Turning Death into a Commodity

ShotSpotter, an expensive gunshot detection technology popular with U.S. police departments, has convinced many that safety is a product to be bought and sold. SoundThinking, the parent company selling ShotSpotter, has exploited a fear of violence to build a successful revenue stream within the prison–industrial complex. The company has mastered how to exploit political conditions in cities beset by gun violence (including Chicago, which I’ve written about for Inquest before), growing from a niche product to a popular police surveillance technology.

SoundThinking has embraced the data economy, using technological and narrative strategies to commodify gun violence and death while deploying ShotSpotter as a tool of political control rather than crime control. SoundThinking is not alone: it is just one of many companies capitalizing on the huge volume of public and private funding being put toward the corporate surveillance industry.

In this essay, I examine ShotSpotter as a case study to explore how the prison–industrial complex has evolved in response to the advent of the data economy. Understanding the growth of the police surveillance tech industry is a critical step in sharpening our organizing interventions against this nexus of state and corporate power.

ShotSpotter (later rebranded as SoundThinking) was founded in 1996 in California, with the initial design concept of applying the science of mapping earthquake epicenters to mapping gunshots through sound wave analysis. Its technology has never been complicated: it is just an array of microphones installed to listen for loud sounds and attempt to triangulate their location. SoundThinking claims to employ a highly accurate machine learning tool to distinguish gunshots from other loud sounds, but the efficacy of this algorithm has never been independently tested. Technically, the extent of the product’s ability is recording loud sounds, collecting data points, and initiating police deployments. ShotSpotter primarily functions as a probable cause generator, manufacturing a reason for police deployments and police stops. These deployments impact the residents of the more than 170 cities across the world where the microphones are installed.

ShotSpotter’s initial business model focused on selling its hardware and software system to customers for a significant upfront fee, requiring each purchasing police department to have the staffing and infrastructure to independently operate the technology. This model limited the company’s customer base and market reach. When current SoundThinking CEO Ralph Clark took over the company in 2010, he changed the business model to a subscription structure. In this new (and current) model, the company retains ownership over the hardware and operates the system on behalf of customers for an annual fee. No longer would ShotSpotter sell the microphones for police to administer: the company now facilitated the whole experience. In 2011 it introduced the “incident review process,” whereby a human reviews each recorded sound after the system reviews and processes it, providing the final determination on whether it was a gunshot or not.

The transition enabled SoundThinking to retain ownership over the data collected by the company’s microphones. Cities now have the opportunity to purchase ownership of their data upfront, but most cities do not, choosing instead to lease access to the data for the duration of the contract. In making this change, Clark was following a broader global trend of embracing data-driven profit models. As the burgeoning data economy incentivized businesses to exploit the massive data trails created by an increasingly digitized existence, ShotSpotter turned to a software-as-a-service business model that profits from marketing gunshot data collection.

Since embracing the early 2010s boom of data commodification, SoundThinking has effectively grown its contracts, revenues, and market dominance. ShotSpotter’s success is rooted in the company’s ability to exploit and evolve the political and economic conditions of “extractive abandonment,” a term coined by Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant to describe how the state intentionally and actively neglects people and communities, then supports the growth of industries that extract profit at their expense.

The idea of extractive abandonment is a synthesis of Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s concept of “organized abandonment” and Marta Russell’s idea of the “money model of disability.” Gilmore theorizes “organized abandonment” as an intentional process under racial capitalism in which elected officials introduce neoliberal policies and orchestrate new patterns of governance by abdicating their responsibility for maintaining public goods. This pattern allows critical infrastructure and public programs to atrophy from consistent budget cuts and other degenerative policies over time. This willful disinvestment transforms and reorganizes the state and limits the ability of government agencies to deliver substantive social programs while manufacturing poverty, precarity, and vulnerability to premature death. The process of organized abandonment both creates and requires crises—like economic recessions or the persistent problem of gun violence—in order to exist and sustain itself. The neoliberal policies involved furthermore facilitate an upward transfer of wealth and political power to the elite through further dispossession of those who already possess the least, whether reckoned in material or political terms. Organized abandonment exploits and deepens existing inequalities, such as systemic racism, furthering multiple crises at the systemic, structural, and personal levels.

