City of Cape Town

The deployment is well established. Engineering News, carried by Polity on 28 July 2023, quoting Alderman JP Smith: acoustic triangulation and GPS pinpoint gunshots and relay the location to dispatch within seconds, with 'within a minute of a weapon being discharged, the police can be deployed' and information on shots fired and weapon type. Live in Hanover Park from December, Manenberg from February and Lavender Hill from March, with 35 firearms and 400 rounds confiscated and 50 arrests, and 10 million rand budgeted for a Nyanga expansion in 2023/24. Cape Argus, 18 June 2026, and IOL, 19 June 2026: the system began as a pilot in Hanover Park in 2016 and expanded to Manenberg and Lavender Hill from 2023; the City invested about 860 million rand over three years across CCTV, drones, body cameras, dashcams, aerial surveillance and gunshot detection; the City described the technology as useful for alerting staff to active shooting incidents and for identifying hotspots to guide deployment.

Status. In June 2026 Smith was quoted as saying: 'The three-year gunshot detection technology tender has run its course and is currently under review.' An analysis published in July 2026 (see the update below) states that the city council ended the use of ShotSpotter in mid-2026 while reviewing a renewal of the contract. No source shows the system still running.

Effectiveness is contested and the record does not take a side: the City calls the technology useful, while crime-focused organisations quoted in the same reporting question whether it achieved its objectives given continued high violence.

No legal basis or oversight arrangement is recorded because no source states one. Cost is not given because the 860 million rand figure covers a basket of technologies, not this system.

Update, November 2026. An analysis by Grant Oosterwyk (University of Cape Town), Ojelanki Ngwenyama (Toronto Metropolitan University) and Raffaele F Ciriello (University of Sydney), published on allAfrica in July 2026, states: "In mid-2026 Cape Town's city council ended the use of ShotSpotter." It adds that the council said it was reviewing a renewal of the contract. It gives City figures of 3,893 alerts and 9,223 rounds fired in 2024/25, about 30 per cent lower than the year before, and says that more than half of the firearms recovered by City enforcement agencies between April and June 2025 were in areas covered by ShotSpotter. The authors state that there has not yet been an independent public audit of the system's accuracy, and that the City assessed its programme largely using data generated by the supplier. The record is recorded as discontinued on this basis; a renewed contract would reopen it.