Chicago’s struggle over the continued use of gunshot surveillance tool ShotSpotter rages on. After the Stop ShotSpotter campaign successfully pressured Mayor Brandon Johnson to commit to ending Chicago’s use of ShotSpotter, lobbyists hired by the company behind ShotSpotter colluded with city council members to reverse the mayor’s decision. This battle has unfolded as evidence mounts that ShotSpotter does few, if any, of the things the company selling it claims. At stake in this fight over Chicago’s use of ShotSpotter is much more than one failed technology: it is fundamentally a fight about power and who has the authority to determine how to define and construct safe communities. It represents a struggle in Chicago’s Black and brown communities to reclaim agency in building safe communities and to assert their right to live free from constant surveillance and criminalization.
How did we arrive at this critical moment? ShotSpotter, a product of the police technology company SoundThinking (traded on Nasdaq and valued at about $170 million), is a gunshot detection surveillance technology used by the Chicago Police Department (CPD), not to mention the police of numerous other U.S. cities. Chicago installed ShotSpotter in 2012, and has used the technology consistently ever since, gradually growing its coverage area from less than a square mile to now more than a hundred square miles. Throughout this expansion, the technology has been concentrated in CPD’s police districts which are majority Black and brown.
ShotSpotter consists of microphones that blanket the service areas, purportedly to detect gunshots and alert CPD to dispatch to the location of the gunshots in order to save lives and prevent crime. When three microphones detect a loud sound, that sound is then “reviewed” by the company’s algorithm. If the algorithm deems the sound to be a gunshot, a human then reviews the sound. This person makes the final determination on whether the sound is a gunshot and initiates the communication to the City of Chicago of potential gunfire, leading to a CPD deployment to the area where ShotSpotter calculates the purported gunshot occurred. This process is inexact, and ShotSpotter’s human reviewers are trained to initiate police deployments when in doubt about whether a sound was a gunshot.
Decarceral thinkers and doers
Every week, Inquest aims to bring you insights from people thinking through and working for a world without mass incarceration.
Sign up for our newsletter for the latest.
Newsletter
Research about ShotSpotter, in Chicago and elsewhere, shows just how inexact this process is. One study from the MacArthur Justice Center showed that 89 percent of ShotSpotter deployments from July 2019 through April 2021 turned up no gun-related crime, and 86 percent led to no report of any crime at all. This equated to “about 40,000 dead-end ShotSpotter deployments” during the study’s 21 months. The system is easily fooled by other loud noises, such as cars backfiring or firecrackers. Research from the City of Chicago Office of Inspector General shows that ShotSpotter fuels racist police practices as it increases the use of stop-and-frisk tactics by CPD. Other research questions ShotSpotter’s ability to do much of anything that the company claims. It’s not clear if ShotSpotter can save lives, improve police response times, impact calls made to 911 reporting gunfire, or reduce fatal and non-fatal shootings or other crimes committed with a gun. (The only “research” that offers a positive assessment of ShotSpotter is research that the company has paid for, such as from Edgeworth Economics and the University of Cincinnati, or that was conducted by entities with strong ties to police forces, such as NYU’s Policing Project.) In reality, ShotSpotter provides a single service: it initiates police deployments in response to loud sounds. Despite the lack of any conclusive evidence of ShotSpotter’s efficacy at reducing or solving crimes, the city has spent nearly $50 million on this technology.
In addition to the lack of efficacy, ShotSpotter also enables police to enact multiple forms of violence against Black and brown people. Community residents and organizers launched the Stop ShotSpotter campaign in 2021 following the CPD killing of thirteen-year-old Adam Toledo in Chicago’s Little Village community. Police were dispatched to the area by a ShotSpotter alert and, when officers encountered Toledo, chased and shot him. Body camera footage revealed that Toledo had his hands raised when he was murdered. Coming on the heels of the 2020 national Black Lives Matter protests, Toledo’s murder galvanized Chicago, leading to widespread protests and calls for ShotSpotter’s removal. Sadly, this was not a one-off incident. In January 2024, just weeks before Mayor Johnson would announce his intention to end ShotSpotter’s Chicago contract, a Chicago officer shot at and narrowly missed a teenager while on a ShotSpotter-initiated deployment. This near-tragic deployment turned out to be initiated by an alert caused by fireworks.
