South Africa: Did Cape Town's Gunshot Detection System Work? Why Jury Is Still Out On What Shotspotter Achieved

What the report says

AllAfrica, republishing an analysis from The Conversation Africa dated 30 July 2026, reported that Cape Town’s city council ended its use of ShotSpotter in mid-2026 while reviewing whether to renew the contract. The US-developed acoustic gunshot detection system, made by SoundThinking, had first been piloted in the city in 2016 and was promoted as capable of notifying police of possible gunfire within about a minute.

The article, by information systems scholars Grant Oosterwyk, Ojelanki Ngwenyama and Raffaele F. Ciriello, frames ShotSpotter as a form of dragnet surveillance because it monitors an area rather than a named suspect. In Cape Town, it was deployed in Cape Flats communities including Hanover Park and Manenberg, areas shaped by apartheid-era forced removals and affected by high levels of gang-related violence. The city had previously stopped the project in 2021 over budget constraints before later reviving and expanding it as part of a wider technology-driven policing strategy.

The authors said city reports pointed to apparent operational value, including 3,893 alerts and 9,223 rounds recorded in the 2024/25 financial year, with alert volumes lower than the previous year. They also noted that more than half of firearms recovered by city enforcement agencies between April and June 2025 were in ShotSpotter-covered areas. However, they stressed that no independent public audit had assessed accuracy, false alerts, police response times or whether the system reduced shootings.

The analysis argues that the unresolved issue is not only technical performance, but accountability: who chooses where surveillance is placed, how it is evaluated, and whether affected residents help define safety priorities. The authors call for independent audits, earlier scrutiny of surveillance tools, stronger community participation and investment in the social drivers of violence alongside any detection technology.