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Pulling the plug on ShotSpotter is part of a campaign to gut law enforcement
Mayor Brandon Johnson’s decision to end the City of Chicago’s contract with technology firm SoundThinking has caused a considerable controversy. Since Chicago ended use of the system, the City Council has taken legislative steps to thwart the mayor, specifically through an ordinance to give Superintendent of Police Larry Snelling the authority to negotiate a contract extension with SoundThinking.
Despite Mayor Brandon Johnson’s repeated claim ShotSpotter never lived up to its promise, if one were to ask him if a gun were fired and no resident were to call 911 to report it, would this mean no gunfire occurred? Mayor Johnson would likely dodge the question and reply that Chicago is the greatest freaking city in the world and that the question is rooted in racism and bigotry.
Although Johnson has dismissed ShotSpotter as a “walkie talkie on a stick,” it is important to highlight the fact that as of September 23 — the day after ShotSpotter was disconnected — countless gunshots have gone unreported. As of this writing, according to CWB Chicago, a total of six persons have been located, with all six either found dead or seriously injured. Of all the instances, none drew more attention than the slaying of Sierra Evans.
Evans, age 19, was found near 95th and Avenue N on the city’s far Southeast Side. In this occasion, Evans' remains were found by police only after a neighbor called 911 to report seeing a woman laying the same spot since the day before. When police arrived, officers found shell casings lying next to Ms. Evans’ remains. Prior to the resident dialing emergency services nearly 24 hours after first observing Evans’ body, police could not establish a time of the shooting nor any 911 call to report the sound of gunshots in the neighborhood.
After Evans’ body was found, Alderman Peter Chico (10) contacted SoundThinking. The technology firm maintains sensors in the area, although they had been disconnected from the Chicago Police Department. Not coincidentally, Chico learned there were multiple ShotSpotter alerts at the location where Evans’ body was found and a count of 11 shots fired at 12:06 a.m., but because the sensors and alert system had been discontinued, Evans’ remains went unnoticed until 9:30 a.m.
One of many cases that ShotSpotter could have made a life-saving difference, some might wonder, how did the Windy City reach the point where the mayor of the third largest city in the United States abolishing a vital tool for law enforcement and public safety? In order to fully understand how Chicago arrived at the unplugging of ShotSpotter, we must return to a dark alley in the Little Village neighborhood in March 2021.
For those who are unfamiliar, on the evening of March 21, 2021, Chicago Police responded to a ShotSpotter alert that sent officers to 2356 South Sawyer. When officers arrived less than 120 seconds to 10 shots fired, they encountered two males at the precise location that ShotSpotter pinged gunfire. One male, 21-year-old Ruben Roman, handed a gun to the second male, 13-year-old Adam Toledo. Unlike Roman, Toledo fled with the weapon. Leading CPD down an alley, Toledo reached a gap in a fence lining the alley and dropped the weapon. Unfortunately, Toledo stopped, began to turn towards the officer to raise his hands and was fatally wounded. Though it was later learned Toledo was a gang member and had earned the nickname “Lil’ Homicide,” the fact ShotSpotter did as it was designed, his death at the hands of a Chicago police officer triggered outrage among community organizers and became the impetus for the campaign to end ShotSpotter.
There is much confusion about ShotSpotter’s capabilities. To critics of the technology, ShotSpotter alerts often result in no reports filed. Some more aggressive detractors go to the length to claim ShotSpotter actually slows a police response to other “more serious” crimes. Ridiculously, some community activists and progressive lawmakers have argued that ShotSpotter disproportionately targets minorities and leads to “over policing” of neighborhoods populated by minorities.
Viewpoints built on fictions, the truth about ShotSpotter is that activists are unconcerned with their stated arguments and their true aim is to hamstring police and remove a vital tool that assists patrol officers and investigators in responding to gang-led gun violence and gathering evidence to make arrests of violent criminals. The goal stems from the ultimate target of defunding — and for some, abolishing — police. This tracks with other activists’ campaigns to end the gang database, which allows officers to more accurately gather and maintain intelligence on known gang members and replacing police with social workers for crime response.
These arguments are, at best, made in bad faith. If we closely examine the efforts these individuals and groups have put forth to achieve their goals and compare them to at Chicago Police’s own data, we know officers arrived on scene of shootings almost two-and-a-half minutes sooner than with a 911 call. The reduced response time is valuable minutes when seconds count.
