Deborah Witzburg Interview - ShotSpotter Evaluation - Chicago Justice Show
The short version: Chicago's own watchdog found ShotSpotter rarely turns up evidence of actual gunfire, a warning sign for every city buying surveillance tech on faith.
Our Take
The Chicago Justice Project's sit-down with Deputy Inspector General Deborah Witzburg is worth your time because it's not activists making noise — it's the city's own internal watchdog laying out, on the record, that ShotSpotter deployments overwhelmingly fail to produce evidence of gun crimes. That's the kind of finding that should stop procurement committees in their tracks, but rarely does, because once a surveillance contract is signed the political incentive is to defend the purchase, not audit it.
This matters far beyond ShotSpotter. It's the same pattern we track with Flock Safety's ALPR network: vendors sell promises of safety and efficiency, cities sign multi-year contracts, and independent evaluation — when it happens at all — comes years later, after the cameras are already bolted to poles and the data is already flowing to third parties. Chicago at least has an Inspector General with the authority to dig into the numbers. Most towns running Flock cameras have no equivalent oversight checking whether the tech delivers on its claims or just expands the surveillance footprint with little accountability.
Credit to the Chicago Justice Project for pushing this interview out and making Witzburg's findings accessible. If your own city is leaning on unproven technology to justify more cameras and more data collection, it's worth finding out what's actually on your streets — check our camera map and see what you can do about it on our take-action page.
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.