Honoring the life and death of ShotSpotter
We are gathered here today to eulogize, pay our respects to, and mourn the passage of our dear protective friend ShotSpotter, who succumbed to the woke mind virus after a long and painful illness this year of our Lord 2024.
Alas we are here not to praise ShotSpotter, but to bury him. Yet, while his detractors claimed he was unceremoniously terminated because of his ineffectiveness, the reality is that the opposite is true.
It was alleged that humble ShotSpotter, which cost the city a mere $6 million a year, a mere bag of shells compared to the massive deficit spending our current mayor, Brandon Johnson, who has thankfully respected the wishes of the dearly departed’s many friends and family and refrained from attending this ceremony.
He and his band of assassins claimed — speciously I might add — that ShotSpotter was ineffective because he did not stop people from shooting; he merely spotted them, detected the noise of their shots ringing out, located them precisely, and enabled a prompt and often lifesaving response by our public servants who are with us here today — our heroic police and fire department paramedics.
ShotSpotter enabled them to save the lives of many victims who would otherwise have been left on the street to bleed out from as many as 14 gunshot wounds, an unfortunately commonplace occurrence in the city that twerks.
We all know the real reasons behind the myriad of stabs inflicted upon our all hearing, all knowing friend and ally. It was not because he was inadequate, but because he was effective. The trigger for ShotSpotter’s unfortunate decline and fall was the tragic death of one Adam Toledo. Adam, who we are sure was a fine young man who would have eventually gone on to be a doctor or a teacher or a humanitarian along the lines of Mother Teresa, was, as all too many young men in Chicago are, engaged in the initiation rituals of one of our myriad local street gangs, also referred to as youths, who were in their precocious adolescent exuberance firing shots at passing cars as part of the initiation ritual, much like some sort of a heavily armed fraternity.
ShotSpotter dutifully spotted the shots, evoking a very rapid police response. From that point in our story, opinions tend to diverge.
Some say Adam had a gun, which makes some sense because that the initiation involves shooting at cars.
Some say that he leveled that gun at the responding police officers, others that none of those things are true, and the nays have it. In this case one thing for sure is that Adam succumbed to gunshot wounds from the responding police officers, a regrettable tragedy.
Those who have their long knives out for ShotSpotter chose to blame him for Toledo’s death and use the opportunity to initiate a regrettably successful campaign to terminate ShotSpotter with extreme prejudice.
The "R" word
Another allegation against our late, lamented friend ShotSpotter was that he had a disproportionate impact on communities of color-in one ugly word, racism.
ShotSpotter was deployed not based on the color of perpetrators’ skin but on the content of their weapons and the resulting cacophony of shots fired, which are unfortunately far more numerous in some places than others — in a word disproportionate.
For example, certain areas of the city such as Lincoln Park, Edison Park and Wicker Park were not monitored by ShotSpotter, whereas Garfield Park and Rainbow Park were.
This is largely because there are very few if any shots to be spotted in unmonitored areas.
I'm reminded of a perhaps humorous anecdote about a man who came across a uniformed official who was in charge of tiger protection in a major metropolitan area. A passerby asked him what his job was, and the official responded that he was in charge of protecting the citizenry from tigers. The passerby replied that there are no tigers in this city. The official said "see what an excellent job I'm doing."
Well, such is the case in neighborhoods that look similar from the air but sound different on the ground. Take Lincoln Park versus South Shore. Thankfully, there are very few shots fired in Lincoln Park, albeit far more than in the not-too-distant past, whereas in South Shore the sound of shots ringing out is as commonplace as car horns blaring on the streets of Manhattan.
It follows that the most efficient and effective way of deploying our friend ShotSpotter was to assign him to monitor areas where shots are actually being fired rather than monitoring the sounds of silence and the peace and quiet of thankfully fairly safe neighborhoods in our fair city.
The concept is shaking the trees with the apples in them or sinking your line where the fish are swimming, not where they aren’t. This has nothing to do with pigmentation. Rather it has to do with the cacophony of combat in our streets.
The two most dangerous words
Two of the most dangerous words in contemporary civil discourse are disproportionate impact. Almost anything that tries to address problems that impact most grievously upon protected minority groups, in this case people of color who live in high gun crime areas, are branded as hopelessly biased against those very victims because of disproportionate impact when analyzed by superficial characteristics such as melatonin.
The victims unfortunately are disproportionately impacted both literally and figuratively. Our silent sentinel ShotSpotter, who once alerted first responders to quickly attend their wounds and transport them to the best trauma centers that money can buy, is now gone but not forgotten, rendered inert by a misguided attempt to protect their rights. Regrettably, the dead have no rights. Like ShotSpotter, they are no more, and they cannot be brought back to this worldly plane of existence (with one possible exception), but certainly not by the hand of man or woman or any pronoun known to humanity.
The perpetrators of the untimely demise of ShotSpotter, in a misguided attempt to pursue equity, diversity, inclusion, and other somewhat raggedy virtue words of the day, have hopefully inadvertently and unknowingly inflicted a world of hurt upon the very people who they claim to represent. This my friends is what constitutes a progressive, or did at least, until the fall of 2024.
Like poor, deaf, and dumb ShotSpotter, progressives were sent a message in November, but they are unable to hear it. Like him, they cannot detect the sound.
