In a press release, a union representing Cambridge police patrol officers said it was “deeply disappointed” by a City Council vote a week earlier to end the use of ShotSpotter technology it uses to listen for gunfire.
A majority of councillors – five of nine members – said May 18 that they saw no evidence that the system keeps anyone safe and won a vote to have the equipment taken down within 90 days. Two members argued in favor of the system and voted to keep it; the two remaining members suggested a lack of strong conviction either way by opting to vote just that they were “present.”
The vote followed a pair of committee hearings and full council meetings that heard hours of additional public comment predominantly opposed to the tech.
“We must question the very commitment of the City Council to public safety,” said the press release from the executive board of the Cambridge Police Patrol Officers Association. The union represents nearly 200 officers.
ShotSpotter microphones were first installed in Cambridge in 2014. “Removing it now sets the city back more than a decade by eliminating a tool that alerts police to likely gunfire within seconds – including incidents when no 911 call is made,” said the organization’s board, which is led by officer Chris Sullivan. It cited 11 times the technology detected gunfire when there were no 911 calls and said this was a “time of heightened concern over gun-related incidents” such as a May 11 gun battle on Memorial Drive.
“Cambridge should be strengthening its ability to detect and respond to gunfire, not weakening it,” the organization said. “The people of Cambridge deserve public safety decisions that improve emergency response. Unfortunately, the City Council has voted to make it harder for police officers and first responders to know when and where help is urgently needed.”
City manager Yi-An Huang admitted last week that the 11 cases cited from the past 10 years were part of Cambridge’s preponderance of gunfire incidents in which weapons are fired but there are no victims.
Shotspotter did not alert police to the May 11 gun battle. Police were alerted to a danger by other police and a parole officer and found the suspect by pinging his telephone. “What matters in those situations is being able to communicate clearly,” Middlesex district attorney Marian Ryan said at a Tuesday community debrief about the incident.
At the debrief, officials showed in a timeline that police were on the way to find the shooter before any gunfire; it all played out over the course of minutes, and the attack was ended within seconds, Huang said.
Cambridge’s acting police commissioner, Pauline Wells, said that because shooters now tend to have more firepower than 10 or 20 years ago – the weapon in the May 11 attack was a high-capacity assault rifle using 2.3-inch rounds – it is “amazing to me that there wasn’t a lot more people shot and killed.”
A state defensive tactics instructor wants to use video from the Cambridge incident “to teach other police officers how to do it the right way,” Wells said.
The organization’s press release on Monday addressed fears that ShotSpotter’s ability to listen 24 hours a day could be exploited by federal agencies: “There is no credible evidence that ShotSpotter has been used to monitor private conversations or identify individuals.”
Opponent research that the tech’s use in Cambridge has a false positive rate of 82 percent was not addressed; the organization was asked via a spokesperson for a response.
Councillors who voted against the technology called it unreliable and unproven and said it doesn’t clearly meet the standards of the city’s Surveillance Technology Ordinance. It also never went through a public process for deployment, they said.
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