Chicago Justice Podcast
The Chicago Justice Podcast challenges the stories we're told about crime, public safety, and justice. Instead of accepting headlines, political talking points, or conventional wisdom at face value, we dig deeper to uncover what the data, research, and lived experiences actually reveal.
Each episode features candid conversations with journalists, researchers, advocates, policymakers, and people working to transform the justice system from within. Together, we examine the policies, institutions, and power structures that shape who is criminalized, who is protected, and who is left behind.
From policing and police accountability to gun violence, surveillance, incarceration, public records, government transparency, and criminal justice reform, we explore the complex issues driving today's debates about safety and justice. Some conversations are uncomfortable. Others are infuriating. All of them are necessary.
Grounded in evidence, accountability, and a commitment to challenging dominant narratives, The Chicago Justice Podcast goes beyond sound bites to expose how systems really work and whose interests they serve.
If you're ready to question assumptions, confront hard truths, and explore what real justice and public safety could look like, this podcast is for you.
Chicago Justice Podcast
What does the science say about ShotSpotter?
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In a first-of-its-kind independent analysis of the effectiveness of ShotSpotter, the science says the technology does not lead to more arrests and convictions for gun crimes and does not reduce these crimes in the areas where it is deployed. The study examined the impact of ShotSpotter in Chicago and Kansas City.
To understand the science more deeply, we sat down with the study’s first author, Dr. Eric Piza, who is a Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice, Director of Crime Analysis Initiatives, and Co-Director of the Crime Prevention Lab at Northeastern University.
The study does uncover that ShotSpotter positively impacted response times, the location of victims, and the recovery of evidence from crime scenes. While this all sounds great, it is not even remotely reflective of the criminological gains promised by SoundThinking, the company that owns the technology. The original sales pitch promised more arrests for gun crimes and convictions and, thus, a reduction in gun violence. None of these promises have come to fruition.
This scholarly peer-reviewed analysis mostly mirrors previous analyses conducted by the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office, the MacArthur Justice Center, and the Chicago Office of Inspector General. Pro-police politicians & journalists in Chicago have dismissed all three of these previous analyses as biased, including the one from the City’s Inspector General. The alt-right refuses to hear any criticism of the police department, no matter how fact-based those criticisms might be. This shuts down any possibility of a public discussion on the merits of anything the police are in favor of.
This most recent study is just being ignored by the media and politicians in Chicago. This is probably because they cannot label it biased. Instead, many alderpersons in Chicago are calling on the mayor to keep the ShotSpotter contract in place despite the technology failing to deliver on any of its promises.
Second question. What is the effect of the shot spot or gunshot detection on crime occurrence?
SPEAKER_01So to explore this research question in both cities, we started off by looking at what we referred to as process measures, right? So whether or not crime went up or down, that's an outcome measure. We were first interested in whether or not the process of responding to shootings improved. What we found in Kansas City was that the collection of ballistic evidence, so essentially shell casings, bullet fragments, significantly increased in the shot spotter area compared to the comparison group. We also found that the recovery of illegal firearms increased in the shot spotter area as compared to the comparison area. We also found that for Chicago. So Chicago, we found that gun recoveries increased in the shot spotter area. When it came to crime outcomes in Kansas City, we found that reports of shots fired. So again, gunfire that did not result in any victimization, that decreased about 22% in the shot spotter zone as compared to the comparison area. However, when we focus on incidents of confirmed victimization, so fatal shootings, nonfatal shootings, and assaults and robbery occurring with firearms, none of those crime categories reduced in either Kansas City or Chicago. So if we had to summarize what we found for that research question, is there seems to be benefits and improvements in the collection of evidence on scene. However, that did not translate to any reduction of gun violence victimization in either city.
