The Kauffman Purchase of SoundThinking: A Moment of Tech History for Predictive Polcing in the U.S.

The company behind ShotSpotter is quietly acquiring the staff and customers of the company that created the PredPol predictive policing software, WIRED has learned.

Brian MacDonald, the CEO of Geolitica, declined an interview and didn’t answer questions about the acquisitions. A third-party spokesperson for SoundThinking, Rob Merritt, tells WIRED that Geolitica is ceasing operations at the end of the year.

“We have already hired their engineering team,” Clark said during the call, a transcript of which is public. He added that the acquisition of patents and staff would “facilitate our application of AI and machine learning technology to public safety.”

The absorption of Geolitica is the latest step in making SoundThinking a one-stop shop for policing tools. The police tech industry is looking at the bundling of unpopular technologies as a potential signal of a new era for the industry and its potential to affect policing in the United States. Sound Thinking changed its name to predict policing, but crime forecasting remains one of the company’s key offerings.

“As a moment of tech history, the purchase is significant,” Andrew Ferguson, an American University law professor and author of The Rise of Big Data Policing, tells WIRED. “We are in a consolidation moment with big police tech companies getting bigger, and this move is one step in that process.”

PredPol was the most widely used of the first, and perhaps the most popular, predictive policing Algorithms. Predictive policing was synonymous with its name.

ShotSpotter alert resulted in dead ends for the police and in some cases delayed response times for other calls for service, according to investigations by The Houston Chronicle and WYSO. In 2021, the MacArthur Justice Center at the Northwestern University School of Law analyzed records kept by Chicago’s Office of Emergency Management and Communications over a two-year period and found that 89 percent of ShotSpotter alerts in the city did not lead to police finding evidence of a gun-related crime.

The United States Justice Department (DOJ) is being asked to investigate whether a gunshot-detection system widely in use across the US is being selectively deployed to justify the overpolicing of mainly Black neighborhoods, as critics of the technology claim.

In a letter today to Merrick Garland, the US attorney general, attorneys for EPIC call for an investigation into whether cities using ShotSpotter are running afoul of the Civil Rights Act—namely, Title VI, which forbids racial discrimination by anyone who receives federal funds.