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Police Are Telling ShotSpotter to Alter Evidence From Gunshot-Detecting AI [vice.com]:

Klepper contested those and other research findings, saying that “the studies’ conclusions do not reflect what we see.” 

He pointed to a 2021 study by New York University School of Law’s Policing Project that determined that assaults (which include some gun crime) decreased by 30 percent in some districts in St. Louis County after ShotSpotter was installed. The study authors disclosed [squarespace.com] that ShotSpotter has been providing the Policing Project unrestricted funding since 2018, that ShotSpotter’s CEO sits on the Policing Project’s advisory board, and that ShotSpotter has previously compensated Policing Project researchers.

Chicago pushes back

Chicago is one of the most important cities in ShotSpotter’s portfolio and is increasingly becoming a battleground over its use.

If a court ever agrees to examine the forensic viability of ShotSpotter, or if prosecutors continue to drop the evidence when challenged, it could have massive ramifications. From January 2017 through June 2021, ShotSpotter reported 94,313 gunfire incidents in the city, an average of 20,958 per year, according to data obtained by Motherboard through a public records request. 

Chicago is ShotSpotter’s second biggest client, after New York City, accounting for 13 percent of the company’s revenue during the first quarter of 2021 [sec.gov]. But Chicago’s $33 million contract with the company is coming to an end and city officials must decide this August whether or not to renew it.

Meanwhile, the city is grappling with new research, a rise in shootings, cases like the Williams and Godinez trials, and tragedies that have prompted renewed criticism of the technology. 

It was a ShotSpotter alert in the early-morning hours of March 29 that dispatched police to a street in Little Village [suntimes.com] where they eventually shot and killed 13-year-old Adam Toledo, who was unarmed at the time.

That and other recent events have sparked a new campaign by community and civil rights groups [actionnetwork.org] in Chicago calling on city officials to drop ShotSpotter.

“These tools are sending more police into Black and Latinx neighborhoods,” Alyx Goodwin, a Chicago organizer with the Action Center on Race and the Economy, one of the groups leading the campaign, told Motherboard. “Every ShotSpotter alert is putting Black and Latinx people at risk of interactions with police. That’s what happened to Adam Toledo.”’

Motherboard recently obtained data demonstrating the stark racial disparity [vice.com] in how Chicago has deployed ShotSpotter. The sensors have been placed almost exclusively in predominantly Black and brown communities, while the white enclaves in the north and northwest of the city have no sensors at all, despite Chicago police data that shows gun crime is spread throughout the city.

Community members say they’ve seen little benefit from the technology in the form of less gun violence—the number of shootings in 2021 is on pace to be the highest [chicagopolice.org] in four years—or better interactions with police officers.

“If you had relationships with any of the people on the block, you wouldn’t need the technology, ’cause we could tell you,” Asiaha Butler, president of the Resident Association of Greater Englewood, told Motherboard. Instead, the technology seems to have given police another excuse not to build relationships with residents. When shots ring out in the neighborhood, police may respond faster, but it’s an “over-militarized police presence. You see a lot of them. It’s not a friendly interaction,” she said.

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