership in this regard; indeed, we believe this type of open audit and assessment—whether performed by us or by others — should become the norm for companies selling technologies to governments and policing agencies.”

Read Full Report

*ShotSpotter Respond was rebranded to ShotSpotter in April 2023.

We Recognize the Urgency Around Protecting Our Physical Environment

As a company focused intently on public safety and the well-being of our communities, we also understand both the importance and the urgency around protecting our physical environment. That’s why our commitment to community safety extends into the realm of protecting marine life, wildlife, and precious ecosystems. Learn more about how our technology is making a significant impact in preventing rhino poaching and fish blasting.

Our passion for creating safer, more connected communities is ingrained in our culture, and we take ethical, environmental, social, and governance (ESG) aspects into account with every business decision we make.

Check out our 2024 ESG Report to learn more

FAQs

The SafetySmart Platform is a suite of five data-driven tools that enable law enforcement and civic stakeholders to be more efficient, effective, and equitable in driving positive public safety outcomes. SoundThinking’s new SafetySmart Platform goes well beyond ShotSpotter®, the leading acoustic gunshot detection service. It includes the leading law enforcement search engine CrimeTracer™, the comprehensive investigation management system CaseBuilder®, the first of-its-kind gun crime tracking and patrol management and case management tool CaseBuilder ® Crime Gun, and the resource and patrol management software ResourceRouter™.

SoundThinking has taken all the necessary steps to ensure citizen privacy. In the case of ShotSpotter, the risk of sensors picking up human voices is extremely low, as independently verified by the New York University Policing Project. Also, in 2019 the Privacy Advisory Commission of the City of Oakland unanimously approved the Oakland Police Department’s continued use of ShotSpotter despite one of the strongest surveillance ordinances in the country. Sound snippets only include the recording of potential gunfire and one second before and after to establish an ambient noise level. Recorded sounds are only stored by ShotSpotter for 30 hours, and then overwritten.