The tired and in our view settled debate over the efficacy of gunshot-detection technology has re-emerged in the form of new research seized upon by Mayor Brandon Johnson, who famously ended the use of ShotSpotter in Chicago nearly two years ago over the fervent objections of a majority of aldermen.
The Johnson administration promised to replace ShotSpotter, which alerted Chicago police immediately to gunshots in parts of the city where gun violence happens all too frequently, after it ended the city’s contract with the technology’s owner, SoundThinking. But since then the process of identifying a new vendor and signing a contract has been painfully slow, betraying the mayor’s lack of urgency.
The process is so slow that a City Council committee held a hearing earlier this month essentially to turn up the heat on administration officials, who offered no explanation for the molasses-like contracting process other than platitudes. That prompted one of those aldermanic ShotSpotter supporters, Finance Committee Chair Pat Dowell, 3rd, to wryly remark, “If I had a dollar for the word diligent, I could go buy a nice lunch today.”
So it came as little surprise Wednesday when Johnson hailed a study just released by the Justice Center at the University of Chicago that concluded the ending of ShotSpotter led to modestly improved police response times to 911 calls in the six months after the technology was terminated. “To those who were obviously promoting fear and casting doubt on our effort to improve safety, this is clear evidence that we are clearly moving in the right direction,” he told reporters on Wednesday.
So what exactly did this study examine? The research showed that in areas previously served by ShotSpotter police response times to 911 calls improved by a little over four minutes on average in the six months after the technology was turned off in September 2024 compared with the six months before. The authors surmised that police responded more quickly because they weren’t “tied up” reacting to ShotSpotter alerts.
First, ShotSpotter was first installed in Chicago in 2012, so this is hardly a comprehensive data set. More importantly, as crime reporting website CWBChicago commented on X, the comparison was apples and oranges. Fall and winter emergency calls will naturally be fewer than in the spring and summer, when violence and accidents increase. So faster response times are more likely to be caused by the lower volume of calls than the absence of ShotSpotter.
The analysis doesn’t get to the heart of the current ShotSpotter debate anyway. And neither do the mayor’s comments.
The City Council members advocating for the return of gunshot technology don’t claim it will reduce violent crime. And neither does this page.
The argument for gunshot technology is twofold. The most important is that in parts of Chicago where gunfire is a regular occurrence, all too often no one calls 911 when shots are fired and so victims are left bleeding in the street for lengthy periods of time. CWBChicago has documented more than 80 such instances since ShotSpotter ended where people were shot and left unattended for many minutes or even hours. Many died.
The second is that even when police get a 911 call, the caller often doesn’t have a clear idea of where the shots were fired, leaving cops searching for a victim and sometimes not finding them, particularly when it’s dark. By contrast, ShotSpotter gives police instant and reasonably precise information on where shots were fired.
Does Johnson ever address these arguments in his frequent attacks on ShotSpotter? Not that we’ve heard.
Let’s return to the source of this analysis. The director of the U. of C.’s Justice Project is a sociology professor named Robert Vargas. Here’s how the university’s website describes his research interests: Vargas “studies how research designs, funding incentives, and evidence-based paradigms can launder police and tech industry interests through the veneer of neutral science, examining which questions get funded, which metrics are privileged, and how these choice architectures shape policy and public imagination.”
That’s quite a mouthful. But on the question of ShotSpotter at least, an academic whose research focus is on how “police interests” “launder” their points of view seems, shall we say, a tad less than objective.
Contrast that with the compelling September 2024 analysis in the Tribune Opinion section by the highly regarded Crime Lab, also at the University of Chicago, which laid out how ShotSpotter helps reduce emergency response times to gun victims and saves lives. No one credible thinks of the Crime Lab as partisan or slanted.
Did Mayor Johnson shout out the Crime Lab’s findings as he was preparing to pull the plug on ShotSpotter? Of course not.
Johnson likes to talk about leading “with what the data shows.” But robust data that don’t fit his prescribed views obviously aren’t worthy of the same amount of discussion as the biased report he extolled earlier this week.
That brings us to the part of the ShotSpotter discussion that perhaps disturbs us most. In his removal of ShotSpotter and lack of urgency to replace it with similar technology, the mayor has subverted the will of a majority of Chicagoans, particularly those on the South and West sides whom he considers his political base.
There’s a reason nearly all aldermen in the neighborhoods once served by ShotSpotter want some sort of gunshot detection technology back again: Their constituents want it.
As Ald. Peter Chico, who represents the 10th Ward on the Southeast Side, told WTTW, “My community wants this tool.”
The mayor keeps trying to convince Chicagoans they’re wrong to want what they clearly do. Officeholders who ignore the clear desires of their constituents eventually become ex-officeholders.
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