SPEAKER_00Off the top was Dr. Eric Pisa, who is a professor of criminology and criminal justice, and director of the crime analysis unit and co-director of the crime prevention lab at Northeastern University in Boston. Today we're going to talk about his and his co-authors' scientific contribution to the discussion, poison discussion, I would say, around ShotSpotter. Owned by Sound Thinking, the over the larger company, operates super secretly, won't let anyone validate their technology that works at all. They won't give anyone the real process and what role humans play in this miracle technology. Humans play a lot more of a role than I think we understand it to be. So the miracle technology is literally just a recording. They triangulate the shot, but they do that, but it's humans that say it's a gunshot for the for the most part. That's why I take them 60 seconds instead of three seconds to report to the police because humans listening. This kind of scientific scientific contribution is a first of its kind. No study like this has been done. Let me just remind you all that Shot Spotter has moved the goalposts and continues to do it. What was Shot Spotter meant to do? It was meant to solve crimes and increase stress. Does it do either? Nope. Now they're saying no, it was meant to be quick to victims and help police departments recover more weapons. Quick to victims, we could talk about that being a good thing. That's obviously a good thing-ish, right? But is it worth the money we're paying for it? And there are better ways to spend that money and maybe reduce the number of victims overall. But also, wait a minute, recover more weapons. Why do we care if you recover more weapons if it's not leading to more arrests, more case clearances, and more convictions? And by the way, if they're leading to more arrests, that means the shooter shooting. I mean, if it's recovering more weapons and not arrest, then means the shooter shooting, dropping gun, and taking off. Okay, so the triangulation helps you get to the gun better that someone in the community probably would have found and probably would have reported. So what is shot spot route? What's the contribution that it's really making? And is it worth the millions of dollars we're spending on it? Now, after our interview with Dr. Pisa, we're gonna analyze an interview by the GIST podcast, where they asked Eric Zorn to co-interview a sound thinking executive about ShotSpotter. And yep, yep, yep. I know you know this already, but the interview's gonna suck. Eric Sorn does a horrible job, so does the host of the GIST podcast. It's really, really bad. And they kind of put the analyses that others have done about sound thinking, they devalue it. The MacArthur Justice one, they don't even talk about the city's inspector general's one, which you would think is done by an independent party, right? Like you could say MacArthur Justice is on the side of offenders more, um, but you can't say that about the Inspector General, the Chicago Inspector General's analysis of Shaft Baden and its impact. And you certainly can't say it about the analysis done by Dr. Pisa and his co-authors at Northeastern. None of that gets mentioned in the interview by Eric Zorn. Not a shock, right, ladies and gentlemen. Okay. So we're gonna get into all that. First, if you listen on the podcast, please subscribe. If you're watching us on YouTube, smash that like button. Hit subscribe, we'd really appreciate it, really helps out the channel. Also, really quickly, our police settlement transparency and accountability ordinance is active. There's a link down below to the CJP Nation if you want to get involved. There's also a link down below to sign a petition. We'd really appreciate that. There's also a paid on link if you want to help us out financially. We really support it. Even five bucks a month helps. I'll be back after an interview with Dr. Pisa to look at that Sound Thinking Exec interview. Professor Eric Pisa, thank you so much for joining us. We really appreciate it.
SPEAKER_01Thank you for having me.
SPEAKER_00So, can you give us like a one or two minute background on yourself? How did you end up at Northeastern? How did why did you pick criminology? And why are you kind of researching these topics?
SPEAKER_01I'll try to do it in one or two minutes. Uh, so this is my second year at Northeastern University. Prior to that, I spent nine years on the faculty of John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Manhattan. Prior to that, I worked as the Geographic Systems in Geographic Information Systems Specialist for the Newark, New Jersey Police Department. And it was in my work as a crime analyst where I got an appreciation of the benefits that data can have for public safety. Um, and that kind of led me on my trajectory to to where I'm at now.
SPEAKER_00Okay, so let me ask real quick. In your paper, you um couch the technology you're looking at is gunshot detection technology. Okay. Yes. Now from an outside, so let me, I know the paper looks at Chicago and Kansas City. Were they both using the same technology? Or at least two different sets of technology?
SPEAKER_01That's a really good question. So they both were using shot spotter technology. Um, shot spotter is the leader in gunshot detection technology. Because of that, a lot of people just use the word shot spotter as a replacement for gunshot detection technology, um, which is fine. I I think the the product is so popular that that's not misleading. Um, so when we use the phrase gunshot detection technology in our research articles, we are indeed talking about shot spotter in both Chicago and Kansas City.
SPEAKER_00Okay. Next question: Who funded your research? I think it's important to talk about those issues. And I know the company um that is that owns the technology ShotSpotter changed your name to Sound Thinking. So is Sound Thinking involved in funding your research or is this completely independent of that?
SPEAKER_01Completely independent from Sound Thinking. This research effort was funded by the National Institute of Justice, which is the research arm of the United States Department of Justice.
SPEAKER_00It is. Okay. So what got you into specifically looking at this technology and how it actually works in these cities?
SPEAKER_01So my research previously has focused on evidence-based policing with a particular interest in how technology is used in policing. One of my earliest National Institute of Justice funded grants was in collaboration with the Kansas City Police Department in 2013, where we try to understand a little bit better about how place-based crime forecasting can help inform patrol. So I've had a relationship with Kansas City going back over a decade. When Kansas City installed ShotSpotter, they mentioned to me that before deciding whether or not to expand the target area, they wanted an outside independent evaluation to be done to identify the benefits or lack thereof that they were receiving from their investment. So from that conversation, we decided to pursue some funding from the National Institute of Justice to support such a research project. In the early stages of writing that proposal, um, I came into contact with a now retired deputy superintendent at the Chicago Police Department. We both were speaking as part of the same event in Washington, DC. I he asked me what I was up to. Um that proposal was taking up most of my time. So I told him that's what we were what I was up to at the moment. And he asked if Chicago can be added as a study site to the proposal. So long story short, that's a little bit about my background, and that's a little bit more particular information about how exactly we came to study ShotSpotter in Kansas City and Chicago.
