Is the government listening? Gunshot detectors spark backlash

When gunshots ring out on America's streets, bystanders face an instant, high-stakes dilemma.

Do I call the cops? Were those even gunshots? (Maybe it was just fireworks.)

Every moment of hesitation risks a delay in medical treatment or gives a suspect extra time to escape. But a high-tech solution to the problem has ignited a fresh round of controversy in cities across the nation.

Law enforcement officials in states including New York, Georgia, California, Michigan and Virginia have credited one system with helping them make arrests and alerting them to gunshots that would have otherwise gone unreported.

The system – part of an arsenal of police surveillance technology advocates have warned about like license plate readers – is a network of audio sensors designed to record the sound of gunshots and tell authorities where the shots were fired.

That's where the problems start.

The technology has faced a host of controversies: concerns over privacy and eavesdropping; complaints about accuracy; and even reports of many devices being installed in the wrong places.

In San José, California, and Champaign, Illinois, officials stopped using the system after finding it was much worse at detecting gunshots than the company claimed. In Jackson, Mississippi, some of the devices were installed on private property without the owners' consent and left in place despite the city's request to remove them. And in Roanoke, Virginia, the city removed the detectors after a botched rollout unsettled residents.

One of those devices was mistakenly installed in Kaitlyn Vaughn's yard, where her children play.

"I feel like everyone should have a right to privacy in their own home, and it makes you feel really vulnerable when you don't know if someone's listening all the time or not," Vaughn said. "You don't have to be doing something wrong to want to have a private space."

Are gunshot detectors listening to more than just gunshots?

Companies behind gunshot detection technology, including Flock Safety, have said the systems are designed to listen for gunshots, not private conversations. A 2019 privacy assessment of Flock competitor ShotSpotter, now known as SoundThinking, by the New York University School of Law's Policing Project found "the risk of voice surveillance was extremely low in practice."

Paris Lewbel, a spokesperson for Flock, told USA TODAY the device "is not a continuous recording device, does not monitor conversations, and cannot be used to listen in on private communications." Lewbel said the devices work kind of like an Amazon Alexa, only starting to record when it hears a "public safety event."

Ethan Ambabo, Flock's former principal product manager, explained the technology slightly differently in a 2023 webinar for prospective customers posted on the company's website. Ambabo said the devices record audio in five-second snippets, analyze the clips using a machine learning model and send them to the cloud and alert law enforcement if they contain the sound of a gunshot.

There have been times that the devices captured both a gunshot-like noise and part of a conversation, Ambabo confirmed, but it's "very, very rare."

"The device does not stream audio," he said. "The other thing about that is the device is not capable of being turned on remotely to stream on audio either, so it's not possible for somebody to just go and sit and listen and be able to hear conversations on there in any kind of meaningful manner."

Flock's announcement of a now-discontinued feature that would detect sounds of "human distress" in addition to gunshots raised further concerns among advocates including Matthew Guariglia, a senior policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

"It's unclear how this technology would be legal when a lot of states that have laws around eavesdropping, around recording people's conversations without them knowing," Guariglia said.

As the mother of two children she described as preschool age and likely neurodivergent, Vaughn worried the distress feature could trigger an unnecessary intrusion from law enforcement.

"They both scream constantly when they're happy, when they're sad, when they're angry, they're always screaming … would my kids just playing outside be recorded and then saved somewhere at the police department?" she said.

Lewbel said distress detection is no longer a feature of Flock's system, but did not respond to questions about what led to that decision or whether it had ever been used by law enforcement.

Does the gunshot detection technology work?

Gunshot detection technology – and controversy surrounding it – isn't new.

SoundThinking has said it established gunshot detection technology more than 25 years ago. Police departments in several states including Illinois, Ohio, North Carolina and Texas have recently moved away from using the technology, the Columbus Dispatch, part of the USA TODAY Network, previously reported.

Flock's gunshot detection system debuted in 2022 and several law enforcement officials credited the technology with helping them track down suspects or revealing a higher frequency of gunfire than was previously known. Flock has said its device can pinpoint the location of a gunshot within 90 feet and is 90% accurate.

