Take a walk around Chicago, or Boston, or New York, or Denver, or San Diego, and look up at the street corners. Depending on the neighborhood, you might see a little white oblong box that looks like it could pick up sound. They look like they could pick up sound because they do pick up sound. It’s a device called a ShotSpotter.
“The microphones detect loud noises that then computer algorithms determine are gunshots. Then a human technician reviews it to confirm that it’s a gunshot. And then the technician, if they confirm it, alerts the local police department to the location of the shooting,” explained Jim Daley, the investigations editor at South Side Weekly, a community paper in Chicago.
There are up to 3,000 of these sensors across Chicago. More than half of the city’s police districts use them—primarily districts that are on the south and west sides of the city. “Because Chicago is a very segregated city, those are disproportionately Black and brown communities,” Daley said.
In theory, ShotSpotter keeps communities safe, by quickly drawing police to the location of gunfire. But in practice, it’s not so simple. Last week, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson announced he was severing the city’s contract with ShotSpotter—and that he has no plans to renew it.
“A lot of the activists who have been pushing for this for many years were very pleasantly surprised. A number of City Council members immediately decried it and have already introduced legislation to try and force the city to keep ShotSpotter,” Daley said. “We’ll see how that plays out over the next few months.”
According to the company behind ShotSpotter, the devices are used in more than 150 cities across the country.
“Supporters of the tech say that it is integral to the police’s ability to do their job. So, the proponents of the technology are saying that by taking it out of these communities, there’s a possibility that the police will not be able to get to victims quickly enough and people could die,” Daley said. “Whether or not that’s true remains to be seen.
On Wednesday’s episode of What Next, we discussed how this high-tech policing might make some people feel safe. But does it really work? Our conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Mary C. Curtis: You’ve been covering ShotSpotter for several years now. What drew you into this reporting?
Jim Daley: In Chicago, ShotSpotter really became a mainstream issue when a young boy named Adam Toledo was killed by the Chicago police after a ShotSpotter alert drew them to his location. Toledo was 13 years old, and he was with a grown man who had allegedly been shooting a gun at passing cars. And that triggered a ShotSpotter alert that brought Chicago police to the scene. The man had handed the gun off to Toledo, who ran away with it. He was chased by a cop. He ultimately dropped the gun and turned around with his hands raised.
His death became a flashpoint because it was so soon after the murder of George Floyd, and it happened within the same political atmosphere. And the fact that ShotSpotter was part of that response really gave the movement to cancel ShotSpotter a lot of steam and ultimately enough political capital to get a candidate for mayor, in Brandon Johnson, to promise to cancel it.
Now, do some of the people in these communities facing violence, say, “Wait a minute. Let’s use ShotSpotter, at least as an attempt to do something to alleviate the violence, even if it is an imperfect solution.”?
Yes. There was a public meeting a couple weeks ago ahead of the announcements of the cancellation. And during the public comment portion of that meeting, people spoke in favor and against ShotSpotter, and a number of people who were community members said that they wanted to keep it in their community. There was one person in particular who spoke whose brother was a victim of a gun murder, and she spoke passionately about how, had ShotSpotter existed, his life might have been saved.
Within the communities themselves, there is debate about whether or not ShotSpotter should stay. This gets to a larger question about how communities that are most impacted by gun violence and also impacted by racist and abusive policing want to address gun violence. The contradiction between having overpolicing and also to some degree underpolicing, where it’s not really rooted in the community but it’s reactive policing that’s not actually fixing the core problems, means that those core problems remain, and people in these communities want those problems fixed. They want to stop the violence by any means necessary. And some people see ShotSpotter as one tool to do that.
There have been a lot of studies out there that call into question just how effective this technology is. What do some of these findings say?
