Officials have reluctantly conceded that the timing of Victorville’s installation of its recently-acquired ShotSpotter firearms-use detection system was less than ideal, as the frequent fireworks blasts that occur in the fist weeks of summer overwhelmed the technology.
Victorville invested $470,000 obtained in the form of a Supplemental Law Enforcement Services Fund grant to offset costs to operated a limited set of sophisticated sound sensors manufactured by Fremont-based SoundThinking Inc.
ShotSpotter is an electronic sound-sensing and interpreting system which is designed to detect gunfire and determine the location from which it emanated. Ideally, it is intended to keep law enforcement agencies immediately abreast of firearms, providing detailed information on the type and caliber of weaponry being used, including whether the devices used were automatic, semi-automatic or single fire, allowing officers to respond in a timely fashion to potentially dangerous or deadly incidents.
The ShotSpotter hardware and software involves about 18 sensors distributed in a one-square-mile coverage area. The sensors consist of a microphone, information processor, data storage and power unit and a global positioning system transponder, together with transmission or beaming antenna, according to SoundThinking. The sensors detect sounds, determining from their characteristics whether they are gunshots and use triangulation to ascertain the spot where the gunshots occurred. A report that the shots took place is relayed in real time to the local law enforcement agency while simultaneously the full spectrum of collected sonic data is sent to the SoundThinking’s incident review center, which is staffed 24 hours a day with technicians and audio interpretation experts in possession of devices to parse the electronic data further. Both human analysts and machines reevaluate the sounds to, according to SoundThinking, “confirm that the events are indeed gunfire. Within 60 seconds thereafter the automated digital analysis and human technicians augment that confirmation “with other critical intelligence such as whether a fully automatic weapon was fired or whether there are multiple shooters.” The full range of data, including a tentative determination of the caliber of weaponry involved populates on the computer screens of the analysts at the incident review center. That data is given a last go-over by Sound-Thinking’s weaponry experts, corrected or annotated as is appropriate, and then sent digitally to the dispatch/communications division of the local law enforcement agency where the gunfire took place as well as onto the smartphones or in-vehicle communication devices of the officers in the field.
In this way, the first responders to the shooting incident have reliable information about what type of weaponry is involved and an appraisal of circumstances where there may be multiple gun-wielding subjects or suspects present, and, as importantly, the precise location of the shooter[s] at the time of the shooting and whether there are known multiple shooters.
Victorville, after a limited trial use of the devices, became San Bernardino County’s first jurisdiction to deploy the ShotSpotter detection systems. The devices were put into place over the course of June 22 and 23, corresponding to the 2025 summer solstice. The advent of the system also corresponded with the usual summer apparition of fireworks in the weeks before July 4. Those include firecrackers, cherry bombs, M-80s and even what sound to be larger explosive ordnance such as quarter sticks of dynamite which are heard in both daytime and at night. Nighttime brings bottle rockets and other pyrotechnic devices launched skyward. The duration and intensity of sound and light displays increases as the calendar progresses toward, and then becomes overwhelming on, July 4.
2025 was no exception in Victorville as elsewhere.
The Sentinel has confirmed that from Saturday June 28 to Thursday July 3, the Victorville ShotSpotter system was at times inundated with data that overwhelmed the analysts. It was unable to confirm a report that on July 4, from shortly before nightfall until midnight the system was simply turned off.
In various places around Victorville, from about 7 p.m. onward on July 4, the air was thick with the smell of sulfur and potassium nitrate
ShotSpotter very obviously has support from influential members of the community. The $470,000 in Supplemental Law Enforcement Services Funds being spent on it could have been utilized on any of a number of other law enforcement support programs, including video cameras in public places or drones that can be adopted for multiple types of observation and surveillance. Flexibility in the law that created Supplemental Law Enforcement Services Funds, Assembly Bill 3229, permits the money to be applied to a multitude of discretionary options, requiring only that the law enforcement agency availing itself of the money give an adequate description of the program and provide a follow-up report on the effectiveness of the program[s] utilized.
“Since its deployment three weeks ago, ShotSpotter has already helped the Victorville Police Department solve three gun-related incidents that were not reported to 911,” according to a Victorville City Statement put out on July 13. “On average, less than 20 percent of gunfire incidents are reported to 911 nationwide.”
Victorville officials say they are 100 percent behind the program and that it represents a cutting-edge technology that will “increase the effectiveness of law enforcement in the community,” while providing officers “the equipment they need to be more proactive be better able to investigate and solve crimes.”
The technology, if used properly according to SoundThinking, will alert police officers to “virtually all gunfire within a city’s ShotSpotter coverage area.”
According to SoundThinking, on the order of 150 cities throughout the country utilize ShotSpotter.
While some in law enforcement see ShotSpotter, which invented in the mid-1990s and first deployed in the field in 1996, as a panacea to the mushrooming of fun violence throughout the country, there are critics of the technology.
Some observers have complained that the technology is far less reliable than the 97 percent accuracy SoundThinking maintains. According to the company, ShotSpotter is “highly accurate at detecting outdoor gunshots,” with a false positive rate of less than 0.5 percent. The City of Chicago, however, which deployed the system because of the epidemic of shootings in the Windy City, ultimately walked away from the technology, claiming it was too expensive for a reporting mechanism city officials said was only 9 percent accurate in highlighting gun-related crime.
Civil libertarians and some safety advocates say that the devices create an unintentional danger to law-abiding citizens in those areas where gun violence is elevated both because those sort of crimes invite a heavier police presence in such areas in general and because police agencies tend to deploy the devices in such areas. When gunfire does take place, the devices commonly trigger a police response to the area, with the involved officers having a built-up anticipation of encountering an armed subject, subjects or suspects[s]. This puts unarmed civilians in such areas in danger because law enforcement officers are therefore more likely to prove aggressive in the use of their firearms in encountering those they have grounds to believe might be armed.
According to those in favor of the ShotSpotter devices, some 85 percent of illicit gunfire goes unreported and SoundThinking’s applied technology carries with it the potential to bring more shootings to the attention of police at an early enough stage for them to do something about it.
The ShotSpotter gunfire detection system is more likely to be deployed in neighborhoods with concentrations of African American and Latino populations, according to critics. SoundThinking executives and those who are believers in the ShotSpotter technology assert that the devices are put into places where gun violence is concentrated, whether those areas are inhabited or frequented by minorities or not.
In Victorville, the devices were given a trial run in the city’s Brentwood and Old Town districts, which were chosen because those areas had the highest incidence of gun-related violence in the city. According to available demographic data, those two neighborhoods feature a population that is 64 percent Latino and 21 percent African American, which vary slightly from the overall population of the city, with 54 percent of the city’s residents self-identifying as Hispanic and 18 percent as African American.
Proponents of ShotSpotter say the devices are primed to play a critical role in redressing gun violence, and can do so in a way by which the benefit derived far outweighs any drawbacks. “There is nothing wrong with deploying this technology in criminal hotspots where innocent people are at risk of being harmed by gun violence,” according to the company.