These examples show how ShotSpotter increases police violence by creating more opportunities for aggressive police actions in communities already heavily surveilled and policed. In both police shooting incidents, the ShotSpotter alert brought police into contact with a young person under the assumption that gun violence was possible, heightening the readiness of police for confrontation. The ensuing encounters demonstrate the dangerous consequences of deploying police based on ShotSpotter alerts. These incidents show that, instead of preventing gun violence, ShotSpotter contributes to a cycle of violence by triggering high-stakes police responses.
In addition to causing violent and possibly fatal police deployments, ShotSpotter also creates the conditions and justification for multiple false arrests of Black and brown people by CPD officers. The technology acts as a sweeping probable-cause generator, as documented in a lawsuit against the City of Chicago for its use of ShotSpotter. One of these arrests included a man who spent nearly a year incarcerated in Cook County Jail during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic—where he contracted COVID twice, and developed uncontrollable hand tremors—before his charges were eventually dropped by the Cook County state’s attorney due to little evidence besides a ShotSpotter alert.
With every new incident of excessive force or false arrests, the data makes it evident that ShotSpotter is nothing more than a hollow technology that intensifies rather than alleviates violence performed by police.
In the three years following Adam Toledo’s death, the Stop ShotSpotter campaign effectively organized and demonstrated that ShotSpotter is not only an ineffective tool for improving public safety but actually makes communities less safe. Mayor Johnson, currently in his first mayoral term, ran in part on a campaign promise to end the city’s contract with ShotSpotter due to its documented inefficacy and harmful impact on communities. The Stop ShotSpotter campaign’s consistent pressure now has ShotSpotter on the cusp of leaving Chicago this November, after Mayor Johnson vowed to not renew its contract.
While we did not expect SoundThinking or CPD to quietly accept this decision, how both have responded is an affront to Chicago’s Black and brown communities. In a clear attempt to undermine Mayor Johnson’s decision, Chicago City Council passed an ordinance on May 22 that would require a full vote by the council to approve the removal of funding for ShotSpotter. Then, on July 17, Alderman David Moore attempted to push through another ordinance that would step out around the mayor by giving CPD’s superintendent the authority to negotiate for ShotSpotter’s renewal. Both of these were actively facilitated by SoundThinking’s hired lobbyists and were a blatant power grab and attempt by the company and CPD to undermine democratic processes.
The May 22 city council debate, similar to previous arguments about ShotSpotter since the Stop ShotSpotter campaign launched in 2021, focused on its efficacy and whether it is a useful tool for addressing gun violence. The city council chose to ignore the mounting evidence that proves ShotSpotter is not an effective tool to prevent gun violence, aid first responders, or provide forensic evidence—instead aligning itself firmly with the company and police.
Without substantive evidence that ShotSpotter can improve public safety, why does CPD and city council defend it? This debate makes transparent what the struggle over ShotSpotter is: a fight for power rather than a genuine attempt at instituting meaningful policy and programs to address gun violence. In this struggle, research is political and only counts if it serves powerful interests.
The possibility that ShotSpotter could remain in Chicago in the current moment illustrates the significant stranglehold that police and corporations have on shaping policy related to public safety. CPD wields its power not for improving daily life for Chicagoans who experience gun violence, but for maintaining the institution’s domination of Black and brown communities. This power asymmetry erodes democracy and the value of the tools that we have to make daily life safer for everyone in Chicago, including the value of research. Rigorous research about substantive policies or technologies matters little when police and corporations control the window of debate for what is considered a legitimate public safety intervention.
In the case of ShotSpotter, CPD and city council members have attempted to discredit the extensive research demonstrating the technology’s limitations or deny its worth in addressing ShotSpotter’s value. With many elected officials across the country captured by police and corporate interests, there is limited space for a critical interrogation of gunshot detection software. This power asymmetry not only enables police to use a tool like ShotSpotter, but when cops and corporations dominate the debate they can ensure that every possible policy or solution that is considered legitimate strengthens the power of police and corporations. This narrows and limits what is possible in generating interventions that could transform the conditions which enable gun violence.
