CHICAGO — Every year in Chicago, ShotSpotter, a surveillance system claiming to detect gunfire, sends over 31,600 unfounded alerts – more than 87 a day – to the Chicago Police Department (CPD) that lead police to find no indication of any gun-related incident. More than 90% of all ShotSpotter alerts turn up nothing. Despite knowing the system is overwhelmingly and dangerously untrustworthy, the City of Chicago deliberately relies on a technology that provides no proven public safety benefit and, instead, enables discriminatory policing, claims a new civil rights class action filed today.

Last year, the MacArthur Justice Center released a study of police data explaining that the overwhelming majority of ShotSpotter alerts turn up nothing. The Chicago Office of the Inspector General (OIG) also analyzed the City’s own police data and concluded that ShotSpotter generates tens of thousands of unjustified CPD deployments each year.

“Chicago is using ShotSpotter to justify stop-and-frisk and exacerbate its history of racist and oppressive policing within communities of color,” said Jonathan Manes, who is leading the ShotSpotter efforts for the MacArthur Justice Center. “The City’s use of ShotSpotter is leading to systematic Fourth Amendment violations and imposes a discriminatory burden on Black and Latinx residents in violation of the U.S. Constitution and the Illinois Civil Rights Act. We are asking the court to order the City to stop using ShotSpotter and to stop relying on ShotSpotter alerts as a reason to stop and frisk people on the streets and treat people as criminal suspects.”

One of the named plaintiffs in the lawsuit, Michael Williams, 65, spent nearly a year falsely incarcerated in Cook County Jail in terrible health after CPD officers deliberately relied on a faulty ShotSpotter alert to falsely accuse him of murder. The Cook County State’s Attorney finally conceded that it could not vouch for the ShotSpotter alert, dropped all of the ShotSpotter evidence, and then admitted to the judge that they had no basis to continue the prosecution and dismissed the charges. Cook County prosecutors regularly drop cases involving ShotSpotter evidence or take other steps to avoid defending the system’s reliability in court when it is challenged.

“I hope this lawsuit puts an end to ShotSpotter in Chicago because of the harm that it’s doing to the Black and Brown community,” said Michael Williams. “I would ask people in Chicago to focus their attention on ShotSpotter before one of their loved ones ends up in the county jail falsely accused or ends up being shot by a trigger-happy police officer chasing a ShotSpotter alert.”

Williams, a figure well-known in his community, volunteered a ride home to a young man one evening. Within a few blocks, the young man was shot through the open window of the car. The ShotSpotter alert originally identified the sound as fireworks and the location as over a mile away. Yet, CPD fixated on this single alert, ignoring evidence showing the shot did not come from inside Williams’ car, to falsely accuse him.

“ShotSpotter landed me in jail,” continued Mr. Williams. “I spent eleven months in terrible conditions in the Cook County Jail because of how police used ShotSpotter to accuse me of a crime I did not commit. It was extremely rough for me. I contracted COVID twice. I did not get proper meals for my diabetes. I developed a nerve condition that gives me tremors in my right hand that I am still dealing with at home.”

ShotSpotter continues to publicly claim a 97% accuracy rate, a deceptive and false statistic. There has never been any actual testing to see whether ShotSpotter can reliably tell the difference between the sound of gunshots and other noises like firecrackers, backfiring cars, construction noises, helicopters, and other loud, impulsive sounds. ShotSpotter’s so-called “accuracy” numbers just assume that its alerts correspond to gunfire 100% of the time and only mark down an alert as a mistake if police happen to file a voluntary complaint. But in Chicago, police officers never file a complaint when they chase down a ShotSpotter alert to find nothing, which is what happens more than 90% of the time. Even with respect to the location of supposed gunshots, ShotSpotter frequently misses the mark by large distances.

As documented by the OIG, CPD uses ShotSpotter alerts to illegally stop and detain thousands of Chicagoans who happen to be in the location of an alert. When CPD receive a ShotSpotter alert, officers race to the location of the alert—often with multiple squad cars—because the system is telling them that a person just fired a gun there. CPD officers treat anyone in the area with suspicion, despite knowing that the overwhelming majority of ShotSpotter alerts turn up no evidence of gunfire.

Daniel Ortiz, another named plaintiff, was finishing his children’s laundry when he was illegally stopped, frisked, handcuffed, interrogated, and ultimately arrested outside of the laundromat by CPD officers following an unfounded ShotSpotter alert. He spent the night in jail before charges were dismissed. In fact, there had been no gunshot, and police found nothing to corroborate the ShotSpotter alert.

“I wasn’t doing anything wrong,” said Ortiz. “I was doing my kids’ laundry. Yet police interrogated me, arrested me, and jailed me for no reason. It felt like the police were trying to ruin my life. It was humiliating. Now, I can’t even face going back to that laundromat.”

The false ShotSpotter alert was the only reason that CPD officers had arrived in the parking lot and targeted Ortiz. Even as it became clear that there was no gunfire to be found, the officers escalated the encounter. Ortiz told them, truthfully, that he had legally smoked marijuana and that he possessed a legal quantity of the drug, purchased at a legitimate marijuana dispensary nearby. They illegally searched his car, discovered the legal amount of marijuana and a legal bottle of prescription drugs prescribed to his mother and falsely arrested him on drug charges.

“I come from a good family, a good household,” said Ortiz. “I have children and responsibilities. But in that moment, all the police saw were stereotypes. That day, I felt that the police could do anything. But I’ve never been a quitter. So, I’m doing this for others. I don’t want this to happen to anyone else.”

According to OIG, in 18 months CPD officers detained more than 2,400 Chicago residents following a ShotSpotter alert or because police encountered a person in an area that officer’s perceived had a history of frequent ShotSpotter alerts.

According to the lawsuit, over a six-month period, police reported used physical force on at least 82 Chicagoans, nearly all unarmed Black or Latinx men, during ShotSpotter-prompted deployments.

In Chicago, the City has chosen to impose these burdens along stark racial lines. The City only deploys ShotSpotter across the South and West sides of Chicago. The City has chosen to blanket ShotSpotter sensors over the twelve police districts with the highest proportion of Black and Latinx residents and the lowest proportion of White residents. 80% of Black Chicagoans and 65% of Latinx Chicagoans live under ShotSpotter’s shadow, compared to only 30% of White Chicagoans. Unfounded ShotSpotter deployments amounted to more than one in twelve of the top-priority police dispatches in the South and West Side police districts where ShotSpotter is active.

“Cities and police have long spent money on technology while abusing the civil liberties of Black and brown people,” said Alejandro Ruizesparza , Co-Executive Director of Lucy Parsons Labs, a digital rights non-profit that is a plaintiff in the lawsuit and is bringing the case on behalf of its members and itself. “This litigation makes it clear police can’t abuse our protected rights by offloading them to technologies or algorithms. Governments shouldn’t be in the business of digitizing racist policing, like stop and frisk.”

Chicago has committed $9 million a year to pay ShotSpotter for the system and it spends countless additional resources to support thousands of hours of CPD officers chasing down largely unfounded alerts. In 2018, the City of Chicago entered a $33 million, non-competitive, three-year contract with ShotSpotter. Despite damning data and growing public concern, the City secretly extended the contract for two more years through August 2023 without any public notice or input and recently increased the contract’s total value by nearly $6 million. The City of Chicago is one of ShotSpotter’s two largest customers, accounting for 18% of its annual revenue in 2020.

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The Roderick & Solange MacArthur Justice Center is a national, nonprofit legal organization dedicated to protecting civil rights and fighting injustice in the criminal legal system through litigation at the trial, appellate, and Supreme Court levels. www.macarthurjustice.org