The City Council is signaling once more its commitment to keeping acoustic gunshot detection technology in Chicago, even if that effort continues to pit aldermen against Mayor Brandon Johnson.
Aldermen who back the ShotSpotter technology Johnson decommissioned this week showed keen interest in the mayor’s plan to add a replacement tool for first responders during a City Council hearing Thursday. They are urging Johnson to quickly install new technology and even gearing up to try to force his hand if he does not.
“I don’t know if ShotSpotter is the best thing. We need to look at everything. We need the best,” Vice Mayor Ald. Walter Burnett, 27th, said during the joint Public Safety Committee and Police and Fire Committee meeting. “It’s life or death.”
Some aldermen are more closely weighing the option of filing an unprecedented lawsuit against the city if Johnson does not come up with an effective replacement. The suit would seek to enforce two ordinances, passed with large majorities in May and last week, giving the City Council and police superintendent control over ShotSpotter’s future.
Johnson has argued the ordinances are not legal because only he has power over such contracts. But Ald. Brian Hopkins, 2nd, said he and others are working with an attorney who could be retained to sue the city and wrest contracting control from Johnson.
“There are a variety of places to go for the lawyers,” Hopkins said. “There are a lot of things happening right now that really don’t have any recent precedent, so you have to create it.”
Hopkins added that a compromise from Johnson could make such a lawsuit unnecessary.
Johnson pledged to veto the ordinance passed in a 33-to-14 vote last week. Aldermen expect that veto to come in the next month.
Burnett said Thursday that he will not join his colleagues in voting to overturn any mayoral veto. Thirty-four votes would be needed from the council to do so.
But Johnson also said he will consider adding other gunshot detection technology. On Sunday, hours before ShotSpotter went offline, that new promise gained momentum as Johnson’s administration took the first step in a procurement process for technologies that “ensure quick response by law enforcement authorities in emergency situations.”
The request for information called for a technology with apparent similarities to ShotSpotter, which uses acoustic sensors mounted on light poles, mostly on the South and West sides, to quickly alert police about the location of suspected gunfire. Johnson has decried ShotSpotter’s cost and blasted its effectiveness, citing reports made by civic groups such as the MacArthur Justice Center and officials such as city Inspector General Deborah Witzburg.
Answering aldermen’s questions Thursday, Witzburg largely stood behind her 2021 report, which found the technology rarely leads to evidence of crimes, investigatory steps or gun recoveries, while tainting officers’ interactions with residents of neighborhoods most affected by gun violence.
But she also pointed out that the report did not focus on the question ShotSpotter supporters have recently argued should be at the forefront of the debate: Does the tool save lives?
“You’re not going to grade your star pitcher on their sliding percentage,” Witzburg said. “How successful something is depends an awful lot on what we are measuring for.”
The city is considering expediting its effort to start using new first responder technology by beginning with a pilot program, Deputy Mayor for Public Safety Garien Gatewood told the Tribune Wednesday.
“Nothing is set in stone but we are looking at options,” Gatewood said. “It’s something we might be willing to explore so long as it doesn’t impact the RFI.”
Gatewood, who had planned to be out of town Thursday, was not present at the hearing, and no representative of Johnson’s administration spoke in his place.
The ShotSpotter divide has been a recurring point of contention in council meetings this year. As aldermen on either side bitterly disagreed Thursday, even two experts brought in to speak from different University of Chicago schools took opposite stances.
Jens Ludwig, director of the University of Chicago’s Crime Lab, estimated ShotSpotter saves 85 lives a year, citing a statistical analysis his lab did on the “highly politicized” issue that he wrote about in a Tribune op-ed last week.
Moments later, University of Chicago sociology professor Robert Vargas struck a different tone. He compared the push to stay in Chicago by ShotSpotter parent company SoundThinking to the “product defense” efforts that “industries like tobacco and opioids have used to combat the regulation of their harmful product.”
“By continuing to change their narrative to fit their marketing strategy, ShotSpotter is trying to delay the inevitable scrutiny that comes with evidenced-based policy,” he said.
Burnett, who is often a close ally of Johnson’s, but has supported ShotSpotter in recent months, pushed back.
“Have you ever lived on the West Side? Or the South Side? Where there is a high crime rate, high death rate, high murder rate?” he asked.
Vargas answered that he had lived in the areas and has written two books on communities in them.
“We live with this stuff every day,” Burnett said later. “It’s different for us.”
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