In this context, research primarily functions as a political tool that is weaponized by police and corporations, as company-funded and police-backed studies are cherry-picked to support questionable claims. As a result, the Stop ShotSpotter campaign has chosen to note but not center the data demonstrating the technology’s ineffectiveness. Our research has not focused on questions of efficacy. Instead, the campaign has grounded our research in abolitionist values and focused on interrogating power. Academics and researchers must do the same, conducting research that identifies, challenges, and discredits the collusion between police and corporate interests. Our research outlines and details the violence at the core of the nexus of power between CPD and SoundThinking. We exposed the collusion between CPD and SoundThinking and how both benefit and profit from the status quo of heavily policed and surveilled communities.
ShotSpotter as a case study shows how surveillance technologies target and criminalize marginalized communities, reinforcing systemic racism and economic disparities. As these data-driven technologies and algorithms amplify racial biases, they contribute to systemic discrimination and exploitation. In the context of gun violence in Chicago, capitalism exploits these conditions by commodifying safety and security, transforming them into products and services that can be bought and sold.
This dynamic creates a perverse incentive structure where companies benefit from the perpetuation of violence and insecurity rather than their resolution. Surveillance technologies such as ShotSpotter are marketed as solutions to gun violence, yet their deployment exacerbates the problem by increasing police presence and aggression in Black and brown communities. This commodification of safety serves to maintain and deepen economic disparities, as resources are funneled into ineffective and harmful technologies rather than addressing the root causes of violence.
Marketplaces are incapable of finding genuine public safety solutions, as their primary function is to generate profit, not to address the complex needs of communities. Consequently, the marketplace’s ability to deliver public safety should be called into question. SoundThinking’s focus on profit, despite its failures, highlights the insidious nature of racial capitalism, where public safety becomes secondary to financial gain. This approach not only fails to provide real safety but also reinforces the structures of racial and economic oppression that contribute to the problem.
The Stop ShotSpotter campaign’s organizing has prioritized cultivating an abolitionist imagination. That perspective is ordinarily excluded from debates when police and corporations get to control and limit what counts as legitimate responses to gun violence. To challenge police and corporate power, we must cultivate an imagination that sees beyond their power and lies about what is possible. We must have what Mariame Kaba and Kelly Hayes call a “jailbreak of the imagination.” Our organizing efforts have centered on building relationships grounded in abolitionist values, which emphasize the dismantling of punitive systems and the creation of communities rooted in care, healing, and mutual aid. By being in intentional community with each other, we aim to cultivate spaces where safety and justice are achieved through collective care rather than surveillance and punishment. Our vision seeks to replace oppressive structures with those that nurture and protect, advocating for a society where justice is defined by the flourishing of all its members rather than the maintenance of order through coercion and surveillance.
When we operate with an abolitionist imagination, we see with clarity what ShotSpotter is. As a result, the challenge to ShotSpotter has transcended an interrogation of the limitations of the technology and has evolved into a referendum on the nature of policing itself and on the meaning and construction of community safety. The fight against surveillance is a fight against the deeply entrenched systems of oppression that maintain and exacerbate inequalities within our city and society. Surveillance, in its many forms, operates as the eyes and ears of power, maintaining a facade of safety while disproportionately targeting and oppressing Black and brown communities. ShotSpotter devices, rather than being tools of genuine public safety, function as instruments of systemic oppression, reinforcing a policing model that prioritizes control and domination over the well-being and autonomy of marginalized individuals. In resisting such technologies, our communities are engaging in a struggle for dignity and autonomy. For Black and brown communities, this battle transcends concerns about immediate safety; it is fundamentally about reclaiming agency and asserting their right to live free from constant surveillance and criminalization.
ShotSpotter’s days in Chicago are drawing to a close because we resisted the power of the police and corporations to control the terms of the debate. It never mattered to us if ShotSpotter worked because we knew that it could never foster safer communities. We researched, changed the conditions, and never ceded ground to the company or CPD. We will win and that’s due to our insistence on grounding our organizing around an abolitionist imagination that shatters the narrow limits of what police and corporations want us to believe is possible.
Image: Ariel Dovas/Flickr