Bruce Rushton
The State Journal-Register
A representative from a gunshot-detection company is scheduling meetings with Springfield aldermen about the effectiveness of technology designed to alert police when shots are fired.
The meetings come midway through a three-year contract reached in 2020, when Springfield aldermen agreed to pay about $644,000 to ShotSpotter, a California-based company, to install gunshot detection equipment covering 4.25 square miles in the city. While Mayor Jim Langfelder and police are ShotSpotter fans, the city council is divided.
ShotSpotter has contracts in more than 100 municipalities, but critics question the technology in cities such as Chicago, where the inspector general in August issued a report stating that slightly more than 9% of ShotSpotter alerts produced evidence of gun-related crimes. Furthermore, the inspector general found, some officers cited high numbers of ShotSpotter alerts in neighborhoods as justification for searching people, even when police weren’t responding to alerts.
According to the Chicago inspector general’s office, the data doesn’t show that ShotSpotter helps fight violent crime, mirroring conclusions reached in a study published last spring in the Journal of Urban Health that showed no significant impact on arrests or the number of gun-related homicides in cities with ShotSpotter. Activists objected to ShotSpotter earlier this year after a Chicago officer responding to an alert shot and killed Adam Toledo, 13, after the boy tossed a gun behind a fence.
Dennis Mares, a Southern Illinois University professor whose research has raised questions about ShotSpotter’s effectiveness, says that criticism from the Chicago inspector general goes too far.
In 2012, Mares and a fellow researcher found that ShotSpotter had little impact in reducing St. Louis gun crimes. More recently, he’s found promise in Cincinnati, where ShotSpotter has been installed, according to a September op-ed piece Mares authored for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
Studies show that ShotSpotter detects 80 percent of gunshots, Mares writes, while citizens report 20 percent of gunfire, and attempts to increase ShotSpotter’s detection rate would increase the number of false alarms. It’s tough to link gunshot alerts to gunplay absent someone being wounded, he wrote, and he faults the Chicago inspector general’s finding that 9.1 percent of ShotSpotter alerts produce evidence of gun crimes.
“I understand why many people may be disinclined to support ShotSpotter technology after reading the recent coverage, but I hope that my added context may soften that stance,” Mares wrote.
In Springfield, some city council members say they’re having second thoughts about ShotSpotter.
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“I’m just not sure it’s worth the money,” said Ward 10 Ald. Ralph Hanauer, who voted against ShotSpotter. “I don’t know that it’s necessarily been a crime solver.” Ward 7 Ald. Joe McMenamin, who also voted no, said that he thought then that the cost outweighed the benefit. He doesn’t plan to meet with the ShotSpotter representative.
“That’s a sales pitch,” McMenamin said. “I don’t trust their objectivity in presenting the information.”
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Through Nov. 23, ShotSpotter this year had issued 809 gunshot alerts, according to Springfield Police Deputy Chief Joshua Stuenkel.
Twenty-five percent of the alerts, more than twice the percentage found in Chicago, were verified as bona fide, either through physical evidence or witnesses, he said. In cases of nighttime alerts, the department, if feasible, sends officers to look for shell casings or other evidence during daylight hours, he said, which could account for the difference.
When ShotSpotter was first installed in Springfield, fireworks produced several false alarms, Stuenkel said, but that’s been addressed.
Stuenkel and Mares, the Southern Illinois University researcher, said the absence of witnesses, physical evidence or charges doesn’t mean that ShotSpotter goofed. Shell casings can get caught in tire treads and travel far, police say, and revolvers don’t discharge casings.
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Joe McMenamin for Ward 7 