SPEAKER_00Okay, so to clarify for my audience, the shot the your research isn't necessarily validating whether or not the actual technology itself identifies gunshots from other sounds in the community. It's not looking necessarily at that, it's looking at the um impact of the technology, right? Because there's a difference there.
SPEAKER_01It's looking a little bit at that. Um, and then just a little bit background on the study. So that to my knowledge, this is the the largest study any anyone's ever done on gunshot detection technology. We look, we had 15 years worth of crime calls for service, GPS coordinates of patrol vehicles, gun recoveries, enforcement, ballistic evidence being collected. We have 15 years of all of that data for both cities. So the ultimate research questions related to what is the impact of this technology on crime prevention and case clearance. However, since we have so much, since we had so much data, we were able to look at some other questions relating to police response and in the case of Kansas City, relating to the accuracy of shot spotter as compared to 911 calls. So that that was just a an overly wrong way to say no, we aren't just looking at outcomes.
SPEAKER_00Okay. How do you there have been reports on shot spotter in Chicago? The inspector general did one, the state's attorney did one, um, Northwestern Legal Clinic at Northwestern University also did one. They all kind of coalesce around the same idea. And one of the issues that has been brought up in Chicago is the false positive rate, the rate at which um shot spotter says there's a shooting in a particular spot, and the police get there and there's no evidence that there was a shooting. So, how does your research deal with that? Because I know according to these other studies, that rate is kind of high. Um, so I'm just wondering how you guys account for that or don't account for it.
SPEAKER_01We were able to explore that question in Kansas City, but not Chicago, unfortunately. And let me take a minute to explain why that was. Um, so our study incorporated what's referred to as a matched case control design. And what that means in everyday plain language is we're not just looking at the shot spotter area or shot spotter incidents in isolation. In order to understand the effect of shot spotter, we also looked at cases occurring outside of the shot spotter area, but that were similar to the cases that occurred in the shot spotter area. So essentially what that allows us to do is create, or rather, to make apples to apples comparisons, right? So we're not looking at the shot spotter information in isolation. We're also not comparing the shot spotter information to data that's unlike the shot spotter area. In Kansas City, we were able to look at unfounded dispositions of calls for service. So essentially, what an unfounded disposition means is that a police officer responds and does not identify any evidence that a legitimate gunfire event took place. They find no bullet casings on the ground. No one comes out of their home to tell the police officer that they indeed heard a loud gunshot. Um, so that's what we mean by unfounded. So what we were able to find in Kansas City was that shot spotter incidents were 15% more likely to result in an unfounded disposition than shots-fired incidents that were reported via 911. Unfortunately, we did not have the same data to do that analysis in Chicago, but we were able to identify that issue in Kansas City.
SPEAKER_00Was there one piece of data that was specifically missing from the Chicago data that wasn't the Kansas City data that didn't allow you to make that analysis, do that analysis in Chicago?
SPEAKER_01The disposition information. So the the calls for service data that we were provided for Chicago did not contain anything about disposition. Um, so that that unfortunately didn't let us pursue that same research question in Chicago.
SPEAKER_00We'll have to talk because I might have some of that data. Actually, we sued we sued nine one, we sued the Office of Emergency Management and Communications for the data. Um, we have some data going back to 2011. Um, and we sued the Chicago Police Department because the CPD collects that data once a year um early in the spring from OEMC. So they have it echoing many years. That's interesting that that's missing. I know there's a phrase in the Chicago Police Department that says um 19 Paul clears them all. And we know from inside sources, and I've seen it in a ride-along, but other they'll handle five, six calls, won't close them, they'll go sit somewhere, do the paperwork they need to do, and close them all all at the same time. Um I see. And so I know that's a problem for staffing analysis because they're not closing in one the time, so you don't know how long a particular incident took. Um, that's interesting that that data is also missing, especially considering how much data you got from the city, for that to be a missing thing is is is kind of interesting.