In Chicago, there was a study a few years ago by the Office of Inspector General that looked at the efficacy of ShotSpotter in terms of leading to evidence of gun crimes and also its impact on policing in these communities. That study found that ShotSpotter alerts led to documented evidence of a gun crime in fewer than 11 percent of cases. It also found that in communities where ShotSpotter was installed, the police had a more elevated response. There was a higher incidence of police stopping and frisking Black and brown men. And other studies have found, for example, in areas where ShotSpotter is installed, 911 response times actually go down slightly. And they believe that that correlation is due to the police chasing ShotSpotter alerts and not having time to respond to 911.
And when they get there, because they know that Oh, wow, there might be a gunshot there, they maybe arrive on the scene a little amped up.
Yes. There was another study that found that the police, in areas where they know ShotSpotter alerts happen, tend to arrive more amped up and ready to jump out and engage. And in Chicago, this has had repercussions. Most recently, there was a case where a ShotSpotter alert went off, and it was unclear whether it was a gunshot or a firework. But the police arrived. They saw a man in his front yard, and they opened fire on him immediately. Fortunately, they didn’t hit him. And it turned out that it was just a firework. It was not a gunshot. The man did not have a gun.
When confronted with these allegations, what’s ShotSpotter’s response?
After the OIG report came out, they really shifted their PR strategy from saying that they prevent gun crime or allow police to capture criminals to saying, “What we actually do is allow the police to get there in time to save victims.” So, from a PR perspective, that was their strategy. They’ve also commissioned their own studies that have attempted to poke holes in some of the findings of the independent studies, but it’s hard to really vet the results of those studies because they’re bought and paid for by the company itself.
The company claims that its technology works very well. It says that it’s over 97 percent effective at catching gunfire. But one of the issues with that is that this is all asserted by the company, and they don’t really show the data to back it up, and there’s no real way to do any control study to see if they actually are capturing all of this gunfire.
You and your team did a lot of investigative reporting recently, showing how the company hasn’t always been as forthcoming to public safety officials as they should have been. What did you find?
Our reporting was based on internal company emails from ShotSpotter, as well as data that we obtained via public records requests from the city and the Chicago Police Department. And we found that in 2023, the police reported 575 incidents of verified gunfire that ShotSpotter sensors had missed in their coverage area.
When we zoomed in and looked at these internal company emails, we found that there was an incident in December of 2022 where two men were shot in a hail of bullets. There were 55 rounds fired, and there were three ShotSpotter sensors in the vicinity, and none of them picked up the shooting. And when a public safety official in Chicago complained about this to the company, the internal emails that we reviewed showed executives saying, “We have sensors that are broken or compromised by ambient noise, but obviously we can’t tell the public safety official this. We need a better reason to give him than our sensors aren’t working.” What we found was that ShotSpotter was not always working as well as executives may have been representing to the city, and that it often frequently missed critical shootings.
When Brandon Johnson ran for mayor of Chicago, he made police reform a central part of his campaign. He also promised to end the city’s contract with ShotSpotter. When he won, ShotSpotter’s stock took a nosedive. Soon after, the company behind ShotSpotter changed its name to Sound Thinking. But despite these setbacks, the company is actually expanding, right?
Along with the name change, they have expanded their product portfolio to include more policing technology than just the gunshot acoustic detection. Among other things, they’ve picked up a predictive policing program, using technology and algorithms to try and determine who might be involved in a crime.
Predictive policing is an unproven area of technology. It’s unclear exactly what the predictive policing tool ShotSpotter is marketing does. We’re not entirely sure yet. But we do have previous models from the Chicago police where they have attempted to roll out predictive policing technology that had disastrous results.
A few years ago, the Chicago police had a program that was designed to predict who might be involved in a gun crime as either a perpetrator or a victim, and it generated thousands of names. The police began visiting one of the people that their predictive policing technology identified, but ultimately, because of the fact that they were visiting his house so often, people in the neighborhood believed that he was an informant, and he was ultimately shot as a result of that. He survived, but in that case, the predictive policing had the direct opposite effect that it was intended to. And the Chicago police quietly moved away from that system.
