The City Council voted Monday night to pull the plug on ShotSpotter, a controversial police surveillance technology in use in Cambridge for more than a decade. The move came after extended public comment and nearly an hour of deliberation, with intense distrust of the current federal administration a factor in approving the policy order.
The policy order to remove ShotSpotter first appeared on the council’s agenda last week but was delayed when vice mayor Burhan Azeem exercised his charter right, citing emotions running high during a meeting that started mere hours after a shooting on Memorial Drive left a gunman and two victims hospitalized.
ShotSpotter uses a network of microphones to alert law enforcement when a high decibel sound potentially indicating a gunshot is recorded. It was first deployed by the Cambridge Police Department (CPD) in June of 2014.
“We shouldn’t frame safety only through surveillance or policing. We have to be expansive,” said Councillor Ayah Al-Zubi, who chairs the public safety committee and was the lead sponsor of the policy order. Councillors Marc McGovern, Patty Nolan and Jivan Sobrinho-Wheeler co-sponsored the order. All four ultimately voted in favor of the order, along with Mayor Sumbul Siddiqui.
The vote bucked requests from both city manager Yi-An Huang and acting police commissioner Pauline Wells to keep ShotSpotter. Huang acknowledged that ShotSpotter was not “a perfect tool” and had tradeoffs, but that ShotSpotter didn’t need to always be accurate to be effective.
“When you look at the data a slightly different way, this is actually allowing [police] to respond more quickly, and that’s what we’ve been hearing from our police leadership,” Huang said.
Wells spoke ahead of the vote and answered questions from city councillors, cited a shooting on Harvard Street in July 2024 in which no 911 call had occurred. Wells said officers found a 48-year-old man with a gunshot wound to his upper thigh. She also invoked the Memorial Drive shooting in imploring the council to vote down the policy order.
“Last Monday’s incident was as anomaly, and frankly, we’ve been lucky. But lucky is not a strategy,” Wells said. “We are literally going into a community meeting tomorrow night and telling them that the city of Cambridge voted down gunshot detection technology after an active shooter event. Why wouldn’t we want to keep our community as safe as possible?”
In both cases Wells cited, though, ShotSpotter was either not solely responsible or not a factor at all in police response. CPD staff have confirmed with Cambridge Day that last week’s shooting on Memorial Drive occurred outside of ShotSpotter’s range. As for the July 2024 shooting on Harvard Street, CPD’s own report confirms that while a ShotSpotter alert was triggered, a patrol unit had also overheard the gunshots and dispatched toward the scene. ShotSpotter activation wasn’t mentioned in the day’s daily log of police activity.
The policy order asks the city manager to direct CPD to turn off and physically remove ShotSpotter microphones within 90 days. Councillors Timothy Flaherty and E. Denise Simmons voted against it, while Azeem and councillor Cathie Zusy voted “present.”
Public discomfort with surveillance
About 30 people came in person or called in during public comment, and all voiced their opposition to ShotSpotter. They cited the city’s lack of control over how ShotSpotter’s data is used, the program’s potential to over-police people of color, and an overall discomfort with surveillance technology as reasons for why they thought the city should discontinue its use.
Some commenters were concerned that ShotSpotter’s high false positive rate, which according to CPD has been 65% over the duration of its use in Cambridge, causes police officers to be on guard when dispatched to a location.
Cambridge resident Rachel Bickelman said she was concerned by “how quickly these situations can escalate when there’s … police with firearms involved in a chaotic moment.” She said she was worried ShotSpotter could lead to “unnecessary and preventable violence.”
Multiple commenters played voice recordings of Cambridge residents who said they were afraid of coming to public comment in person out of fear of retaliation.
Dana Grottenstein shared a recording of a comment made in Spanish by a Cambridge resident who identified herself as Sandra. Grottenstein translated remarks saying residents of public housing like Sandra did not come to public comment because they “have felt watched, and we have felt punished whenever we have complained or spoken out against something. I do not want these machines recording us. Get these microphones out of our neighborhoods.”
Some who provided voice notes through their in-person intermediaries mentioned having “mixed status” households, meaning that someone in their household could be subject to deportation. They worried about ShotSpotter microphones “listening in on immigrant communities.”
Alex Marthews, co-chair of Digital Fourth, a civil liberties group, translated a recording of a woman who identified herself as Angela and said “I fear for my situation every day. This secret surveillance isn’t abstract. It is a real threat.”
Former mayor Anthony Galluccio was not at public comment but shared with Cambridge Day a letter sent to the city council and Huang. The letter spoke out against ICE’s “trampling of due process” but asked councillors not to let anger at the Trump administration drive their votes. “Please pause and think about how to control the use of technology but not eliminate it,” the letter said, adding that local government “is responsible for protecting us.”
There is no evidence that ShotSpotter maker SoundThinking has supplied data, including recordings of conversations its microphones are capable of picking up, to the federal government. But the Trump administration has confirmed its purchase of commercially available location data on people residing in the U.S. from other companies to aid in investigations.
”Security theater”
After public comment, councillors spent nearly an hour discussing the policy order. Some struck a conciliatory tone, acknowledging the variety of viewpoints on council.
“I’m not going to say that anybody who votes to keep [ShotSpotter] doesn’t care. That’s cheap, that’s political, and we should do better,” said McGovern.
Councillors in favor of the policy order to remove ShotSpotter said the technology was ineffective.
“In terms of what we tell the community tomorrow, I hope we can tell them that we’re using things that work,” said Sobrinho-Wheeler, in response to Wells’s remarks. “Let’s actually use proven technologies … rather than some security theater.”
The council also voted last October to stop use of Flock, whose technology scans license plates. But others didn’t want to ditch the technology altogether without an alternative in place.
“The argument in favor is that it may help the police or law enforcement in gathering sufficient evidence, so that even in the absence of witnesses testimony, we can hold people accountable,” said Simmons. As for privacy concerns, she said “If you’re on your phone, you walk past a Tesla, a Ring doorbell … We’re being surveilled all the time, whether we like it or not.”
Some councillors thought public concern that ShotSpotter could report to Immigrations and Custom Enforcement (ICE) were overblown.
“I think it’s a false narrative to think that federal agents are monitoring conversations that are overheard by ShotSpotter,” said Flaherty.
At least one public commenter misattributed the funding the city gets for ShotSpotter to ICE. Cambridge’s ShotSpotter program has been funded through grant money the city of Boston receives through the Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA). FEMA and ICE are both part of the Department of Homeland Security.
Simmons made a motion to table the policy order in favor of a compromise that would direct the city to re-write its contract with SoundThinking to restrict how the company is allowed to use data collected on Cambridge residents. The motion failed by a 5-4 vote, with Azeem, Flaherty, Simmons, and Zusy voting in favor and the other five councillors voting against.
McGovern said the risks simply outweighed the benefits.
“I don’t think [ShotSpotter] is listening to everybody at their kitchen table, nor do I think the city is going to be less safe without it,” he said. For him, the decision to remove ShotSpotter came down to “the access of the information not being in our hands. And under this current federal administration, that’s scary.”
Advocates who spoke in favor of dismantling ShotSpotter could be seen high fiving each other in the hallway outside of council chambers immediately following the vote.
Marthews, the Digital Fourth co-chair called the vote a “wise decision based on a sober consideration of the evidence.” “ShotSpotter has never been shown to reduce gun violence, and it is better for the city to not have rolling audio monitoring of its citizens as they pass by about their daily lives.”
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