A company that operates gunshot detection systems in about 100 cities across the United States announced this week that San Diego saw the largest reduction of gunfire incidents between 2018 and 2019.

According to data from ShotSpotter, gunfire incidents were down 17 percent in San Diego last year compared to the previous year.

A San Diego police spokesman on Friday could not immediately confirm ShotSpotter’s findings.

The San Diego Police Department began using ShotSpotter technology in 2016 on a trial basis and has continued using it since then. Records show the department pays ShotSpotter $235,300 per year to use its technology. It is deployed in a 3.5-mile area in southeastern San Diego, including parts of Valencia Park, Skyline, O’Farrell and Lincoln Park.


San Diego also had the lowest gunfire incidents per capita of the largest metropolitan areas where ShotSpotter technology is used, according to Sam Klepper, ShotSpotter’s senior vice president of marking and product strategy.

“This is impressive for the San Diego Police Department and the entire community,” Klepper said in a phone interview Friday, adding that San Diego’s police department is an “exemplary user” of the gunshot detection technology, which is also used in New York, Baltimore, Chicago, San Francisco and Oakland, among many other cities.

ShotSpotter is made up of a series of audio sensors that pick up noises loud enough to be gunshots. Once detected, the sound is sent to a review center where a specialist determines if it was or likely was gunfire.

Information about the system alert or “activation” — including where it happened, how many shots were fired and whether there was more than one shooter — is then sent to officers in the field.


According to Klepper, 80 percent of all gunshot incidents go unreported by community members. The purpose of ShotSpotter is to quickly report gunfire — the company guarantees it can identify and report gunfire in under a minute, but says it averages closer to 30 seconds — so officers can respond.

When San Diego police studied the data in 2017, they found that of the 101 activations recorded, only 28 were reported by the community.

Though crime statistics in San Diego for 2019 are not yet available, ShotSpotter’s data appears to track with trends that have seen overall crime rates drop in recent years, reaching a 49-year low in 2017.