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Chicago’s mayor has ended the ShotSpotter system that helped direct cops to gunfire

By Andrea Widburg

What’s really racist is to allow your anti-racism to turn minority neighborhoods into war zones where good people of all colors cannot live safely and never know whether their children will make it through the streets alive.

A truism about police is that they usually arrive on the scene too late to stop a crime. This isn’t their fault. When it comes to gun crimes, people first find safety and then call the police. In Chicago, though, the ShotSpotter system changed that dynamic. Monitors mounted on poles used technology to locate gunshots and notify the police. The system worked, but Chicago’s hard-left mayor, Brandon Johnson, allowed the contract with ShotSpotter to expire. Although the mayor complains about the system’s price (which he gets wrong) and about a corporation making money, his real problem is that it’s “racist,” because it mostly captures shootings in minority neighborhoods.

According to a September 9 report from a local Chicago news station, the Chicago Police Department’s records showed that the ShotSpotter has helped capture criminals and save lives:

"ShotSpotter has accuracy rating, in current data period, 99%. That is not ShotSpotter data. That is Chicago police," said Public Safety Committee Chairperson Ald. Brian Hopkins.

Broken down more specifically, this new Chicago police data shows gunfire generated nearly 30,000 ShotSpotter alerts in the first eight months of 2024.

Roughly 75% of those alerts had no corresponding 911 call.

[snip]

Chicago police data shows since January of this year, police have responded two-and-a-half minutes faster to gunfire alerted only by ShotSpotter, in about 12 minutes, than the 14.5 minutes it takes officers to arrive when responding to a 911 call without a ShotSpotter alert.

[snip]

In response to those alerts, Chicago police data shows officers have aided 143 gunshot victims since January.

That last data point is especially interesting. It means that the police were probably able to save the lives of people who were unconscious or too badly injured to call for help.

ShotSpotter has helped police make several arrests simply because it allowed them to arrive at the scene of a shooting before the shooter escaped:

Our team reads hundreds of Chicago police reports every week. We can say with certainty that ShotSpotter alerts routinely result in the arrests of armed men—and they’re almost always men—after shots are fired in the city.

Just recently, ShotSpotter proved its worth when it enabled police to get to the scene of a mass shooting (one dead, several wounded) in time to arrest a suspect. And while the article doesn’t say, it’s entirely possible that the speed with which the officers arrived kept the shooting from being even deadlier.

Intriguingly, information from an analysis by the Cook County attorney’s office is quite different. (The outgoing department head is Kim Foxx, a Soros prosecutor.) That office claims that the system helped only minimally in “prosecuting gun violence cases,” leading “to arrests in just 1% of more than 12,000 incidents” in five years. Given the $50 million contract, this cost almost $15,000 per arrest and slightly over $700,000 per conviction. That latter number, by the way, suggests a prosecutorial problem, not a ShotSpotter problem.

SoundThinker, which is ShotSpotter’s parent company, noted problems with the analysis:

The company said other factors need to be considered while pointing to the technology’s key purposes: responding to gunfire that’s not typically reported to 911; assisting victims; bolstering officer safety; helping cops collect evidence; building community trust.

During its time in Chicago, SoundThinking said ShotSpotter has been credited with saving more than 125 lives and has led to the recovery of more than 3,000 illegal guns and over 25,000 pieces of evidence.

What seems to be the real problem for the Soros crowd, including Johnson, is the claim that the system, which records and locates the sound of gunshots, is “racist”: “Community public safety groups argued that the system sends police officers to predominantly Black and Latino neighborhoods for often unnecessary and hostile encounters.”

Police leaders responded with the obvious point: “They argue that crime rates – not residents’ race – determine where the technology is deployed.”

Speaking of money, Mayor Johnson has a problem with a corporation getting money to stop Chicago crime:

“They said. ... it would reduce gun violence by 50% and that this was going to make neighborhoods safer,” Johnson said at an unrelated news conference Monday at Soldier Field. “We cannot afford the interest of corporations to play off the pain and the suffering of the people of Chicago.”

The city spent “$100 million for a walkie-talkie on a pole, and the reason why they said we needed it was to reduce gun violence,” he added. “It didn't do that.”

In other words, corporate profiteering! However, the same report explains that the city had spent only $53 million on the system, meaning that Johnson’s financial facts were off by almost 100%.

What really tells you about the system’s efficacy, though, as compared to Mayor Johnson’s bias, is that the City Council is opposed to his decision to scrap the system. Last week, it voted 33-14 to overturn that decision, the second time it’s done so. Yesterday, though, Johnson finally responded to the pressure to say he’s put in an official request for a task force to investigate alternative options.

Johnson won’t find any alternative options, of course, because they’ll all end up being racist. Chicago’s criminal elements and Chicago’s minorities live in the same neighborhoods. If there are gunshots fired, it’s a good bet that they’re fired in a minority neighborhood with a minority hand on the trigger. (Harris-Biden illegal immigration is not helping the situation.) As Willie Sutton answered when asked why he robbed banks, “Because that’s where the money is.” The same is true for Chicago gunshots.

What’s really racist is to allow your anti-racism to turn minority neighborhoods into war zones where good people of all colors cannot live safely and never know whether their children will make it through the streets alive.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2024/09/chicago_s_mayor_has_ended_the_shotspotter_system_that_helped_direct_cops_to_gunfire.html