According to the Department of Homeland Security’s “Stop the Bleed” campaign, the average response time for someone to bleed out after experiencing serious physical trauma from an injury, a gunshot, for example, is only 3-5 minutes. In addition to more timely responses, it is obvious a computer when paired with acoustic detectors that can triangulate the location of gunshots, is far more accurate than the average person who thinks they have heard gunshots nearby to their home. This is, of course, if residents are even motivated to call 911.
Despite the falsehoods surrounding ShotSpotter, the technology has never been marketed to be all-important element in fighting crime. On the contrary, ShotSpotter is acknowledged as a tool to fill in the gaps in neighborhoods with higher crime rates and in communities where residents are unlikely to hear gunshots or cannot definitively locate where gunfire occurred.
For all the arguments in favor of ShotSpotter, perhaps the strongest is the system works far more reliably and accurately than human beings. Per SoundThinking’s website:
“ShotSpotter uses an array of acoustic sensors that are connected wirelessly to ShotSpotter’s centralized, cloud-based application to reliably detect and accurately locate gunshots using triangulation. Each acoustic sensor captures the precise time and audio associated with impulsive sounds that may represent gunfire."
"This data is used to locate the incident and is then filtered by sophisticated machine algorithms to classify the event as a potential gunshot. Acoustic experts, who are located and staffed in ShotSpotter’s 24×7 Incident Review Center, ensure and confirm that the events are indeed gunfire. They can append the alert with other critical intelligence such as whether a fully automatic weapon was fired or whether there are multiple shooters. This entire process takes less than 60 seconds from the time of the shooting to the digital alert popping onto a screen of a computer in the 911 Call Center or on a patrol officer’s smartphone or mobile laptop.”
This innovative technology leads to more reliable, more accurate and swifter police responses to gunshots. Inherently, a 911 call will take longer, as it becomes a literal game of “Telephone,” through which a call placed to a 911 dispatcher begins a journey into a computer system where it is received, read, interpreted, before being remitted to beat officers on the street. On the contrary to the lengthier dispatch process, ShotSpotter detects gunshots in less than a minute and notifies police via their police computers in the same timeframe, with precise accuracy and a time stamp.
There should be no debate on ShotSpotter; it is just technology capable of outperforming human beings. In addition to reducing response time, this valuable tool also provides detectives and evidence technicians with a precise location and time stamp and allows them a starting point in their investigation. For police administrators, ShotSpotter data allows them to compile better data around crime trends and allows them to develop better deployment strategy, crime fighting tactics — such as hot spot policing and problem-oriented policing — both of which have been shown to have led to significant reductions in crime.
If we are to believe that Mayor Johnson and the progressive team he assembled at City Hall are serious about addressing crime, particularly “gun violence,” then we should be led to believe that the mayor and his staff would want an all-hands-on-deck approach to addressing the scourge of gun violence and ending the trauma gun violence causes in Chicago. This would mean the mayor would want every tool available to counter crime.
We would be wrong to believe Johnson is committed to confronting crime, considering the mayor and his aides have led the fight in depleting law enforcement of tools and resources necessary to combat violence in Chicago. This is obvious, considering the entire fight against ShotSpotter originated with a fatal police shooting of a known gang member who was observed on video shooting at passing cars and was pursued by police as a result of ShotSpotter’s timely and accurate detection. The “movement” that Johnson and his progressive partners claim have better ideas and a better vision has revealed itself to desire the dismantlement of law and order.
It is easy to pretend gunfire does not exist you when you are surrounded by over 140 police officers. Unlike Mayor Johnson, residents of Chicago do not have the luxury of a brigade of officers protecting them. What residents rely on is a justice system, which includes police. The loss of ShotSpotter is just the latest in a series of setbacks for Chicago Police as they attempt to keep crime under control. The loss of ShotSpotter follows restrictions to police foot and vehicular pursuit, limitations placed on crowd control, a burdensome Consent Decree, excessive paperwork (Tactical Response Report or Investigatory Stop Report), and curbs on street stops of suspicious individuals.
Mayor Johnson can claim ending the contract with SoundThinking is grounded in budget savings or failure of the technology to meet its promise. The mayor is being less than forthcoming. Rather than budget savings or ShotSpotter failing Chicago, the end of the technology is found in Johnson’s and his progressive allies’ desire to deprive Chicago Police of the necessary devices — technology or other advantages — to tackle crime. Johnson’s sole purpose is to hollow out the Chicago Police Department.
ShotSpotter did not fail Chicago. ShotSpotter was a success in the case of Adam Toledo, yet the death of a gang member stirred a campaign to end the system’s use. If there was any failure surrounding ShotSpotter, it was Mayor Johnson failing Sierra Evans by refusing to keep the system connected.
