“Every interaction between Black and Brown community members and CPD responding to a gunshot alert is dangerous. It puts people at risk of violence and harm,” says Stop ShotSpotter organizer Navi Heer. In this week’s episode of “Movement Memos,” host Kelly Hayes talks with two organizers from Chicago’s Stop ShotSpotter campaign, which claimed a major victory this week, and investigative journalist Jim Daley of South Side Weekly, about the interaction of Big Tech and policing in Chicago.

Music by Son Monarcas & David Celeste

Note: This a rush transcript and has been lightly edited for clarity. Copy may not be in its final form.

Kelly Hayes: Welcome to “Movement Memos,” a Truthout podcast about organizing, solidarity, and the work of making change. I’m your host, writer and organizer Kelly Hayes. Today, we are revisiting the campaign to Stop ShotSpotter in Chicago. Organizers have been working for the last few years to end the city’s contract with ShotSpotter, which rebranded itself as SoundThinking in 2023. Citing studies questioning the technology’s effectiveness and a groundswell of grassroots organizing, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson campaigned on a promise to end the ShotSpotter contract. On Tuesday, after months of uncertainty, news broke that Johnson would, in fact, end the city’s contract with SoundThinking. The Johnson administration said in a statement, “The City of Chicago will not renew its contract with SoundThinking that expires February 16, 2024, and will decommission the use of ShotSpotter technology on September 22, 2024.”

This is a tremendous victory for grassroots organizers in Chicago, and it also demonstrates that activists can take on Big Tech, as it relates to policing, and win. How did they do it? Well, we’re going to talk about that today.

As we mark this important victory, let’s take this moment as an opportunity to talk about the intersection of Big Tech and policing, and how technologies like ShotSpotter actually function in our communities. In our last episode, we talked about predictive policing technologies, and how they are used to conjure up probable cause and to justify aggressive policing. In recent years, police violence has been more widely discussed, and officials have made many promises about reforms that would ostensibly help to correct this problem. But as we’ve seen, these technologies have not curbed police violence. In fact, police in the U.S. killed a record number of people last year. What this tech has done is increase the reach of mass surveillance and create data-driven justifications for police who enact the same old aggressive practices on particular individuals or in particular communities. If someone is on an algorithmically generated list, or if a geographic area is highlighted as a probable crime hub, or if an algorithmic system says a gunshot has been detected, a presumption of guilt is cast over individuals targeted by police and cops have a PR shield for their actions.

Police have a long history of defending such technologies, even when they’re proven ineffective, such as Chicago’s now-defunct algorithm-driven “heat list,” which we discussed in our previous episode. Remember the police commander who insisted that if you were on the heat list, there was a reason for that, even though the Chicago police could never explain how the list, which didn’t differentiate potential victims from potential perpetrators, really worked? The truth is, police will always defend anything that provides cover for their aggression and brutality. Cops thrive on the presumption of guilt, because it bolsters their impunity. This is the same reason that police have ardently opposed bail reforms and the work of bail funds, insisting that people they arrest should remain in jail – even though bail and pretrial incarceration are only supposed to exist to secure a defendant’s appearance at trial. Cops want to play judge, jury and executioner, and too often, the system has indulged their desire to usurp those authorities. High-tech policing only furthers those destructive ends.

There are, of course, studies and reports that call ShotSpotter’s effectiveness into question. A study conducted by MacArthur Justice Center at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law reviewed ShotSpotter deployments for roughly 21 months and found that 89 percent of ShotSpotter alerts turned up no gun-related crime, and 86 percent resulted in no report of any crime at all. According to the study, “In less than two years, there were more than 40,000 dead-end ShotSpotter deployments.” That’s 40,000 incidents where police charged into mostly marginalized communities, with a justification ready for any violence they might inflict. Whoever they harassed, whoever they might abuse, or kill, they had a ShotSpotter alert they could point to, in order to make their actions seem reasonable.

In Graham v. Connor, the Supreme Court ruled that “the ‘reasonableness’ of a particular use of force must be judged from the perspective of a reasonable officer on the scene.” A ShotSpotter alert, or data produced by any of the predictive technologies we’ve discussed on the show, provides cover for the kind of actions police normally take in the course of policing. In short, Big Tech provides psychological alibis for brutality.

We have also seen evidence in recent weeks, from a report by SouthSide Weekly investigative journalists Jim Daley and Max Blaisdell, that ShotSpotter has sometimes failed to detect major shootings, and struggled internally with capacity issues and potential code violations. We will be hearing from Jim Daley today about some of those findings. We will also be hearing from Stop ShotSpotter organizers Navi Heer and Nathan about how ShotSpotter harms marginalized communities, and why a more effective gunshot detection system is not the answer. This conversation was recorded prior to the announcement that the city’s contract with ShotSpotter would be coming to an end, so you won’t hear organizers celebrating here. This is, nonetheless, an opportunity to learn from organizers who took on Big Tech and their local police apparatus and won.

