The lengthy and intense City Council debate this week over the future of ShotSpotter, the heavily hyped and deeply flawed policing technology, came at a fitting time: just before Memorial Day weekend, when the summerlong fight against violent crime begins in earnest.
Summer is when the Chicago Police Department is put to the test, and ShotSpotter has been a key tool since 2018, when then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel signed the contract.
The 34-14 council majority who voted to take authority to cancel ShotSpotter out of Mayor Brandon Johnson’s hands paid little mind to the steady stream of research — focused on ShotSpotter’s performance in Chicago, Boston, Kansas City and elsewhere — that exposes ShotSpotter’s unreliable performance.
Never mind that three U.S. senators this month called for a Department of Homeland Security investigation into alleged racial bias in how ShotSpotter is deployed nationwide. Never mind reports from the city of Chicago’s inspector general and Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx that raise serious questions about the reliability of ShotSpotter’s technology and its usefulness in prosecuting crimes.
Never mind all that, because police officers on the streets, people in the neighborhoods and a majority of the aldermen in City Council have their minds made up. They know what they know and see what they see. ShotSpotter — a system of sound sensors and computers designed to send alerts about gunshots it detects to data centers that then deploy police to the scene — has its staunch backers, no matter what the data and critics might say.
The backers see a $9 million-a-year tool that, however problematic it may be, still is better than doing without it altogether. They hear Johnson’s concerns that ShotSpotter leads to overpolicing and that it reinforces biases on the police force. Yet they respond that underpolicing worries them more. After all, the Chicago Police Department has about 2,000 vacant positions, a gap sure to be felt in the heat of summer, and ShotSpotter can help support the depleted ranks of officers.
In the City Council debate on Wednesday, support for ShotSpotter brought about an unusual harmony between aldermen from wards on the Northwest and Southwest sides, where many police live, and aldermen from the South and West sides, where violent crime is most deeply felt.
Ald. Monique Scott, 24th, noted four mass shootings in her North Lawndale ward in her two years as alderman. In the latest gunfight, six shooters fired 90 shots — and not one person called 911, Scott said.
There is particular disdain over Johnson’s flip-flop on the ShotSpotter contract. First, he canceled the contract in February, fulfilling a campaign promise. Then he quickly renewed it for nine more months, in order to get through the Democratic National Convention in August with ShotSpotter still in place.
South Side Ald. Anthony Beale, 9th, saw disparity in that decision. “If it was good enough to extend through the convention to protect the conventioneers, it’s good enough to protect the residents of this city every single day,” Beale said.
Johnson still wants to part ways with ShotSpotter and its parent company, SoundThinking. But the City Council with its vote Wednesday ventured boldly into a contracting authority that lies squarely in the mayor’s domain. The vote would require council approval to cancel ShotSpotter in any ward, and it ordered up new data collection, designed to inform decisions about the fate of the ShotSpotter contract.
The council’s vote mandates CPD to report data on police response times to ShotSpotter alerts not accompanied by 911 calls, to ShotSpotter alerts backed up by 911 calls and to 911 calls without any ShotSpotter alerts. Data on bullet casings and weapons collected, as well as arrests, also is required.
Earlier this month, CPD disclosed similar data sets that gave a mixed picture of ShotSpotter’s performance over the prior six years. Whether another six months of data tells a different story remains to be seen.
Whatever the data shows, it likely won’t sway opinions much. Response time metrics are just part of the ShotSpotter story, and aldermen this week embraced the company’s new emphasis on the way ShotSpotter alerts police to help shooting victims who might otherwise not receive aid.
With summer bearing down on us, it’s important to note ShotSpotter itself is just one slice of a broader discussion about the state of policing in Chicago. In that broader picture, issues of race, income, privilege, bias, police tactics and many other factors come into play and also inform how residents and their elected representative view ShotSpotter.
Police Superintendent Larry Snelling has made his position clear: He wants the technology, no matter what the mayor, his boss, might say. Snelling’s stance clearly is part of the superintendent’s effort to win support from the CPD rank and file. It also fits into his view that CPD needs to embrace the latest technology and tactics in order to combat violent crime.
In this sense, the extension of the ShotSpotter contract, paired with the City Council’s demand for data collection, could produce a little-discussed benefit for the city. With ShotSpotter still in place for Snelling’s first summer as police chief, we will be able make meaningful, apples-to-apples comparisons of CPD effectiveness under Snelling compared with other top cops in other years.
This all puts Mayor Johnson in a tricky position: He is still hoping to rid himself of ShotSpotter, yet he needs his police chief to succeed, with help from the costly, high-tech tool he would rather do without.
If the Snelling-led police force is effective this summer, ShotSpotter might yet extend its stay on the watch, whether Johnson likes it or not.
David Greising is president and CEO of the Better Government Association.
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