Chicago turns off its gunshot-tracking system

Chicago is grimly famous for gun violence. So why is the city giving up on a high-tech tool in the fight against violent crime?

Mayor Brandon Johnson's office this week announced it would end Chicago's contract with ShotSpotter, a gunshot detection firm. ShotSpotter's system uses an A.I.-linked network of microphones to detect gunfire and quickly route emergency crews to the location — whether or not a 911 call has been made. The technology has been "criticized for inaccuracy, racial bias and law enforcement misuse," The Associated Press said. Johnson campaigned for office last year on a pledge to end ShotSpotter use. Now, his office said, the city will turn to "the most effective strategies and tactics" in its efforts to reduce gun crimes.

The decision was fiercely criticized. "Technology is where policing is going as a whole," police superintendent Larry Snelling said in October. "If we're not utilizing technology, then we fall behind in crime fighting." The question is whether ShotSpotter effectively aids that fight. A 2021 study of the system found that alerts mostly caused police to chase ghosts, said NPR: More than 80% of ShotSpotter alerts turned up "no report of any crime at all."

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

"Surveillance technology has a veneer of objectivity, but many of these systems do not work as advertised," said Jonathan Manes of the McArthur Justice Center.

'Unnecessary and hostile encounters'

Gunshot detection technology has its defenders. Police have praised the system "for speeding up emergency responses to shootings," The Chicago Tribune said. And ShotSpotter CEO Ralph Clark said his company's tools have "led police to locate hundreds of gunshot wound victims where there was no corresponding call to 911." 

Race is part of the debate. The system's critics have "argued that the system sends police officers to predominantly Black and Latino neighborhoods for often unnecessary and hostile encounters," as The Guardian said. One activist called ShotSpotter "another tool that police have for just searching and harassing Black and brown people in our communities." But the company says its technology is deployed in neighborhoods with high crime rates, regardless of race. "We believe all residents who live in communities experiencing persistent gunfire deserve rapid police response," the company said in an online explainer, "regardless of race or geographic location."

The "jury is out" on the overall usefulness of ShotSpotter, The Chicago Tribune said in an editorial. Yes, the system "comes with a lot of false alarms and wrong locations." And those false alarms can lead to a "SWAT team of hyped-up police officers" showing up in a neighborhood "in a ginned-up state." But Chicago police credit ShotSpotter with saving "scores of lives." The police superintendent clearly wants more time to evaluate ShotSpotter, the paper said. He should get it.

'Recipe for failure?'

That may not happen. Johnson said he wanted to keep the city's contract with ShotSpotter through the summer. But the technology could be "turned off as early as the end of the week," ABC Chicago said. Why? Because Johnson's office announced the end of the contract before it had reached a firm agreement with ShotSpotter to stay in place through this summer, when the Democratic National Convention will be in town. That means — barring a last-second agreement — Chicago could lose the service by midnight Friday.

Johnson's end-the-contract-but-not-now approach is confusing, The Chicago Sun-Times said in an editorial. "That makes ShotSpotter simultaneously bad enough to get rid of now, and yet good enough to keep around for another six months." The bigger problem is that the mayor is turning away from ShotSpotter "without having something on deck to replace it." That's a "bad policy and a recipe for failure."