Every unfounded ShotSpotter deployment creates an extremely dangerous situation for residents in the area. ShotSpotter primes police to believe that they are heading to a dangerous location where a person has just fired a gun. Any resident who happens to be in the vicinity of a ShotSpotter alert will be a target of police suspicion or worse. These volatile deployments can go wrong in an instant.

The Chicago Police Department has a long history of excessive force, illegal and discriminatory stop-and-frisk, and other abusive policies and practices. ShotSpotter is a tool and tactic that contributes to these problems. It exacerbates police bias towards marginalized communities and distrust and fear from residents.

The City of Chicago has chosen to deploy ShotSpotter to cover 12 police districts. Spotspotter’s deployment tracks — and exacerbates - Chicago’s racial divide.

The twelve ShotSpotter districts are exactly those with the highest proportion of Black and Latinx residents—and the lowest proportion of White residents.

On an average day, ShotSpotter sends police out into these communities more than 87 times looking for gunfire in vain.

Only residents in these neighborhoods must live under ShotSpotter’s constant surveillance. ShotSpotter generates thousands of dead-end police deployments hunting for gunfire in these neighborhoods. We wanted to understand the burden that this imposes on covered neighborhoods.

We started by looking at 9-1-1 calls across the city from July 1, 2019 through April 14, 2021. People in every neighborhood across Chicago use 9-1-1 to report that they heard gunshots. How many extra unfounded police deployments are there when a neighborhood is also wired up with ShotSpotter?

This chart shows how many unfounded reports of gunfire get called in to 9-1-1.

This chart shows the additional unfounded police deployments due to the presence of ShotSpotter.

ShotSpotter imposes a massive additional burden of unfounded and unnecessary police deployments—but only in the predominantly Black and Latinx districts where it is deployed.

The predominantly Black and Latinx neighborhoods where ShotSpotter operates will have inflated gunfire statistics because of the enormous number of unfounded ShotSpotter alerts. These statistics can create a false “techwash” justification for racialized and oppressive patters of policing in communities of color.

The Chicago Police Department requires its managers to incorporate ShotSpotter data into its CompStat reports, which are used to hold commanders accountable to performance targets. This could lead commanders to throw ever more resources at a phantom problem, unless the ShotSpotter data are carefully filtered to exclude unfounded alerts.

ShotSpotter drains municipal resources from communities that have been disinvested for decades. ShotSpotter’s contract alone costs the city more than $9 million per year. That sum does not include the cost of tens of thousands of unfounded police deployments every year.

ShotSpotter also contributes to the slow response that residents on Chicago’s South and West sides get when they actually call 9-1-1 for assistance. ShotSpotter alerts are treated as “Priority 1” calls, which means they take precedence over nearly all other calls for police service.

ShotSpotter is responsible for fully 1 in 12 Priority 1 police dispatches in districts where ShotSpotter is active. This contributes to the slow or non-existent police response. A recent study by Wirepoints in Chicago found that in 2021 there were 400,000 high priority (Priority 1 or Priority 2) incidents where dispatch had no police available to send.