Boston Herald55%
Cambridge City Council to decide Monday on reinstating ‘racist’ ShotSpotter 57%
By Tim Dunn75%
8/1/2026, 1:36:05 PM
BS Summary: This article contains 24 faulty reasoning types, including Appeal to Emotion, Availability Heuristic, and Self-Serving Bias, with Post Hoc (False Cause) as the most egregious example at 17.6% saturation with 129 hits. Analysis detected 1,011 faulty-reasoning hits from 731 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 48.5% and a BS Rank of 57% (11,068 of 25,471 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 56.50% of the article peer group.
The Cambridge City Council is considering whether to reinstate the ShotSpotter acoustic gunshot detection system it had voted to discontinue on the grounds the technology “exacerbates the over-policing of Black and Brown communities,” among other claims.
City Councilors are scheduled to take up an order on Monday that would request the City Manager to “temporarily restore and reactivate ShotSpotter within the areas of Cambridge previously covered by the system “ It comes after councilors voted 5-2 on May 18 to discontinue the gunshot detection service and the intense public backlash that followed the decision.
Cambridge residents and councilors in support of discontinuing ShotSpotter claim the technology “exacerbates the over-policing of Black and Brown communities,” and “inflicts a lasting psychological toll on residents, including those targeted by ICE,” among other claims of privacy rights and racial abuses.
“People have voiced how the contract with SoundThinking was arrived at by means that removes Cambridge’s control over their data and provides avenues for that data to be used to harm our neighbors.
People have voiced how ShotSpotter has been deployed in a way to further inequality and systemic racism in Cambridge,” said Cambridge resident and Democrat Socialists of America member Andrew Kim at the May 18 hearing.
Kim was one of dozens of Cambridge residents who spoke in support of getting rid of ShotSpotter.
Most, like Kim, characterized the technology as racist.
Others speculated information collected by the system is sent to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), though without citing any supporting evidence of that.
“The City Manager is requested to work with relevant City departments including the Law Department to ensure that there is no new data collected by ShotSpotter devices and all existing data shall be kept, used, or deleted only as required by law under our Welcoming Community Ordinance and Surveillance Technology Ordinance,” the May 18 order reads.
The scheduled vote on whether to backtrack the May decision follows intense backlash from national public safety leaders and police unions as violence makes headlines in the Greater Boston Area, including the mass shooting on Memorial Drive.
The CEO of the company behind the technology fought back against claims it is “racist” on a recent podcast.
“I always find it curious that when people look at it through a lens of law enforcement showing up as a protector to serve and protect, wouldn’t you want to enable that law enforcement agency to have a tool to be able to respond to criminal gunfire?
And why would that be racist?”
said SmartThinking CEO Ralph Clark in a recent appearance on the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal podcast.
Clark went on to explain how ShotSpotter is meant to serve neighborhoods where criminal gunfire is less often, if at all, called into police as an emergency, allowing for not only faster response times by law enforcement, but to also plan police patrols in accordance with areas with the highest volume of criminal gunfire.
“Especially when you think about the victimization that happens in these communities with gunshot wound victims that aren’t attended to because no one calls 9-1-1.
It’s the most bizarre thing in the world to me.
I don’t get it, other than maybe they just are looking at it more through an enforcement lens and they don’t like the consequences (of the police response),” he said.
City councilors came under intense scrutiny following the May 18 vote, especially from local police unions who say ShotSpotter could have helped a recent victim of a shooting in the city.
A Department of Public Works employee who was fatally shot in the early morning hours of July 4 and did not receive emergency care for nearly an hour.
“There was no opportunity for the victim to receive emergency aid for approximately 60 minutes.
This is directly related to the City Council’s mandate removing ShotSpotter technology from deployment in Cambridge,” the Cambridge Police Patrol Officers Association and Cambridge Police Superior Officers Association said in a joint statement sent to multiple outlets.
“If ShotSpotter detection was received at the time of this incident, Cambridge emergency personnel would have had the opportunity to discover the scene much sooner than 60 minutes after the incident, and render emergency aid to the victim,” they said.
The resolution was on the agenda for the Council’s last meeting on July 23, but was ultimately tabled.
Analysis
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