SPEAKER_01Um, I think I think just just a little bit of background there. I think what was complicated in Chicago was there was an incredible amount of turnover in the agency and both in the city government throughout our project. Um, so the deputy superintendent I mentioned before, literally the week after we were notified that we got funding, he retired. The deputy superintendent he passed me off to retired a few months after that. So in Chicago, we were continuously in a position where we had to reestablish the relationships necessary to get the data. Um, in Kansas City, since I had such a long-standing relationship with them, we were able to make multiple requests for data. We were able to get original data sets, learn a little bit about what was in the data versus what was not in the data. We were able to go back and ask if those additional data points can be added. So that that's partially why we had more data to work with in Kansas City than we had with Chicago. Um, to be to be honest, I don't think it was a case of the Chicago police department trying to hide anything from the researchers.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, no, and I don't, I think a lot, I think the public doesn't understand a lot of the problems are less about the whole conspiracy and hiding and secretness and about the agency just not functioning well. So the data isn't collected well in a way. Now, there might be reasons underlying in the in at the base level within the police force about why that is, but it isn't someone up top saying, hey, we're not gonna give you that data. Don't give it to that guy. We don't trust him. It's not so much that I'm sure some of that occurs, but definitely not. It's about just how well the data is systemically captured, right? Um, I know that's been it's an issue around all agencies, not just the justice system.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, real world administrative data is messy.
SPEAKER_00It is, and it's and it's also not a it's never been, it's it's not a priority for police departments that don't make it a priority. Um, I know a researcher friend of mine at Loyal University Chicago. Um, I can't, I'm not supposed to tell you which one, but he did, uh, he was working with a prosecutor's office in a large Midwestern city. And this old prosecutor who'd been in office for many years retired. One of his underlings got in, got elected, and he just came in and he put in a case management system, and he just told anyone who didn't want to do it, you're gone. Put the data in and he put all kinds of alerts. So if the data wasn't entered right or it wasn't entered, he they would eventually know. And he said, You're gonna put this in and you're gonna do it, you're gonna have to find another job. It was systemically, but then they have a massively rich data set for which they can make decisions on. But if you don't have that and you're always just putting out fires, which is what large police departments do, um, good fires and bad fires that are just made up out of thin air, um, see it's hard to have a systemic uh determination throughout the entire ranks of the management to get data. And that's less about it's less about conspiracies than it is just a management issue top to bottom, unfortunately. Okay.
SPEAKER_01So you and I should also acknowledge, too, that that funding for this project came through in 2020. We all remember what happened in 2020. Uh, we spent the first quarter of the year thinking the world was going to end. We spent the rest of the year still thinking the world was going to end, but then dealing with social unrest that surfaced from the George Floyd murder. Um, so we really didn't start the research project until 2021. Um, so that's kind of another reason why data collection was a little a little slower than we hoped it would be.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, absolutely. In 2020 through everything in the crazy though. Let's just be honest. And I I really push researchers and uh journalists, especially. They try to compare crime data and stuff from 2020 to other years. It's like, no, you please don't do that. Things are just different. Just skip it. Just skip it, please. Okay. Um, so I want to look at your research questions, and we're gonna try to tackle them one by one here. So, what is the and I want to talk about both if you can, the Kansas City uh effects and the Chicago effects, and I know those can be different, right? Obviously. All right. So the first one is what is the effect of the gunshot detection technology on officer response and search behavior?
SPEAKER_01So, to answer that research question, what we were able to do is use automated vehicle locator data from both Kansas City and Chicago. Now, what that data entails is essentially just GPS trackers placed in the patrol vehicles that give you on a 30-second basis the exact location of the patrol vehicles. So, what we were able to do is we were able to use that data to get a sense of how often police officers were stopped at at gunfire events, how long they spent on scene at gunfire events. And what we found was that in both cities, police officers responding to shot spotter events were on scene for significantly longer than police officers who responded to 911 calls. When we looked at the response time, and when calculating response time, we just looked at how long did it take for the officer to arrive after they were within half a kilometer of the shooting scene. Again, we also found that officers responding to shot spotter events responded quicker than officers responding to 911 calls.
SPEAKER_00Okay, so that's a positive impact. Right. So I mean, right. And so I'm trying to because I I think there. In Chicago, there are two camps. Um, shot spotter is the worst thing ever, and it can't do anything right, and never does anything right. And shotstotter is the best technology ever, and we need to keep it and pay millions for it. Um, I think the answer is a little more nuanced, but I do think your research um results here, and we'll get to the last one.
SPEAKER_01Um well, the the the good news for those two camps is there's enough nuance in the findings of this research project for both sides to get pretty angry at me, and they do. So I'm I'm just bringing people together. That's all I'm doing here.
