Chicago activists call on mayor to end use of ShotSpotter
The short version: Chicago organizers are pressing Mayor Brandon Johnson to finally ditch ShotSpotter, spotlighting how broken promises on surveillance tech become permanent infrastructure.
Our Take
FOX 32 Chicago captures something we see over and over in this fight: a mayor campaigns on ending a surveillance program, gets into office, and suddenly the tech is still humming along. ShotSpotter isn't an ALPR system, but it's cut from the same cloth as Flock's camera network — a private vendor selling cities on the promise of safety, with little independent proof it actually reduces crime, and plenty of documented cases of bad data sending armed officers into tense, sometimes deadly encounters based on a sound algorithm's guess.
The pattern here matters beyond Chicago. Once a department integrates a surveillance tool into daily operations, walking it back becomes a political fight all its own — budgets get built around it, vendors lobby hard to keep contracts alive, and 'ending' the program quietly turns into 'pausing' or 'rebranding' it. That's exactly the playbook we've watched Flock Safety run in city after city when local officials try to hit pause on ALPR deployments.
Credit to these activists for holding a politician to his own word — that's the only lever that reliably works. If you want to see what's already watching your block, check our camera map, and if you're ready to push back locally, our take-action page has the tools to get started.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of FOX 32 Chicago, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.