REPORT PUTS SHOTSPOTTER ON THE SPOT
City’s watchdog finds technology rarely leads to evidence of gun crimes, investigatory stops
The city’s top watchdog issued a scathing report Tuesday that found ShotSpotter technology used by the Chicago Police Department rarely leads to investigatory stops or evidence of gun crimes and can change the way officers interact with areas they’re charged with patrolling.
The report from the city’s Office of the Inspector General analyzed 50,176 ShotSpotter notifications from last January through May. Just 9.1% indicated evidence of a gunrelated offense was found. Only 2.1% of the alerts were linked directly to investigative stops, although other stops were detailed in reports that referenced the technology but didn’t correlate with a specific ShotSpotter notification.
Deborah Witzburg, the city’s deputy inspector general for public safety, said the report shows using ShotSpotter technology comes with “significant costs” far beyond the now-extended contract’s multimilliondollar price tag.
Community concerns about using ShotSpotter technology are just one added cost. So are the “really tragic outcomes” that can result when police officers are sent to respond to ShotSpotter alerts “without a lot of information about what they might find when they get there,” Witzburg said.
She cited the case of Adam Toledo, a 13-year-old shot in March by a police officer responding to a ShotSpotter alert. Toledo’s hands were empty when the fatal shot was fired, though he was seen on the officer’s body-worn camera holding a pistol a moment earlier.
WItzburg also noted the case of Chicago police officers Eduardo Marmolejo and Conrad Gary, struck and killed by a South Shore train while investigating a ShotSpotter alert.
“We found very little data to show a clear link between ShotSpotter alerts and the recovery of evidence of a gun-related crime or even the ability to make an investigatory stop which might yield evidence of a gunrelated crime or evidence of a gun. … There is sort of an anecdotal sense that the use of this technology is beneficial. But we can’t make public policy based on anecdotes.”
Cathy Kwiatkowski, a spokeswoman for the city’s Department of Procurement Services, confirmed Thursday that the threeyear, $33 million contract with the Silicon Valley-based startup had been extended for two years at the request of CPD.
As the acoustic gunshot detection system has come under heavy fire amid recent studies and reports challenging its efficacy and accuracy, Mayor Lori Lightfoot and Supt. David Brown have continued to publicly support using the technology.
In a statement, ShotSpotter denied the report is an indictment of the technology’s accuracy, which it claimed “has been independently audited at 97% based on feedback from more than 120 customers. Nor does the OIG propose that ShotSpotter alerts are not indicative of actual gunfire whether or not physical evidence is recovered.”
CPD is standing firmly behind the technology.
“In order to reduce gun violence, knowing where it occurs is crucial. ShotSpotter has detected hundreds of shootings that would have otherwise gone unreported,” police spokesman Tom Ahern said in a statement originally issued last week.
In May, the MacArthur Justice Center released a study that found nearly 86% of police deployments to ShotSpotter alerts in Chicago prompted no formal reports of any crime. ShotSpotter later commissioned a report showing “severe flaws” in the study, but the inspector general’s office broadly backed that specific conclusion, saying “a large percentage of ShotSpotter alerts cannot be connected to any verifiable shooting incident.”
Tuesday, the MacArthur Justice Center said the inspector general’s report “reaffirms the truth” that ShotSpotter is “wholly unreliable and fundamentally dangerous to the communities of color on Chicago’s South and West sides where it is employed.”
The inspector general’s report also took a look at investigative stop reports not specifically linked to a ShotSpotter alert in which the technology was simply mentioned in the narrative of an incident report.
“There’s no specific ShotSpotter information. But a CPD member’s impression of the frequency of alerts in an area changes their policing behavior. … The police department members cited frequency of ShotSpotter alerts in an area as part of their justification to stop someone or pat them down or to otherwise develop suspicions,” Witzburg said.
“If this is a technology which has a very low return rate in producing evidence of gun-related crime, it’s appropriate to think about whether we’re comfortable with its presence at all, if its presence is also shaping behavior when there isn’t even an indication of a specific alert.”
Though ShotSpotter cited the “independent audit” commissioned by the company that found the technology is overwhelmingly accurate, the company’s system remains a closely guarded trade secret.
Meanwhile, the Associated Press last week published an investigation that found the system could miss gunshots or wrongly detect other sounds as gunfire. It concluded there were serious issues with using the technology as evidence.
As with another report published in July by Vice, the AP investigation noted that ShotSpotter employees have altered both the location of an alert and the number of
gunshots detected.
Nevertheless, some officials defended ShotSpotter as an important crime-fighting tool.
Ald. Chris Taliaferro (29th), chairman of the City Council’s Committee on Public Safety, said he agrees with “some of the points made” by the inspector general, which justify looking at how CPD uses ShotSpotter “with a more critical eye.”
But Taliaferro said it would be a grave mistake to get rid of the gunshot detection technology.
“It’s worth the price for the lives that we are saving because ShotSpotter can be attributed to officers responding much more quickly to the scene to save lives,” said Taliaferro, a former Chicago police sergeant.
“I’ve heard parents whose children have been saved that somehow attribute that to the quick response of officers in getting that particular person to the hospital. That officer got on the scene simply because ShotSpotter alerted them.”
Ald. Anthony Beale (9th), former longtime chairman of the Council’s Police Committee, argued the problem is not ShotSpotter technology. It’s overhauled policies restricting foot pursuits and vehicular chases.
“The ShotSpotter is extremely valuable. However, in order for the technology to work, you have to have the police be able to pursue and go after the bad guys when they see or hear that the technology has pointed in a certain direction,” Beale said.
Instead of getting rid of ShotSpotter, Beale advised Lightfoot and Brown to “take the handcuffs off ” officers, “let them do their job in an aggressive manner” and embark on a major hiring blitz to fill an alarming number of officer vacancies caused by a tidal wave of retirements.
“I’m hearing we’re gonna be down 1,500 by the end of the year,” Beale said.