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Your reporting raises bigger questions about what’s at stake when private companies partner with public institutions. When your paper asked ShotSpotter about some major shootings its technology missed, you were stonewalled, right?
Whenever government is involved in a public-private partnership, one of the real problems that comes up is transparency. We were able to get some information from the police department about these missed shootings, but we were only able to do so after they initially rejected our public records request, citing a trade secrets exemption. We appealed that to the attorney general, and the attorney general ruled in our favor that this was not actually a trade secret and forced the police to reveal this information.
But this was the first time that anyone had successfully gotten those records via a public records request. Other reporters had had it denied for years. In a public-private partnership that has to do with public safety, particularly when it’s a public safety initiative that’s sending officers to scenes of ostensible shootings, you need a lot of transparency to understand how it’s working, how well it’s working. And without that, it leads to potential for abuse or fraud or terrible accidents to happen.
Also, there’s the matter of what the incentives are for a private, for-profit company. How aligned are public safety and private profit?
ShotSpotter is a publicly traded company. So, as like any publicly traded company, their primary incentive is to increase shareholder value, which means if it’s selling products that are reactive to gun violence, it doesn’t have a huge incentive to see gun violence be reduced. Whereas municipalities, residents, citizens all want that to be the ultimate goal. We want less gun violence.
Technology cannot really prevent violence. It can’t uplift communities. It can’t raise the general standard of living. All it can do is give the police data to be in this reactive mode when they show up.
Nevertheless, when it comes to tackling gun violence, or any systemic threat to public safety, it seems like police are often convinced that new and emerging technologies are the best path forward.
You see this in recent years in everything from body-worn cameras to automatic license plate readers to surveillance cameras. (In Chicago, they’re called pod cams.) There’s various reasons why police like tech. They see it as more reliable than human witnesses. When you’re on the stand in a trial, it likely holds up very well because it has this perception of not having any bias; it’s just cold, hard facts. The current chief of the Chicago police, Larry Snelling, has repeatedly said that he is an advocate for technology-based policing. But again, all of that is very reactive. They’re getting a gunshot alert and sending officers to the scene.
You’ve talked about how ShotSpotter may disproportionately affect communities of color in Chicago. Do you see that playing out across the country?
Yes. When ShotSpotter was found to have its sensors overwhelmingly be in Black and brown communities in Chicago by one study, their response was essentially, “Well, that’s where the crime is.” This is also the case in other cities where ShotSpotter is installed. In New York, in Detroit, elsewhere, it’s overwhelmingly installed in Black and brown communities. And it gets to the larger question about how we police cities. This was something that came up during the George Floyd rebellions and has been part of the national conversation. And the issue always comes down to how police are policing these communities.
This is absolutely an inflection point. Chicago has ShotSpotter’s most expensive contract. It’s losing a huge client. There is a possibility that other municipalities, when they’re considering whether to renew the contract or sign a new contract for the first time, might look to Chicago and see this city that has gun violence as a problem, that was ShotSpotter’s biggest customer, and has been for over five years now, canceled the contract. They might think twice about signing up themselves.
How would it play out politically if gun violence were to go up after ShotSpotter is discontinued? There seems to be a lot riding on how this plays out.
If gun crime goes up in the months after ShotSpotter is expired, undoubtedly the people who want to keep it will say that it’s because we canceled the contract with ShotSpotter—whether or not that’s true. If gun crime goes down after ShotSpotter, the argument can be credibly made that canceling the contract did not have a negative effect on gun crime.
The conversation around ShotSpotter, especially in recent weeks as the contract was getting ready to expire, has overwhelmingly, on both sides, been driven by emotion and pathos as opposed to data and facts. And that will continue. That’s true for a lot of political discourse in this day and age, especially when it comes to public safety. A lot of it is driven by victim statements—on one side victims of gun violence, and victims of police abuse on the other. Both of them have very legitimate points. And some politicians are willing to exploit that in service of their own ends, so that will continue.