SPEAKER_00Okay, well, then you're doing it right. That's your job, right? The job is nuance, and I try to, you know, I try to tell reporters like everything is not, it's not just all black and white. Um, I am not a fan personally of shot spotter. I think the money could be used in better ways, although your research results we're going to talk about do bring like quicker response is a good thing. There's no doubt about it. Um, and I like how systemic it was. It was in two cities. This this research was badly needed, whether it makes it into the public discourse in Chicago, um, like all the polarization in our country now. There's the polarization in Chicago.
SPEAKER_02Yes.
SPEAKER_00Everything the police want, nothing the police want. Um, and I don't think either side is doing themselves any favors. Um, but that's we could go on because that at every level, I'm in DC. I'm at the seat of polarization at this moment, right now. Um, okay. Second question: what is the effect of the shot spot or gunshot detection on crime occurrence?
SPEAKER_01So, to explore this research question in both cities, we started off by looking at what we referred to as process measures, right? So, whether or not crime went up or down, that's an outcome measure. We were first interested in whether or not the process of responding to shootings improved. What we found in Kansas City was that the collection of ballistic evidence, so essentially shell casings, bullet fragments, significantly increased in the shot spotter area compared to the comparison group. We also found that the recovery of illegal firearms increased in the shot spotter area as compared to the comparison area. We also found that for Chicago. So, Chicago, we found that gun recoveries increased in the shot spotter area. When it came to crime outcomes in Kansas City, we found that reports of shots fired. So again, gunfire that did not result in any victimization, that decreased about 22% in the shot spotter zone as compared to the comparison area. However, when we focus on incidents of confirmed victimization, so fatal shootings, non-fatal shootings, and assaults and robbery occurring with firearms, none of those crime categories reduced in either Kansas City or Chicago. So if we had to summarize what we found for that research question, is there seems to be benefits and improvements in the collection of evidence on scene. However, that did not translate to any reduction of gun violence victimization in either city.
SPEAKER_00And am I right in the third one, the third question, because I want to get back to that. But the third question looks at case clearances, which I think in Chicago, and I think the way Shotspotter was sold, I can only speak to Chicago, is it was supposed to really impact and improve case clearances. And I know that's how public officials have talked about it. There's going to lead to more arrests and less gun violence. We're going to get them.
SPEAKER_01So despite the increased recovery of firearms, despite the increased collection of ballistic evidence, shootings weren't being solved any more frequently in either city following the installation of ShotSpotter.
SPEAKER_00Okay. That to me is staggering. It blows away all of our I've got a master's in criminal justice. I've been doing this a long time. That idea blows my mind. Hey, we're going to give you a technology that's going to get lead you to get to the scenes quicker, collect more guns, collect more casings, collect more evidence. I don't think there's a criminologist out there that would say that is all that, oh, that's all great, but it's not going to late lead to arrests increasing. So I know you don't have an obvious, you don't have an answer, right? You didn't answer that necessarily 100%. What are your thoughts on why that reality exists?
SPEAKER_01That's a really good question. And um, in my general research on technology, one theme that I've continuously found is that the benefits of technology need to translate into improvements into the day-to-day work of policing in order for those technologies to achieve their goals. So we don't have data. I want to be careful in saying this, right? We don't have data to tell us why this is the case. But I think what this finding points to is that the mere action of collecting bullet fragments does not automatically make a shooting easier to solve, right? Getting guns off the street, while that I think is a noble goal in and of itself, but this suggests that simply recovering more firearms, again, does not make shootings easier to solve. I don't know why that's the case. We don't have the data to really say why those improvements in process did not translate into improved investigations, but I think the findings are pretty clear that they they did not.
SPEAKER_00Okay, we're gonna go on the hypothesis land here. We're just gonna hypothesize about things because you don't have the data, but I I have you here and I've got to ask. I mean, is it possible? Let me give you uh uh an example of something that happened in Chicago. I used to have an office for my nonprofit along the river in River North in Chicago, one of the priciest areas to live and everything in the city. And there was an assassination. A gang member was crossing the bridge to go to some stake joint he was working. There was a gang member in the middle of the bridge waiting for him, rush hour, 5 p.m. All these people out there, as soon as the guy approaches, the guy drops his duffel bag, pulls out a gun, and assassinates the gang member, flees, runs right past my office, which I came down two minutes later. I would have ran into the guy. When reporters dug into that, they said, um, the gangs said, Hey, well, there was this unit called special operations section roving in Chicago at that point, and they pull over pretty much anyone between certain ages that was black or brown and just searched them on the street or in the car, they pull them over. So they said, We know SOS is here, so we have to go do it somewhere else. And that's part of the one of the problems about measuring crime impact is if they're just pushing it, what impact do they have? Yes, the reduction in the area is better, you know. Area A that we're studying is great, the crime went down, but if the crime is just moving to other parts of the city, you haven't really reduced crime, you've just pushed it. And this incident with shot spotter, I'm wondering if the the people doing the shooting are adapting and they know they're doing the shooting area, but they're dropping the guns so they can, they're not worried about keeping the gun to go do it because they know if they get caught with it eight blocks out, they're doomed. I know in Chicago I had officers tell me if they're not the first car on the scene, the other responding cars will look for runners. They look for people fleeing the this the area. Um so I'm just wondering, I'm trying to hypothesize why you would collect more guns but not lead to case clearances. That seems so counterintuitive to me.
