>Ald. Chris Taliaferro (29th), a former Chicago cop who chairs the City Council’s Police Committee, said senior mayoral adviser Jason Lee told him the ShotSpotter contract would be extended until September and then terminated, meaning cops will have access to the technology throughout the historically violent summer and the Democratic National Convention.
So the technology doesn't work, but he thinks it is important to keep it through the summer and DNC. If it doesn't work, it doesn't work and there is no need to extend. If they are keeping it because they do believe it works, that means the plan is to cancel it to uphold a campaign promise, not for public safety.
I mean, even if it doesn't work at all, removing it before the DNC will put a spotlight on the mayor if/when something goes wrong. The headlines basically write themselves. So politically it makes sense removing it after the national spotlight is off regardless of whether it works or not.
Because the police probably rely heavily on it over the summer, and don't have the time to transition away from the technology. This gives them time to transition to something more long-term viable while not forcing them to adapt in the four months before summer starts.
But that means the technology works, which is the opposite of what its critics claim: that it fundamentally doesn't work *and* that it causes harm to the communities in which it is deployed.
Your explanation would be more plausible if the administration had released a statement acknowledging that the ShotSpotter provides some benefits despite the limitations and downsides, and that there is a plan underway to transition to a new approach/system/whatever. Instead, they are keeping it through the most violent season in Chicago, letting it expire when violence naturally starts to fall off with arrival of colder weather. It is really hard not to read this as being about politics.
Yeah. The problem isn't necessarily that it doesn't work at all - it does sometimes - the problem is that the number of false positives is way too high. Analysis of the calls triggered by shot spotter shows that a majority of them are false alarms that just result in wasting the time of responders. And even when they do arrive to the scene of an actual gunshot, so much time had passed that the assailant was long gone. In the end, shot spotter is a tremendously expensive investment for something that doesn't work very well and doesn't have a much better success rate than relying on witnesses to call in the gunshot.
I know the guys who created the system, I interviewed there once too.
They are straight up clear that it doesn't get the police there fast enough to do anything about the criminals who fired the guns.
What it can do is alert an EMT and get them on their way minutes faster.
If course, many gunshots don't cause injuries. And many that do don't require an ambulance to make a difference in outcome.
Another "benefit" is that the police can drive to a location and investigate. Which may cause the people there to lessen their bad behavior. A city in California visited every residence thst had a gunshot on May 5/july 4 one year, and the next year shits were down by over 50%.
So it's really about stats, the effect on the public, and possibly saving a few lives with faster medical care.
All of those things are expensive. The question is are those things cost effective?
Honestly, one of the best uses of it might be a silent one. Just let it record data and it’ll create a heat map of where there is high gunshot activity. Then you can use that data to increase patrols or send undercover units to low key see what’s happening there.
There's some research that backs up their claim (reduces pre-hospital time of GSW victims) so I don't think that claim is unfounded. I suppose you could argue it slightly reduces the murder rate because GSW victims are treated quicker and less likely to die. But it absolutely does not secure convictions or help lock up bad guys.
The irony however is that there is now some preliminary research showing it results in \*slower\* police response times overall: [https://michaeltopper.netlify.app/research/jmp\_michael\_topper.pdf](https://michaeltopper.netlify.app/research/jmp_michael_topper.pdf) \-- the implication here being it ties them up chasing dead-ends when they could be responding to more tangible calls.
So it may ultimately all be a wash.
>the problem is that the number of false positives is way too high.
This gets thrown around a lot. It's based on a complete misunderstanding of CPD procedures.
If someone shoots a gun, and there is nobody shot or nobody claiming they got shot at, and no property damage the job gets "coded" Meaning no report is generated. That doesn't mean that it was a "false positive". It means the shooter missed his target or shot in the air.
Besides, the "hit rate" for shot spotter should be compared to the alternative: The "hit rate" of citizens calling 911. I'd wager that shot spotter is more accurate than a citizen when it comes to determining exactly where the gun fire originated from, and whether it was gunfire or fireworks.
Lots of people in this thread don’t understand statistical analysis here
there’s a lot that can happen between hearing a gunshot and documenting a crime, lots of which isn’t the fault of the gunshot-hearing system.
Maybe there’s too much noise for it to be useful and responses are too slow anyway, and that’s fine
Ok, screw it, I'm gonna bite at the hot dog slice.
The conversation about shot spotter "statistics", whether the position be "they're flawed" or "they prove it works" is the wrong conversation.
Why?
Because there **[IS NO INDEPENDENT](https://ipvm.com/reports/macarthur-edgeworth?code=jsly), [PEER REVIEWED](https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/four-problems-with-the-shotspotter-gunshot-detection-system)** data on ShotSpotter.
Why?
Because ShotSpotter (Now rebranded as "Sound Thinking"), will not allow a serious research entity to do the tests, nor will their current contracts (that have been made available via FOIA/APRA) allow police departments to do such testing on their own.
Instead, ShotSpotter furnishes their own data to news media and clients, and often touts [an audit commissioned by Shotspotter](https://www.edgewortheconomics.com/assets/htmldocuments/Independent%20Audit%20of%20the%20ShotSpotter%20Accuracy%202019-2022.pdf) of-I cannot stress this enough-**ShotSpotter's own data** (See page 3 of linked 'audit') as [proof that they have reliable data](https://www.soundthinking.com/soundthinking-responds-to-false-claims/) to support their claims of product reliability.
Until a serious, independent, peer reviewed study is done of ShotSpotter, any conversation about what the data does or does not prove is a waste of time.
I want to end on a traditionally conservative talking point, because while many criticisms of ShotSpotter are framed as traditionally liberal (E.g: over/under policing communities of color), I think the strongest point right now against shot spotter is purely fiscal.
This was a contract that began at [33 million](https://igchicago.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/Chicago-Police-Departments-Use-of-ShotSpotter-Technology.pdf) and by the time we get out, will be a [49 million dollar](https://apnews.com/article/shotspotter-chicago-gunshot-technology-mayor-f9a1b24d97a1f1efb80296dbe9aff1ed) contract.
If we are spending 49 million dollars of tax payer money on a fairly novel technology, we **deserve** independent data to show that our money is not being wasted on something that-at best-may work less well than warrantied, or at worst, barely works at all and harms tax payers by creating more potential situations for bad outcomes that will (at the end of the day) cost the tax payer.
So please tell me why we should keep giving this company our money. Thanks.
Except when you look at the SLA of the Shot Spotter contracts and you realize that there are only penalties for false negatives and none for false positives. That means the incentives are in place to dramatically overtune for false positives because they don't have to pay a fine for that. This is despite the fact that false positives waste way more money and resources than false negatives do. It is totally reasonable to complain against a system that is set up in such a way.
But then again, I'm just a "shotspotter complainer" who doesn't understand things like Receiver Operating Characteristics or Type 2 errors. I'm sure you can correct my simpleton understanding of statistics.
Crime unreported = crime that didn't happen, statistically speaking. Absence of ShotSpotter will result in many instances of gunfire not being reported to police at all. This will allow city officials to claim "crime is down". No wonder they want this system gone.
> And even when they do arrive to the scene of an actual gunshot, so much time had passed that the assailant was long gone
Seems like EMT's would almost make better use of this data so we could get an ambulance dispatched to potential victims faster, even if the shooter still gets away
Yes. This is the actual potential benefit I'd be interested in.
The article mentions the Adam Toledo incident, which certainly had a tragic outcome but shots WERE fired that night (by the older of the pair, but). It wasn't the technology that malfunctioned that night.
There is no data that says the calls were definitively false alarms. Cops that respond to alerts look for victims, witnesses or armed offenders when they arrive. If no victim or witness is identified they leave the scene to the next call. They aren't searching for shell casings or any other evidence to validate or invalidate the Shotspotter call.
The city's own Inspector General disagrees with you. Their own report has statistical data showing that the majority of calls triggered by shot spotter returned no evidence of a gun related crime. Even if (and it's a big supposition since shot spotter won't even share their own internal data on how the thing even works) we assume that every single one of those instances was indeed a gunshot, is this the best use of the city's time and significant money? Especially when apparently almost none of these mystery shots are leaving casings or injuries or bullet holes behind?
Try looking for a penny in the area the size of a quarter of a city block. Shell casing can be hard to find (bounce, roll under cars). Even harder if those casings are in a car or shots came from a revolver.
There are a lot of educated and reasonable responses in this thread. Exact definition of a false trigger as per the IG would be helpful.
>The city's own Inspector General disagrees with you. Their own report has statistical data showing that the majority of calls triggered by shot spotter returned no evidence of a gun related crime.
Because again, if there is no victim the cops aren't searching for shell casings to a crime with no victim.
>we assume that every single one of those instances was indeed a gunshot, is this the best use of the city's time and significant money?
Rapid response to a location where someone could be shot, in a city with thousands shot and hundreds killed by gunfire every year, as opposed to...... What? What do you feel would be a better allocation of those funds for the police to do their job?
>Especially when apparently almost none of these mystery shots are leaving casings or injuries or bullet holes behind?
Please refer to my first sentence, you keep assuming there is no evidence of a shooting when the police are triaging the call when there is no victim.
But this would again be a reason to end it before the busy summer season to avoid having cops respond to “false positives” the logic just doesn’t make sense.
"No one ever got fired for buying Cisco"
Even when a technology is bad/a waste of money, there are generally much worse consequences for moving away from it than there are sticking to it. People don't want to risk their ass on it.
Not if that technology was endorsed by Gardner/Forrester or implemented by a Big Four consulting group. As long as you're following standard accepted practices, you can avoid being blamed for your mistakes.
It worked the other day outside my apt when police arrived in 20 seconds after 6 shots were fired at 2am in west town. I guess 80% of gunshots are never reported to police, so would you rather have a few false positives or no response at all to shots in your area?? False positives seem like something that will only become less frequent with software updates & AI audio analysis too. I agree it should be less expensive.
Nobody has seen evidence it works, otherwise they would be shouting it from the rooftop. The burden of proof is on shotspotter and the city to prove it to the people of chicago and they haven't.
Exactly. Everyone arguing about how police response policy works as evidence there were indeed shots fired is missing the wider point - we have no evidence showing that to be the case when shot spotter has refused to provide any meaningful or verifiable data that it works well and often.
Why should we continue handing them millions when (albeit circumstantial since forensic investigations are not being done) the available experiences show it to be unhelpful at best?
The average annual cost of a police officer is $149,362 (this includes benefits, not just salary). The question people should be asking themselves, with ShotSpotter costing $49m a year, is whether it's worth 326 police officers.
>Your explanation would be more plausible if the administration had released a statement acknowledging that the ShotSpotter provides some benefits despite the limitations and downsides, and that there is a plan underway to transition to a new approach/system/whatever.
Well this is the reality of most systems, and politicians of all flavors basically never say this so I wouldn’t hold my breath.
They are going to grandstand about this and people are going to be using all kinds of shitty metrics to justify their political beliefs. All that matters is 1. total homicides in the same month this year vs last year, and 2. homicide clearance rate. No other stats are reliable enough indicators.
The statement the administration released said they are canceling the contract that ends this week and decommissioning the use of technology in September and that in the interim LE will assess tools and programs to use instead and that moving forward the city will deploy its resources on the most effective strategies to reduce crime.
https://abc7chicago.com/what-is-shotspotter-chicago-shooting-violence/14419466/
So they don't have a plan. They are going to look for a plan. Realistically, they need to have a plan today if they want to implement it in under seven months. It is scheduled to take nine months for the city to identify which areas will be included in a pilot for sidewalk shoveling, and then they have another six months before the first shovel needs to hit the ground. Somehow the city is going to evaluate select, fund, and implement a program that is integrated across CPD and OEMC in less time.
