Home » Antioch Has 516 ShotSpotter Activations in 2024

Antioch Has 516 ShotSpotter Activations in 2024

by CC News
Shotspotter

The Antioch Police Department has released data on its ShotSpotter activity through September 30, 2024 in the City of Antioch.

The data was released after the city council voted to expand ShotSpotter and while the city currently has a 20-year high in homicides at 14—the average is 9.6 annually.

According to chief Brian Addington, the data shows a total of 516 total activation’s with 444 actual incidents.  He added there have been 97 case reports for the year (which is generated if officers respond to the call and locate evidence of a shooting such as casings, bullet holes, victims or witnesses).

“Approximately 5% of the activations are determined by the responding officer to be false activations due to car backfires, fireworks, etc.,” said Addington.

Editors Note: The ShotSpotter data is January 1, 2024 – September 30, 2024. An executive summary was not provided nor if any arrests resulted from a shotspotter activation.

While the City of Chicago (IL) and Durham (NC) voted to do away with shotspotter earlier this year, the city of Oakland voted this week to continue its contract.  

CEO of SoundThinking Ralph Clark pointed out back in February: “If 80-90% of gunfire goes unreported, why wouldn’t you want to close that gap? Especially, if it had the potential to save 100+ lives in addition to other ancillary benefits. Still have not heard any reasonable argument against that proposition.”

Antioch Expands ShotSpotter

At its October 8 meeting, the Antioch City Council voted to expand ShotSpotter by accepting a federal award in the amount of $740k.

Antioch Mayor Lamar Hernandez-Thorpe said at the meeting the grant fills in the gaps the city of Antioch had to give the city more coverage.

“All this is, is a tool to support law enforcement,” said Hernandez-Thorpe. “It does not reduce crime, it helps us respond better. It helps create stronger evidence to file cases with the District Attorneys Office. Its very data rich… its an additional tool we have in the city to help us make data informed decisions. This tool is important as it relates to critical data.”

In 2022, Antioch added four square miles of ShotSpotter gunshot detection technology to cover some of the “most violent” prone areas of our city. With the grant, the Department will add an additional three and a half square miles of coverage.

According to the staff report between Jan 1-June 12, 2024:

  • Community Policing Zone 301/303 had a total of 37 of the listed crimes including 1 homicide
  • Community Policing Zone 503/606 had a total of 32 of the listed crimes to include 1 homicide
  • Community Policing Zone 602/604 had a total of 27 of the listed crimes to include 1 homicide.

Based on crime analysis, there has been a significant spike in crime and shots fired incidents, an area of 3.5 square miles, which includes 3 different hotspots, was identified for expansion.

Back in 2022, Antioch approved a 5-year contract for ShotSpotter. The 5-year, $1.41 million contract was approved in a 4-1 vote with Councilmember Lori Ogorchock dissenting citing she did not believe they should use “salary savings” and instead should use ARPA funding.


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2 comments

Dg October 18, 2024 - 11:10 am

RIP Emmanuel Rader. Find the cowards who killed Braun harold and Shawn lexur . RIP

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WPR October 18, 2024 - 11:56 am

What a surprise shot spotter confirms what any long time resident already knows Sycamore is epicenter. Followed by concentrations of low income high density housing. Would be interesting to overlay residences using section 8 onto shot spotter map. Is there a correlation? Does APD even have enough officers on shift to respond to activations of the system in a timely manner what are response times? How many section 8 residences are there in Antioch and what is the percent vs total number of residences in the city compared with surrounding cities?
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To reduce Antioch crime rate city should permanently install a podium at Sycamore Square to facilitate vacuous pontifications.

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