SPEAKER_01It's really tough to hypothesize on that. Um I think we also have to be mindful though that bullet fragments and ballistic evidence can be left on scene from non-shooting cases. So, for example, um, someone firing in the air uh, you know, to celebrate a sports win. This is actually a big problem in Kansas City. After the Chiefs play, um, the actual police department actually receives more reports of people firing guns in the air uh to celebrate. Um makes sense. Maybe the bear, maybe maybe the bears and the bulls aren't good enough nowadays for Chicago to have that same problem. Um, but to hypothesize on that, uh collecting bullet fragments from that may be less investigatively valuable than collecting ballistic evidence from an actual homicide scene. But again, it's I I'm hesitant to go too much further with that, only because again, we don't have the data to really disentangle that.
SPEAKER_00Okay, it's fascinating.
SPEAKER_01I apologize for taking a shot at the Chicago sports scene.
SPEAKER_00That was that was beautiful. No problem. They have not. What was our last championship? The Hawks won three and six years. Yeah, it's been a while. We're pretty dry. Um, let me tell you, the Bears got a 39 years. Yeah, we're going on 40 years next year. They haven't won anything. Um, I digress. All right. Well, I want to say thank you so much for doing this. I know it was kind of a pain to set up, um, but I really appreciate your research, it's incredible. Um, you have obviously given people in Chicago, both sides, plenty to chew on and yell about. Um, yeah, it's gonna be it's it's it's really fascinating research. Do you have plans? So do you have plans for any more shot spotter research?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, so we're still publishing uh research articles off of this project. So we currently have four articles that are published and available. Um, just as a note to to everyone listening, all research articles from this project are open access, meaning that anyone can access them. They're not behind any paywall. They're all available from my website, which is ericpisa.net. My last name is P as in Peter I-Z-A. First name is E-R-I-C. So ericpisa.net. You could get all of those articles free of charge. Um, so we currently have four published. We have a fifth that should be published, I think, over the next couple of months. And then there's two other research articles that we're currently working on in preparation for submitting them for peer review. Um, so in total, we anticipate having six or seven articles published on this project. Uh, four, again, are currently out in the world.
SPEAKER_00Okay, one last question. Have you heard from Sound Thinking or anyone at ShotSpotter about your work? Yes, and I'm gonna leave it at that. And the reason I ask is I know that I have published things um questioning the validity of their technology. And I got a call about a year and a half ago, and they invited me out to some campus in the DMV area um to come look at the technology. And I think my wife ended up being sick and we were questioning whether she had COVID, so I didn't go. All right, so um I I I had assumed um they would be reaching out. I wonder how they feel. Um, maybe I should call them and see. All right, well, thank you so much, Professor. I really appreciate the time. Great work, and hopefully we'll talk again.
SPEAKER_01Great, thank you. Thank you for having me. This was a lot of fun.