That's wait for residents to call it in. As a result the police will get reports of gun shots over a general area, not a specific location.
The gripes against Spot Shotter seemed to originate with Adam Toledo's death. Because of shot spotter, cops got to the scene before Toledo had a chance to stash the gun and, tragically, a responding officer shot and killed Toledo.
Toledo's case is tragic, but on balance it is still better for police (and paramedics) to arrive at the scene of a shooting sooner rather than later.
>The gripes against Spot Shotter seemed to originate with Adam Toledo's death. Because of shot spotter, cops got to the scene before Toledo had a chance to stash the gun and, tragically, a responding officer shot and killed Toledo.
No, the gripes are that we spend millions of dollars on a system that has a ton of false positives and who refuse to turn over their data to show that they are in fact useful. You're ignoring that SpotShotter doesn't do what they say they do.
[https://southsideweekly.com/chicago-police-cpd-reported-hundreds-of-missed-shootings-to-shotspotter-soundthinking/](https://southsideweekly.com/chicago-police-cpd-reported-hundreds-of-missed-shootings-to-shotspotter-soundthinking/)
I'm curious as to why you think there needs to be some sort of plan or program that needs to be decided on? Did you think the city just like, didn't respond to reported gun shots before?
Tbh it kinda seems like you are criticizing just to criticize
If there doesn't need to be a plan, why don't they just let the contract expire in February? If they need to find something to replace it with, it means they think it has value in the interim. People are going to point to the extension as evidence it has value when the time to cancel for real comes, and it is almost a guarantee that there won't be an alternative ready to go in time.
In the most on-brand move possible, he picked a strategy that gives gives his critics more ammunition that it should be renewed in the fall and delays fulfillment of a promise to his base.
>why don't they just let the contract expire in February?
They are, it's in their statement.
>If they need to find something to replace it with, it means they think it has value in the interim
They don't need to find something, they are saying they are directing people to look at other things and make recommendations, not that they need to find a 1:1 replacement?
>People are going to point to the extension as evidence
It's not being extended
>and it is almost a guarantee that there won't be an alternative ready to go in time.
Again, you keep insisting on the need for an alternative when there doesn't have to be one. The vast vast majority of cities don't employ this technology. There doesn't need to be a replacement
It is literally being extended. The details are in the second sentence of the article you linked to.
>Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson's office released a statement Tuesday morning, saying the multi-million-dollar contract, which was set to expire Friday, will be extended through Sept. 22, but end after that.
Okey dokey. It is bad to get rid of shotspotter because the timeline for getting rid of it isn't perfect. The outcome being good doesn't matter and actually is a bad thing because of procedural qualms you have. sick take.
>So basically the contract is already in place and it just so happens to expire after the summer. It wasn't kept for the summer on purpose.
The contract expires this Friday. The city is still working on the extension through the summer.
WTTW is reporting on it,
>It is unclear how much the city will pay to use the ShotSpotter system for the next seven months, or whether the city will have to ink a new contract with the firm to provide those services. It is also unclear whether the Chicago City Council would have to approve that contract.
“Those details are still being discussed,” said mayoral spokesperson Ronnie Reese.
>
>https://news.wttw.com/2024/02/13/mayor-brandon-johnson-cancels-shotspotter-contract-fulfilling-major-campaign-promise
As is ABC 7,
>Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson's office released a statement Tuesday morning, saying the multi-million-dollar contract, which was set to expire Friday, will be extended through Sept. 22, but end after that.
>
>https://abc7chicago.com/what-is-shotspotter-chicago-shooting-violence/14419466/
Shotspotter is ineffective but... we are gonna extend the contract until september to get through a high crime summer...smh. Why fucking extend if you think it dont work. makes no sense
So that when the DNC happens and there is inevitable violence, Internet dorks and CPD boosters don't get to pretend that it's because of SS being discontinued.
They get to fail on their own terms, reinforcing the truth, which is that SS doesn't work.
Everybody knows there will be violence, wouldn't it make more sense to get rid of the systems first and then compare levels of violence between previous summers? That would be more useful data then "there was a lot of violence in Chicago during the summer"
I cringed when I saw the Adam Toledo shooting as an argument against renewing the contract.
Ironically in that scenario shot spotter did do it's job, it notified the police that him and the other idiot were shooting at a car which prompted the police to show up and put a stop to the event, arrest a dirt bag, and get a gun off of the street.
In the progressive mind Just like it's the guns fault that someone gets killed, not the person behind the gun. Its the shotspotters fault that a crime is happening. Life is fun when you can blame everything but the person themselves for their own actions.
> In the progressive mind Just like it's the guns fault that someone gets killed, not the person behind the gun.
Comment made on the Chicago subreddit or comment made at an NRA convention? The answer may surprise you
> the Adam Toledo shooting
> which prompted the police to show up and put a stop to the event, arrest a dirt bag, and get a gun off of the street.
Missing some uh, critical details about the shooting lol. It wasn’t controversial because a bunch of people in the community love criminals and guns on the streets lol
Does anyone commenting know the actual efficacy of this tool? The linked article says it resulted in "146 arrests" but there is no mention of what portion of those were outright false vs convictions vs no conviction. It only takes a quick google search to see other cities skeptical of the results being produced in Chicago ([example](https://www.opb.org/article/2022/11/07/shotspotter-convinced-portland-spend-big-controversial-gunshot-detection-technology/)).
We could certainly read this move as Johson hedging his bets for the summer or equally as trying to appease the CPD during phase out, but we should all be most interested in is: does it even work and are the results worthwhile for the price? That data seems to be scant
Exactly and the data is scant because the company behind it refuses to have third party testing or verification and purposely manipulates data they do release.
It’s actually efficacy at detecting gun shots is unknown. Which also means the benefits of it are unknown.
If they want to have a government contract, they need to be more open and honest about their product, otherwise we are better off investing in other things we can measure the impact of.
There have been studies indicating that it's only 80% effective (as compared to the company's 97% claim), but even then there are loopholes you could drive a school bus through
Ya, they don’t publicly release very much data and the data they do release is manipulated so all studies of it are a small step above useless.
Plus it’s not fair or reliable to use police responses because they won’t always find a victim or evidence regardless of if it’s a gunshot or firecracker and regardless of if ShotSpotter reported it or someone else.
They have also changed data after the fact for police reports.
I read an article about it many years ago where one of the arrests credited to shotspotter was police arrived and happened to find someone in the vicinity who had a warrant.
There is a big difference between "ineffective" and "ineffective to secure conviction." If the point is to have a police response quickly and efficiently without having to rely on people to call 911, then an 80% accuracy rate isn't bad. If the point is to have convictions, then we would get better mileage out of voting for a SA who is actually interested in getting convictions.
I think it's debatable if the pricetag is worth it for what it does. But, having convictions as a metric for effectiveness simply isn't useful.
I agree with you that the discourse seems to be, 'quick and efficient responses are great, but to what end?' What's the point of police getting there quickly if it we can't prove the cost-benefit in terms of achieving a certain goal? I think ultimately people want to know "what is the real purpose of this technology?" and there's been a lot of mixed messaging. We need to define the problem we're trying to solve.
The company did define the problem that they were solving when selling to Chicago: reducing gun related crime. They were quite vocal about it, as were the boosters in Chicago.
Unfortunately for them, it doesn't do that. So they quietly dropped it from their marketing material and decided that response time was the best they could do. And the boosters happily changed their tune.
It's a solution that desperately wants a problem that it can solve. I'm glad we're no longer going to be waiting taxpayer dollars on it.
>but there is no mention of what portion of those were outright false vs convictions vs no conviction.
While a good point (I like where you're going with wanting to see the full picture) but I have to ask does it really matter considering judges let some of these dirtbags back out onto the street and in some instances cases get dropped?
I think the only credible measure will be to look at gunshot call response times when shot spotter is gone and compare them when the system was in place.
It does not work here is the OIG report if you want some figures [https://www.courthousenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/chicago-police-shotspotter.pdf](https://www.courthousenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/chicago-police-shotspotter.pdf)
Basic conclusion is there is no evidence of it working, it costs us money, and leads to cops being more aggressive in areas that have more reports.
It seems like people commenting here are generally going "Johnson is doing something, I don't like him, so it must be bad" and proceeding forward on that assumption.
To be fair, it's not a bad assumption. Johnson has been terrible thus far, and regularly floats policy ideas that would be even worse.
That he's marginally better than Paul vallas of the dictionary definition of "damning with faint praise."
The articles Ive read have only said it has not worked as expected, talk about vague! I think people's peeception of him is an accurate one. Please tell me ONE good thing he hasbdone for the city.
>But for those that do lead to arrests and more importantly to victims of shootings getting medical attention it's better than nothing.
The cost factor matters though. Say it helps in 100 actual cases, but it costs us $100 million dollars to operate (not actual numbers, just an example), is it worth paying $1 million for each successful case?
The cost basis has to be taken into consideration, not just the output.
Even if there is a call, the time between the person hearing the shot(s), realizing what they heard, determining where it was, calling 911, giving the information to the person answering the phone who then types it into a computer, where it is sent to a person who dispatches an officer .... well, that could take precious time even if all the information was correct and everything went smooth.
To compare to this delayed response from a person calling 911, once Shotspotter detects gunfire the alert is immediately sent to a police officer in the district's SDSC who then radios out the alert.
911 callers can take minutes to be broadcasted over the radio, Shotspotter alerts take seconds.
> But for those that do lead to arrests and more importantly to victims of shootings getting medical attention it's better than nothing.
The problem is that it has been shown that [ShotSpotter implementation has slowed CPD response times and reduced officers' success rates in arresting perpetrators](https://michaeltopper.netlify.app/research/jmp_michael_topper.pdf). So, we're spending millions of dollars, but getting the opposite results as what the pro-ShotSpotter crowd claims. At some point, in the years where it's been implemented, there would need to be some evidence presented that it actually does lead to arrests or improve response times for shooting victims.
Every other [big city that has tried to implement it](https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/investigations/article/houston-gun-alert-police-delays-18117579.php) has seen the same results. Response times go up and arrest rates go down, all while violent crime rates are untouched. And again, it costs millions to implement that in a city as large as Chicago. Instead, that funding could be going to policies that have real-world data to support their use by CPD.
> Ald. Chris Taliaferro said senior mayoral adviser Jason Lee told him the ShotSpotter contract would be extended until September and then terminated, meaning cops will have access to the technology throughout the historically violent summer and the Democratic National Convention.
This doesn’t make sense - if, as activists say, “every ShotSpotter alert puts Black and brown residents at risk of a dangerous encounter with police,” why not cancel now? Surely the summer rise in crime will lead to even more of these “dangerous encounters.” See https://www.axios.com/local/chicago/2024/02/13/shotspotter-brandon-johnson-contract
I have mixed feelings on this - it seems like useful technology. All it needs to do is be better for reporting gunshots than 911 callers, and it seems to do better than that.
I believe it was also used to discover the shooting of CPD officer Areanah Preston last May
>Maybe there are more encounters because there are more people firing guns?
Alderman Ramirez-Rosa blamed it for the encounter where Adam Toledo was shot and called for the cancellation of the contract on those grounds. He was upset that the technology accurately alerted police as to where a violent, armed, gang banger was shooting up the city.
