Is it true that in a study of 68 large metropolitan U.S. counties, ShotSpotter did not have a significant impact on gun-related homicides or arrest outcomes?

The Journal of Urban Healthy Study, the source of this claim, has some significant procedural flaws.

In this case, the study considered data from across entire counties, whereas ShotSpotter coverage areas typically only cover a small portion of counties. Because ShotSpotter sensors do not detect and report gunfire incidents outside the coverage area where they are deployed, the system would not be able to alert law enforcement to incidents in most of the geographic areas that were analyzed in this study. For example, just 3.1% of St. Louis County is in the ShotSpotter coverage area, making findings across the entire county inapplicable to ShotSpotter’s technology.

Bottomline: these results are not credible and need to be dismissed.

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