It was a shot heard ‘round the world, a sea change in the views of the public, what those many years younger than me and thee call a vibe shift.
Chicago had the lowest turnout in this election than almost any other on record. In the presidential race, the Democratic candidate carried Illinois, considered a deep blue state, by only 10.8 percent, down from a 17 percent margin of victory in 2020.
A large part of this was the defection of the very people for whom progressives claim to advocate. These are the people who have to live with the gun crimes that plague our city and die as a result of those gun crimes.
Since ShotSpotter’s lamentable demise, a running total has been kept by CWB Chicago of the number of deaths attributed to slower response times as a result of his unfortunate — dare we say it — murder. Victims who might have been attended to and transported to emergency care within minutes are now left bleeding slowly to death from their gunshot wounds for hours. Because no one heard the shot or their shouts. No one communicated instantaneously an alert that someone may have been shot. Instead, these people died alone watching their life force flow away much like ShotSpotter from the grievous wounds inflicted upon them by their persecutors.
Was ShotSpotter without fault? Who among us would cast the first stone, or perhaps a better analogy — fire the first shot?
Yes, ShotSpotter was capable of being confused by shot like sounds such as fireworks on the Fourth of July. These are known as false positives.
Were unnecessary police responses sometimes summoned to such pyrotechnic incidents? Yes, they were. Did that cost the city money? One could make the argument through clever cost accounting that it did.
But the reality is the police that responded and the EMS personnel (who generally didn't get involved unless they were summoned by the police) were on duty anyway. Responses became visible in the community and arguably that is a good thing even if they were summoned to a false positive.
So, the out of pocket is probably just simply the cost of gas to drive over and check it out. Instead of a dead body or a wounded victim, they might find only the smell of gunpowder and the paper from an exploded M80.
No, alas poor ShotSpotter wasn't perfect — nothing and nobody is. But CWB estimates that over 30 people have died as a result of ShotSpotter’s untimely demise. Say $500,000 was saved per month divided by 30 lives lost equals about $17,000. Is that how much black lives matter in this town?
As always, life goes on. We are told that Mayor Johnson and his merry band of city employees are evaluating an alternative technology. Perhaps it will be better, perhaps worse (one bedraggled law enforcement officer was overheard on police scanners asking if he should tape his walkie talkie to a stick and poke it out the window of his aimlessly reconnoitering squadron).
Perhaps it will be deployed, perhaps it will not — who knows what the future holds. But in the interregnum-which may be mercifully brief or alarming lengthy, scores are dying who could have been saved. Criminals who might have been disarmed and taken off the streets to protect the citizens of our most-under resourced communities are left free to fight and kill again. The guns that our progressive friends claim to want to get off the streets are in their hands being flaunted on social media in ritual displays of strength, creating a menacing environment of fear that plagues even the most innocent holiday celebrations such as the lighting of the Chicago Christmas tree and the once spectacular Festival of Lights. These once joyous events have been perverted into spectacles of murder, mayhem, menace, and carnage by armed combatants.
Where once sleigh bells were ringing and children were singing, shots are ringing out-and on the nightly news we hear the usual pronouncement: detectives are investigating but no suspects have been identified — because ShotSpotter is no longer there listening — a silent Sentinel pinpointing the precise position of the perpetrators and enabling law enforcement and first responders to do their jobs efficiently and effectively.
These sorts of progressive virtue signals are so popular among our diverse population that the leader of our merry prankster band has the lowest recorded approval rating of any mayor in the history of Chicago, hovering in the low teens and trending downward. Fortunately for Johnson, one of his ilk cannot fall off the floor: he’s only got 10 or 11 percentage points of approval to lose.
As Jimmy Breslin once asked of the 1962 Mets: “Can’t anybody here play this game?” As Michael Madigan finds himself not at the table but on the menu in this Thanksgiving holiday season, we must confess to being sadder but wiser knowing that there are worse things than corruption, such as downright incompetence, ignorance, acute stupidity, and even deliberately subversive threats to cede the streets to criminals.
If progressives continue down this path and are deaf to the message sent by the electorate of our fair city, these ratings will continue to plummet and there will be a reckoning at the ballot box. So we should be heartened in the end that the sacrifice of poor ShotSpotter may have sent a louder noise across our city than has ever been heard before. At some point people will be fed up and say enough is enough. Whose streets? Our streets, "We the People," the hardworking, law abiding, tax paying, voting citizens across all of Chicago.
At some point, the pendulum swings when common sense is left abandoned in the street like a gunshot victim whose cries of pain are no longer heard by ShotSpotter or the politicians who have slain him as he lies on his funeral pyre.
Yet let us not lament his passing. He would not want to hear us do that. If he could speak, he might ask “Why do you mourn?”
Instead, he would want us to speak out more loudly than ever before that we're mad as hell and we're not going to take it anymore. That we're tired of reckless public policies that conflate social justice with an abandonment of criminal justice. That we will dedicate ourselves and inspire our fellow citizens to abandon their silence and to speak out loudly and strongly and effectively until we finally purge the those who would either willfully or unknowingly make government not the solution to our problems but the problem itself, as our lost and lamented Ronald Reagan once declared in his paradigm changing campaign in 1980.
And we hear the echoes of the immortal words of George Orwell: “No matter how much you deny the truth, the truth goes on existing."