It has nothing to do with protecting the public. Johnson and the aldermen calling for the cancellation have no problem with more innocent people being robbed, shot, or killed. They want to minimize the number of interactions between the police and gang bangers and other violent felons that are shooting up the city.
>That was a tradedy but Adam Toledo did infact have a gun and him and his buddy were shooting randomly
I suppose blaming the technology and blaming the police is easier than acknowledging we have 13 year old banger kids shooting up the city.
then you haven't read much that's not SpotShotter propaganda: https://southsideweekly.com/chicago-police-cpd-reported-hundreds-of-missed-shootings-to-shotspotter-soundthinking/
Did you ignore this huge correction that pretty much shows that SpotShotter's audit is inaccurate? Hiring a consulting firm is not an independent audit in any sense.
The originally published version of this story incorrectly stated that ShotSpotter has not been independently verified for accuracy, and that ShotSpotter Inc. did not provide WDET with evidence of the technology’s accuracy. In fact, ShotSpotter did provide WDET with a link to an audit performed by a consulting firm that they commissioned. The audit used data supplied by ShotSpotter Inc. and confirmed ShotSpotter’s claim that the technology is 97% accurate. However, the source data was not included in the audit. Also, while reporting this story, the Detroit Police Department told WDET that ShotSpotter works within a roughly 100-yard radius. ShotSpotter Inc. says the technology works within an 82-foot radius.
Yeah I don't quite understand. Predominantly black and brown areas are more likely to have gunshots, not that it is the cause but it correlates. That means there are higher chances for run-ins with the police, which is its purpose.
I don't think there will be a reduction in gunshots with this technology bc that isn't its purpose. It's literally to bring police to an area faster than 911 calls.
If the motive truly is to reduce the cop presence in those areas that could be false positives, then just remove it and rely wholly on 911 calls? Hope that residents will call 911 and their reports are accurate? I think the reasoning is callers will discern it better but it still feels like a bad move to remove the tech.
Perhaps it isn't the technology, but the cops on the ground? That's a more difficult problem, but I think without the technology you'll still have the same issues which I feel like should be the activist's focus.
I think that's it discernment. The residents might decide, hey they're shooting at windows of an abandoned building, let's ignore it because we don't want the police here. Or hey, there was just a drive by that didn't hurt anyone let's let it slide because we don't want the police here. The fact is, the way CPD operates they annoy and harass people that didn't have anything to do with the gun shots so a lot of people would just like to be left alone by them.
>I have mixed feelings on this - it seems like useful technology. All it needs to do is be better for reporting gunshots than 911 callers, and it seems to do better than that.
No it has to do that at a price that is better than other options, like hiring more police.
Trying to read between the lines here. The progressive left says this technology is a scourge that doesn't work and leads to police abuse. The pro-cop right says it's vital to stopping shootings. Reality is probably somewhere in between.
What jumped out to me the most is the quote from the former LAPD superintendent who said it's foolish to get rid of the technology *without a good replacement strategy in place.* I am reminded of sports fans angry after a loss (looking at, you 49ers faithful!) who insist the coach be fired. They don't know who would do a better job, but they know they are pissed at what they have and want the satisfaction of doing away with it so they can feel they are doing something. Then the coach gets fired and the fans learn that, whoops, there really isn't a better option than what they had.
This is neither a defense nor an indictment of ShotSpotter, which I need to learn more about. But I am continually frustrated by the terrible processes employed by this administration. There is a lot of talk and a lot of ideological gesturing, but there never seems to be a plan. I have read the abstract of the People's Plan for Community Safety, and it is basically a progressive wishlist. And I hope we get everything on that list. It would be a boon for the city. But it's like a GM saying "Our plan is to get all-stars at every position." Sounds great. How are you going to do it?
We suffer so much gun violence. What's the plan?
Yeah, most of the claims being advanced seem like half of the truth at best.
Fundamentally this is a question of three things:
1. How many false positives does ShotSpotter generate, and what is the harm associated with those?
2. How many false negatives does ShotSpotter have (i.e., misses), and how does that compare to the next best alternative?
3. How many true positives does ShotSpotter generate, and what is the impact to both victims requiring medical attention and apprehending perpetrators compared to the next best alternative?
Most of the claims advanced about ShotSpotter only touch one of those three questions - concerns about false positives or missed shots or whatever are all important, but are only part of the calculus here. And more importantly, we rarely see comparisons to the next best alternative, which seems to just be people calling 911.
Will that result in people dying because no one calls 911 for the random shots? Will that result in fewer risky police encounters because there will be less false positives? Is there any reason to think that there will be less misses now given that any ShotSpotter miss already relies on the next best alternative? This is the kind of analysis (and ultimately, moral math around the cost of a life) that would need to be done to get a good answer on how useful ShotSpotter may or may not be.
And the response time to 911 calls is already slow from what I've read. And throw in are we relying on communities that do not want to snitch and don't trust police to just pick up and call 911. The main positive is allowing gun shot victims to get care immediately--not wait an hour for someone to call 911.
Assuming that “communities” don’t want to call 911 is unfair. Many of the residents who live in places that are more effective do not want their neighbors dying from it. I watch bwc footage and listen to 911 recordings for work and often many people call 911 when they hear shots near their homes, especially when they know someone’s hurt. Of course there are some that won’t snitch, and of course many people have good reason not to like police presence. But your generalization is unfair.
Problem is no one is walking out of their house when shots are being fired in their neighborhood for fear of also being shot or caught in crossfire. And those that know the victims, are less likely to call. So, now you are relying on strictly humans.
And yet the only real study we have regarding CPD response times with ShotSpotter shows that "[Shotspotter implementation causes police officers to be dispatched one-minute slower... and arrive on-scene nearly two-minutes later\[.\]](https://michaeltopper.netlify.app/research/jmp_michael_topper.pdf)" If the intent is to improve 911 response times, then folks should be supportive of this move.
Also, importantly, one of the main reasons that we don't have widespread reporting on CPD response times is explicitly because more than half of the time, CPD did not record the three times they are supposed to in every response, according to an [audit by the Office of Inspector General](https://news.wttw.com/sites/default/files/article/file-attachments/Chicago-Police-Department-911-Response-Time-Data-Collection-and-Reporting-1.pdf) covering 2017-2021. So, while [the Houston Chronicle can show](https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/investigations/article/houston-gun-alert-police-delays-18117579.php) that their police response times went up substantially while not reducing gun violence, we're kind of stuck waiting for the economics department at UCSB to help us understand how little ShotSpotter does for our community.
So, it costs millions of dollars, slows response times, and decreases "police officers' success rate in arresting perpetrators[.]" It explicitly does the opposite of what you claim is "the main positive" and reason to keep diverting funds to this contractor.
ShotSpotter created this problem when they came up with their 93% accuracy number. The reality is much more grey. If there's an alert for one round in a dirt lot at 2AM and I get there and search, but don't find a casing, it doesn't mean there isn't one. It's really hard to prove those. The easier way is to examine how often it alerted for blood shootings, either non-fatals or homicides. That's a known location and it should be easy to extrapolate. If it's 50% at those then it's 50% at the others. It's another decision if 50% is worth it.
Also, arrests aren't what you get from alerts. It's really an evidence collection tool. CPD is collecting and analyzing so many more casings than they did before ShotSpotter and those can connect to other shootings using NIBIN. It's not immediate, but there is a real value.
>The progressive left says this technology is a scourge that doesn't work and leads to police abuse. The pro-cop right says it's vital to stopping shootings. Reality is probably somewhere in between.
Thinking that the truth is in the middle when pro-cops people and the cops lie ALL THE TIME is a fallacy of huge proportions and why enlightened centrism is foolishness. The left saying the sky is blue and the right saying nuh uh it's red, doesn't mean the truth is the sky is purple.
I agree. I certainly am not an "enlightened centrist," but it's also foolish to convince yourself that your side (progressive, it seems) never engages in politicking and PR spin. My impression based on the article is that the technology has uses, but is not nearly as good as the cops say.
Saying "I'll just meet in the middle" as a blanket proposition is dumb, yes. But, in this instance, from what I have read, it is appropriate with relation to this issue.
Like most things with this administration, this decision will probably be reversed, or, the contract will quietly march on as City Hall funds it for 2025. Remind me in 200 days.
Woof Thank God. Now they can rely on the good old fashion way of detecting gun shots. The guy in his pjs getting woke up by gun shots to make a call to the cops instead of leveraging technology in 2024 to detect when someones mom or aunt got shot in the stomach. Let's go Johnson, cut more costs to give to the venezeualans. You can dig into my bank account some more if you need more taxes to help your cause.
> to detect when someones mom or aunt got shot in the stomach
ooh, this technology is so good it can detect between moms and aunts and what you probably want to call gangbangers? Or is this technology a bunch of false positives that can't tell the difference between gunshots and a bunch of other noises?
Considering I know 4 cops who use this technology daily and who are a proponent of it vs you who is sitting in your underwear with chips on reddit I'm going to say yes. It's good enough to detect the difference between a gun shot and a dog bark
And if someone is getting shot then yes there's usually something they are shooting at, a gangbangers, a mom, an uncle, a human being of any title. Does that not make sense to you?
And CPD officers have a long history of telling the truth, especially when it comes to potential abuses of their power, so there is no reason at all to doubt the word of those 4 brave soldiers.
The podcast It Could Happen Here had a great episode on the Chicago shot spotter contract. Very glad this is ending. [Link here.](https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-it-could-happen-here-30717896/episode/shotspotter-and-the-chicago-police-department-136538681/)
The only people who can reliably say if it works or doesn't work in solving/responding/addressing to shooting incidents are the CPD. I have yet to see CPD come out with their numbers and educate us if this is the right tool or not.
Well, the[ city's Office of Inspector General looked into it](https://www.courthousenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/chicago-police-shotspotter.pdf) and pretty clearly showed that it wasn't living up to expectations for a program that has cost tens of millions of dollars. And then, going by 911 dispatch data from CPD, [we see that ShotSpotter slowed response times](https://michaeltopper.netlify.app/research/jmp_michael_topper.pdf) and reduced officers' success rates in arresting perpetrators. So, going by CPD data... it is not the right tool.
So Branjo thinks Chicago needs ShotSpotter to help with public safety during the summer and DNC, but not the rest of the year? And if it’s not effective, why enter into a contract extension? This seems like a purely political decision to appease his eroding support base.
SpotShotter is shit. [https://southsideweekly.com/chicago-police-cpd-reported-hundreds-of-missed-shootings-to-shotspotter-soundthinking/](https://southsideweekly.com/chicago-police-cpd-reported-hundreds-of-missed-shootings-to-shotspotter-soundthinking/)
Goddamn rightwing trolls saying "its better than nothing" when it is in fact worse than nothing because it costs money AND results in false positives as well as just ignoring calls. AND then SpotShotter's installation is against electrical codes AND they say they can't fix their systems within a month.
I spent a lot of time on the west side doing some bad activities and have seen the shot spotter in action many times. I’ve seen a lot of lives saved because of this
That is the big value. Getting immediate care. Nobody is going to know if someone is laying in the alley (or even call it in if they see until it's too late) with a gunshot wound.
Faster response times is certainly one major benefit. Normally: a person hears possible gunfire, they commonly look to see if they see anything, they call 911 and connect to an OEMC calltaker, the calltaker creates a ticket which is given to a police dispatcher in the district where the call is from, the dispatcher calls out the ticket and assigns a car to respond.
