Reimagining Public Safety: Data, Trust and Community Outcomes

Public safety leaders are being asked to do more with less and pulled in many directions. Reduce gun violence. Increase transparency. Adhere to new laws. Update technology. Stay within budget. Figure out service levels without additional staff. Keep communities safe.

That was the backdrop for a fireside chat at the 2026 NBC-LEO Summer Conference in Birmingham, Alabama, where SoundThinking President and CEO Ralph Clark sat down with Mayor Van R. Johnson II, 1st Vice President of the National League of Cities and Mayor of Savannah, Georgia. Mayor Johnson started his career as a police officer, which gave the conversation a perspective that mixed policy with lived experience on patrol. The discussion covered a lot of ground, and the recap will cover some of the main dialogue, along with some of Mayor Johnson's most direct answers from the stage.

Clark opened by framing why SoundThinking exists in the first place. Over 80 percent of criminal gunfire goes unreported in the communities most affected by gun violence. That gap means police departments are often working without a clear picture of what is actually happening on their streets.

While technology, especially gunshot detection technology, helps complete the full picture of gun violence in an area, Clark was careful to note that technology alone will not fix public safety. It takes leadership, collaboration, and trust between residents and the agencies serving them.

Mayor Johnson described a law enforcement hiring landscape that has turned into a bidding war. In his home county, more than 20 different police agencies compete for the same pool of officers through retention bonuses and lateral transfer incentives.

That shortage has pushed departments to rely more heavily on technology as a force multiplier, not a replacement for personnel.

"Job number one is public safety. If folks are not safe, you cannot be effective," Mayor Johnson said.

He connected staffing pressure directly to the need for smarter deployment of resources.

"You have to have knowledge-informed policing. You have to have what's called predictive policing, because sometimes we can really mess up by not having the right resources in the right place at the right time."

One of the most candid parts of the conversation covered Georgia's constitutional carry law and the state preemption fights that follow it. Mayor Johnson pointed to a striking statistic from Savannah: more than 240 guns were stolen from unlocked cars in one year –– no broken windows, no forced entry, just an open door.

Savannah passed a local ordinance encouraging residents to lock their cars. The state legislature moved to override it.

"We're fighting not only the perennial trigger pullers in the street, we're also fighting state governments and threats of preemption from people who will charge us to say, 'Well, you got to keep your community safe, but we're not going to give you the tools to do it,'" Mayor Johnson said.

On the broader tension between gun rights and public safety, he put it plainly.

"I believe we can protect the Second Amendment and protect second graders at the same time."

Clark shared a story from early in his career at SoundThinking, a ride-along in Baltimore where he responded to the scene of a homicide involving a teenager. What struck him most was not the scene itself, but the reaction of the young people standing nearby. There wasn't one. They had seen it before.

Clark also connected that desensitization to outcomes that rarely show up in crime statistics: academic performance, teen pregnancy, early substance use, and untreated trauma.

"It's all connected," he said. Growing up in Brooklyn, he described reaching a point where he stopped consciously hearing gunshots because he had heard them so often. He tied that same desensitization to undiagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder across entire neighborhoods.

During audience Q&A, an audience member turned to a solution that has nothing to do with technology: block captain programs, where trained residents watch out for their own streets and pass along what they know.

"Neighborhoods instead of hoods. Put the neighbor back in the hood, that's what I'm talking about," he said.

He was direct about why this matters. Police typically respond after a crime happens, not before it.

An audience member also stated, "Because the police, if we're honest, they only come after something happens. They're not there to prevent it."

Rebuilding that kind of community accountability, he said, means giving residents the confidence to act, even when it involves calling out their own neighbors.

The final audience question asked Mayor Johnson to separate policing culture from public safety as a system. His answer widened the lens considerably.

"If we talk about public safety and only align it with police, we're missing the whole point. Public safety is police, it's fire, it's community services, it's all of those things. It's an ecosystem."

He was equally candid about what cities do not control once an arrest is made, including prosecutors and judges. That is where he sees data playing its biggest role, not just in identifying where gun violence happens, but in building cases strong enough to keep repeat offenders off the street.

"We now could dial up a map of saying, these are the gunshots, and these are the events on this date and this time over this period of time that is attributed to this person, which is why he doesn't need to be on our streets. That is technology that we did not have before."

Neither Clark nor Mayor Johnson framed technology as a silver bullet. The conversation kept returning to the same idea: public safety improves when data, community trust, and local leadership work together instead of competing for credit. Technologies like gunshot detection are tools that allow public safety agencies to be more data-driven and strategic when making decisions.

Staffing shortages, under-resourced neighborhoods, budgetary constraints, and other issues cannot be solved by technology.  But technology is a tool that can give public safety leaders the information they need to make decisions that keep their communities safe.