LAW-ENFORCEMENT TECHNOLOYChicago Is the Latest City Rethinking Disputed Technology That Listens for Gunshots
More than 150 U.S. cities use ShotSpotter, but now Chicago has joined a growing list of cities that have cut ties with the controversial company that tries to reduce urban gun violence with 24/7 technology that listens for the crack of gunshots and immediately notifies police.
Chicago has joined a growing list of cities that have cut ties with a controversial company that tries to reduce urban gun violence with 24/7 technology that listens for the crack of gunshots and immediately notifies police.
This month, Chicago Democratic Mayor Brandon Johnson announced the city would not renew its contract with SoundThinking, the California-based company behind ShotSpotter, software that uses a network of hidden neighborhood sensors to detect the sound of gunfire.
Chicago was spending around $9 million annually on one of the biggest installations in the country, covering around 100 square miles.
More than 150 cities nationwide use ShotSpotter in an effort to help police departments respond to more incidences of gunfire, which often go unreported by residents. Cities that have recently shown new or continued interest in the technology include Cleveland, Seattle and Little Rock, Arkansas.
Leaders say it can help save gunshot victims’ lives by enabling emergency responders to get to the scene of a shooting more quickly. As a result, they add, investigators can more quickly recover ballistic and bullet casing evidence used to solve crimes.
But over the past decade, cities around the country such as Atlanta; Charlotte, North Carolina; New Orleans; and San Antonio, Texas, have decided to discontinue their use of ShotSpotter. Those decisions coincided with a growing body of research showing that ShotSpotter has not succeeded in reducing gun violence, has slowed police response times to emergency calls, and often did not lead to evidence recovery. SoundThinking has vigorously disputed criticism about ShotSpotter’s efficacy.
As cities continue to reevaluate their strategies for bringing down gun assault numbers, which spiked during the pandemic and are slowly falling, they must focus on tools that are proven to keep their communities safe, especially with strained resources, said Thomas Abt, a senior fellow at the Council on Criminal Justice, a nonpartisan think tank, and an associate research professor in criminology and criminal justice at the University of Maryland.
“It’s troubling to have a powerful for-profit vendor pushing this strategy that has been widely adopted, but there’s not a lot of evidence that it’s particularly effective,” Abt said.
The Chicago mayor’s office reiterated that concern when it announced Johnson’s decision to stop using ShotSpotter, saying the city “will deploy its resources on the most effective strategies and tactics proven to accelerate the current downward trend in violent crime.” The city plans to decommission the software on Sept. 22.
