Lightfoot foot Pursuit policy change
The short version: A Chicago Justice Project breakdown of ShotSpotter's dismal 85% no-report rate shows how gunshot detection tech manufactures pretexts for police stops, not public safety.
Our Take
Tracy Siska of the Chicago Justice Project digs into Jamie Kalven's reporting on foot pursuit policy and surfaces a number that should stop every city council member cold: 85.35 percent of ShotSpotter alerts in Chicago generated zero case reports. That's not a rounding error, that's a system that sends armed officers racing into neighborhoods, often triggering risky foot pursuits and stops, based on alerts that turn up nothing eight times out of ten. Siska's pushback on a "conservative" reading of that stat matters because the sanitized version of this story always undercounts the human cost of false positives.
This is the pattern we track across the country: acoustic sensors, ALPRs, and other always-on detection tech get sold to city halls as objective, data-driven policing, then the data itself shows the objectivity is a mirage. When five out of six alerts go nowhere, what you've actually built is a machine for generating suspicion and justifying aggressive encounters in the same handful of over-policed zip codes, every single day. Foot pursuit policy doesn't exist in a vacuum — it exists downstream of systems that manufacture the pretext for the chase in the first place.
Credit to Siska and the Chicago Justice Project for keeping the receipts on this. If your city is running ShotSpotter or quietly expanding Flock camera networks alongside it, check our camera map to see what's already watching your block, and use our take-action guide to push your local council for the same kind of hard numbers Chicago is finally being forced to answer for.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of Chicago Justice Project, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.