At least three people, including two teenagers, have been killed in Chicago over the last two weeks in shootings that weren’t immediately reported by residents calling 911 and that occurred in neighborhoods previously covered by the city’s now-decommissioned ShotSpotter gunshot-detection system.
The body of 19-year-old Sierra Evans was discovered Saturday morning on Chicago’s Southeast Side hours after she was shot, according to media reports. On Tuesday, police found Thaddeus Scott, 53, dead with gunshots to his chest and back on a West Side street.
Most recently, police found a 14-year-old boy fatally shot late Tuesday on a West Side sidewalk. Police didn’t receive a call about him until about 45 minutes after he was shot, according to the public-safety news site, CWBChicago, which is keeping a running tally of shooting victims who are injured or killed in neighborhoods that had ShotSpotter.
Other Chicago news outlets also reported on the three killings.
Some of the city’s aldermen say it’s possible some of the three victims may have been saved if ShotSpotter had been active and if emergency responders had arrived promptly. They are calling for ShotSpotter to be reactivated in Chicago.
In response, the office of far-left mayor Brandon Johnson, who ended the ShotSpotter contract in part to appease progressive activists who supported his candidacy, said the deaths shouldn’t be used for political gain.
“This is not about politics,” Garien Gatewood, deputy mayor for community safety, told WGN9 News in a statement. “This is about how we support families and communities, and perpetuating their pain for political gain is extremely insensitive and immoral.”
Johnson announced in February that he would be canceling ShotSpotter this fall. Anti-police activists who backed his campaign say the technology is expensive, ineffective at reducing crime, and racist for being overly-deployed in minority neighborhoods. Johnson recently dismissed ShotSpotter’s sophisticated acoustic sensors which accurately detect gunfire as nothing more than “walkie-talkies on a stick.”
A recent data analysis by the Chicago Police Department found that during the first eight months of the year ShotSpotter alerts helped police make hundreds of arrests, recover hundreds of guns and thousands of bullet casings, and provide aid to more than 100 shooting victims, some of whom wouldn’t have otherwise received timely care.
The vast majority of Chicago aldermen supported keeping ShotSpotter and backed measures to keep the system, but Johnson argued that only the mayor has contracting power. ShotSpotter-backers accused Johnson of playing “Russian roulette with our constituents’ lives.”
Johnson officially terminated the city’s relationship with SoundThinking, ShotSpotter’s parent company, at 12:01 a.m. on September 23.
That night, less than 24 hours after police stopped getting ShotSpotter alerts, a police sergeant encountered a woman on the sidewalk who’d been shot twice in the leg and was transported to a hospital with critical injuries, according to CWBChicago. No one reported the shooting to 911.
Around 9:30 a.m. on Saturday, police found Evans’s body in an alley. The recent high-school graduate was working at UPS and had dreams of opening a beauty salon, the teen’s family told the Chicago Tribune.
Alderman Peter Chico, a ShotSpotter supporter and police officer, reached out to SoundThinking leaders to see if their sensors were still in place and if they had detected shots. They were and they had. Alderman David Moore, another ShotSpotter supporter, told local news outlets that the system had detected gunshots about nine hours earlier near where Evans was found.
“It’s unfortunate the young woman’s death is an example of how this tragedy may have been avoided if the ShotSpotter technology was still active. Instead of a resident finding her body hours later, the sound of gunfire would have alerted CPD to multiple shots at 12:06 a.m.,” Moore told reporters.
“While the politics of this city is trying to minimize this tragedy, I’m not going to remain silent,” he added. “In the name of safety and on behalf of the residents across the city, I am calling upon the administration to reactivate ShotSpotter immediately.”
Chico agreed that police would have likely found Evans much sooner if ShotSpotter was active.
“Her lying here in the alley for eight, nine hours is unacceptable,” he said. “It’s inhumane.”
Even if Evans’s life couldn’t have been saved, ShotSpotter could have helped police investigate the shooting and identify her killer, the teen’s family members said.
“If ShotSpotter was on that night, we probably wouldn’t have been able to save her, but at least we would have found out where it was and we could have found out who it was or where the shots came from,” Carlos Abrams, Evan’s stepfather, told the Tribune.
Alderwoman Monique Scott released a statement on Instagram calling for ShotSpotter to be reactivated after the 14-year-old boy was killed in her ward and no one promptly called 911.
“An ambulance could have been dispatched within minutes, but instead, a young man bled out on the street,” she wrote. “We are in a crisis, especially on the West Side. No one expects ShotSpotter to solve every crime, but it could have saved a life with a timely alert.”
In total, CWBChicago has identified six shootings without 911 calls, including the three fatal shootings, that have occurred in neighborhoods where ShotSpotter had been active.
Just before Chicago’s ShotSpotter contract lapsed, Johnson put out a formal request — a Request for Information — for companies to submit proposals for “reliable and efficient forms of first responder technology” to replace the system.
He also announced that a working group is in the process of “developing alternative options to continue increasing safety for Chicago residents and communities.” The group is exploring: victim-prevention and victim-assistance programs; efforts to improve police response times; “Investing in first responder personnel to work with communities to help resolve crimes”; and increasing funding for outreach programs and hiring “violence interrupters.”
“The ultimate goal is to deploy resources on the most effective strategies and tactics proven to accelerate the current downward trend in violent crime. We have to explore better options that save more lives,” Johnson said in a statement. “Through this RFI process, the City of Chicago will be able to aggressively look at equitable alternatives to help first responders acquire the absolute best community safety resources to aid them in reaching and responding to emergency scenes.”