ShotSpotter Attempts To Memory Hole Itself, Rebrands As ‘SoundThinking’

You know you’re fucked when the only way out of your current SEO/PR nightmare is to distance yourself… well, from yourself. Some of this predates Google’s search engine stranglehold. But altering public perception sometimes means hoping someone will look at your shiny new logo, rather than your disturbing past.

After killing innocent people while providing security to government forces in Iraq in 2007, Blackwater rebranded several times, hoping to keep one step ahead of negative news cycles. It became Xe Services in 2009, Academi in 2011, and — after a merger with Triple Canopy (another private security firm) — Constellis.

The same thing happened with Taser. Taser — named after its foremost product (itself a loose acronym for a 1911 young adult fiction novel: “Tom Swift and his Electric Rifle“) — found itself submerged by critical reporting. Pitched as “less lethal,” the electric stun gun was frequently lethal. So lethal, in fact, that Taser (the company) whipped up a brand new medical condition to explain why so many people ended up dead following Taser deployments by cops: “excited delirium.”

Unable to escape its past (and the nasty results served up during vanity searches), Taser rebranded. Now offering more than surprisingly lethal less-lethal weapons, Taser became Axon, a maker of body cameras and proprietary software that creates yet another barrier between criminal defendants and the evidence being used against them.

Joining this rogues gallery of government contractors changing d/b/a designations is ShotSpotter. ShotSpotter has found itself on the receiving end of plenty of negative press coverage. Not only that, but it’s found itself on the receiving end of lawsuits. But, most importantly, it’s found itself on the receiving end of law enforcement contract cancellations, most of them due to the tech’s inability to meaningfully impact gun crime.

Joshua Bote of San Francisco-focused news outlet SFGate reports the California tech firm is changing its name, presumably in hopes of distancing itself from its self-inflicted wounds.

ShotSpotter, the contentious Bay Area-based company that provides gunshot tracking technology to police departments and other law enforcement agencies, has rebranded following a dramatic stock drop just a day after the election of Chicago’s new mayor.

Now called SoundThinking, the company rebrand comes just a week after the election of Chicago Mayor-elect Brandon Johnson. Johnson, according to the Chicago Sun-Times, promised throughout his campaign to end the city’s ongoing relationship with the company despite outgoing Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s renewing the multimillion-dollar contract.

The tech “SoundThinking” sells to cops will still be called ShotSpotter, at least for now. No sense confusing folks who are happy with their shot spotting service provider, no matter how many false positives it generates or how little it actually contributes to closing criminal investigations.

Presumably, the tech will be renamed as soon as feasibly possible, because you can’t distance yourself from your own bad news when your flagship product is still wandering around under its own name, reeking of stigma.

The company’s press release begs to differ with all of my assumptions, but it does so in such a buzzword-laden piece of PR gimmickry even the most ardent fan of faulty gunshot detection tech might find themselves suppressing an eyeroll.

The new name reflects the company’s focus on public safety through industry-leading law enforcement tools and community-focused solutions for non-law enforcement entities to utilize for a holistic approach to violence prevention, social services and economic assistance.

As part of its corporate rebrand, SoundThinking is proud to introduce its SafetySmart Platform, an integrated suite of four data-driven tools that enable law enforcement and community violence prevention and health organizations to be more efficient, effective, and equitable in driving positive public safety outcomes. 

Equitable? Holistic? Give me a break. The press release lists ShotSpotter’s (I’m not going to help ShotSpotter launder its reputation) four offerings, three of which are just more the same cops-but-a-computer bullshit that has failed to make things more equitable (or safer) [or {vomits a bit} holistic] for years now.

• ShotSpotter is an acoustic gunshot detection system that alerts police to virtually all gunfire within a coverage area in less than 60 seconds, helping reduce police response times to gun crimes and save lives.
  
• CrimeTracer is a law enforcement search engine that enables investigators to search through more than 1 billion criminal justice records from across jurisdictions to generate tactical leads and quickly make intelligent connections.
  
• CaseBuilder is a one-stop investigative management system for tracking, reporting, and collaborating on cases. It produces a single electronic courtroom-ready document to help prosecutors clear cases and take offenders off the streets.
  
• ResourceRouter is software that directs the deployment of patrol and community anti-violence resources in an objective way to help maximize the impact of limited resources and improve community safety.

Only the last one bothers to deal with the community, and then only the part of the community that has “anti-violence” resources, whatever the fuck those are. And it’s not actually about equitable, holistic policing. It’s just predictive policing under ShotSpotter’s kinder, gentler rebranding, which drops “ShotSpotter” from the verbiage, but otherwise is just cops feeding biased data into a system to generate biased “solutions” that allows cops to do what they’ve always done: go after the most vulnerable members of society.

ResourceRouter (formerly ShotSpotter Connect) is a patrol and analyst tool that automates the planning of directed patrols for all Part 1 crime data across an entire jurisdiction, daily. With ResourceRouter, analysts and supervisors review pre-generated directed patrol assignments that ensure officers are at the right place at the right time to maximize crime prevention while also guarding against over and under policing.

So, congrats ShotSpotter. You’ve got a new name but the same old game. If you want to spend millions plastering a new logo on everything, good for you. But you’re still the same company underneath all the SoundThinking coffee mugs and mouse pads. And we at Techdirt will never let you forget it.