SPEAKER_00Thanks again to Dr. Pisa for sitting down with us. We really appreciate it. Super fascinating discussion. So is shaft batter worth it to cities considering how little it does in the way of criminal justice, besides getting the victims faster. Well, this is what it doesn't do. It doesn't lead to more arrests, it doesn't lead even lead to more clearances. Case is cleared by the police saying they know who did it, but they can't prove it. Or a person fled the jurisdiction or they're in jail somewhere else, right? They don't even get that. That's not even an arrest needs to be made. They can't get that bar, and they're certainly not leading to more convictions. Is it soft? Is the technology basically a total failure? If you graded on the bar of what they promised sound, what sound thinking and shot spotter promised it would do, of course, it's an absolute total failure. The reason they're bringing up they recover more weapons and they get the victims quicker is because they got to grasp on to something, right? And in Chicago, all their creatures, right, in the city council, fraudulent, useless politicians, all about a lot of them are like, we must keep ShotSpotter. Wait, it's not leading to more arrests or convictions or clearances. Why do we need to keep it? Well, think about it this way, ladies and gentlemen. We have to keep it because if the people in the city are not blaming the police, the next in line to get blamed are the politicians themselves. That's what politicians will do anything and everything to find all the solutions to crime and violence in Chicago in the criminal justice system. We don't know need to invest in the South and West sides. No, no, no, no. First they need to stop the violence, then investment will just happen as if you know the gentrification that's happened in Chicago since the 90s is didn't take any investment. It's all just because violence, you know, moved out of certain communities and into others. Right? They're trying to deflect the blame. So remember that. Okay. That's why the solutions are always found in the criminal justice system. So let's get Eric Zower, who's a guest interview with the GIS podcast. We're going to look at some of the quotes here. And they're interviewing like this, right? Tom Chitam, senior VP for Forensic Services for Sound Thinking, which is a parent company of Shot Sputter. Let's take a look at what we learned from this. It's a quote. The criticism, says I'm this is Chisholm, Chitum. The criticism that it that it doesn't lead to lots of arrests overlooks all the other measures of success. It does, in fact, lead to many arrests. Very often, shot sputter is the first event in the chain of events that leads to gun-related arrests. But that's not the only measure, and it's not its most important measure. Locating gunshot victims that are often left behind at shooting scenes, helping police locate evidence so that they can conduct investigations that lead to downstream, downstream investigations. I think those are the important factors too. Oh, okay. See, you see that flop they're doing, ladies and gentlemen. You see that switch, they are great flip-floppers. Non-arrest, not conviction, not even clearances. It's it's it's about you know how we collect other evidence, and somehow down the road that leads to an arrest and a commission. Ladies and gentlemen, the little secret is that the police actually, when you look at arrests and convictions, don't clear very many homicide cases. Right? Drive-by's random shootings where the person takes off, they're very hard to solve. When they do solve them, a lot of time it's because someone else gets pinched. Someone who knows about someone doing a shooting gets arrested or is involved in it, gets arrested for some serious crime, wants to plead bargain their way out, so they give up the shooting. Right, John, when Johnny shoots someone and takes off and or drives by and then dumps the car, if there's no fingerprints there and they find the weapons or they shoot someone in a neighborhood, drops the gun and takes off. There's no fingerprints there. How are they solving it? What evidence do they have? They have a nine millimeter with no serial number and no prints. They have no way to connect it to Johnny. You're thinking once because they collected that gun, and months later, someone says Johnny did it. Well, we got the gun, Johnny did it. You can't connect the gun to Johnny, it's irrelevant. Or they're being shell casing. There's no fingerprints on it. You can't connect it to the gun or Johnny, or you can connect it to the gun, but not to Johnny. It doesn't make a damn big difference. It's that Isaac has said, hey, I saw Johnny do it. I know him and him and Dave and Mark, they all did the shooting. And listen, I'll give them credit. Getting the shooting victims is probably a good thing. The question from people who are against the use of shot spotter because all of its negatives and all the ghost uh shootings where they're sending cops all over the city at all times of the day looking for shootings that don't exist, and then they're sending them constantly in the black and brown communities for shootings that never happened. So these cops are amped up. For me, and for a lot of critics, though, it's about whether or not that 9, 10, 11, whatever the contract is every year, whether that can be put to better use in a way that actually we actually start reducing shootings. And if we reduce the shootings, because we're making other ways, other avenues to invest this money, the lead to less shootings were leading to less victims. So we don't have to worry about getting to them quicker, they will just be less. And again, it's moving the goal pulse because that's what they do. Here's another one. But very often, gunfire goes unreported through 911. That chronic underreporting and gunfire has a few different reasons. Okay, but and I've done ride-alongs before, ladies and gentlemen. Did one in the 25th on weekend on a Saturday night. There was a police involved shooting that night. We went to multiple. This is 15 years ago, 16 years ago. It was from Master 17 years ago. It was a long time ago now. We went to, we were all over, we were on a special car, we didn't have a beat, so we were all over the district because they want to show us what was actually going on. We went to multiple scenes where there were supposedly gunfire. No evidence, no sign of a shooting, no witness. If someone calls 911 and says gunfire, and they get to the scene and all the houses are dark because they don't want to cooperate with the