Transparent Council
After six postponements, an intense town hall, and relentless campaigning by Mayor Duggan and Chief White, the Detroit City Council voted 5 to 4 to support a $7 million contract for ShotSpotter gun detection technology.
The fight against ShotSpotter is far from over.
Across the country people are recognizing that bloated police budgets and increasing surveillance technologies are not making us safer. Alternatives to policing are gaining momentum and the lame, repeated refrain that spending more money will prevent violence rings hollow.
In the recent struggle against ShotSpotter in Detroit, three things are now clear. First, no one wants money intended to help people recover from COVID redirected to technologies of surveillance. The effort to use federal support dollars was rejected thanks to massive public outcry.
Second, thousands of people learned about the increasing use of surveillance and ShotSpotter. Hundreds of people spoke out against ShotSpotter based on research, analysis, and the experience of other cities. Speakers at City Council referred to the origins of the company profiteering from war and noted for its public relations expertise, not its technological capabilities. They pointed to research that consistently demonstrates the ineffectiveness of ShotSpotter. This research included:
In a peer reviewed study published last year in the Journal of Public Health, researchers “examined the effect of ShotSpotter” by analyzing data from 68 large metropolitan counties in the United States from 1999 to 2016. The results suggest “that implementing ShotSpotter technology has no significant impact on firearm-related homicides or arrest outcomes.”
In Chicago a 2021 report by the city’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) found that “ShotSpotter alerts rarely produce documented evidence of a gun-related crime, investigatory stop, or recovery of a firearm.”
MacArthur Justice Center at Northwestern’s Pritzker School of Law study found “40,000 dead-end deployments” and concluded that “the vast majority of alerts generated by the system turn up no evidence of gunfire or any gun-related crime.”
A 2020 paper in the Journal of Experimental Criminology considered the effect of the system in St. Louis finding that the system did not correspond to any “reductions in serious violent crimes,” but that it did increase demand on police resources.
Critics also pointed to flaws in ShotSpotter claims of effectiveness, noting that such claims were contained in research conducted by or paid for by the company itself.
In contrast to these reasoned arguments, those advocating ShotSpotter used highly emotional appeals, pointing to the deaths of children, raining gunfire, and wild claims of ShotSpotter effectiveness. While it is understandable why some people may accept such arguments, there is no excuse for the behavior of Councilman Young. He rattled off statistics with no foundation. His behavior was typical of the 5 who voted for the contract.
Third, the police and the administration play fast and loose with data to get what they want. This time, even some council members were not buying the efforts to confuse causation and correlation. Council member Waters voted against ShotSpotter because she said data from the 8th and 9th Precincts do not show that it has positively affected crime rates. She endorsed concerns of critics, adding the community is “rightly fearful of the impacts it can have on our people.”
She said, “Cases from other localities show how the technology can be abused to infringe on citizens’ First Amendment rights, and other localities are abandoning the technology because it has led to more negative police/community interactions. Detroit cannot afford to deploy this unproven and dangerous technology that could hurt those most vulnerable in our community while exposing the city to potentially millions in lawsuits.”
Such fears are well founded. This week we have seen the tragic results of police use of deadly force, killing Porter Burke during a mental challenge. Mr. Burke was carrying a pocket knife. It is not hard to imagine what ShotSpotter will bring, as police rush to gunfire.
The tragedies awaiting us rest on those who voted for ShotSpotter. But their days are numbered. More people are becoming aware of those on council whose cynical efforts to curry favor with powerful interests are the most transparent part of how they “govern.”