Cambridge’s police unions said the shutdown of ShotSpotter gunfire-listening technology may have contributed to the death on Saturday of Xavier Bautista. They issue a joint press release Monday.
Bautista, 32, of Cambridge, a Public Works employee for the city, was shot at 4:30 a.m. Saturday at Broadway and Norfolk Street in The Port neighborhood, police and district attorney Marian Ryan said. A 911 call expressing concern about the victim came in at 5:26 a.m., police said.
Scanner reports show first responders were on the scene just one minute later, but Bautista was dead when they arrived, and declared so at 5:33 a.m. The unions called it a tragedy “compounded by the fact that … if ShotSpotter detection was received at the time of this incident, Cambridge emergency personnel would have had the opportunity to discover the scene much sooner than 60 minutes after the incident, and render emergency aid to the victim.”
“This is directly related to the City Council’s mandate removing ShotSpotter technology from deployment,” the Cambridge Police Patrol Officers Association and Cambridge Police Superior Officers Association said.
City councillors voted May 18 for the city manager to get rid of the technology. Police public information officer Robert Reardon confirmed on Saturday that the order had been followed, and police had no access to ShotSpotter at the time of the shooting.
The police unions said ShotSpotter sensors had detected gunfire “in that region of the city” before, though they did not identify specific gunfire incidents in which ShotSpotter contributed to a faster response.
The area where Bautista was found was within the former coverage area of ShotSpotter, Reardon said Monday in an email. “It is plausible that an active ShotSpotter system could have resulted in first responders arriving on scene to render aid to the victim more quickly, particularly in this case when the shooting was not reported via 911,” he said. The call that came in was not report a gunshot or shooting, and “it was only determined that a shooting took place at this location well after the fact because of a call to check on [a body on the ground].”
Bautista was “by that time was deceased,” Reardon said.
The technology, first installed in 2014, had a false positive rate of 82 percent of the time it triggered in Cambridge, according to critics at public safety committee hearings over the past two years and in the council meetings debating the technology. There were also surveillance concerns, and objections that the devices had never been approved through the proper city procedures.
Questioning accuracy
It also did not always hear actual gunfire. Police said ShotSpotter gave no alerts during a gun battle May 11 on Memorial Drive because there were no microphones nearby. Spencer Piston, an associate professor of political science at Boston University who has given testimony to a council committee on the technology, told councillors it was his understanding a ShotSpotter microphone is installed about four blocks from where a shooter fired as many as 60 rounds from an assault rifle.
Patty Nolan, a co-sponsor of the May 18 policy order that ended ShotSpotter by a vote of five of nine councillors, called Bautista’s death “a complete tragedy.” But she cautioned: “We should not jump to judgment until we have the full facts of whether there could have been a way to save Xavier’s life. Would ShotSpotter have been activated is an important question, and if so, would that have made a difference? That’s a question that is legitimate to ask.”
“I look forward to having a technology that does not have the problems of ShotSpotter as identified by the ACLU and others that would still allow us to know about guns being fired,” Nolan said.
Another co-sponsor, Marc McGovern, said it was “understandable that people are asking” whether ShotSpotter would have made a difference, but there is not enough information to know whether it “would have detected the gunfire or, if it had, whether it would have changed the outcome. Regardless of what the investigation ultimately shows, we must continue looking for ways to improve public safety while protecting civil liberties and avoiding unnecessary surveillance.”
The councillors said they sorrowed for Bautista and others caught up in violence. “My heart is broken for his family and our community,” McGovern said.
Answering police unions
The Black Response, an organization that opposes the devices and helped organize committee hearings, weighed in Tuesday, after the original publication of this article.
The group noted that the shooting took place on July Fourth weekend, “a particularly difficult time for gunshot detection systems because of the large number of fireworks,” and because of that, people “should be very careful about using this tragedy to claim that ShotSpotter would have made a difference.”
“Numerous studies have shown ShotSpotter devices are highly inaccurate at the best of times, routinely missing gunshots and also generating false alerts regularly,” information presented to the council along with concerns about the potential for abuse of the system. “Police unions in Cambridge have suggested that ShotSpotter alerts help first responders arrive on the scene faster. But the most recent study of this issue found that in Chicago, the opposite was true. Response times actually got faster after ShotSpotter devices were removed.”
Example from 2024
In May, acting police commissioner Pauline Wells defended ShotSpotter with a specific example: a July 2024 incident in which gunfire on Harvard Street critically injured a 48-year-old “local father” whose injuries required immediate medical care.
“Thankfully, due to the ShotSpotter activation and a prompt, precise response from nearby officers, that is what he received,” Wells said, afterward giving a dramatic reading to an excerpt from a police report.
At the time of that incident, an officer asked by radio whether ShotSpotter had activated. The response heard that night on the police scanner was no – ShotSpotter was not triggered.
This post was updated July 6, 2026, to add comment by police public information officer Robert Reardon. It was updated July 7, 2026, with quotes from The Black Response and councillor Marc McGovern.
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