Why Candi CdeBaca Was The Only Councilperson to Vote No on ShotSpotter

Our Take

City Cast Denver's look back at the ShotSpotter vote is worth your time, and not just as a Denver history lesson. Every surveillance rollout follows the same script: a council chamber full of politicians eager to look tough on crime, a vendor promising a tidy technical fix, and one lone voice asking who's actually going to be watched, and who gets to say no. Candi CdeBaca was that voice on ShotSpotter. The pattern repeats today with Flock Safety's ALPR cameras, pitched the same way — as an easy, apolitical tool that only catches 'bad guys' — while the actual scope of what gets logged, shared, and searched stays vague.

That's the through-line this video makes worth watching even if you've never thought about gunshot-detection microphones before. Both ShotSpotter and Flock rely on communities not asking hard questions until the system is already installed and the vendor contract is signed. By the time people realize their movements or their neighborhood's audio are being fed into a private company's database, there's no vote left to cast. CdeBaca's no didn't stop the program, but it put a marker down that dissent existed, and that mattered.

Credit to City Cast Denver for revisiting a vote most people have forgotten. If you want to see whether similar surveillance tech has landed near you, check our camera map, and if you'd rather not wait for your own council's lone dissenting vote, our take-action page has ways to speak up before the contract's signed.