This conversation also demonstrates the importance of local investigative journalism in exposing the ways that police reforms and technologies do not serve us. As local media outlets, and national independent outlets, struggle to survive in these times, Jim’s work serves as a reminder that we need to rally around publications we believe in, and ensure that they survive.

If you appreciate this episode, and you would like to support “Movement Memos,” you can help sustain our work by subscribing to Truthout’s newsletter or by making a donation at truthout.org. You can also support the show by subscribing to the podcast on Apple or Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts, or by leaving a positive review on those platforms. Sharing episodes on social media is also a huge help. As a union shop with the best family and sick leave policies in the industry, we could not do this work without the support of readers and listeners like you, so thanks for believing in us and for all that you do. And with that, I hope you enjoy the show.

[musical interlude]

Nathan: Hello, I am Nathan, they/she pronouns, a BYP100 organizer and Stop ShotSpotter campaign member for around two years. I’ve done a lot of work in relation to the social media accounts for ShotSpotter and other forms of public messaging and just trying to do as much outreach in communities as possible, as well as working with public officials and trying to build relationships around that and then I have also helped with some research for the campaign.

Navi Heer: Hi, my name is Navi. I use she/they pronouns. I’m also a Stop ShotSpotter campaign member here in Chicago. I’ve been involved since summer of 2021 and similar to Nathan, I have been helping with some of the public-facing and internal communications, building relationships with partners, coalition orgs, electeds, and a lot of deep canvassing and engagement around this technology, what it does, who it harms, and thinking about reallocation of those funds towards more life-affirming institutions and programs.

Jim Daley: My name’s Jim Daley, I use he/him pronouns, and I’m the investigations editor at South Side Weekly where I’ve been covering police and public safety for several years now.

KH: Well, I am grateful to be in conversation with you all today. Navi and Nathan, can you tell us what the struggle to end the ShotSpotter contract in Chicago looked like so far?

NH: I can share that the campaign to end the contract with ShotSpotter in the city of Chicago started in response to the murder of 13-year-old Adam Toledo by CPD in March of 2021. At that point in time, there were some folks who knew what ShotSpotter was, but a large group of folks, a coalition of different community organizations, including folks who work in anti-surveillance work, decarceration work, abolitionist organizers, violence interruption workers, immigrant justice orgs, and impacted community members came together to organize around canceling this contract.

Initially, the demands were to both cancel the contract with ShotSpotter and redirect those funds to things that would actually create safety such as Peacebook. Part of those initial demands also included an independent audit by the OIG [Office of Inspector General] and the MacArthur Justice Center also published a report during that time, and maybe I’m naive, that at that time fully expected that when all this information was emerging about the harm, the inefficacy, the inaccuracy of this tech, it would prompt those decision makers to get on board with canceling the contract.

That of course proved not to be true. A lot of our organizing has been around the past three city budget cycles, including removing the line item that funds the contract, also exploring a budget amendment to remove the funding after the budget had been finalized. Introducing ordinances around removing the use of gunshot detection services in the city of Chicago. There was also a special hearing on CPD tech that happened in November of 2021. That was a big organizing moment for the coalition where CPD and ShotSpotter had to answer questions about the tech and the data that does not exist around how the tech is used in Chicago.

And for the past three years, we’ve also been constantly engaging with different alderpeople and their staff. With community members, we’ve held many teach-ins. We’ve had thousands of conversations through canvassing and we’ve also been supported the entire time by many independent studies both in Chicago and nationwide talking about the harms of ShotSpotter. And some of those findings have been based on CPD’s own data and FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] requests. And currently, in this past six months, we’ve also engaged with the CCPSA [Community Commission for Public Safety and Accountability] body. I believe we’re the first campaign to do so by using a petition process to call for a special meeting on ShotSpotter, which is actually being held tonight. And we’re hoping that is a space where we can further talk about the harms of ShotSpotter and the technology.

The current mayor, Brandon Johnson, part of his campaign commitments included canceling the ShotSpotter contract and he went as far as to say, “I don’t see why this can’t be done the first a hundred days,” which didn’t happen. And we’re still continuing to engage with the mayor’s office to make that demand a reality.

Nathan: I think I can provide a little different perspective than Navi because they’ve been in it since the beginning. For me, it has really been just wonderful to see abolitionist principles used in this way and to see how hyper-local organizing can build so much power in a city where often it is extremely hard to get in touch with the people in power. And I also think it has been a wonderful learning experience for me and I am just excited for this campaign to be able to allow other Black and Brown people to learn how to really engage with the political structure that we are unfortunately put under. And so yeah, that’s what the campaign has meant to me along with it being just a way that I can really engage in trying to address violence that happens to me and my people every day. And it has helped just keep me hoping and believing that we will in fact liberate ourselves from police violence and capitalism and all of the things.

KH: Thank you for that. I really appreciate the work you have all been doing, as well as the abolitionist principles that you’ve brought to that........

© Truthout