Progressive activists despise ShotSpotter, a smart if costly piece of licensable technology that uses acoustic sensors to detect the sound of gunfire and then can quickly alert police officers to the precise locations of potential incidents of violent crime.
That means police officers do not have to wait for a 911 call from a witness or victim that may never come at all. And if the police arrive fast to the right spot, they might prevent subsequent shots and even save lives, especially given that a gun battle with several people with multiple firearms always has someone who shoots first. Furthermore, where there is gunfire, there is often a victim lying in a pool of blood and the faster help arrives, the better the chance of medical intervention saving a life.
That’s the theory, but the anti-ShotSpotter activists point to how it can also mean that a SWAT team of hyped-up police officers arrive in a ginned-up state, their own firearms at the ready and without much situational awareness in the community where the shots were heard. In 2021, many of those activists have noted, it was the ShotSpotter system that alerted police to gunshots being fired in a fraught and miserable situation that led to an officer fatally shooting 13-year-old Adam Toledo. Without ShotSpotter, they say, Adam would still be alive now.
We’ve written before about our misgivings with this system, which costs the city millions of dollars a year and comes with a lot of false alarms and wrong locations. It also has a less-than-stellar reputation when it comes to securing convictions in court.
In 2021, a report from Chicago’s Office of the Inspector General looking at ShotSpotter alerts in 2020 and the first part of 2021 found that an actual, actionable criminal gun offense had been committed in less than 10% of the times police went rushing to the scene at ShotSpotter’s behest. (SoundThinking, Inc., the owner of ShotSpotter, claims a very high level of accuracy when it comes to actual gunfire; the technology obviously can’t judge the level of prosecutable criminality and sometimes the detected gunshots have been fired into the air).
What might potentially happen in the other 90% of those incidents is what has most troubled the anti-ShotSpotter activists, who blame it for “overpolicing” vulnerable neighborhoods. Along with other unintended consequences, they understandably have feared a bunch of police officers showing up, spoiling for a fight.
Of course, if that’s your kid lying on the sidewalk in the 10% of cases, you’d be glad the police arrived fast. And the Chicago Police Department itself has credited the technology with saving scores of lives.
Still, Mayor Brandon Johnson listens to progressive activists far more readily than the police. He vowed during his campaign to end the city’s contract with ShotSpotter, although he actually extended the contract last June on a short-term basis. Since then, he’s said little.
According to city records, the contract is set to expire on Feb. 16, which is the end of next week.
Interestingly, police Superintendent Larry Snelling was asked about ShotSpotter at a community meeting Jan. 24 and offered his support on the grounds that any tool potentially preventing Chicagoans’ lives being lost to gun violence is useful to the department. Many of the benefits of ShotSpotter when it comes to helping victims are both unnoticed and unlikely to show up in the studies, he added.
We’ve also heard in recent days from smart thinkers on the ground when it comes to police matters that there’s compelling anecdotal evidence police arrive much faster after a ShotSpotter alert than a 911 call. There is real fear, we’ve been told, in Chicago neighborhoods frightened by violent, gang-related crime that the end of ShotSpotter might result in yet more gun crimes going undetected and help for victims arriving far more slowly, if at all. ShotSpotter has some unlikely defenders, especially among the pragmatists who worry about these matters and particularly since its exit will be replaced with … nothing.
We’ll add that ShotSpotter is a technological tool, no more and no less, and what really matters here is what human police officers actually do when they respond to its alarms. If Snelling can emphasize the kind of police training that recognizes the dangers inherent to this kind of system, if he can assuage these very real community fears and show people the data to prove he has done so, maybe he could turn ShotSpotter into a more clear-cut force for good.
In a previous editorial we said the jury was out on ShotSpotter. We still feel that way, even as we note that no one should fire off a gun on the streets of Chicago and not expect to be held accountable.
But Johnson has put his trust in the expertise of his new police chief, and we think that man should be given the tools he says he needs without extraneous second-guessing in advance.
By all means, make the renewal for a definable, newly examinable period. After that, Snelling can — and should — report on whether it has helped make our city safer.