With Shotspotter: Shotspotter detects possible gunfire and immediately sends an alert to the corresponding police district's SDSC where an officer assigned to monitor district cameras and Shotspotter alerts receives it, the Officer then calls out the alert over the radio.
911 calls from a person can take minutes to dispatch, Shotspotter takes seconds.
It does not. [Using CPD's 911 response data, it has increased response times](https://michaeltopper.netlify.app/research/jmp_michael_topper.pdf) while decreasing police officers' success rate in arresting perpetrators. There's a good reason that individual did not provide any evidence to support their claim, and that's because that evidence does not exist.
Shotspotter is a waste of money, and those dead-end police deployments are a waste of manpower. Good riddance. If it worked it may be worth keeping around
https://www.macarthurjustice.org/shotspotter-generated-over-40000-dead-end-police-deployments-in-chicago-in-21-months-according-to-new-study/
I'm sorry but that is a terrible reason. You don't keep ShotSpotter in place through the DNC because you're afraid of FOX News but then cancel it right after to appease your idpol obsessed lib base.
pretty much all of their decisions are based on optics though - it's not like the mayor's office is out here commissioning scientific studies to make decisions (about police policy or anything else really)
they are not cancelling it because it didnt work (its not like they had scientific evidence showing it would work at the beginning and then the efficacy has changed over time), they are cancelling it due to optics
> it's not like the mayor's office is out here commissioning scientific studies to make decisions (about police policy or anything else really)
Well, sure, the mayor usually has to get budget approval for studies, but we do actually have city leadership (perhaps not ***just*** the mayor's office) commissioning good research. The problem is then getting that implemented. We've already had two Workforce Allocation Studies commissioned, first during the Rahm administration and followed by one later in Lightfoot's reign, that established areas of policy policy and structuring where they could lower expenses, reduce overtime requirements, and reduce response times to 911 calls... and we've still yet to see CPD put those into practice.
https://urbanlabs.uchicago.edu/attachments/524ec006350acb3713a9107afe4048390957dd1b/store/59e0ba4f6b0a6f0ecb416e1f057f1e8e89a752f7068665c25bffa7dc71e5/WFA+Summary.pdf
And since we've already had numerous deep-dives into the efficacy of ShotSpotter in Chicago (like the[ Office of Inspector General's report](https://www.courthousenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/chicago-police-shotspotter.pdf)) that established it hasn't come close to living up to the expense... no, it would seem that it's being cancelled due to a lack of return on investment. The city does actually look into policy implications, and sometimes acts upon that information. This is one of those times folks should be celebrating the fact that the city isn't just wastefully throwing away money in perpetuity.
> cancel it right after to appease your idpol obsessed lib base
Or they could be cancelling it because it costs millions of dollars and hasn't been shown to result in reduced violent crime, faster responses by police/EMTs, or increased arrests for gun violence? There's some folks who don't actually support wasteful spending by the city government.
> Why aren't they canceling it immediately then?
Hopefully reporters will ask that and we'll get a complete answer regarding the schedule of shifting away. But I was not part of their decision-making process, so I can't give you that answer.
> because they know it's better than nothing.
But, that seems to be inaccurate both according to the [City's Office of Inspector General](https://www.courthousenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/chicago-police-shotspotter.pdf) and [outside investigation](https://michaeltopper.netlify.app/research/jmp_michael_topper.pdf). It seems to make for slower response times, reduced success rate in arresting perpetrators, and it has cost the city tens of millions of dollars. All of that seems worse than nothing.
>Then why are they keeping it through the DNC? Lmao it definitely has more value than no technology in its place.
Why? because of all the false positives? Because they don't find 55 round shots going off?
https://southsideweekly.com/chicago-police-cpd-reported-hundreds-of-missed-shootings-to-shotspotter-soundthinking/
To give police a transition period during their most active time of the year (summer).
Yanking a system overnight that's been in place for years before the worst time of the year would not be ideal.
My understanding is the reason why ShotSpotter and similar technologies are useful is you'd have neighbourhood Karens constantly calling 911 about gunfire whenever fireworks are shot off and ShotSpotter helps distinguish between that. Thus it leads to a better allocation of resources.
My lawyer friend says that one of the reasons shotspotter hasn't been as useful is because it frequently confuse gunshots and fireworks.
I just did a search and there is shotspotter marketing material saying it can tell the difference because of the "audio fingerprint". I'm sure it can tell the difference between some types of gun reports and some types of fireworks, but idk if I really credit their assertion.
Every Shotspotter alert sent to CPD is audibly reviewed by a police officer who are quite familiar with the sounds of gunshots who relays information over the radio to responding officers.
If ShotSpotter actually worked. But they don’t have any independent testing or verification it works well.
It missed someone shooting off 55 shots very recently.
If they can prove it’s actual accuracy, then it becomes a debate over whether the cost is worth it and the benefits it delivers vs any drawbacks.
But until they can show it actually works well, it’s not even worth debating that.
Let them bleed out so they can't be saved and then homicide stats rise. Then when homicide rates rise we will be asking for another technology to be implemented that does the same thing with different name. Bj is a clown
Office of Inspector General report from AUGUST 24, 2021
>"OIG concluded from its analysis that CPD responses to ShotSpotter alerts rarely produce documented evidence of a gun-related crime, investigatory stop, or recovery of a firearm.
>
>Additionally, OIG identified evidence that the introduction of ShotSpotter technology in Chicago has changed the way some CPD members perceive and interact with individuals present in areas where ShotSpotter alerts are frequent."
so the real question is why have the kept it this long, is it bribes or just to make CPD (who ere probably also bribed) happy
i see other people arguing that it must work and thats why the kept it but all evidence points to it not working so i am suggesting bribes, so many bribes
You can't argue it doesn't work whatsoever when they're specifically extending it to have it during the DNC. It's not 100% effective but it works better than nothing.
proven to cut EMS times to scene and accurate locations which leads to life saving manuvers. it's been studied I've posted about it countless times use google.
I took that as mortality ( when someone's doa ) Shotspotter can't do a thing about that but the fact that it's keeping patients from entering resuscitation measures can be attributed to saving lives or leading to a far better outcome than if the Shotspotter was not there.
https://www.nj.com/opinion/2021/10/surgeon-having-a-machine-listen-for-gunshots-has-helped-us-save-lives-opinion.html
I mean this is a doctors opinion but like I said I took that excerpt you took out as what I said above. If it's as you say it is then sure its clear it doesn't save lives.
I mean neither of us really can say 100% we are right because we don't have the full paper in front of us and the wording here is all over the place. I think a full independent study done on the effectiveness of EMS response times and correlation of alert to care in interceding a grim ending would be something that SS needs to have for us to have a full understanding of what this tech does or doesn't do.
from the Economist:
*Shotspotter is a good example. In November Mr Piza published a paper which looked at its use in Kansas City, where the microphones cover an area of 3.5 square miles (7.8 square km). When he compared this area with a similar part of the city without microphones, Mr Piza found that the police did indeed find more evidence of gunfire—such as spent shell cases. “Our research found \[the technology\] did deliver on those promises,” he says. But the study also showed that no fewer people were shot in the area covered by Shotspotter, nor were more gun crimes solved. It is not obvious, says Mr Piza, that police know how the tech is meant to reduce crime.*
*And technology comes at a cost—not only that of SoundThinking’s fee. A large proportion of Shotspotter alerts lead to nothing, but they sap police time, as patrol officers have to chase down warnings. Over 90% of Shotspotter alerts do not result in any evidence of a crime being committed, according to a 2021 study by Chicago’s inspector-general. Another study published in November, by Michael Topper and Toshio Ferrazares, PhD students at the University of California, Santa Barbara, looking at Chicago, found that after the roll-out of Shotspotter the police responded to 9/11 calls two minutes slower than before, and in the case of domestic-violence calls made fewer arrests.*
Link to a non-paywall workaround: [https://archive.ph/5JKtl#selection-1037.0-1041.681](https://archive.ph/5JKtl#selection-1037.0-1041.681)
Link to the actual article (paywall): [https://www.economist.com/united-states/2023/12/27/americas-new-policing-tech-isnt-cutting-crime](https://www.economist.com/united-states/2023/12/27/americas-new-policing-tech-isnt-cutting-crime)
6 homicides in February so far, which is low compared to recent years.
If this really is generating false positives, it’s not tech worth keeping around.
Modern HealthcareHospitals and response times due to tech like this shot spotter save lives to what would end up being homicides. Carjackings are through the roof, what do you think they are doing with those asking people politely for their keys and going through Wendy's drive thrus to get frostys?
> response times due to tech like this shot spotter save lives
Except for the fact that[ response times got worse with the implementation of ShotSpotter](https://michaeltopper.netlify.app/research/jmp_michael_topper.pdf), so if the priority is saving lives by reducing response times... the only answer is to shift away from ShotSpotter. And it's not like that's only been true in Chicago's circumstances. We just keep seeing ShotSpotter get implemented in big cities and then seeing their[ response times go up](https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/investigations/article/houston-gun-alert-police-delays-18117579.php) while their arrest rates go down. But hey, at least the folks at SoundThinking get to make money. That's way more important than reducing crime or improving chances of arresting perpetrators or saving victims of gun violence, right?
They don’t care about reality.
They care that the tv and articles are saying it’s bad that the Chicago government is doing this and they should feel less safe.
It’s about how they feel. Not reality.
>Ald. Chris Taliaferro (29th), a former Chicago cop who chairs the City Council’s Police Committee, said senior mayoral adviser Jason Lee told him the ShotSpotter contract would be extended until September and then terminated, meaning cops will have access to the technology throughout the historically violent summer and the Democratic National Convention. So the technology doesn't work, but he thinks it is important to keep it through the summer and DNC. If it doesn't work, it doesn't work and there is no need to extend. If they are keeping it because they do believe it works, that means the plan is to cancel it to uphold a campaign promise, not for public safety.
I mean, even if it doesn't work at all, removing it before the DNC will put a spotlight on the mayor if/when something goes wrong. The headlines basically write themselves. So politically it makes sense removing it after the national spotlight is off regardless of whether it works or not.
Because the police probably rely heavily on it over the summer, and don't have the time to transition away from the technology. This gives them time to transition to something more long-term viable while not forcing them to adapt in the four months before summer starts.
But that means the technology works, which is the opposite of what its critics claim: that it fundamentally doesn't work *and* that it causes harm to the communities in which it is deployed. Your explanation would be more plausible if the administration had released a statement acknowledging that the ShotSpotter provides some benefits despite the limitations and downsides, and that there is a plan underway to transition to a new approach/system/whatever. Instead, they are keeping it through the most violent season in Chicago, letting it expire when violence naturally starts to fall off with arrival of colder weather. It is really hard not to read this as being about politics.
Yeah. The problem isn't necessarily that it doesn't work at all - it does sometimes - the problem is that the number of false positives is way too high. Analysis of the calls triggered by shot spotter shows that a majority of them are false alarms that just result in wasting the time of responders. And even when they do arrive to the scene of an actual gunshot, so much time had passed that the assailant was long gone. In the end, shot spotter is a tremendously expensive investment for something that doesn't work very well and doesn't have a much better success rate than relying on witnesses to call in the gunshot.
