Chicago Mayor ‘Doesn’t Want to Know the Truth’ about ShotSpotter as City Abandons Life-Saving Tech

The company behind the ShotSpotter gun-shot detection system remains committed to serving and protecting lives in Chicago, even as the city’s far-left mayor prepares to begin phasing out the system on Sunday, a top executive for the company told National Review.

Tom Chittum, the senior vice president of forensic services for California-based SoundThinking, said in an interview that Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson “has simply dug in his heels and doesn’t want to know the truth [about ShotSpotter], because that is not what is driving his decision making.” He said that Johnson — who recently dismissed ShotSpotter’s sophisticated acoustic sensors as nothing more than “walkie-talkies on a stick” — “clearly doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”

And, he said, if the company’s contract does expire in Chicago, SoundThinking leaders are prepared to wait Johnson out and re-engage with “the next elected leader who has some common sense” and “reinstitutes ShotSpotter.”

Attempts by National Review to reach Johnson for response via the mayor’s website were unsuccessful.

Johnson, a ShotSpotter critic who campaigned on doing away with the system, is preparing to start phasing it out on Sunday and to finish decommissioning it on November 22, despite pushback from a strong majority of the city council. Aldermen have called Shottspotter an “invaluable” tool that has been proven to save lives. Johnson said he would veto an ordinance the council passed this week to allow the police superintendent, a ShotSpotter supporter, to contract with the company.

Anti-police activists who have called ShotSpotter racist and a waste of money helped to elect Johnson last year.

Johnson’s decision to end ShotSpotter’s service comes on the heels of a new Chicago police data analysis that shows that through the first eight months of the year, ShotSpotter alerted police to more than 21,000 gunshot events with no corresponding 911 call. It aided police in making hundreds of arrests and recovering hundreds of guns and thousands of bullet casings — ballistic evidence that is critical for investigations.

Police were also able to render aid to 143 shooting victims after receiving ShotSpotter alerts during that period, but only seven of those people received aid without a corresponding 911 call, the report says.

The editorial boards of the city’s two major newspapers, the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Sun-Times, have both called for the city to continue with ShotSpotter. “Chicago must keep ShotSpotter. The data leaves no doubt,” the Tribune headline read.

And a new poll of 907 likely Chicago voters by the left-of-center Change Research found that 70 percent support or strongly support keeping ShotSpotter, with the strongest support coming from black voters and the city’s oldest residents. Even a majority of respondents who voted for Johnson, or 53 percent, supported ShotSpotter, the poll found.

“I can’t understand why Brandon Johnson would focus on such a small, loud segment of his constituency when it is clear that a majority of voters don’t feel as he does,” Chittum said. “The idea that people don’t want police responding to gun violence is not true.”

Before joining SoundThinking in 2022, Chittum was a longtime leader with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives — he started as an agent in 1999 and rose to become the bureau’s deputy director. Chittum, who is also a lawyer, said he joined SoundThinking after his ATF career because he saw “incredible potential in its technology to improve policing, save lives, and reduce gun crime.”

He said he was also impressed by the company’s willingness to defend itself of false or misleading allegations, including filing a $300 million defamation suit against Vice Media in 2021 for an article that falsely alleged that the company alters evidence for law enforcement.

“I think what you’re seeing is evidence of that again in Chicago,” he said. “This is not a company that will simply stand by while a small, vocal, uninformed or dishonest opposition maligns us and tries to what we believe is essential public-safety technology.”

ShotSpotter precisely identifies the location of gunshots through triangulation, utilizing a series of microphones in its coverage area. Trained acoustic experts then review the audio before an alert is sent to first responders, typically in less than a minute.

The recent Chicago police analysis found that ShotSpotter alerts were accurate 99.6 percent of the time, and that on average police responded 2 ½ minutes faster to ShotSpotter alerts without a corresponding 911 call than when they received a 911 call without a ShotSpotter alert.

During a city council meeting on Wednesday, an alderman critical of ShotSpotter, Andre Vasquez Jr., claimed that it had failed in its mission of reducing gun violence in the city and that the company’s leaders and supporters have had to reframe it as a life-saving tool that helps first-responders find gunshot victims when no one calls 911. Another alderman, Jason Ervin, alleged that ShotSpotter has somehow discouraged community engagement leading to fewer residents believing they need to call 911 when they hear shots.

