City Council Votes To Keep Paying ShotSpotter For Tech That’s Done Nothing To Make The City Safer

It appears Chicago’s city leaders (well… excluding the mayor, Brandon Johnson) aren’t afraid of spending nothing on do-nothing tech that even the city’s watchdog says is a waste of money. They’re not afraid to blow money on stuff that’s doing nothing to make residents safer, even as residents continue to complain about the level of gun violence in the city.

Back in 2021, the city’s Inspector General took a look at the ShotSpotter tech being used by the Chicago PD. Here’s the most damning conclusion, stated as succinctly as possible:

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

That’s what residents were paying at least $11 million a year for: something that didn’t have any effect on crime and was likely far less accurate than ShotSpotter’s denials and overstatements claimed.

On the other hand, it seemed to keeps cops busy, even if it wasn’t actually reducing gun crime:

[The] 2021 [Inspector General’s] study in Chicago found that, in a period of 21 months, ShotSpotter resulted in police acting on dead-end reports over 40,000 times. Likewise, the Cook County State’s Attorney’s office concluded that ShotSpotter had “minimal return on investment” and only resulted in arrest for 1% of proven shootings, according to a recent CBS report.

So, the city decided to terminate its $49 million contract with ShotSpotter, which would end the fiscal bleeding by the end of September of this year. That would have resulted in a savings of at least $11 million annually. And that’s just in terms of the ShotSpotter contract. Presumably another few million in savings would hit the bottom line once the PD stopped scrambling officers to “dead-end” ShotSpotter reports and stopped wasting the time of prosecutors who weren’t being given enough evidence to successfully prosecute gun-related crimes.

That’s what happened earlier this year. Now, things are changing. ShotSpotter has created its own site to save itself from being kicked out of Chicago. That would be fine, but its efforts are being aided by news sites that seemed to think SpotShotter’s self-serving campaign deserved to be presented as “news” even though 100% of the “save this poor tech company” effort was just some former Chicago PD official insisting the tech that had failed for years be allowed to keep failing for years to come.

Whether or not ShotSpotter’s “please save our paycheck” site had anything to with this is tough to say, but it appears Chicago lawmakers have decided it’s better to keep spending money on questionable cop tech than… you know, not spending money on questionable cop tech.

Here’s Dave Byrnes with more details for Courthouse News Service:

The Chicago City Council Wednesday approved a measure that could keep the controversial ShotSpotter gunshot detection system in town, potentially upending Mayor Brandon Johnson’s plan for the city to end its $49 million contract with ShotSpotter’s parent company SoundThinking this September.

We’ll see how far this pushback goes. As for the mayor, who’s one of ShotSpotter’s (several) critics, this vote means nothing. The contract will be terminated as previously declared.

Even if the mayor can’t shoot this down, the outcome of this vote by the council doesn’t mean ShotSpotter will continue to make as much money as it historically has in Chicago. A measure proposed earlier this year would prevent a city-wide expulsion of ShotSpotter tech, placing the yay/nay vote in the hands of individual alderman and the areas they oversaw.

The passed order revamps the earlier language. And that might still end up being a good thing for Chicago residents, who hopefully won’t have to continue to pay for cop tech that doesn’t work and/or their own surveillance (especially if they live in predominately black or Latino neighborhoods).

A revised version of the proposed order from March eliminated [the individual alderperson provision], instead stipulating that any decision to remove ShotSpotter from a city ward would have to go through a public safety committee meeting and a full city council vote. It also called on the Chicago Police Department to gather as much data as possible on Shotspotter’s efficacy by September.

This does two good things, but attaches them to a bad thing. Certainly this should be opened to public comment. And forcing the Chicago PD to deliver ShotSpotter data is also useful, especially when the city’s Inspector General noted in 2021 that the department’s collection of data was, at best, (um) spotty. (At worst, it bordered on obstruction.)

But then the same city council that originally proposed holding onto ShotSpotter tech should be left to each alderperson (due to the mayor’s alleged “overreach”) now suggest individual alderpersons shouldn’t be allowed to make these decisions on their own. The just-passed order says each individual decision by neighborhoods and their direct representation can be overridden by the city council, which just transfers the “overreach” from the mayor to the council.

And that revision makes it clear the council will almost always override any removals approved by individual alderpersons. The council objected to the first contract termination by trying to take the decision away from the mayor. Now, it appears the council wants to take that decision away from the public as well, which makes any period of public comment mostly performative. Individual alderpersons may actually listen to their constituents but it will be the rest of the city (the other alderpersons) that gets to decide whether or not ShotSpotter remains in their neighborhoods.