Editorial cartoonist Scott Stantis on ShotSpotter for for Sun, Sept 15, 2024. (Scott Stantis/For the Chicago Tribune)
The Editorial Board | Chicago Tribune
There now is no question that Chicago needs the gunfire detection technology known as ShotSpotter.
We sympathize with those who wish this financially strapped city did not have use for an expensive system designed to get police officers more quickly to a bloody scene on its streets. We dearly wish the same. But the data is clear. Need it we do. To remove it will cost the lives of Chicagoans.
Back in May, we noted that whatever arguments had been made against ShotSpotter as a tool to catch and arrest violent criminals were ignoring something yet more important: the technology’s ability to get help quickly for shooting victims, including those rapidly bleeding to death. In an ideal city, people would call 911 and emergency workers would rush immediately to the scene; heck, in an ideal city, those scenes would never materialize in the first place. But we do not inhabit such a halcyon place. In the here and now, those scenes play out every weekend.
On Thursday, this newspaper published an op-ed piece by researchers from the University of Chicago’s Crime Lab using new data from their work in the field. The conclusion? ShotSpotter saves lives.
When Joe Ferguson, then the city’s inspector general, wrote a 2021 report on the Chicago Police Department’s use of ShotSpotter, he rightly made the point that more data was needed. On Thursday, we published more data.
The Crime Lab methodology looked at the differences between what happened at shooting scenes right at the boundaries of adjoining police districts — those that have ShotSpotter and those that do not. The idea was to capture as much of a like environment as possible. Districts have to be divided somewhere and if you look right at where they meet, then other demographic and socioeconomic factors are far less likely to come into play; researchers in other fields, such as education, use the same technique.
What did the University of Chicago researchers find? “After ShotSpotter goes live, fatality rates are about 4 percentage points lower in the areas with the technology. With an overall fatality rate of 17%, this is about a one-quarter drop in the odds the victim dies.”
And if that were not persuasive enough? “Given the number of shootings each year in the police districts that currently have ShotSpotter, there is, roughly speaking, a 3-in-4 chance that the technology saves about 85 lives per year. That comes from multiplying a 4-percentage-point change in the fatality rate by the total number of shootings in the ShotSpotter areas, equal to 2,124 in 2023.”
That’s written in hedged data speak, not the kind of fevered political debate you might find on the floor of the City Council. But only a fool cannot see that makes for determinative evidence that ShotSpotter saves a lot of lives by getting help to victims sooner.
Read more here.