Whether Cambridge’s ShotSpotter gunfire-listening devices will return is now to be voted in August. A special City Council session on Thursday ended with orders paused by councillors using their “charter right” to bump items to the next meeting, but not before discussion of whether the city was leaning on a reactive technology instead of putting adequate resources into addressing the root causes of violence.
In addition to a potential return of ShotSpotter – a nationally controversial technology that a five-councillor majority voted May 18 to shut down as ineffective and open for abuse as surveillance – a pause was called on two more orders: one seeking more funding and responsibility for unarmed response teams; another asking a look at all of the city’s violence response and prevention strategies and support for survivors of violence.
The orders followed the fatal Fourth of July shooting of Xavier Bautista, 32, a city Public Works employee with a fiancée and young child. He was killed near his home in The Port neighborhood in the early morning by a group of masked men and lay undiscovered for around an hour until a passerby saw him and called 911. One suspect in the shooting was arrested July 13.
The city’s police unions, many residents and city councillors E. Denise Simmons and Tim Flaherty have raised the possibility that if ShotSpotter had been turned on, first responders could have arrived at the scene of Bautista’s shooting more quickly, potentially saving his life and moving faster to catch and arrest his killers.
Simmons and Flaherty co-sponsored the order to revive federal grant funding and turn ShotSpotter back on “until the city has completed a robust and inclusive public process regarding its continued use, with particular attention given to the views of residents from neighborhoods most affected by gun violence.”
“If there was a 1 percent chance that ShotSpotter would have had a Cambridge police officer or emergency first responder be there with a less than 1 percent chance to save his life, it’s worth it to me. And I’m sure it’s worth it to everybody in that neighborhood, and to everyone in his family,” Flaherty said. “Changed circumstances require us to reactivate ShotSpotter.”
Asking for hard data
That was questioned by councillor Jivan Sobrinho-Wheeler, who wanted hard data about the abilities of the technology from acting police commissioner Pauline Wells. She and city manager Yi-An Huang had made the case to councillors in May to keep the technology. They pointed out that despite its many false positives and other flaws, there had been 11 times in the past decade that ShotSpotter had brought police to where guns had been fired and no 911 calls had come in about it. None of those instances had victims, though; all police knew of those incidents were that guns had been fired and shell casings were left for officers to find.
There were four shootings in Cambridge that resulted in injuries last year – how many were in range of ShotSpotter microphones, and how many did ShotSpotter pick up, Sobrinho-Wheeler asked.
Three were in the coverage area, but none of those triggered the technology because the guns weren’t fired in the open air, Wells said. The fourth incident was not within range of a ShotSpotter device – similar to the extended firings of assault rifles at a May 11 gun battle on Memorial Drive, which Wells said went unheard by ShotSpotter in Cambridge but was picked up across the Charles River in Boston.
Would ShotSpotter actually have heard the gunfire this Fourth of July? Sobrinho-Wheeler pointed to ShotSpotter contract language saying the technology was suppressed during that holiday and New Year’s Eve, when fireworks could be mistaken for gunshots.
Wells said she was told by SoundThinking, the ShotSpotter parent company, that the technology would not have been suppressed at the time of Bautista’s shooting. But she admitted that ShotSpotter hadn’t heard gunfire that took place July 4, 2025. For all of last year, there were 11 shots-fired incidents, two of which were in a T station and not Cambridge jurisdiction; of the nine remaining, seven were in ShotSpotter coverage areas – but only three triggered ShotSpotter.
“We want to ground this in real evidence. We want to be doing things that actually work and not just to make a political point,” Sobrinho-Wheeler said.
Community that’s affected most
That wasn’t as important for everyone. Councillor Cathie Zusy, seeking compromise, suggested there was another way to look at it. “I’m not convinced it’s an effective technology, but I’m also not convinced it’s an evil technology,” Zusy said. “But if it makes the community that’s impacted most by violence feel safer, then it’s actually serving a function.”
For Simmons, the issue was that she felt the decision to turn off ShotSpotter had been made without adequate input from those most affected by violence in Cambridge, which she identified as Black and brown people in The Port neighborhood – arguments similar to those she made before the vote was taken to shut the technology off. “They did not even know the City Council had voted on it. They did not know the decision has been made,” Simmons said Thursday. “They felt disrespected because no one asked them.”
Two women from The Port who spoke at a July 8 community meeting said they wouldn’t take part in public comment Thursday, councillor Marc McGovern said, “because they didn’t feel supported and they were hurt by some of what was said and how it was said.”
Process and public comment
The process leading to the May vote about the technology included two committee meetings in 2025 and this year, and included Black and brown residents of Cambridge as commenters and leaders of the effort. Dozens of residents and others spoke during a public comment period Thursday too, making up the first hour and a half of the four-hour meeting that was weighted heavily against ShotSpotter. Black and brown people were among the speakers.
“I feel disrespected, unheard and as though aspects of my identity – that I’m Black or brown, the color of my skin – have been wielded against me. I feel compelled to speak, as I have for a number of ShotSpotter-centered meetings, because ShotSpotter is garbage,” said a resident identifying himself as Malik A. “It is trash. It does not work.”
Several speakers during public comment urged officials to focus more on solving the root causes of the gun violence that arises in Cambridge several times a year.
Equalizing resources
Councillor Ayah Al-Zubi, the leader of that process around ShotSpotter, cried at the meeting while emphasizing the same point about “preventing gun violence long before it starts.” She illustrated that with budget figures – $56 million for police this year versus $2.7 million for the unarmed Community Safety Department, which has within it $300,000 earmarked for community organizations doing on-the-ground services. “Do we really think $300,000 for five groups is going to actually do the work to reduce gun violence?” she asked.
“I will entertain conversations on technology when and only when we have adequate support and funding for community-based organizations and the Community Safety Department. They deserve an honest chance to do the work sustainably,” Al-Zubi said, using her charter right to end discussion on the Simmons-Flaherty policy order.
Simmons responded by using her charter right on the other orders, both written by Sobrinho-Wheeler.
Violence in 2012 and 2024
Insight into the value of a working gunfire-detection technology came to vice mayor Burhan Azeem after a 2024 shooting at a basketball court in front of his home. Azeem, an EMT, saw the victim and said was torn whether to rush to help or call 911.
Later, he said, the mother of the girl who was shot got a note on her door threatening her not to talk with police about suspects: “Don’t be a rat.”
“Then it made sense to me that how Charlene Holmes happened, where everyone knows who her killer is but people just won’t say the name,” Azeem said, referring to an unsolved drive-by shooting in 2012. “It is because people do shootings in our city because they genuinely believe that they can get away with it.”
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