Chicago’s ShotSpotter Fans Fail To Save City Contract Despite Last-Minute Maneuvering

The writing was on the wall, or rather, on the City of Chicago’s Inspector General’s report:

The CPD data examined by OIG does not support a conclusion that ShotSpotter is an effective tool in developing evidence of gun-related crime.

Kind of a big problem when the tech was acquired specifically to address Chicago’s years-long acceleration in gun-related crime. That report was issued in August 2021. Three years later, most city council members were willing to let the ShotSpotter contract expire at the end of September 2024, rather than keep paying for something that wasn’t working.

Most, but not all. A few proponents of the system successfully passed a measure that had the potential to override the mayor’s decision to let the contract expire. Instead of leaving it in the mayor’s hands, the full council would have to vote on the contract to decide its fate.

Meanwhile, ShotSpotter itself (now doing business as “SoundThinking”) entered the conversation by whipping up a site containing canned letters Chicagoans could sign and email to their representatives. It also altered its narrative. Rather than touting its success in tackling gun crime, ShotSpotter execs were now claiming the real value of the system was decreasing EMS response times to detected gunshots. Suddenly, it was no longer about fighting crime, but saving lives.

Of course, ShotSpotter offered no evidence of this supposed efficiency and it really had no answer for the IG report noting the system did very little to solve gun crime, much less lead to successful prosecutions. The only response ShotSpotter had was “Well, don’t measure it that way.” Measure it this way.” And since no law enforcement agency utilizing ShotSpotter cross-references that with EMS response times, ShotSpotter was free to claim it helps save lives because no one could produce any evidence stating otherwise.

Despite all of this, it looks as though ShotSpotter’s contract with Chicago will be allowed to expire at the end of this month. The measure passed to demand a full vote on the contract has failed somewhat spectacularly. A last-minute flame-out is all that’s left of efforts to save ShotSpotter from its own inability to provide a useful product, as Tom Schuba and Fran Spielman report for the Chicago Sun Times.

Ald. David Moore (17th) had hoped to use a parliamentary maneuver at next week’s City Council meeting to force a vote on that ordinance, which has languished in the Rules Committee, where legislation often is sent to die.

Moore planned to invoke Rule 41. That means he’d first need two-thirds of the 50-member Council — 34 members — to suspend the rules for immediate consideration of an ordinance if no action had been taken on it in committee. Then, he would need 26 votes to pass the ordinance.

Instead, [Rules Committee Chair Michelle] Harris put Moore’s ordinance on Monday’s agenda, effectively killing the chance for Moore to invoke Rule 41 on Wednesday.

Well, live by the parliamentary rules, die by the parliamentary rules. Putting this on the agenda allows the Rules Committee to refer it to another committee, where it will gather even more dust until after the ShotSpotter contract expires. It’s not exactly a subtle move, but it gets the job done.

And it also makes a whole lot of people angry, especially advocates of ShotSpotter who have offered no evidence that contradicts the findings of the IG report released three years ago. Instead, they continue to insist shutting the system off will result in more violence and deaths, despite there being nothing on the record that shows ShotSpotter contributed to any decreases in violent gun-related crime.

It’s a dirty trick but one either side would have gladly employed if they had the option. In this case, it was those opposed to extending the contract that had the parliamentary upper hand. No amount of chain emails from the Save ShotSpotter site will change anything at this point. And all the supporters have to work with are the sort of claims we always hear from surveillance fans when any surveillance method is on the chopping block: vague assertions about impending crime apocalypses. History shows these hysterical projections rarely, if ever, manifest themselves in reality. I wouldn’t expect that truism to be undercut here either.