The administration’s positions on ShotSpotter have taken Moore by surprise. “We shouldn’t be finding out about it in the press,” he said.

Johnson announced in February the city would stop using ShotSpotter in late September, nodding to studies questioning its effectiveness as a tool to catch criminals and curb crime alongside its annual price tag of around $10 million. The system uses acoustic sensors mounted on light poles concentrated overwhelmingly on the South and West sides to alert police about the location of suspected gunfire.

As a candidate, he pledged to terminate ShotSpotter, a target of activists that gained notoriety in 2021 after a gunshot alert from a street in Little Village sent responding police running after 13-year-old Adam Toledo. An officer fatally shot Toledo during the chase.

The September end date would give Chicago police time to adapt to the tool’s expiration over the summer, Johnson said. But speculation quickly emerged after the announcement that the company had not yet agreed to the extension, a possibility about which Johnson refused to directly answer questions. Days later, he announced there would be an additional two-month “transition period” before the technology goes offline in November.

The company that operates ShotSpotter, SoundThinking, and the technology’s council proponents quickly went to work trying to keep it in Chicago. Company lobbyists shared with aldermen multiple drafts of an order designed to allow ShotSpotter to remain, the Chicago Reader reported Friday. A SoundThinking spokesperson said in a statement Tuesday that the company is “committed to doing whatever we can to help the Chicago Police Department.”

Through early April, Moore’s ward had the city’s second-most shooting victimizations — instances in which a person was wounded or killed by gunfire. He said he thinks he has the votes to pass the order Wednesday, but expects Johnson allies to “defer and publish” it, a parliamentary maneuver to temporarily block a vote. Moore said he hopes some kind of gunshot detection system will continue to operate in Chicago, even if it is not the ShotSpotter system that came to the city in a 2012 pilot program.

Johnson initially strongly rejected the possibility of replacing ShotSpotter with a different gunshot detection tool, but later floated his openness to using the money the city spends on the technology for a system to more quickly dispatch ambulances instead of police. His administration has not shared any specific plans for ShotSpotter alternatives.

The decision has also put Johnson at odds with his police superintendent, Larry Snelling. Snelling publicly praised the tool shortly before Johnson announced it would be axed. The superintendent stuck to his support Friday while speaking next to Johnson at a news conference where he pledged to “work around” whatever the City Council determines.

“When it comes to ShotSpotter, I’ve seen our officers get to locations quickly and I’ve seen them save lives,” he said.

Johnson stuck to his criticism, calling the data on the technology “very clear.” The differences between Chicago’s most violent neighborhoods and other parts of the city is “gross inequity” created by decades of government disinvestment, and broad investment in them is the best tool to fight crime, he argued.

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