Chicago News: Illinois $56Billion Budget; E-Bike Regulation; CPD Faster After ShotSpotter Removed

Our Take

Buried in this Heart of Chicago Interviews roundup is a data point that deserves way more attention than a single segment: a University of Chicago analysis found police actually responded faster to 911 calls on the South and West Sides after ShotSpotter was ripped out. That's not a minor footnote — it's a direct rebuttal to years of claims that acoustic gunshot detection makes officers quicker and communities safer. If anything, it suggests the system was clogging up dispatch with false positives and pulling resources toward phantom shots instead of real calls for help.

We've said it before about ALPRs and we'll say it again about ShotSpotter: the surveillance industry sells cities on speed and safety, but the receipts rarely back it up. Chicago spent tens of millions on a system that flagged mostly non-gunfire noise, sent cops into neighborhoods on high alert for nothing, and apparently made response times worse, not better. That's the same pattern we track with Flock Safety's ALPR network — expensive tech marketed as a crime-fighting silver bullet, deployed with little independent evaluation, and left in place long after the evidence turns sour.

Credit to Heart of Chicago Interviews for surfacing the UChicago findings alongside the budget and e-bike news — it's easy for this kind of accountability data to get lost in a busy news cycle. If your city is being sold on ALPRs, gunshot sensors, or any other always-on surveillance tool, don't take the vendor's word for it. Check our camera map to see what's already watching your streets, and hit up our take-action page if you want to push back before the contract gets signed.