It’s been nine months since Brandon Johnson became mayor of Chicago. It only seems far longer. Spirited debates over policies, though, are part of the normal back-and-forth of political life. Our biggest concern, only growing, is the managerial incompetence of this administration.
The latest example is ShotSpotter, the gunshot-detection technology Chicago police have used for seven years to respond more rapidly to shootings, which of course remain distressingly frequent. Johnson promised during his campaign for mayor to end the city’s contract with SoundThinking, the company behind ShotSpotter.
We don’t think that pledge was based on sound thinking or on a sufficiently complex understanding of how the technology not only has often helped deliver fast help to a young person lying in a pool of blood, but how it also has dispersed potential bad actors when police cars arrive at a melee. Shotspotter hasn’t just spotted shots, it has meant some were never fired. Still, Johnson was duly elected and that was a pledge he made. Chicagoans knew that, or should have known that, when they voted for him.
But then Johnson hemmed and hawed.
The police superintendent Johnson chose — arguably his most important appointment since becoming mayor — publicly called for renewing the pact, arguing that the technology was a great help to his department. Activists that Johnson regards as his base pushed to end it. Many aldermen, worried about the fallout in their neighborhoods if police response times worsen without ShotSpotter, called for its continuation.
All the while, Johnson said nothing on the matter as the Feb. 16 contract expiration deadline crept nearer. A scant three days before then, as in on Tuesday, Johnson announced his plan. He would do away with ShotSpotter but extend the contract another six months to help the cops get through the high crime summer months and keep the Democratic National Convention in August running smoothly.
This page has been ambivalent about the results the technology has delivered, although at a recent public hearing a strong argument was made that the limited data available fails to look at victims’ lives saved. In practice, ShotSpotter has been functioning as an automated 911 alternate; we don’t measure the need for an emergency response system based on its efficacy as a prosecutorial tool. ShotSpotter’s ideologically inclined foes gloss over all that.
We recently called on the mayor to grant a limited extension to give Superintendent Larry Snelling time to prove the police can use ShotSpotter more effectively.
But Hamlet on the fifth floor tried at the eleventh hour to appease both his police chief and his base (and maybe also a worried Gov. J.B. Pritzker whose national reputation rides on a successful DNC). The only problem is Johnson forgot to let ShotSpotter’s owner in on his plans before making them public. Surprise! A day later, news leaked that SoundThinking told City Hall it wouldn’t agree to the short-term extension.
In as high-profile a situation as this, what competent mayor would announce there will be a contract extension with a vendor without closing a deal with the vendor first? It appears City Hall just assumed SoundThinking would be OK with continuing for another several months even though the company had no contractual obligation to do so.
Whether or not ShotSpotter works as well as everyone would like, SoundThinking has taken a lot of PR lumps in Chicago as activists and some politicians besmirch the technology as racist. Johnson himself hasn’t gone quite that far but during the campaign he derided ShotSpotter as not being “worthwhile.”
The company is angry, we hear from a source who’s spoken directly with them. It’s hard to blame them.
This, remarkably, isn’t Johnson’s first SpotShotter misadventure. Shortly after taking office, he signed off on $10 million to extend ShotSpotter through most of February, garnering brickbats from his progressive base for doing so. His administration blamed an automatic signature and said Johnson would have reviewed the payment more closely if he’d known that was happening. That was one of the first signs Chicago was in for a roller coaster ride with this mayor.
As we write, the city will lose access to ShotSpotter at midnight Friday unless the mayor’s office can convince the company to change its mind on the short-term extension. Presumably, if that happens, it will require a lot more money than the millions the city already is shelling out. (As an aside, SoundThinking may want to rethink whether continuing its understandable fit of pique makes strategic sense for itself over the longer term, since the company extols the technology as life-saving. If Chicago is willing to pay for another six months, withholding already-installed technology can be framed as putting lives in danger over personal or corporate grudges.)
Still, if Johnson were a student in Negotiations 101, he would be failing right now. He’s put his administration — and, far more importantly, the city — in a terrible position.
Six more months of ShotSpotter wouldn’t just have helped Chicago police over the summer. Equally as important if not more so, it would have bought time to come up with an alternative approach, whether technological or through a change in police tactics, to keep response times to shootings from backsliding and ensure gun victims still get fast help. Many people who live in those communities are deeply worried about what might happen as soon as Saturday morning.
Unless there’s an eleventh-hour agreement, and we’re hoping there will be, Johnson and Snelling now have less than two days to figure that out thanks to the mayor’s ineptitude.
This is only the latest in a series of blunders for this administration. Near the top of the list, if not at the top, was Team Johnson’s plan late last year to construct a winterized tent camp for migrants on vacant land in Brighton Park contaminated with toxics. Pritzker killed the ill-conceived plan but only after the city was well along in constructing the temporary shelters.
Indeed, the administration’s entire handling of the migrant crisis has been woeful, including deciding to fine operators of buses transporting migrants who didn’t comply with city rules on licensing, locations and drop-off hours. That simply prompted those operators to drop migrants in suburban locations, making management of the crisis all the more chaotic for the city.
We could go on.
We’re nine months into this mayoralty, so at this point Johnson can’t use his inexperience as an excuse. The mayor badly needs more competent people around him, yes. But he also seems to need a healthy dose of common sense.