ShotSpotter is the technology that just won’t go away. At least not yet.
Mayor Brandon Johnson intended to allow the city’s contract with the gunshot-tracking system to expire last month, but then remembered — whoops — the Democratic National Convention was coming to town. Maybe ShotSpotter wasn’t so bad after all. He renewed the contract through November, paying a premium $8.6 million price for nine months of additional use.
The flipping and flopping on ShotSpotter, over a period of weeks, was hardly Johnson’s finest episode as mayor, to put it mildly. But just as good intentions sometimes go awry, bungled missteps can turn to the city’s advantage. Perhaps that could still happen with ShotSpotter.
ShotSpotter is designed to use microphones in city neighborhoods and computer algorithms sourced from strategic response centers to “hear” gunfire in the streets and dispatch police to the scene. Chicago police Superintendent Larry Snelling continues to back it — bravely so, given that his boss campaigned on a promise to kill the contract.
Johnson has reason for skepticism, based on the Chicago Police Department’s troubled relationship with technology over the years, and the ways in which technology has contributed toward distrust of police in communities that are Johnson’s political base.
Before ShotSpotter, there was the gang database — a tool designed to help identify gang members so police officers could intercede after shootings to prevent more violence. But two city inspector general reports found bias in the use of the database: 95% of names examined for a 2021 IG report were Black or Latino residents, for example.
The city’s new Community Commission for Public Safety and Accountability last year scrapped plans for a new database, in effect concluding CPD’s experiment with the tool.
Chicago also has close to 50,000 closed-circuit surveillance cameras — or just under 2 for every 100 residents, the sixth-highest concentration in the country, according to Comparitech, a technology research firm. Information about the effectiveness of this densely concentrated web remains shrouded in mystery.
A new Illinois law allows police departments to use drones for surveillance at large public events, and CPD a few years ago reportedly experimented with drones for counterterrorism efforts. Snelling has said he plans to use helicopters for police chases; presumably, drones won’t be far behind.
The digital policing tools offer the promise of speedier, more effective responses to crime. Cops-in-a-box and eyes and ears in the sky are considered unblinking, unbiased projections of police capability.
ShotSpotter so far stands as yet another example of how tools can be adopted and entrenched, despite results that fall far short of what’s needed: Even when Johnson tried to quit the system, he couldn’t quite commit.
Chicago’s ShotSpotter contract dates to 2018, when Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s administration signed on without a competitive bid. Emanuel’s administration used a loophole in the city’s procurement requirements, citing ShotSpotter’s contract with the city of Louisville, Kentucky, to set Chicago’s pricing rather than negotiating a volume discount — on behalf of Chicago taxpayers — for the far bigger Chicago installation.
ShotSpotter’s parent company renamed itself SoundThinking last year after a run of bad publicity and lawsuits alleging misuse or unreliability of the technology. Still, SoundThinking stands behind its big profit producer. It claims that the technology accurately reports gunshots in 97% of all alerts, speedily gets police officers to the scene of crimes and leads police to find shooting victims even in cases where no public calls for help have been made.
The sales pitch has earned ShotSpotter contracts in about 150 cities nationwide. But a steady stream of government oversight and investigative reports has raised legitimate doubts.
Chicago’s IG in 2021 found that police developed evidence of a gun-related crime in only about 9% of more than 50,000 ShotSpotter alerts over a 17-month period. The IG also found that frequent ShotSpotter alerts in some neighborhoods made police officers suspicious of people living there. Oversight reports from Kansas City, Missouri, and other municipalities have raised similar concerns.
Just last month, a study leaked by the office of outgoing Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx found that ShotSpotter led to arrests in only about 1.5% of cases examined over a five-year period ending last August, according to a Chicago Sun-Times report. More than a third of arrests arising from ShotSpotter alerts did not include a gun charge.
Nongovernmental studies have been negative on ShotSpotter, too. The MacArthur Justice Center at Northwestern University’s Pritzker School of Law found that in 89% of ShotSpotter alerts in Chicago, police found no evidence of a gun-related crime, and 86% of alerts led to no charges at all. That’s better than Foxx’s reported findings but still woefully short of expectations.
And The Associated Press last year uncovered an internal company document from 2021 — produced in response to a Chicago lawsuit against ShotSpotter — revealing that technicians working in ShotSpotter’s review centers intervene and overrule ShotSpotter’s algorithm in 10% of all alerts. The finding was at odds with the image ShotSpotter has promoted of a relatively automated and nearly fail-safe technology.
SoundThinking contests such findings, usually without offering specific data to disprove the research. And coming on top of concern that ShotSpotter installations have been concentrated in South and West Side communities victimized by racially biased policing, it’s no surprise the technology has been targeted by progressives.
There are plenty of public safety advocates who argue that ShotSpotter, whatever its flaws, is better than no high-tech, gun-crime detection at all. Last month, as Johnson was moving to cancel the contract, an argument emerged that ShotSpotter had saved lives by calling police and medical help to the aid of shooting victims who might have died but for the ShotSpotter alert.
Well, if that does happen in any meaningful way, ShotSpotter and its supporters have an opportunity now to build their case that this is an essential contribution to the city’s safety and welfare. Surely, if the claims are true, there are plenty of police and other records available to back them up.
Mayor Johnson delivered for his progressive base when he decided to end the ShotSpotter contract. He prudently if clumsily decided to shift his stance ahead of the Democratic convention.
Between now and September, there is plenty of time to make a decision that serves Chicago best.
David Greising is president and CEO of the Better Government Association.
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