Listening to ShotSpotter: Acoustics and Predictive Policing in Chicago

Abstract

This project hopes to highlight a moving, multidirectional story about acoustic surveillance tools and how they are used to predict and conduct the future. I focus on ShotSpotter Inc’s occupation in Chicago, which has grown omnipresent following the signature of the city’s current contract with ShotSpotter for $33 million in the summer of 2021, lasting through August 2023 (Del Vecchio and Chapman 2022).² Chicago is now blanketed with microphones and Strategic Decision Support Centers (“SDSC’s”) installed to 21 of the city’s 22 police districts. (Ibid and CBS 2020)³. Chicago accounted for 14% of ShotSpotter’s total revenue in 2021, as the company’s second largest customer (MarketScreener 2022)⁴. Activists in the city have protested this relationship, especially after ShotSpotter acquired predictive policing company HunchLab in 2018.⁵ Legislation in Illinois has yet to adequately grapple with advanced acoustic surveillance and predictive policing techniques, further ripening this moment for this dialogue.⁶

This project is not a study of the borne and exacerbated ills of ShotSpotter’s collaborations with Chicago Police and their rise of their technocratic methodologies, nor is the project much concerned with ShotSpotter’s credence as a technology that is successful even by its own objectives.⁷ Rather, this project is an experimental inquiry into how our futures may be patrolled by means of acoustic capture and prediction. I explored this by placing ShotSpotter’s approach in contrast with other shapes and styles of listening that nurture the past, present, and future.