Criminal Territories: A Corporate Discourse of Gunshot Detection on the Urban Frontier

This paper investigates narratives of crime and policing in the public-facing discourse of ShotSpotter Inc., a growing security technologies company specializing in acoustic gunshot detection systems. Based on ethnographic observation of ShotSpotter's shareholder calls and prospective client webinars, I argue that the company's framing of criminality reproduces familiar frames of civilization and savagery. Yet this frame is assimilated into a model and language of "precision policing" in which the rationality of technoscience is claimed to preclude the excessive use of force. Examining ShotSpotter's peculiar geo-epistemology of gun crime and the logic of territory, I advance that technoscientific assemblages in this context do not obviate state violence; they obscure it.