Turning to the “money model of disability,” Russell observes the growth of industries constructed around the warehousing of bodies defined as disabled—that is, bodies that cannot advance the aims of capitalism as workers and are thus considered surplus. As Russell notes, “persons who do not offer a body which will enhance profit-making as laborers are used to shore up US capitalism by other means.” Russell describes how disabled people are instead made profitable through the development of industries of care. This includes corporate-owned housing facilities and a massive charity industry, as both manufacture profit from the holding and warehousing of the bodies of people who would not otherwise contribute to the reproduction of capital. Rather than allowing this surplus population to continue receiving economic resources, these industries turn disabled people into a profit mechanism by creating economic infrastructure through the maintenance of their lives.

Adler-Bolton and Vierkant construct “extractive abandonment” from these concepts to describe the process by which populations rendered surplus via organized abandonment are still successfully made profitable to capital, primarily in the context of the political economy of health and health care. Their analysis outlines how capital has shaped the idea of health in order to create the conditions by which the unhealthy can create profit through health-care industries despite their inability to perform labor. Much of the flow of capital around health care circulates around the warehousing of bodies needing treatment and care. Capitalism reproduces death, but in the case of health care and disability, it extends life for the purpose of profit.

The growth of prisons since the 1970s is another system that exemplifies the process of extractive abandonment: profits are reaped by warehousing criminalized bodies deemed surplus to capitalism. The prison–industrial complex is a dynamic system of power that evolves in order to sustain and reproduce itself over time. Since capital is always seeking new means for profit by exploitation and extraction, shifting economic conditions have created new opportunities for profit within the prison–industrial complex. This is evident in the transformation of the global economy, and with it the carceral economy, over the last twenty years with the rise of the data economy and big tech. The state and corporations have aligned by leveraging the growing data economy to buttress their power and create new mechanisms of control and profit that do not require physical imprisonment. The surveillance technology industry presents a novel dimension of extractive abandonment in the prison–industrial complex, and ShotSpotter exemplifies this expansion.

ShotSpotter functions as extractive abandonment infrastructure by packaging a simple technology as an innovative product through narrative and marketing mythmaking, creating conditions by which gun violence and death themselves become profitable. ShotSpotter’s value proposition seeks to foster a perception that the technology is essential to any comprehensive policing strategy, and the company’s marketing implies that detection of gunshots will lead to a reduction in gun violence and improved community safety. In reality, ShotSpotter’s profitability has little, if anything, to do with the efficacy of the company’s hardware or software. There is no conclusive evidence that ShotSpotter meaningfully reduces gun violence, saves lives, or improves police response times. By turning to ShotSpotter, elected officials are choosing to invest in corporate surveillance technology rather than programs which can substantively reduce community violence. This choice has the effect (whether intentional or not) of strengthening police power and furthering the process of organized abandonment.

SoundThinking thrives amidst conditions of organized abandonment because, despite its marketing promises, ShotSpotter’s profitability requires continued gun violence to maintain the product’s valuation. Without gun violence—or the threat of it—ShotSpotter serves no purpose. SoundThinking requires the threat and reality of gun violence to justify such a major outlay of public funding or maintain a customer base. If ShotSpotter actually did what it claimed, it would put itself out of business.

SoundThinking’s business model exemplifies an innovation of extraction in the prison–industrial complex. The revenue model of physical incarceration relies on profiting off of people by capturing and detaining them in a process of “slow death.” While incarceration keeps people alive for their utility within the prison–industrial complex, ShotSpotter’s market innovation in the prison–industrial complex taps into a new revenue stream that does not even need people to stay alive. To put it crudely, SoundThinking found a way to optimize and monetize a formerly inefficiently utilized resource: death by gun violence.

