Mayor Brandon Johnson signed an agreement last week to spend over $10 million more on the controversial ShotSpotter technology he lambasted on the campaign trail and vowed to do away with.
At least that’s what the paperwork outlining the payment shows.
Jason Lee, Johnson’s senior adviser, said the mayor’s signature was unwittingly attached to the document, which authorized the hefty payment to cover a contract extension that former Mayor Lori Lightfoot approved last October.
The procurement office used an electronic signature device with Johnson’s signature that authorized the $10 million additional payment to cover the extension that Lightfoot had authorized, Lee explained. “That’s not the procedure that we will have moving forward, but that’s what was done.”
The document approves an additional $10,184,900 payment to SoundThinking, the company that owns ShotSpotter, a system that detects gunfire and alerts police. It also bears the signatures of City Comptroller Reshma Soni and Chief Procurement Officer Aileen Velazquez.
“The mayor would not have been a rubber stamp and would have closely reviewed this,” Lee said, though he noted that Johnson may have been legally obligated and that failing to sign off could have prompted legal action.
The controversial ShotSpotter contract started in August 2018 and is now valued at nearly $49 million, according to the document. In approving the extension last year, Lightfoot quietly pushed the end date from Aug. 19 to Feb. 16 next year.
A SoundThinking spokesperson said the agreement signed by Johnson merely ensures that extension “is properly funded.”
But the automatic approval angered Johnson and has now led to a review of the city’s procurement procedures, Lee said.
Meanwhile, the future of ShotSpotter in Chicago remains unclear.
During his campaign for mayor, Johnson criticized the technology and threatened to stop using it, citing the cost and “clear evidence it is unreliable and overly susceptible to human error.”
“This expensive technology played a pivotal role in the police killing of 13-year-old Adam Toledo. That cannot happen again,” his campaign website stated. “Brandon Johnson will end the ShotSpotter contract and invest in new resources that go after illegal guns without physically stopping and frisking Chicagoans on the street.”
That hardline stance appeared to send ShotSpotter’s stock value into a tailspin after Johnson was elected in April, and the company then changed its corporate name to SoundThinking. Acknowledging the new name of the rebranded company is among the changes written into the document Johnson signed.
“While we cannot speculate on the city’s next steps,” the company spokesperson said in a statement, “SoundThinking continues to focus on providing the highest quality gunshot detection services to the Chicago Police Department, so they can render swifter aid to gunshot victims and more effectively respond to incidents of gun violence, better protecting the citizens of Chicago.”
While Lee acknowledged Johnson’s “deep concerns” about the technology, he continued to leave the door open to extending the deal.
“The mayor, just like he has on every issue, listens to alternative opinions or all of the opinions, takes in all of the information and makes the best decision that he can,” Lee said. “That’s what his leadership is about. That’s what he’ll do.
“At the end of the contract in February, there will be a decision made on whether that contract will be extended,” he said. “But the mayor’s been clear about his concerns about that.”
Activists, researchers and the city’s top watchdog have also raised alarms about the ShotSpotter technology.
In May 2021, the MacArthur Justice Center found that nearly 86% of ShotSpotter deployments prompted no formal reports of crime.
The city’s Office of the Inspector General issued a scathing report that August showing ShotSpotter rarely leads to investigatory stops or evidence of gun crimes and can change the way officers interact with communities.
A spokesperson for ShotSpotter previously claimed the researchers’ findings “relied heavily on a flawed analysis of incomplete data,” and the inspector general’s office’s conclusions were “misrepresented by critics to spread a false narrative about ShotSpotter’s accuracy.”
The spokesperson claimed the technology is 97% accurate, and said the police department had credited the firm “with 125 lives saved in the last five years, the recovery of 2,985 firearms and 24,421 pieces of evidence.”