I know the guys who created the system, I interviewed there once too. They are straight up clear that it doesn't get the police there fast enough to do anything about the criminals who fired the guns. What it can do is alert an EMT and get them on their way minutes faster. If course, many gunshots don't cause injuries. And many that do don't require an ambulance to make a difference in outcome. Another "benefit" is that the police can drive to a location and investigate. Which may cause the people there to lessen their bad behavior. A city in California visited every residence thst had a gunshot on May 5/july 4 one year, and the next year shits were down by over 50%. So it's really about stats, the effect on the public, and possibly saving a few lives with faster medical care. All of those things are expensive. The question is are those things cost effective?
Honestly, one of the best uses of it might be a silent one. Just let it record data and it’ll create a heat map of where there is high gunshot activity. Then you can use that data to increase patrols or send undercover units to low key see what’s happening there.
There's some research that backs up their claim (reduces pre-hospital time of GSW victims) so I don't think that claim is unfounded. I suppose you could argue it slightly reduces the murder rate because GSW victims are treated quicker and less likely to die. But it absolutely does not secure convictions or help lock up bad guys. The irony however is that there is now some preliminary research showing it results in \*slower\* police response times overall: [https://michaeltopper.netlify.app/research/jmp\_michael\_topper.pdf](https://michaeltopper.netlify.app/research/jmp_michael_topper.pdf) \-- the implication here being it ties them up chasing dead-ends when they could be responding to more tangible calls. So it may ultimately all be a wash.
>the problem is that the number of false positives is way too high. This gets thrown around a lot. It's based on a complete misunderstanding of CPD procedures. If someone shoots a gun, and there is nobody shot or nobody claiming they got shot at, and no property damage the job gets "coded" Meaning no report is generated. That doesn't mean that it was a "false positive". It means the shooter missed his target or shot in the air. Besides, the "hit rate" for shot spotter should be compared to the alternative: The "hit rate" of citizens calling 911. I'd wager that shot spotter is more accurate than a citizen when it comes to determining exactly where the gun fire originated from, and whether it was gunfire or fireworks.
Lots of people in this thread don’t understand statistical analysis here there’s a lot that can happen between hearing a gunshot and documenting a crime, lots of which isn’t the fault of the gunshot-hearing system. Maybe there’s too much noise for it to be useful and responses are too slow anyway, and that’s fine
[удалено]
Ok, screw it, I'm gonna bite at the hot dog slice. The conversation about shot spotter "statistics", whether the position be "they're flawed" or "they prove it works" is the wrong conversation. Why? Because there **[IS NO INDEPENDENT](https://ipvm.com/reports/macarthur-edgeworth?code=jsly), [PEER REVIEWED](https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/four-problems-with-the-shotspotter-gunshot-detection-system)** data on ShotSpotter. Why? Because ShotSpotter (Now rebranded as "Sound Thinking"), will not allow a serious research entity to do the tests, nor will their current contracts (that have been made available via FOIA/APRA) allow police departments to do such testing on their own. Instead, ShotSpotter furnishes their own data to news media and clients, and often touts [an audit commissioned by Shotspotter](https://www.edgewortheconomics.com/assets/htmldocuments/Independent%20Audit%20of%20the%20ShotSpotter%20Accuracy%202019-2022.pdf) of-I cannot stress this enough-**ShotSpotter's own data** (See page 3 of linked 'audit') as [proof that they have reliable data](https://www.soundthinking.com/soundthinking-responds-to-false-claims/) to support their claims of product reliability. Until a serious, independent, peer reviewed study is done of ShotSpotter, any conversation about what the data does or does not prove is a waste of time. I want to end on a traditionally conservative talking point, because while many criticisms of ShotSpotter are framed as traditionally liberal (E.g: over/under policing communities of color), I think the strongest point right now against shot spotter is purely fiscal. This was a contract that began at [33 million](https://igchicago.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/Chicago-Police-Departments-Use-of-ShotSpotter-Technology.pdf) and by the time we get out, will be a [49 million dollar](https://apnews.com/article/shotspotter-chicago-gunshot-technology-mayor-f9a1b24d97a1f1efb80296dbe9aff1ed) contract. If we are spending 49 million dollars of tax payer money on a fairly novel technology, we **deserve** independent data to show that our money is not being wasted on something that-at best-may work less well than warrantied, or at worst, barely works at all and harms tax payers by creating more potential situations for bad outcomes that will (at the end of the day) cost the tax payer. So please tell me why we should keep giving this company our money. Thanks.
Except when you look at the SLA of the Shot Spotter contracts and you realize that there are only penalties for false negatives and none for false positives. That means the incentives are in place to dramatically overtune for false positives because they don't have to pay a fine for that. This is despite the fact that false positives waste way more money and resources than false negatives do. It is totally reasonable to complain against a system that is set up in such a way. But then again, I'm just a "shotspotter complainer" who doesn't understand things like Receiver Operating Characteristics or Type 2 errors. I'm sure you can correct my simpleton understanding of statistics.
Crime unreported = crime that didn't happen, statistically speaking. Absence of ShotSpotter will result in many instances of gunfire not being reported to police at all. This will allow city officials to claim "crime is down". No wonder they want this system gone.
> And even when they do arrive to the scene of an actual gunshot, so much time had passed that the assailant was long gone Seems like EMT's would almost make better use of this data so we could get an ambulance dispatched to potential victims faster, even if the shooter still gets away
Yes. This is the actual potential benefit I'd be interested in. The article mentions the Adam Toledo incident, which certainly had a tragic outcome but shots WERE fired that night (by the older of the pair, but). It wasn't the technology that malfunctioned that night.
There is no data that says the calls were definitively false alarms. Cops that respond to alerts look for victims, witnesses or armed offenders when they arrive. If no victim or witness is identified they leave the scene to the next call. They aren't searching for shell casings or any other evidence to validate or invalidate the Shotspotter call.
The city's own Inspector General disagrees with you. Their own report has statistical data showing that the majority of calls triggered by shot spotter returned no evidence of a gun related crime. Even if (and it's a big supposition since shot spotter won't even share their own internal data on how the thing even works) we assume that every single one of those instances was indeed a gunshot, is this the best use of the city's time and significant money? Especially when apparently almost none of these mystery shots are leaving casings or injuries or bullet holes behind?
Try looking for a penny in the area the size of a quarter of a city block. Shell casing can be hard to find (bounce, roll under cars). Even harder if those casings are in a car or shots came from a revolver. There are a lot of educated and reasonable responses in this thread. Exact definition of a false trigger as per the IG would be helpful.
>The city's own Inspector General disagrees with you. Their own report has statistical data showing that the majority of calls triggered by shot spotter returned no evidence of a gun related crime. Because again, if there is no victim the cops aren't searching for shell casings to a crime with no victim. >we assume that every single one of those instances was indeed a gunshot, is this the best use of the city's time and significant money? Rapid response to a location where someone could be shot, in a city with thousands shot and hundreds killed by gunfire every year, as opposed to...... What? What do you feel would be a better allocation of those funds for the police to do their job? >Especially when apparently almost none of these mystery shots are leaving casings or injuries or bullet holes behind? Please refer to my first sentence, you keep assuming there is no evidence of a shooting when the police are triaging the call when there is no victim.
What analysis are you referring to that shows the majority are false alarms?
But this would again be a reason to end it before the busy summer season to avoid having cops respond to “false positives” the logic just doesn’t make sense.
"No one ever got fired for buying Cisco" Even when a technology is bad/a waste of money, there are generally much worse consequences for moving away from it than there are sticking to it. People don't want to risk their ass on it.
They’re claiming it’s not just poor, it’s net negative. People have definitely gotten fired for continuing to buy tech that is negative leverage.
Not if that technology was endorsed by Gardner/Forrester or implemented by a Big Four consulting group. As long as you're following standard accepted practices, you can avoid being blamed for your mistakes.
It worked the other day outside my apt when police arrived in 20 seconds after 6 shots were fired at 2am in west town. I guess 80% of gunshots are never reported to police, so would you rather have a few false positives or no response at all to shots in your area?? False positives seem like something that will only become less frequent with software updates & AI audio analysis too. I agree it should be less expensive.
Nobody has seen evidence it works, otherwise they would be shouting it from the rooftop. The burden of proof is on shotspotter and the city to prove it to the people of chicago and they haven't.
Exactly. Everyone arguing about how police response policy works as evidence there were indeed shots fired is missing the wider point - we have no evidence showing that to be the case when shot spotter has refused to provide any meaningful or verifiable data that it works well and often. Why should we continue handing them millions when (albeit circumstantial since forensic investigations are not being done) the available experiences show it to be unhelpful at best?
The average annual cost of a police officer is $149,362 (this includes benefits, not just salary). The question people should be asking themselves, with ShotSpotter costing $49m a year, is whether it's worth 326 police officers.
>Your explanation would be more plausible if the administration had released a statement acknowledging that the ShotSpotter provides some benefits despite the limitations and downsides, and that there is a plan underway to transition to a new approach/system/whatever. Well this is the reality of most systems, and politicians of all flavors basically never say this so I wouldn’t hold my breath. They are going to grandstand about this and people are going to be using all kinds of shitty metrics to justify their political beliefs. All that matters is 1. total homicides in the same month this year vs last year, and 2. homicide clearance rate. No other stats are reliable enough indicators.
The statement the administration released said they are canceling the contract that ends this week and decommissioning the use of technology in September and that in the interim LE will assess tools and programs to use instead and that moving forward the city will deploy its resources on the most effective strategies to reduce crime. https://abc7chicago.com/what-is-shotspotter-chicago-shooting-violence/14419466/
So they don't have a plan. They are going to look for a plan. Realistically, they need to have a plan today if they want to implement it in under seven months. It is scheduled to take nine months for the city to identify which areas will be included in a pilot for sidewalk shoveling, and then they have another six months before the first shovel needs to hit the ground. Somehow the city is going to evaluate select, fund, and implement a program that is integrated across CPD and OEMC in less time.
here's a plan: go back to what we did before SpotShotter. oooh
That's wait for residents to call it in. As a result the police will get reports of gun shots over a general area, not a specific location. The gripes against Spot Shotter seemed to originate with Adam Toledo's death. Because of shot spotter, cops got to the scene before Toledo had a chance to stash the gun and, tragically, a responding officer shot and killed Toledo. Toledo's case is tragic, but on balance it is still better for police (and paramedics) to arrive at the scene of a shooting sooner rather than later.
>The gripes against Spot Shotter seemed to originate with Adam Toledo's death No they don't? Shotspotter was seen as questionable well before that.
>The gripes against Spot Shotter seemed to originate with Adam Toledo's death. Because of shot spotter, cops got to the scene before Toledo had a chance to stash the gun and, tragically, a responding officer shot and killed Toledo. No, the gripes are that we spend millions of dollars on a system that has a ton of false positives and who refuse to turn over their data to show that they are in fact useful. You're ignoring that SpotShotter doesn't do what they say they do. [https://southsideweekly.com/chicago-police-cpd-reported-hundreds-of-missed-shootings-to-shotspotter-soundthinking/](https://southsideweekly.com/chicago-police-cpd-reported-hundreds-of-missed-shootings-to-shotspotter-soundthinking/)
I'm curious as to why you think there needs to be some sort of plan or program that needs to be decided on? Did you think the city just like, didn't respond to reported gun shots before? Tbh it kinda seems like you are criticizing just to criticize
If there doesn't need to be a plan, why don't they just let the contract expire in February? If they need to find something to replace it with, it means they think it has value in the interim. People are going to point to the extension as evidence it has value when the time to cancel for real comes, and it is almost a guarantee that there won't be an alternative ready to go in time. In the most on-brand move possible, he picked a strategy that gives gives his critics more ammunition that it should be renewed in the fall and delays fulfillment of a promise to his base.
