they want to reduce gun violence.
At the core of the opposition to ShotSpotter is the lack of empirical evidence that it works—in terms of both its sensor accuracy and the system’s overall effect on gun crime.
The company has not allowed any independent testing of its algorithms, and there’s evidence that the claims it makes in marketing materials about accuracy may not be entirely scientific.
Over the years, ShotSpotter’s claims about its accuracy have increased, from 80 percent accurate to 90 percent accurate to 97 percent accurate. According to Greene, those numbers aren’t actually calculated by engineers, though.
And the sensors, in Chicago anyway, are deployed unequally:
It was a ShotSpotter alert in the early-morning hours of March 29 that dispatched police to a street in Little Village where they eventually shot and killed 13-year-old Adam Toledo, who was unarmed at the time.
That and other recent events have sparked a new campaign by community and civil rights groups in Chicago calling on city officials to drop ShotSpotter.
“These tools are sending more police into Black and Latinx neighborhoods,” Alyx Goodwin, a Chicago organizer with the Action Center on Race and the Economy, one of the groups leading the campaign, told Motherboard. “Every ShotSpotter alert is putting Black and Latinx people at risk of interactions with police. That’s what happened to Adam Toledo.”’
Motherboard recently obtained data demonstrating the stark racial disparity in how Chicago has deployed ShotSpotter. The sensors have been placed almost exclusively in predominantly Black and brown communities, while the white enclaves in the north and northwest of the city have no sensors at all, despite Chicago police data that shows gun crime is spread throughout the city.
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