Fresno City Council Approved Half-Million-Dollar ShotSpotter Expansion — Who’s Counting the Results?

The Fresno City Council voted in November 2021 to expand the city’s ShotSpotter gunshot-detection system by three square miles, bringing total coverage to 17.46 square miles. The contract amendment with ShotSpotter Inc. cost $535,849 through the end of fiscal year 2024.

Chief of Police Paco Balderrama’s staff report said the expansion would cover four council districts identified by “weapons-related gunshot calls for service and firearms crimes reported for 2020 and year to date 2021.” The report does not name the districts, publish the crime data used to pick them, or state how many incidents each area saw.

The city negotiated the rate down to $65,000 per square mile per year for three years. The original budget passed in June 2021 had allocated $150,000 for two square miles.

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The staff report says the technology would allow “a more rapid law enforcement response to violent crimes and illegal weapons being discharged in our City.” It does not state what response time the system achieves, how many alerts it generates, or how many of those alerts lead to arrests.

The Breakdown

• The contract runs through June 30, 2024 and covers three additional square miles, for a total of 17.46 square miles citywide.
• The total cost is $535,849 over three years.
• The staff report cites 2020 and 2021 gunshot calls and firearms crimes as the basis for choosing the areas, but does not publish the numbers or name the districts.
• The vote happened November 4, 2021, and passed.

What This Means for You

This is how your city council spends your money on crime response technology. The contract commits over half a million dollars to a system the staff report describes only in general terms — faster response, better coverage — with no stated measure of how the existing 14.46 square miles performed, how many alerts turned into arrests, or whether the technology reduced crime in the areas it already covered. You are funding the expansion and you are owed the results before the next expansion.

What to Watch

ShotSpotter is the beneficiary here, collecting $535,849 under this contract. The neighborhoods in the four unnamed council districts are supposed to benefit from faster police response, but the material offers no way to verify that claim — no baseline response time, no alert-to-arrest rate, no crime reduction data from the existing coverage areas. The city’s own staff report does not say how it will measure whether the system works.

What would settle it: the number of ShotSpotter alerts generated per square mile per year, the number that resulted in an arrest, the number that turned out to be false alerts, and the change in firearms crime rates in the areas already covered compared to areas without the system. The Fresno Police Department has that data or can produce it. If the technology works, the numbers will show it. If the city is not tracking those numbers, that is the story.

The material also does not state who decided which three square miles to cover, whether the affected neighborhoods were consulted, or what the plan is if the contract ends in 2024 with no measurable improvement. A technology contract this size, with no stated accountability measure, is exactly the kind of spending a voter should ask about before the next budget cycle.