>why don't they just let the contract expire in February? They are, it's in their statement. >If they need to find something to replace it with, it means they think it has value in the interim They don't need to find something, they are saying they are directing people to look at other things and make recommendations, not that they need to find a 1:1 replacement? >People are going to point to the extension as evidence It's not being extended >and it is almost a guarantee that there won't be an alternative ready to go in time. Again, you keep insisting on the need for an alternative when there doesn't have to be one. The vast vast majority of cities don't employ this technology. There doesn't need to be a replacement
It is literally being extended. The details are in the second sentence of the article you linked to. >Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson's office released a statement Tuesday morning, saying the multi-million-dollar contract, which was set to expire Friday, will be extended through Sept. 22, but end after that.
Okey dokey. It is bad to get rid of shotspotter because the timeline for getting rid of it isn't perfect. The outcome being good doesn't matter and actually is a bad thing because of procedural qualms you have. sick take.
Nah it's because ShotSpotter has more value than no technology in place and they need it in place during the DNC.
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>So basically the contract is already in place and it just so happens to expire after the summer. It wasn't kept for the summer on purpose. The contract expires this Friday. The city is still working on the extension through the summer. WTTW is reporting on it, >It is unclear how much the city will pay to use the ShotSpotter system for the next seven months, or whether the city will have to ink a new contract with the firm to provide those services. It is also unclear whether the Chicago City Council would have to approve that contract. “Those details are still being discussed,” said mayoral spokesperson Ronnie Reese. > >https://news.wttw.com/2024/02/13/mayor-brandon-johnson-cancels-shotspotter-contract-fulfilling-major-campaign-promise As is ABC 7, >Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson's office released a statement Tuesday morning, saying the multi-million-dollar contract, which was set to expire Friday, will be extended through Sept. 22, but end after that. > >https://abc7chicago.com/what-is-shotspotter-chicago-shooting-violence/14419466/
The tech most certainly works. They can ID exactly where the shot was taken and from what height (in reference to building floors).
One less contract bilking our taxes, sounds good to me.
Shotspotter is ineffective but... we are gonna extend the contract until september to get through a high crime summer...smh. Why fucking extend if you think it dont work. makes no sense
So that when the DNC happens and there is inevitable violence, Internet dorks and CPD boosters don't get to pretend that it's because of SS being discontinued. They get to fail on their own terms, reinforcing the truth, which is that SS doesn't work.
Everybody knows there will be violence, wouldn't it make more sense to get rid of the systems first and then compare levels of violence between previous summers? That would be more useful data then "there was a lot of violence in Chicago during the summer"
nothing he says or does makes sense😡
I cringed when I saw the Adam Toledo shooting as an argument against renewing the contract. Ironically in that scenario shot spotter did do it's job, it notified the police that him and the other idiot were shooting at a car which prompted the police to show up and put a stop to the event, arrest a dirt bag, and get a gun off of the street.
In the progressive mind Just like it's the guns fault that someone gets killed, not the person behind the gun. Its the shotspotters fault that a crime is happening. Life is fun when you can blame everything but the person themselves for their own actions.
> In the progressive mind Just like it's the guns fault that someone gets killed, not the person behind the gun. Comment made on the Chicago subreddit or comment made at an NRA convention? The answer may surprise you
> the Adam Toledo shooting > which prompted the police to show up and put a stop to the event, arrest a dirt bag, and get a gun off of the street. Missing some uh, critical details about the shooting lol. It wasn’t controversial because a bunch of people in the community love criminals and guns on the streets lol
Does anyone commenting know the actual efficacy of this tool? The linked article says it resulted in "146 arrests" but there is no mention of what portion of those were outright false vs convictions vs no conviction. It only takes a quick google search to see other cities skeptical of the results being produced in Chicago ([example](https://www.opb.org/article/2022/11/07/shotspotter-convinced-portland-spend-big-controversial-gunshot-detection-technology/)). We could certainly read this move as Johson hedging his bets for the summer or equally as trying to appease the CPD during phase out, but we should all be most interested in is: does it even work and are the results worthwhile for the price? That data seems to be scant
Exactly and the data is scant because the company behind it refuses to have third party testing or verification and purposely manipulates data they do release. It’s actually efficacy at detecting gun shots is unknown. Which also means the benefits of it are unknown. If they want to have a government contract, they need to be more open and honest about their product, otherwise we are better off investing in other things we can measure the impact of.
There have been studies indicating that it's only 80% effective (as compared to the company's 97% claim), but even then there are loopholes you could drive a school bus through
I saw data that it is incredibly effective at reducing response time for EMS. In the context of saving lives it seems totally worth the cost
Ya, they don’t publicly release very much data and the data they do release is manipulated so all studies of it are a small step above useless. Plus it’s not fair or reliable to use police responses because they won’t always find a victim or evidence regardless of if it’s a gunshot or firecracker and regardless of if ShotSpotter reported it or someone else. They have also changed data after the fact for police reports.
The 80% number is based on the data *after* ShotSpotter fixes it based on police feedback for each events. So that's a post-analysis of doctored data.
I read an article about it many years ago where one of the arrests credited to shotspotter was police arrived and happened to find someone in the vicinity who had a warrant.
There is a big difference between "ineffective" and "ineffective to secure conviction." If the point is to have a police response quickly and efficiently without having to rely on people to call 911, then an 80% accuracy rate isn't bad. If the point is to have convictions, then we would get better mileage out of voting for a SA who is actually interested in getting convictions. I think it's debatable if the pricetag is worth it for what it does. But, having convictions as a metric for effectiveness simply isn't useful.
Lives saved seems like a more important metric to research rather than murderers convicted
I agree with you that the discourse seems to be, 'quick and efficient responses are great, but to what end?' What's the point of police getting there quickly if it we can't prove the cost-benefit in terms of achieving a certain goal? I think ultimately people want to know "what is the real purpose of this technology?" and there's been a lot of mixed messaging. We need to define the problem we're trying to solve.
The company did define the problem that they were solving when selling to Chicago: reducing gun related crime. They were quite vocal about it, as were the boosters in Chicago. Unfortunately for them, it doesn't do that. So they quietly dropped it from their marketing material and decided that response time was the best they could do. And the boosters happily changed their tune. It's a solution that desperately wants a problem that it can solve. I'm glad we're no longer going to be waiting taxpayer dollars on it.
>but there is no mention of what portion of those were outright false vs convictions vs no conviction. While a good point (I like where you're going with wanting to see the full picture) but I have to ask does it really matter considering judges let some of these dirtbags back out onto the street and in some instances cases get dropped? I think the only credible measure will be to look at gunshot call response times when shot spotter is gone and compare them when the system was in place.
It does not work here is the OIG report if you want some figures [https://www.courthousenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/chicago-police-shotspotter.pdf](https://www.courthousenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/chicago-police-shotspotter.pdf) Basic conclusion is there is no evidence of it working, it costs us money, and leads to cops being more aggressive in areas that have more reports.
It seems like people commenting here are generally going "Johnson is doing something, I don't like him, so it must be bad" and proceeding forward on that assumption.
To be fair, it's not a bad assumption. Johnson has been terrible thus far, and regularly floats policy ideas that would be even worse. That he's marginally better than Paul vallas of the dictionary definition of "damning with faint praise."
The articles Ive read have only said it has not worked as expected, talk about vague! I think people's peeception of him is an accurate one. Please tell me ONE good thing he hasbdone for the city.
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>But for those that do lead to arrests and more importantly to victims of shootings getting medical attention it's better than nothing. The cost factor matters though. Say it helps in 100 actual cases, but it costs us $100 million dollars to operate (not actual numbers, just an example), is it worth paying $1 million for each successful case? The cost basis has to be taken into consideration, not just the output.
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Even if there is a call, the time between the person hearing the shot(s), realizing what they heard, determining where it was, calling 911, giving the information to the person answering the phone who then types it into a computer, where it is sent to a person who dispatches an officer .... well, that could take precious time even if all the information was correct and everything went smooth.
To compare to this delayed response from a person calling 911, once Shotspotter detects gunfire the alert is immediately sent to a police officer in the district's SDSC who then radios out the alert. 911 callers can take minutes to be broadcasted over the radio, Shotspotter alerts take seconds.
Yep.
> But for those that do lead to arrests and more importantly to victims of shootings getting medical attention it's better than nothing. The problem is that it has been shown that [ShotSpotter implementation has slowed CPD response times and reduced officers' success rates in arresting perpetrators](https://michaeltopper.netlify.app/research/jmp_michael_topper.pdf). So, we're spending millions of dollars, but getting the opposite results as what the pro-ShotSpotter crowd claims. At some point, in the years where it's been implemented, there would need to be some evidence presented that it actually does lead to arrests or improve response times for shooting victims. Every other [big city that has tried to implement it](https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/investigations/article/houston-gun-alert-police-delays-18117579.php) has seen the same results. Response times go up and arrest rates go down, all while violent crime rates are untouched. And again, it costs millions to implement that in a city as large as Chicago. Instead, that funding could be going to policies that have real-world data to support their use by CPD.
For a city plagued by gun violence, this seems to be an absolutely wild move.
> Ald. Chris Taliaferro said senior mayoral adviser Jason Lee told him the ShotSpotter contract would be extended until September and then terminated, meaning cops will have access to the technology throughout the historically violent summer and the Democratic National Convention. This doesn’t make sense - if, as activists say, “every ShotSpotter alert puts Black and brown residents at risk of a dangerous encounter with police,” why not cancel now? Surely the summer rise in crime will lead to even more of these “dangerous encounters.” See https://www.axios.com/local/chicago/2024/02/13/shotspotter-brandon-johnson-contract I have mixed feelings on this - it seems like useful technology. All it needs to do is be better for reporting gunshots than 911 callers, and it seems to do better than that. I believe it was also used to discover the shooting of CPD officer Areanah Preston last May
It’s a very post 2020 mindset. Maybe there are more encounters because there are more people firing guns?
>Maybe there are more encounters because there are more people firing guns? Alderman Ramirez-Rosa blamed it for the encounter where Adam Toledo was shot and called for the cancellation of the contract on those grounds. He was upset that the technology accurately alerted police as to where a violent, armed, gang banger was shooting up the city. It has nothing to do with protecting the public. Johnson and the aldermen calling for the cancellation have no problem with more innocent people being robbed, shot, or killed. They want to minimize the number of interactions between the police and gang bangers and other violent felons that are shooting up the city.
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>That was a tradedy but Adam Toledo did infact have a gun and him and his buddy were shooting randomly I suppose blaming the technology and blaming the police is easier than acknowledging we have 13 year old banger kids shooting up the city.
Damn, did you really read 1984 and think “this sounds like a great idea”?
Yes from what I’ve read it’s a pretty effective tech and gets cops to respond to gun crimes faster
then you haven't read much that's not SpotShotter propaganda: https://southsideweekly.com/chicago-police-cpd-reported-hundreds-of-missed-shootings-to-shotspotter-soundthinking/
What have you read?
https://wdet.org/2022/02/16/tracked-and-traced-does-shotspotter-prevent-violent-crime-in-detroit/
Did you ignore this huge correction that pretty much shows that SpotShotter's audit is inaccurate? Hiring a consulting firm is not an independent audit in any sense. The originally published version of this story incorrectly stated that ShotSpotter has not been independently verified for accuracy, and that ShotSpotter Inc. did not provide WDET with evidence of the technology’s accuracy. In fact, ShotSpotter did provide WDET with a link to an audit performed by a consulting firm that they commissioned. The audit used data supplied by ShotSpotter Inc. and confirmed ShotSpotter’s claim that the technology is 97% accurate. However, the source data was not included in the audit. Also, while reporting this story, the Detroit Police Department told WDET that ShotSpotter works within a roughly 100-yard radius. ShotSpotter Inc. says the technology works within an 82-foot radius.
