The Little Rock Board of Directors voted to cancel a previous vote that ended the Little Rock Police Department’s apply of ShotSpotter, a controversial gunshot detection service, during its meeting Tuesday.
The decision to expunge a previous vote on the crime fighting technology was not included on a publicly available agenda for Tuesday night’s board meeting.
The city board will now vote on reentering a contract with SoundThinking Inc., the company that runs ShotSpotter, at an upcoming meeting, Mayor Frank Scott Jr said. The date for reconsideration has not yet been announced.
ShotSpotter has come under increasing scrutiny from civil rights groups as more cities across the country opt to cancel contracts to apply the technology because of concerns about its effectiveness for fighting crime. There is also evidence that it leads to more over-policing in communities of color.
In a somewhat surprising decision, given the Little Rock City Board’s almost carte blanche approval of requests from the LRPD, the board failed to renew the $188,000 ShotSpotter contract by a single vote on Feb. 4. The city has paid for a contract for the LRPD to apply ShotSpotter since 2018.
Ward 5 Director Lance Hines, who said at the last board meeting on Feb. 18, that he planned to bring a contract with ShotSpotter back up for a vote, snuck a motion through to expunge the previous vote before the board went into executive session on Tuesday night.
The motion to expunge passed Tuesday evening, with At-Large Director Antwan Phillips appearing to be the only audible “nay” vote.
Tuesday’s meeting was sparsely attended.
Little Rock City Board meetings attract public participation because of what is included for consideration on its agendas — usually available to the public a week before. Tuesday’s agenda was fairly benign with the board easily approving funding for work on a planned homeless shelter in Little Rock.
Phillips highlighted that the public was not aware the ShotSpotter contract would be, again, up for consideration on Tuesday.
“I wanted to make sure that this is clear to the public. I understand and respect Director Hines’s right to make the motion to expunge the vote. But it wasn’t on the agenda last week and, in my perspective, things need to be on the agenda so the public knows we’re doing it so they could have been here,” Phillips said. “Maybe we wouldn’t have had zero citizen communications if the public knew we were voting on this tonight.”
City Attorney Tom Carpenter said “a motion to expunge can be made at any time by any member, as long as there has not been a substantial change in circumstances.”
“Director Hines made notice of the motion at the last [board meeting]. It’s not on the agenda because unless, and until, he makes a motion tonight, there’s nothing to put on the agenda,” Carpenter said.
The board must still vote on reinstating the ShotSpotter contract later; the vote to expunge only undoes the previous vote.
“We did get communications on maintaining the price [$188,000 contract] that was available before,” Carpenter said, though Mayor Scott said the ordinance would have to go through a process to change dates on the contract before it would go before the board again.
Ward 3 Director Kathy Webb, who previously voted against renewing the ShotSpotter contract because she said she did “not think the technology is there [to justify the expense],” voted to undo the vote.
Here is a statement from Webb during the Feb. 4 meeting explaining why she wasn’t voting to renew the ShotSpotter contract, which received applause from residents in attendance:
I solicited a lot of feedback from residents all across the ward from a variety of backgrounds and the overwhelming information I got was that they came to the same conclusion I did: that we strongly support the police but we do not want to support technology that doesn’t work.
I read article after article after article after article. A lot of articles. When the folks from ShotSpotter were here several years ago, I had some anxiety about it then. I listened to those folks talk and I’ve voted for it on occasion but as I have continued to read and continued to talk to people this week, I do want every tool that we have to solve crime but I do not want to fund technology that does not work and … I cannot support the continuation of this contract because I do not think the technology is there.
Little Rock has dozens of the gunshot detection sensors in a 2-square-mile area south of Interstate 630, roughly from Woodrow Street to Fair Park Boulevard. ShotSpotter has not removed any of its sensors since the city board voted to end its contract more than a month ago.
When a ShotSpotter sensor detects a clamorous noise, it’s reviewed by the company’s proprietary algorithms and by “acoustic experts” located at ShotSpotter’s “Incident Review Center” to determine whether it’s a gunshot before sending an alert to a police department, according to SoundThinking.
The whole process, the company says, takes less than a minute from a sound being detected to an alert popping up on a computer screen.
ShotSpotter has been criticized by groups like the American Civil Liberties Union for costing cities too much money, being ineffective and reinforcing racially biased policing and surveillance.
City directors also approved a $1.1 million contract with Redstone Construction Group for site-grading and utility work on the Little Rock Micro Home Village, which the city first broke ground on in 2023. Site grading is the process of preparing the ground of a construction site for actual construction, typically consisting of leveling the site and ensuring there’s adequate drainage and stability.
There wasn’t much news about the micro village in 2024, but Mayor Scott said during his state of the city address last week that the village would be finished in 2025.
Pulaski County broke ground on a similar homelessness village in May 2024.