ShotSpotter is constructed to extract profit from the murder of people in Black, brown, and poor communities rendered surplus by organized abandonment—a form of profit extraction that the prison–industrial complex had previously been unable to fully activate. In this sense, SoundThinking is a necro-business (to adapt political theorist Achille Mbembe’s term “necropolitics”), and its product, ShotSpotter, creates profit from the death of those deemed economically surplus. Despite the company’s messaging, SoundThinking has little business interest in ending gun violence. Death, particularly Black death, is a commodity to SoundThinking.

For ShotSpotter’s customers, its value is as an infrastructure of political control, not crime control. ShotSpotter supplies elected officials and police agencies with a mechanism for narrative management, utilizing the company’s technological innovation and marketing mythmaking to maintain political power. This is achieved through multiple simultaneous tactics that the company has honed within its business strategy.

A primary tactic is the company’s function, on behalf of police, to usurp the agency and political power of residents in communities targeted for microphone installation, excluding those populations from efforts to address gun violence. SoundThinking promotes ShotSpotter’s ability to detect gunshots and deploy police to scenes of gun violence even when residents do not call 911, but it’s perpetually listening microphone system offers another benefit to its customers: the ability of the company, police, and elected officials to remove community voices from their primary role in responding to gun violence. While SoundThinking touts its “human-in-the-loop” model for reviewing gunshots, its employees are the only humans it wants in the loop. This prevents community members from self-determining when police are needed, while reinforcing state power to maintain police as the primary tool to respond to gun violence.

Complementary to this silencing, SoundThinking employs a strategy of “copaganda,” using media coverage to reproduce ideological support for ShotSpotter—and organized abandonment—outside of the communities where the technology is deployed. SoundThinking, police, and elected officials build broad public support for ShotSpotter through positive news placements which present the large volume of sounds that ShotSpotter records as gunshots in order to demonstrate a utility for the expensive technology and pad the image of the company and the officials who support it. SoundThinking attempts to gain control over the narrative of gun violence while dominating the political will of communities who are offered only ShotSpotter, suppressing any community desires for alternatives. 

When there is opposition, SoundThinking’s strategy is to delegitimize these community voices in every public forum possible by using fear to manufacture demand for ShotSpotter by scratching the very real scars of gun violence. SoundThinking, elected officials, and police leverage the specter of death to create or maintain contracts, especially in cities such as Chicago that have been scarred by gun-related deaths. These parties use the fear of additional deaths to create urgency and center ShotSpotter in all debates over how to end gun violence. The company masterfully markets its microphones as tools that can prevent death (without specifying precisely what this means), thereby positioning its product as the primary focus of any and all discussions about solutions to gun violence. Public debate ends up being limited to arguing whether the product works, thus preempting discussion of how to achieve what communities actually want: an end to gun violence. 

ShotSpotter takes up all of the air in the room; it precludes the imagining of possible solutions outside of gunshot detection technology and maintaining the product’s position as essential to any proposed violence reduction strategy. When community members expose SoundThinking’s false marketing claims, the company, police, and elected officials inevitably shift to a single talking point: if ShotSpotter can save even one life, then it’s worth the cost. It is in the context of this claim that ShotSpotter’s true function as a tool of political persuasion comes into sharp focus. SoundThinking uses the threat of gun violence to maintain coercive control on behalf of elected officials and police. It is a narrative strategy in which the continued threat of gun violence serves as the justification for the transfer of significant public funds—in some cases millions of dollars—to a highly profitable gunshot detection company.

With community members removed from the decision of whether to call police, and sidelined from conversations about community violence, police and elected officials are emboldened to speak for the community. They often wield this power strategically, shaping the conversation and deploying aligned community voices in ways that reinforce the legitimacy of ShotSpotter and the power of police and elected officials. SoundThinking and the police have shared motives; their symbiotic relationship is centered around protecting both police power and the business interests of SoundThinking’s investors.