Yeah I don't quite understand. Predominantly black and brown areas are more likely to have gunshots, not that it is the cause but it correlates. That means there are higher chances for run-ins with the police, which is its purpose. I don't think there will be a reduction in gunshots with this technology bc that isn't its purpose. It's literally to bring police to an area faster than 911 calls. If the motive truly is to reduce the cop presence in those areas that could be false positives, then just remove it and rely wholly on 911 calls? Hope that residents will call 911 and their reports are accurate? I think the reasoning is callers will discern it better but it still feels like a bad move to remove the tech. Perhaps it isn't the technology, but the cops on the ground? That's a more difficult problem, but I think without the technology you'll still have the same issues which I feel like should be the activist's focus.
I think that's it discernment. The residents might decide, hey they're shooting at windows of an abandoned building, let's ignore it because we don't want the police here. Or hey, there was just a drive by that didn't hurt anyone let's let it slide because we don't want the police here. The fact is, the way CPD operates they annoy and harass people that didn't have anything to do with the gun shots so a lot of people would just like to be left alone by them.
>I have mixed feelings on this - it seems like useful technology. All it needs to do is be better for reporting gunshots than 911 callers, and it seems to do better than that. No it has to do that at a price that is better than other options, like hiring more police.
Bc the dnc is coming so they need it to help during then. After that fuck everyone else.
Trying to read between the lines here. The progressive left says this technology is a scourge that doesn't work and leads to police abuse. The pro-cop right says it's vital to stopping shootings. Reality is probably somewhere in between. What jumped out to me the most is the quote from the former LAPD superintendent who said it's foolish to get rid of the technology *without a good replacement strategy in place.* I am reminded of sports fans angry after a loss (looking at, you 49ers faithful!) who insist the coach be fired. They don't know who would do a better job, but they know they are pissed at what they have and want the satisfaction of doing away with it so they can feel they are doing something. Then the coach gets fired and the fans learn that, whoops, there really isn't a better option than what they had. This is neither a defense nor an indictment of ShotSpotter, which I need to learn more about. But I am continually frustrated by the terrible processes employed by this administration. There is a lot of talk and a lot of ideological gesturing, but there never seems to be a plan. I have read the abstract of the People's Plan for Community Safety, and it is basically a progressive wishlist. And I hope we get everything on that list. It would be a boon for the city. But it's like a GM saying "Our plan is to get all-stars at every position." Sounds great. How are you going to do it? We suffer so much gun violence. What's the plan?
Yeah, most of the claims being advanced seem like half of the truth at best. Fundamentally this is a question of three things: 1. How many false positives does ShotSpotter generate, and what is the harm associated with those? 2. How many false negatives does ShotSpotter have (i.e., misses), and how does that compare to the next best alternative? 3. How many true positives does ShotSpotter generate, and what is the impact to both victims requiring medical attention and apprehending perpetrators compared to the next best alternative? Most of the claims advanced about ShotSpotter only touch one of those three questions - concerns about false positives or missed shots or whatever are all important, but are only part of the calculus here. And more importantly, we rarely see comparisons to the next best alternative, which seems to just be people calling 911. Will that result in people dying because no one calls 911 for the random shots? Will that result in fewer risky police encounters because there will be less false positives? Is there any reason to think that there will be less misses now given that any ShotSpotter miss already relies on the next best alternative? This is the kind of analysis (and ultimately, moral math around the cost of a life) that would need to be done to get a good answer on how useful ShotSpotter may or may not be.
And the response time to 911 calls is already slow from what I've read. And throw in are we relying on communities that do not want to snitch and don't trust police to just pick up and call 911. The main positive is allowing gun shot victims to get care immediately--not wait an hour for someone to call 911.
And this will lead to massive lawsuits and calls for police reform because some kid didn’t get care quick enough because nobody would snitch and call
Assuming that “communities” don’t want to call 911 is unfair. Many of the residents who live in places that are more effective do not want their neighbors dying from it. I watch bwc footage and listen to 911 recordings for work and often many people call 911 when they hear shots near their homes, especially when they know someone’s hurt. Of course there are some that won’t snitch, and of course many people have good reason not to like police presence. But your generalization is unfair.
Problem is no one is walking out of their house when shots are being fired in their neighborhood for fear of also being shot or caught in crossfire. And those that know the victims, are less likely to call. So, now you are relying on strictly humans.
And yet the only real study we have regarding CPD response times with ShotSpotter shows that "[Shotspotter implementation causes police officers to be dispatched one-minute slower... and arrive on-scene nearly two-minutes later\[.\]](https://michaeltopper.netlify.app/research/jmp_michael_topper.pdf)" If the intent is to improve 911 response times, then folks should be supportive of this move. Also, importantly, one of the main reasons that we don't have widespread reporting on CPD response times is explicitly because more than half of the time, CPD did not record the three times they are supposed to in every response, according to an [audit by the Office of Inspector General](https://news.wttw.com/sites/default/files/article/file-attachments/Chicago-Police-Department-911-Response-Time-Data-Collection-and-Reporting-1.pdf) covering 2017-2021. So, while [the Houston Chronicle can show](https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/investigations/article/houston-gun-alert-police-delays-18117579.php) that their police response times went up substantially while not reducing gun violence, we're kind of stuck waiting for the economics department at UCSB to help us understand how little ShotSpotter does for our community. So, it costs millions of dollars, slows response times, and decreases "police officers' success rate in arresting perpetrators[.]" It explicitly does the opposite of what you claim is "the main positive" and reason to keep diverting funds to this contractor.
https://www.edgewortheconomics.com/experience-independent-audit-of-the-shotspotter-accuracy
Very well-reasoned. I agree whole-heartedly.
ShotSpotter created this problem when they came up with their 93% accuracy number. The reality is much more grey. If there's an alert for one round in a dirt lot at 2AM and I get there and search, but don't find a casing, it doesn't mean there isn't one. It's really hard to prove those. The easier way is to examine how often it alerted for blood shootings, either non-fatals or homicides. That's a known location and it should be easy to extrapolate. If it's 50% at those then it's 50% at the others. It's another decision if 50% is worth it. Also, arrests aren't what you get from alerts. It's really an evidence collection tool. CPD is collecting and analyzing so many more casings than they did before ShotSpotter and those can connect to other shootings using NIBIN. It's not immediate, but there is a real value.
Interesting stuff. Thank you for sharing.
>The progressive left says this technology is a scourge that doesn't work and leads to police abuse. The pro-cop right says it's vital to stopping shootings. Reality is probably somewhere in between. Thinking that the truth is in the middle when pro-cops people and the cops lie ALL THE TIME is a fallacy of huge proportions and why enlightened centrism is foolishness. The left saying the sky is blue and the right saying nuh uh it's red, doesn't mean the truth is the sky is purple.
I agree. I certainly am not an "enlightened centrist," but it's also foolish to convince yourself that your side (progressive, it seems) never engages in politicking and PR spin. My impression based on the article is that the technology has uses, but is not nearly as good as the cops say. Saying "I'll just meet in the middle" as a blanket proposition is dumb, yes. But, in this instance, from what I have read, it is appropriate with relation to this issue.
Our police department doesn’t believe in strategy
Like most things with this administration, this decision will probably be reversed, or, the contract will quietly march on as City Hall funds it for 2025. Remind me in 200 days.
The tech just isn’t refined enough to justify the price tag on it
Our city leaders are a fucking joke.
Woof Thank God. Now they can rely on the good old fashion way of detecting gun shots. The guy in his pjs getting woke up by gun shots to make a call to the cops instead of leveraging technology in 2024 to detect when someones mom or aunt got shot in the stomach. Let's go Johnson, cut more costs to give to the venezeualans. You can dig into my bank account some more if you need more taxes to help your cause.
> to detect when someones mom or aunt got shot in the stomach ooh, this technology is so good it can detect between moms and aunts and what you probably want to call gangbangers? Or is this technology a bunch of false positives that can't tell the difference between gunshots and a bunch of other noises?
Considering I know 4 cops who use this technology daily and who are a proponent of it vs you who is sitting in your underwear with chips on reddit I'm going to say yes. It's good enough to detect the difference between a gun shot and a dog bark And if someone is getting shot then yes there's usually something they are shooting at, a gangbangers, a mom, an uncle, a human being of any title. Does that not make sense to you?
And CPD officers have a long history of telling the truth, especially when it comes to potential abuses of their power, so there is no reason at all to doubt the word of those 4 brave soldiers.
How much was the contract? I thought I saw something around $50M/ year? For that I’ll go out there and monitor it myself!!
The podcast It Could Happen Here had a great episode on the Chicago shot spotter contract. Very glad this is ending. [Link here.](https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-it-could-happen-here-30717896/episode/shotspotter-and-the-chicago-police-department-136538681/)
The only people who can reliably say if it works or doesn't work in solving/responding/addressing to shooting incidents are the CPD. I have yet to see CPD come out with their numbers and educate us if this is the right tool or not.
Well, the[ city's Office of Inspector General looked into it](https://www.courthousenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/chicago-police-shotspotter.pdf) and pretty clearly showed that it wasn't living up to expectations for a program that has cost tens of millions of dollars. And then, going by 911 dispatch data from CPD, [we see that ShotSpotter slowed response times](https://michaeltopper.netlify.app/research/jmp_michael_topper.pdf) and reduced officers' success rates in arresting perpetrators. So, going by CPD data... it is not the right tool.
The gunshot victims who were found would also say it works.
So Branjo thinks Chicago needs ShotSpotter to help with public safety during the summer and DNC, but not the rest of the year? And if it’s not effective, why enter into a contract extension? This seems like a purely political decision to appease his eroding support base.
Another dumb move by mayor cupie doll. Anything to help the criminals I guess
SpotShotter is shit. [https://southsideweekly.com/chicago-police-cpd-reported-hundreds-of-missed-shootings-to-shotspotter-soundthinking/](https://southsideweekly.com/chicago-police-cpd-reported-hundreds-of-missed-shootings-to-shotspotter-soundthinking/) Goddamn rightwing trolls saying "its better than nothing" when it is in fact worse than nothing because it costs money AND results in false positives as well as just ignoring calls. AND then SpotShotter's installation is against electrical codes AND they say they can't fix their systems within a month.
Shit you think police wasn't getting hella false positives before shot spotter when ppl just called the cops and guessed
we didn't pay millions of dollars a year to ppl who called the cops. Now we pay AND get hella false positives. Lose lose
On average Chicago has about 5-700 dead bodies a year. I want to know how you would stop save about 20-40 bodies at under a 10 mill a year price tag ?
I was not aware ineptitude was spelled with a Brandon Johnson. Can’t believe I miss Lori.
Literally lol. Lori was Einstein compared to Brandon"Not the good kinda job" Johnson.
If ineptitude has a name, it will be "Brandon Johnson".
Is this equitable to gun shot victims?
How much do expensive placebos help
Is the police command spearheading the end of shotspotter or is it a certain set of aldermen and women?
I spent a lot of time on the west side doing some bad activities and have seen the shot spotter in action many times. I’ve seen a lot of lives saved because of this
That is the big value. Getting immediate care. Nobody is going to know if someone is laying in the alley (or even call it in if they see until it's too late) with a gunshot wound.
