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Originally Posted by sentinel
The fact that Johnson refused to renew ShotSpotter’s contract is quite disappointing, and I wish people would discuss it more because it’s such a vital tool.
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I've never seen a coherent explanation for why it is vital, only scaremongering. You would think the company would be able to make a clear case for the value of their product.
On the other hand, I have seen
a bunch of research on how it doesn't help lower gun violence.
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In May 2021, the MacArthur Justice Center released a study that found most ShotSpotter alerts turn up no evidence of gunfire or any gun-related crime but instead send police on thousands of unfounded and high-intensity deployments, which are focused almost exclusively in Black and Brown communities. The researchers found that 89% of ShotSpotter deployments in Chicago turned up no gun-related crime and 86% led to no report of any crime at all.
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One study published in April in the peer-reviewed Journal of Urban Health examined ShotSpotter in 68 large, metropolitan counties from 1999 to 2016, the largest review to date. It found that the technology didn’t reduce gun violence or increase community safety.
“The evidence that we’ve produced suggests that the technology does not reduce firearm violence in the long-term, and the implementation of the technology does not lead to increased murder or weapons-related arrests,” said lead author Mitch Doucette.
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Another study published in November, by Michael Topper and Toshio Ferrazares, PhD students at the University of California, Santa Barbara, looking at Chicago, found that after the roll-out of Shotspotter the police responded to 9/11 calls two minutes slower than before, and in the case of domestic-violence calls made fewer arrests. Ralph Clark, the CEO of SoundThinking, says people who think the tool is directly able to prevent violent crime are “singularly misinformed”.
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