Through these technological and narrative strategies, state and corporate interests further manufacture the conditions for ShotSpotter to operate as a tool of extractive abandonment. ShotSpotter’s hardware and software are not designed to interrupt gun violence: the intelligence gathered from the microphones is put to use for political, rather than crime, control. To put it simply, SoundThinking’s customers are not served by ending gun violence.

The rapid growth of the data economy—and its relationship to prisons and policing—has been actively enabled by government policy. The United States government and military were essential in developing (and funding the development of) the computational hardware and software that birthed the Internet, the age of mass computing, and the global tech industry. The development of these technologies occurred alongside a turn to neoliberal politics, which cannot be disentangled from the intensification of policing and the growth of mass incarceration; the introduction of data-driven policing strategies such as COMPSTAT in New York City (one of COMPSTAT’s pioneers, Bill Bratton, is now a SoundThinking Board Member); and the early marriage of the finance and tech industries. The “War on Terror” furthered this turn: in the aftermath of 9/11, the data economy flourished as major corporations, including Microsoft and Motorola, took full advantage of the crisis to expand the public and private markets for surveillance technology. Corporations partnered with the federal government to design legislation that would open the spigot of federal funding, then eagerly signed large contracts to build the government’s mass surveillance infrastructure.

Beyond SoundThinking, other companies selling surveillance tools have gained market positions in recent decades. This accelerated after the murder of Michael Brown in 2014 led to mass uprisings against police violence. Body-worn cameras quickly became a bipartisan-supported reform to improve police accountability; Axon (formerly Taser) took full advantage of the growth in funding that followed. Despite a growing prison and police abolitionist movement, public funding for surveillance has continued to increase the power of police. The data economy is a big business for police vendors, with estimates that the market will grow to $37 billion by 2033. While police used surveillance technologies before the rise of the data economy, companies now profit from packaging access to datasets compiled from a variety of monitoring tools. These companies include Flock Safety, Fusus, Vigilant Solutions, Genetec, Peregrine, and Predpol (SoundThinking purchased the remnants of Predpol in 2023), selling subscriptions to technologies such as body-worn cameras, license plate readers, and gunshot detection sensors. 

In 2017 SoundThinking closed on an initial public offering. Since then, it has purchased multiple companies as it seeks to diversify its product offerings and revenue streams. Its portfolio now includes predictive policing tools, databases, investigative case management software, and a partnership for automated license plate readers under the company’s “SmartSafety” Platform. All these acquisitions show a clear attempt to transform itself from a company with a niche market into a corporation capable of fulfilling a diverse array of its consumer’s needs. While there may be little evidence that any of these technologies improve public safety, they are effective at boosting both corporate profits and the power of police. ShotSpotter exemplifies this new market, in which digital tools are used to contain, control, and extract in new ways.

ShotSpotter is a case study about how present political and economic conditions are proving to be such fertile ground for the growth of a massive corporate surveillance industry within the prison–industrial complex. The advancement of surveillance companies over the last twenty years has enabled the state to reconstitute its power and further legitimize police through a greater reliance on private industry. Now, under the renewed political regime of Trump, the industry is already showing huge expectations for growth and profitability. It’s well-documented how the Trump administration is significantly relying on the existing apparatus of surveillance technologies to intensify state oppression and repression. Trump’s use of these tools illustrates that, more than profit, the private surveillance industry allows for systems of state control that are antagonistic to democratic values. It’s clear that this administration will continue to fuel the development of the corporate surveillance industry—encouraging expanded use of these tools and the data they collect—across all levels of policing and this is a harbinger of things to come.

_{Image: Jeremy Brooks / Flickr}

Contributors

Ed Vogel Ed Vogel is a member of the Stop ShotSpotter Chicago campaign and national coalition.

Topics

• Institutions & Practices

Tags

• big tech
• community organizing
• gun violence
• policing
• public safety