But nine months into their pilot program, police in Champaign, Illinois, found only 8% of alerts generated by Raven resulted in officers finding a scene where shots appeared to have been fired. Police said the majority of the unfounded alerts were fireworks. Police spokesperson Joe Lamberson said the system was no longer used after the one-year trial.

The San José Police Department found the Flock device was roughly 50% accurate during the first few months of its pilot program, but that rose to 80% after recalibration, according to a May 2024 report from the city's Digital Privacy Office. Though the devices were able to detect gunfire that went unreported through other channels, they also logged dozens of false positives – sounds classified as gunshots that were determined not to be by human reviewers – and failed to detect a gunshot directly underneath where a sensor was placed, the report found.

"Raven was removed from the city of San José following the report as Raven was not meeting department accuracy expectations," the department said in a statement to USA TODAY.

Privacy concerns put pressure on local governments

The technology can be highly divisive, with one survey of Portland, Oregon, residents finding roughly 48% supported and 51% opposed the city using the devices in their neighborhood. After seeing those results, city leadership abandoned plans to implement the technology, according to Kris Henning, the Portland State University professor who conducted the survey.

Nearly 80% of respondents in Portland expressed some level of concern about privacy. Henning said the anxiety around this and other surveillance tech appears to stem from a deeper distrust in law enforcement, which if addressed could help solve the issue of gunshots going underreported.

"It's more about, can we trust this company? Can we trust the government with this data?" he said. "In a broader sense, then it's not really about me and them spying on me, it's just a general sense of government intrusion."

Similar concerns have bubbled up in other cities where Flock's gunshot detection technology has been deployed. Residents of Pontiac, Michigan, spoke out about these concerns at a city council meeting on June 17, The Detroit News reported.

"Personally, I don't think what they're doing with our data or our information can be trusted," Destiny Ingram said, according to the outlet.

The Oakland County Sheriff's Office used Raven in the city for six months as part of a free pilot program, The Detroit News reported. As of May 8, the gunshot data was used in nine cases including homicides, attempted murders and felons in possession of a firearm, the outlet reported, citing law enforcement.

Despite the concern from residents, the city council voted to renew the contract at a cost of $72,000 for two years, The Detroit News reported.

"It's on us to pick up the pieces when tragedy happens, not just to answer philosophical questions," said Mayor Mike McGuinness, referencing the balance between public safety and privacy rights, according to the outlet.

Botched rollouts halt deployments

In at least two cities, issues with Flock's gunshot detection technology began before the system could be used. Tommie Brown, a spokesperson for the Jackson, Mississippi, Police Department, told USA TODAY that Flock installed some Raven devices on private property without the knowledge or permission of police or the property owners.

"Additionally, despite the City's request that the devices be removed in 2025, Flock has not yet retrieved them," Brown said. "In late June 2026, Flock Safety informed the City that analytics associated with the acoustic sensors had been operating within the approximately half-square-mile area where the devices were installed, despite JPD never having activated or used the system."

In Roanoke, city manager Valmarie Turner said the Raven devices were being removed and the rollout was being halted after a "preventable city process failure."

Turner said misspelled and incorrect addresses were included in the list of places the sensors were set to be installed, which the city council approved in April, due to "data entry errors." The ordinance authorizing the installation was repealed on July 6.

The Cardinal News reported that at least 30 devices were installed in the wrong locations. City officials did not respond to multiple requests from USA TODAY for more information about the botched rollout.

"I know that Flock is a big issue, but we don't necessarily want to create the impression that we are involved in this national Flock debate when this is really not about that," Jenel Few, a spokesperson for the city, said in a brief phone interview. "It's about a clerical data entry error on the part of the city."

Vaughn said she was glad the device near her home was removed quickly, but after learning more about Flock, she doesn't want them anywhere in Roanoke.

"The more I looked at it, the more and more chilling it got," Vaughn said. "Especially the lack of transparency."

Contributing: Shahid Meighan, Columbus Dispatch

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Is the government listening? Gunshot detectors spark backlash

Reporting by N'dea Yancey-Bragg, USA TODAY / USA TODAY

USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect

Copyright Reuters or USA Today Network via Reuters Connect

This story was originally published July 11, 2026 at 9:47 AM.