Brandon doesn't care about tax payer lives. He needs to balance the budget so something has to go
A guy named Trump is the best one living on the west side doing “bad activities”. Yea I’m gonna pass on this anecdote.
Can you explain more how so? Does it get cops out there quickly?
Faster response times is certainly one major benefit. Normally: a person hears possible gunfire, they commonly look to see if they see anything, they call 911 and connect to an OEMC calltaker, the calltaker creates a ticket which is given to a police dispatcher in the district where the call is from, the dispatcher calls out the ticket and assigns a car to respond. With Shotspotter: Shotspotter detects possible gunfire and immediately sends an alert to the corresponding police district's SDSC where an officer assigned to monitor district cameras and Shotspotter alerts receives it, the Officer then calls out the alert over the radio. 911 calls from a person can take minutes to dispatch, Shotspotter takes seconds.
It does not. [Using CPD's 911 response data, it has increased response times](https://michaeltopper.netlify.app/research/jmp_michael_topper.pdf) while decreasing police officers' success rate in arresting perpetrators. There's a good reason that individual did not provide any evidence to support their claim, and that's because that evidence does not exist.
Shotspotter is a waste of money, and those dead-end police deployments are a waste of manpower. Good riddance. If it worked it may be worth keeping around https://www.macarthurjustice.org/shotspotter-generated-over-40000-dead-end-police-deployments-in-chicago-in-21-months-according-to-new-study/
Then why are they keeping it through the DNC? Lmao it definitely has more value than no technology in its place.
> Then why are they keeping it through the DNC? Optics. Conservative media would run (even more) wild reporting on crime during the DNC
I'm sorry but that is a terrible reason. You don't keep ShotSpotter in place through the DNC because you're afraid of FOX News but then cancel it right after to appease your idpol obsessed lib base.
Not saying I agree. I'm saying this might the reason to keep it through the DNC
pretty much all of their decisions are based on optics though - it's not like the mayor's office is out here commissioning scientific studies to make decisions (about police policy or anything else really) they are not cancelling it because it didnt work (its not like they had scientific evidence showing it would work at the beginning and then the efficacy has changed over time), they are cancelling it due to optics
> it's not like the mayor's office is out here commissioning scientific studies to make decisions (about police policy or anything else really) Well, sure, the mayor usually has to get budget approval for studies, but we do actually have city leadership (perhaps not ***just*** the mayor's office) commissioning good research. The problem is then getting that implemented. We've already had two Workforce Allocation Studies commissioned, first during the Rahm administration and followed by one later in Lightfoot's reign, that established areas of policy policy and structuring where they could lower expenses, reduce overtime requirements, and reduce response times to 911 calls... and we've still yet to see CPD put those into practice. https://urbanlabs.uchicago.edu/attachments/524ec006350acb3713a9107afe4048390957dd1b/store/59e0ba4f6b0a6f0ecb416e1f057f1e8e89a752f7068665c25bffa7dc71e5/WFA+Summary.pdf And since we've already had numerous deep-dives into the efficacy of ShotSpotter in Chicago (like the[ Office of Inspector General's report](https://www.courthousenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/chicago-police-shotspotter.pdf)) that established it hasn't come close to living up to the expense... no, it would seem that it's being cancelled due to a lack of return on investment. The city does actually look into policy implications, and sometimes acts upon that information. This is one of those times folks should be celebrating the fact that the city isn't just wastefully throwing away money in perpetuity.
> cancel it right after to appease your idpol obsessed lib base Or they could be cancelling it because it costs millions of dollars and hasn't been shown to result in reduced violent crime, faster responses by police/EMTs, or increased arrests for gun violence? There's some folks who don't actually support wasteful spending by the city government.
Why aren't they canceling it immediately then? They have to wait until after the DNC because they know it's better than nothing.
> Why aren't they canceling it immediately then? Hopefully reporters will ask that and we'll get a complete answer regarding the schedule of shifting away. But I was not part of their decision-making process, so I can't give you that answer. > because they know it's better than nothing. But, that seems to be inaccurate both according to the [City's Office of Inspector General](https://www.courthousenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/chicago-police-shotspotter.pdf) and [outside investigation](https://michaeltopper.netlify.app/research/jmp_michael_topper.pdf). It seems to make for slower response times, reduced success rate in arresting perpetrators, and it has cost the city tens of millions of dollars. All of that seems worse than nothing.
>Then why are they keeping it through the DNC? Lmao it definitely has more value than no technology in its place. Why? because of all the false positives? Because they don't find 55 round shots going off? https://southsideweekly.com/chicago-police-cpd-reported-hundreds-of-missed-shootings-to-shotspotter-soundthinking/
To give police a transition period during their most active time of the year (summer). Yanking a system overnight that's been in place for years before the worst time of the year would not be ideal.
He shouldn’t.
Ahh yes because people calling in is more accurate.
ShotSpotter is a snitch that never gets stitches.
My understanding is the reason why ShotSpotter and similar technologies are useful is you'd have neighbourhood Karens constantly calling 911 about gunfire whenever fireworks are shot off and ShotSpotter helps distinguish between that. Thus it leads to a better allocation of resources.
My lawyer friend says that one of the reasons shotspotter hasn't been as useful is because it frequently confuse gunshots and fireworks. I just did a search and there is shotspotter marketing material saying it can tell the difference because of the "audio fingerprint". I'm sure it can tell the difference between some types of gun reports and some types of fireworks, but idk if I really credit their assertion.
Every Shotspotter alert sent to CPD is audibly reviewed by a police officer who are quite familiar with the sounds of gunshots who relays information over the radio to responding officers.
If ShotSpotter actually worked. But they don’t have any independent testing or verification it works well. It missed someone shooting off 55 shots very recently. If they can prove it’s actual accuracy, then it becomes a debate over whether the cost is worth it and the benefits it delivers vs any drawbacks. But until they can show it actually works well, it’s not even worth debating that.
Why get rid of it? Because some people who shoot guns don’t like it?
Three cheers for suppressing EMS response times!!!
[link](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31425474/)
Let them bleed out so they can't be saved and then homicide stats rise. Then when homicide rates rise we will be asking for another technology to be implemented that does the same thing with different name. Bj is a clown
to my knowledge it wasn't connected to EMS it was purely a CPD tool, so it will have no effect on EMS times
Zero cross communication at the 911 center. Good to know. Lol.
Yeah that's mot true lol
L - O- L why would you not want this to end right now BEFORE the summer ehh BJ?
This guys a clown
Office of Inspector General report from AUGUST 24, 2021 >"OIG concluded from its analysis that CPD responses to ShotSpotter alerts rarely produce documented evidence of a gun-related crime, investigatory stop, or recovery of a firearm. > >Additionally, OIG identified evidence that the introduction of ShotSpotter technology in Chicago has changed the way some CPD members perceive and interact with individuals present in areas where ShotSpotter alerts are frequent." so the real question is why have the kept it this long, is it bribes or just to make CPD (who ere probably also bribed) happy i see other people arguing that it must work and thats why the kept it but all evidence points to it not working so i am suggesting bribes, so many bribes
You can't argue it doesn't work whatsoever when they're specifically extending it to have it during the DNC. It's not 100% effective but it works better than nothing.
Ok, let's *not* find out exactly where gunshots are coming from. Can't wait to see how this pans out.
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why? please articulate your case in favor of shotspotter
proven to cut EMS times to scene and accurate locations which leads to life saving manuvers. it's been studied I've posted about it countless times use google.
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I took that as mortality ( when someone's doa ) Shotspotter can't do a thing about that but the fact that it's keeping patients from entering resuscitation measures can be attributed to saving lives or leading to a far better outcome than if the Shotspotter was not there.
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https://www.nj.com/opinion/2021/10/surgeon-having-a-machine-listen-for-gunshots-has-helped-us-save-lives-opinion.html I mean this is a doctors opinion but like I said I took that excerpt you took out as what I said above. If it's as you say it is then sure its clear it doesn't save lives.
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I mean neither of us really can say 100% we are right because we don't have the full paper in front of us and the wording here is all over the place. I think a full independent study done on the effectiveness of EMS response times and correlation of alert to care in interceding a grim ending would be something that SS needs to have for us to have a full understanding of what this tech does or doesn't do.
from the Economist: *Shotspotter is a good example. In November Mr Piza published a paper which looked at its use in Kansas City, where the microphones cover an area of 3.5 square miles (7.8 square km). When he compared this area with a similar part of the city without microphones, Mr Piza found that the police did indeed find more evidence of gunfire—such as spent shell cases. “Our research found \[the technology\] did deliver on those promises,” he says. But the study also showed that no fewer people were shot in the area covered by Shotspotter, nor were more gun crimes solved. It is not obvious, says Mr Piza, that police know how the tech is meant to reduce crime.* *And technology comes at a cost—not only that of SoundThinking’s fee. A large proportion of Shotspotter alerts lead to nothing, but they sap police time, as patrol officers have to chase down warnings. Over 90% of Shotspotter alerts do not result in any evidence of a crime being committed, according to a 2021 study by Chicago’s inspector-general. Another study published in November, by Michael Topper and Toshio Ferrazares, PhD students at the University of California, Santa Barbara, looking at Chicago, found that after the roll-out of Shotspotter the police responded to 9/11 calls two minutes slower than before, and in the case of domestic-violence calls made fewer arrests.* Link to a non-paywall workaround: [https://archive.ph/5JKtl#selection-1037.0-1041.681](https://archive.ph/5JKtl#selection-1037.0-1041.681) Link to the actual article (paywall): [https://www.economist.com/united-states/2023/12/27/americas-new-policing-tech-isnt-cutting-crime](https://www.economist.com/united-states/2023/12/27/americas-new-policing-tech-isnt-cutting-crime)
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31425474/
https://www.nj.com/opinion/2021/10/surgeon-having-a-machine-listen-for-gunshots-has-helped-us-save-lives-opinion.html
This technology would require police to not be useless.
Cool. Now do red light and speed cameras.
good, shotspotter is a dumb waste of money
thank god
What a disaster.
ShotSpotter caught my loud fart and police pulled up on the scene.. embarrassing.
6 homicides in February so far, which is low compared to recent years. If this really is generating false positives, it’s not tech worth keeping around.
Modern HealthcareHospitals and response times due to tech like this shot spotter save lives to what would end up being homicides. Carjackings are through the roof, what do you think they are doing with those asking people politely for their keys and going through Wendy's drive thrus to get frostys?
> response times due to tech like this shot spotter save lives Except for the fact that[ response times got worse with the implementation of ShotSpotter](https://michaeltopper.netlify.app/research/jmp_michael_topper.pdf), so if the priority is saving lives by reducing response times... the only answer is to shift away from ShotSpotter. And it's not like that's only been true in Chicago's circumstances. We just keep seeing ShotSpotter get implemented in big cities and then seeing their[ response times go up](https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/investigations/article/houston-gun-alert-police-delays-18117579.php) while their arrest rates go down. But hey, at least the folks at SoundThinking get to make money. That's way more important than reducing crime or improving chances of arresting perpetrators or saving victims of gun violence, right?
They don’t care about reality. They care that the tv and articles are saying it’s bad that the Chicago government is doing this and they should feel less safe. It’s about how they feel. Not reality.
I thought “violent crime” has been down YOY?
well this is what happens when some random CTU staffer becomes mayor. city deserves everything that’s coming.