police, and the 911 caller calls back and no one's answering. That's an unreported. That doesn't go down to the stats as a gunfire. They have no evidence of gunfire. That's unreported. That's an unreported gunfire. Statistically, right? You have no evidence, no witness, no report, ladies and gentlemen. That's the way it goes. So that line about very goes unreported. They, if there is no way to determine between a complete ghost call, and we know there are thousands, if not tens of thousands, of them in Chicago, a complete ghost call where the the sound was never a gunshot. They then shot spotter said it was, and it sent cops racing there. And an actual gunshot where the offender fled, and there's no one, someone calls 911 or shots butter's there, and someone calls 911 and says on the phone there was a gunshot in the area because no one can pinpoint it where they're at. And the cops show up and there's evidence of it. There's no gun left behind, there's no victim to say I was shot or shot at, and no one's picking up 911. There's no way to know the difference between that. Shotspotter has no idea. That's a total bullshit line. We move on. So I think it'd be misleading to focus on percentages rather than nominal figures. Percentages for like arrests, appearances, convictions. So what if those numbers were right and they're not? But they are right because you know what? MacArthur looked at it, the state's attorney looked at it, um, the inspector general looked at it, and now we've got Pisa's peer-reviewed scientific study. They all coalesce, they all merge, they're all pretty much saying exactly the same damn thing. I'll get back to this. Let me start again. First of all, I think it can be me misleading to focus on percentages rather than nominal figures. So even if the numbers were right and they're not, you're still talking about thousands of alerts of gunfires that produce valuable police response, help recover evidence and help locate victims. Okay. I wouldn't say thousands, but let's just say you what's a valuable police response? If there's nobody there and no one's the offender isn't there, someone say I got shot at wasn't there, and what is valued in a police response? They're just saying generically a police response to anything is good. It isn't when you have limited resources in a city. Recover evidence. Okay, why do we give it about evidence that doesn't lead to arrests? Why do we care about that? They show up to you saying there's four gunshell casings on the ground. Okay. There's no fingerprints on it. What does that do? Help vocate victims again. Credit turret is they're due. Okay, that it has increased. And they get to him quicker. That's cool. I like that. I love it. Is it worth 11 million? Right? Can we invest that money in other ways? Probably. Here's Eric Zorn, a question from Eric, a statement-ish question-ish in our Zorn. But if the failure to prove or solve a crime is the standard, couldn't we say that same thing about 911? Did widespread adoption of a hugely expensive 911 emergency system lower crime rates in big cities? Wait a minute. Eric, you're the journalist, my friend. Well, so-called journalist. He hasn't been a journalist in many, many years. He hasn't done anything worth a shit in a very long time. It's a total tool. Eric, they said they themselves marketed this to cities, saying it would solve, increase solved crimes, increase case clearances, increase arrests. It doesn't do that. It is failed. Period. It's failed. So the next question is why don't we budget on what the technology says it would do? One. Two, if we're going to spend all this money, shouldn't how it works be public? Shouldn't it be publicly tested? Shouldn't we know how much human um involvement there is in the actual gunshot detection? And if you look, because there's none of this in the in these in the um interview, they've got caught helping many cities and changing alerts that the technology says is fireworks. They've gone in after bad police shootings and said, oh no, it's a shooting. And the police, they've said, oh, it was one shot. The technology did then human involvement. But you know, the police in this, they need proof that it was like four or five, six shots. You can look it up. Vice did things, other organizations have done stuff. And the human involvement goes back later, excuse me, and says it's four or five, six, eight shootings or shots. I'm sorry, Zoran's total, total shell of himself. I would say he should be embarrassed, but he's beyond that anymore. The shot spotter work? I don't think so. All the available evidence, I'm grading them on their marketing, what they said the technology would do. And again, we're getting the victims quicker. Great. Although, by the way, ladies and gentlemen, look it up. There was an officer-involved shooting where ShotSpotter didn't say there was a shooting, so it took cops like half an hour to find them. Like it they totally missed it. ShotSpotter was completely useless. I digress. I'm judging them on the standard they set. It doesn't work. On the reasons they marketed and sold at cities, it doesn't work. Following crimes, arrests, less gun crimes, less gun violence, zero, negative, probably negative million. It just doesn't do what it says it was going to do. And what it does is we know for sure as a side effect, is that send cops on thousands and thousands of ghost calls a year where there were no shooting at all. Then they're amped up and they're going into what they're doing is they're using these shots ghost alerts as, and this is something MacArthur Justice proved. And I think the inspector general also validated this. They're using the shot spotter alert as probable cause to stop people in the area of it and search them. So a ghost gunshot call sends cops racing into minority communities, and they're using it as just a fake justification for stopping frisk in the area. But Zorn loves it. So is it just podcast host, they both love it. And I agree, they do rip Brandon Johnson and keeping it for the DNC. Um, but he's gonna get rid of it afterwards. I gotta say, I agree with that. If you're gonna get rid of get rid of it. If you're not, you're not. But um, that was as everything Brandon Johnson done it, Brandon Johnson does, it's amateur hour for sure. Thank you so much for being here. I really appreciate it. Next week we have David Shapiro, executive director of the Chicago Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights, and he'll be discussing IDOX, Illinois Christians, unconstitutional use of solitary confinement. Thank you all. See you next week.