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Abstract

While police agencies continue to rely heavily on technologies to perform the basic functions of law enforcement, research has largely ignored the community impacts of certain technologies. In Chicago, the gunshot detection tool ShotSpotter has raised concerns with community members that have gone unexamined and unrecognized by city officials. Through semi-structured interviews with Chicago community advocates, city officials, public defenders, and other stakeholders with knowledge about ShotSpotter, this paper explores the major concerns about the impacts of ShotSpotter and its use by CPD and law enforcement actors. In the absence of rigorous research about the effects of this technology, this paper relies on the findings of the 2021 Office of Inspector General report about ShotSpotter’s operational effectiveness to provide implications for how these concerns should direct the City’s actions with respect to their contract with ShotSpotter and future decisions about technology deployment. Analysis of these interviews revealed that community advocates were most concerned with ShotSpotter’s contribution to the hyper-policing of majority Black and Latinx neighborhoods on the South and West sides of Chicago and its wrongful use as prosecutorial evidence in courts.

Ultimately, the concerns that community advocates and researchers expressed in this paper suggest that the City should cancel its contract with ShotSpotter and signal a shared desire for increased community investment, political representation, and government accountability.

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