Chittum said it is “absolutely false” that ShotSpotter has ever been sold as just a gun-violence prevention tool, even though it has been shown to reduce crime in some cities.

“ShotSpotter has long touted its value for locating gunshot-wound victims, for collecting evidence, for increasing the speed of response,” he said.

He said it’s “awful that [Ervin] believes that community engagement is calling 911 when crime is afoot,” and countered that ShotSpotter can improve community engagement with police. Residents can lose faith and trust in police when they don’t see officers responding to shootings, Chittum said. ShotSpotter makes it more likely police will respond.

“If police use those occasions when they respond out, even if they don’t find a gunshot-wound victim or arrest an offender, if they use those occasions to make contact with the people that live in those communities, knocking on doors, saying, ‘We’ve got a report of gunfire, did you hear anything? Did you see anything? Is everyone okay? If you know something please let us know, we care, we’ll respond.’ If they do that, I believe those low-friction contacts will build trust with law enforcement and the community,” he said.

Chittum noted that in many cases, community members may be in fear of retaliation if they call 911. ShotSpotter makes it more likely police will respond to those shootings, too.

Chittum was particularly critical of some of the more zealous anti-ShotSpotter activists who claim that the technology is “racist” and “evil,” that it is overly deployed in minority communities to spy on residents, and that it is dangerous because it sends amped up cops with itchy trigger fingers into minority neighborhoods.

“I have been shocked by the headwinds this technology has faced, because who doesn’t want police to respond to shootings?” he said. “ShotSpotter serves as a convenient proxy for police for a crowd of people who are anti-police. They can’t abolish the Chicago Police Department, so they will focus on ShotSpotter instead.”

He called the suggestion that ShotSpotter is deployed in a racist manner, disproportionately in minority neighborhoods, “entirely dishonest.”

Those critics, he said, “know full well that gun violence does not affect everyone in America the same way. It is disproportionately concentrated in communities of color. And I think this dishonest narrative shows that people are so opposed to people being arrested that they don’t care about people being killed.”

While there is no singular tool that can reduce crime on its own, Chittum said, ShotSpotter is an essential tool, along with a 911 system, in a comprehensive approach to fighting crime and saving lives.

“ShotSpotter and 911 together provide law enforcement more information,” he said. “ShotSpotter can tell you the what, the when, and where of gunfire, not the who. That requires investigation. But sometimes a 911 caller can tell you who, or can give you details, descriptions, and ShotSpotter can’t do that. So, the two in combination are more powerful than either in isolation.”

Chittum pushed back on the suggestion by some that ShotSpotter can be almost too effective and can overwhelm understaffed police departments with gunshot alerts, most of which don’t lead to shooting victims or to arrests.

“Are they suggesting that the ostrich approach to gun violence is better, where we stick our head in the sand and don’t learn about it?” he said. “There is no disputing that ShotSpotter will increase your awareness of gun crime, and that will require you to respond to it. The answer, though, is not to pretend it doesn’t exist. It is to adequately staff policing.”

Chittum also pushed back on media reports that cities across the county are canceling their ShotSpotter service. He said that in reality, it’s a “handful of cities, literally a number I can count on my fingers.”

“In the last year alone, more ShotSpotter customers have expanded their coverage, grown the size of their footprint, than have canceled in all of this company’s history,” he said.

According to a report in the Sun-Times, SoundThinking has offered Chicago a 48 percent discount for the next 15 months — a drop from $1.2 million per month to $626,012 — to continue the service and to buy it more time to consider its gunshot-detection options.

If SoundThinking’s contract in Chicago does expires on Sunday, the company will stop sending the company real-time gunshot alerts and will begin dismantling its infrastructure in the city. The company will continue to provide police with historical gun crime data and analytics tools for the next 60 days.

Chittum didn’t deny that SoundThinking has a business interest in Chicago, but he insisted there is more at stake than just profits to his company’s leaders.

“We must remain profitable to continue doing the work that we do. But I don’t believe it is simply a tagline to say that we do work that matters. And from the CEO on down, I believe this is a company that tries to do what it says it does,” he said. “We believe in this technology.”