Editor's note: This article was revised on July 26 to include a statement from ShotSpotter responding to and disputing the allegations made in the lawsuit against the Chicago Police Department.
A new class action lawsuit seeks to block Chicago Police from continuing to rely on its ShotSpotter system when making stops and arrests for potential gun violence.
The lawsuit claims the system, which police use to help identify possible shootings in real time, is unreliable and produces racially discriminatory false arrests and harassment of innocent people living in predominantly Black and Latino neighborhoods on Chicago’s South and West sides.
The lawsuit was filed on July 21, by attorneys Jonathan Manes and Alexa Van Brunt, of the Roderick & Solange MacArthur Justice Center, of Chicago.
The MacArthur Justice Center is a non-profit social justice legal organization, which participates in litigation against police and government agencies to press wrongful conviction claims and to promote a list of predominantly progressive political goals, including the protection of “immigrants rights,” “protestors’ rights,” and ending cash bail, among others.
Chicago’s “use of ShotSpotter is fueling unconstitutional policing practices in a City that has a long history of discriminatory police conduct,” the lawsuit said. “Every day in Chicago, Chicago Police Department (CPD) officers are deployed around 100 times to chase down alerts of supposed gunfire generated by ShotSpotter.
“More than 90% of the time they find no indication of any gun-related incident, according to the City’s own data. The result is more than 31,600 unfounded CPD deployments every year because of ShotSpotter…
“… The City’s decision to use this unreliable technology to direct massive numbers of unwarranted and highly volatile police deployments produces grave and systematic violations of Chicagoans’ constitutional and statutory rights.”
According to the complaint, the city spends more than $9 million a year to for-profit company ShotSpotter to use its gunshot detection system.
The complaint asserts, however, that the city has targeted the system primarily at Black and Latino neighborhoods, and use the system to dispatch officers about 100 times a day to investigate suspected gun violence. However, more than 90% of those suspected incidents turn out to be false alarms, the complaint said.
Nonetheless, responding officers allegedly use the ShotSpotter system to justify “scores of illegal stops and arrests” of people who allegedly just “happened to be near the location of an alert.”
The complaint calls specific attention to the alleged false arrests of Michael Williams, a Black 65-year-old man from Chicago’s South Side, and Daniel Ortiz, 36, a Puerto Rican man.
According to the complaint, both men were wrongfully arrested by Chicago Police responding to ShotSpotter alerts in their neighborhoods.
According to the complaint, Williams spent 11 months in jail after police claimed ShotSpotter indicated a gun shot came from within his car on May 31, 2020. According to the complaint, the gun shot came from outside, targeted at a passenger in his car. According to the complaint, Williams took the injured man to the hospital, and gave his name and contact information to hospital security, who then turned it over to police.
He was then arrested after voluntarily going with police to answer questions about the incident. When the case went before a judge, prosecutors abruptly dismissed the case.
Ortiz was allegedly outside a laundromat on April 19, 2021, when officers allegedly rolled up to investigate an allegedly false report of gun fire detected by ShotSpotter. According to the complaint, officers then used that report as justification to search Ortiz’s vehicle, where they found an allegedly legal amount of marijuana and a bottle of prescription medication, allegedly for Ortiz’s mother.
According to the complaint, Ortiz was released the next day, and ultimately recovered his vehicle, which had been seized by police.
The lawsuit asks the court to award Williams and Ortiz compensatory and punitive damages.
However, the complaint further asks the court to issue orders barring the city from continuing to use ShotSpotter to aid police investigations, or as justification for stops, searches and arrests of gun violence suspects. The lawsuit asks the court to declare the use of ShotSpotter amounts to violations of the Illinois Civil Rights Act and the U.S. Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause.
ShotSpotter was not named as a defendant in the lawsuit.
However, the company released the following statement on July 26 in response to the lawsuit's allegations:
“The ShotSpotter system has an independently verified accuracy rate of 97%. In this case, the company consistently identified the same intersection in both its real-time alert and subsequent detailed forensic report, as later acknowledged by the Associated Press ("the location identified on the maps and GPS coordinates in both reports remained around the same intersection"). In fact, Mr. Williams himself agrees that the gunfire that killed Safarian Herring happened at that intersection.
"ShotSpotter was not responsible for Michael Williams’ arrest or incarceration. The arrest report never mentions ShotSpotter and Mr. Williams was not arrested until three months after the real-time alert was issued. Authorities decide whether to arrest and prosecute someone and ShotSpotter is not involved in those decisions. ShotSpotter identifies and alerts on gunfire incidents, not people.
"ShotSpotter was not aware until months after Mr. Williams had been arrested and did not know the prosecutor’s theory of the case was that Mr. Williams shot Mr. Herring inside a car. Once ShotSpotter learned of the prosecutor’s theory, the company reminded the prosecutor that ShotSpotter's evidence is only guaranteed to locate shots fired outdoors, not inside a car or building, and would not support the prosecutor’s theory of the case. It was then that the prosecution dismissed the case against Mr. Williams.
"Mr. Williams’ defense counsel also had the information necessary to raise this argument, but he did not. ShotSpotter did.
"ShotSpotter provides unique, reliable, and valuable evidence and expert witness testimony that has been successfully admitted in 200 court cases, in 20 states, and has survived scrutiny in dozens of Frye and Daubert challenges.”
The lawsuit comes as the city of Chicago continues to suffer from its worst multi-year crime waves in decades. According to Chicago city data, homicides are up 29% and firearm violence incidents are up 13%, compared to 2019. And those represent declines from the highs of 2020 and 2021.
Further, carjacking incidents are at their highest levels ever recorded in Chicago. And all manners of violent crimes have increased throughout the city, including in neighborhoods and districts once considered relatively low crime areas.