The Springfield City Council postponed a decision on whether to renew its ShotSpotter contract as the mayor pursues tweaks to the agreement and Ward 2 Ald. Shawn Gregory said he plans to introduce an amendment to the ordinance.
The City Council voted Sept. 1 to withdraw the ordinance for a $1.1 million, three-year contract for the acoustic gunshot detection surveillance technology. Ward 10 Ald. Ralph Hanauer made the motion, which he said was done at the request of the mayor. The unanimous vote to withdraw the ordinance occurred before any discussion took place at the council meeting.
A revised version will be introduced to the council in a few weeks, said Mayor Misty Buscher.
“It looks like the contract had some language that I wanted to get updated,” Buscher told IT, but wouldn’t elaborate further.
However, Gregory told Illinois Times he suspects his planned amendment is the cause of the delay.
“I would imagine that somebody’s in agreement with the amendment that was coming,” Gregory said. While it hasn’t been formally introduced, it has been circulated among the other council members.
The amendment specifies that “renewing the technology should be accompanied by a continued commitment to act on the information it provides” and calls for the city to use a data-driven process to identify priority areas for neighborhood cleanup, resident engagement and community partnership.
Hanauer told IT he hasn’t done a thorough review of Gregory’s proposal but is concerned about any new spending in the budget.
“If we have a bunch of new programs or whatever – how are we going to pay for it, and where the money’s coming from?” Hanauer said.
Gregory also told IT that ShotSpotter data should answer the question of whether the notifications are leading to arrests. He said the police department previously provided that information back in 2022, but hasn’t since then.
Then-Springfield Police Chief Kenny Winslow told IT in 2021 that police were only able to prove that there had been gunfire for 23% of ShotSpotter notifications.
The system, run by California-based company SoundThinking, covers 5.25 square miles of Springfield, primarily on the east side. It uses microphones to detect the sound of potential gunshots and alert police to a location.
Illinois Times has reviewed ShotSpotter data obtained by a Freedom of Information request and found that from Jan. 1, 2022, to Aug. 21, the system has received 3,419 notifications of possible gunshots.
The system labels notifications as “probable gunfire,” “multiple gunshots” or a “single gunshot.”
Springfield Police Chief Joseph Behl told IT that officers have responded to every alert, but he wasn’t aware of how many of the notices have been confirmed gunshots.
“I don’t know how much of those result in… where we have casings or we have damage or we have confirmed shots fired,” Behl said. “I don’t know what the percentage is with that.”
When asked if he has data to address the question of whether ShotSpotter notifications have led to more gun violation-related arrests, Behl said he didn’t know.
“I don’t think I’ve ever looked that up; I’ll be quite honest with you,” he said.
Behl said one way he measures the success of ShotSpotter is by the number of guns that have been recovered, but was unsure if it could be credited solely to the system.
“Almost 500 firearms are recovered annually, and that’s from 2021 forward,” Behl said. “Now, is that specifically for ShotSpotter? Maybe not. Does it have to do with manpower? Does it have to do with training, tactics and other technologies that we have? Probably.”
Behl said the success of removing illegal weapons from the streets can be attributed to multiple factors, but the additional technology helps.
“It probably has a culmination of all those things, but ShotSpotter definitely puts us in the right spot where the gunfire is,” he said.
Sangamon County’s violent crime rate has gone down over the last 30 years, following national trends, IT has reported. Experts haven’t determined a single reason for the decline and say more research is needed.
The city first approved the technology in 2020 with the council voting 7-3 for a three-year contract totaling $643,750. In 2023, the council signed on for another three years for a total of $870,188.
However, some research has found the technology doesn’t help to reduce crime.
A 2021 MacArthur Justice Center study of ShotSpotter’s use in Chicago found the “vast majority of alerts generated by the system turn up no evidence of gunfire or any gun-related crime.”
The MacArthur Justice Center, a national civil rights organization, noted, “CPD publicly promotes ShotSpotter as an essential tool for crime prevention, but there is no evidence that it reduces crime.”
In 2025, the city of Chicago settled a lawsuit backed by the organization which was filed by people claiming they were harmed by police use of the surveillance system.
“The lawsuit focused on the tens of thousands of ShotSpotter alerts every year that led police to find no evidence of gunfire or gun crime, but often resulted in unwarranted police stops that violated the Fourth Amendment,” stated the MacArthur Justice Center.
The Chicago Police Department discontinued its contract with ShotSpotter in 2024.
A study that same year by Northeastern University examining the use of ShotSpotter in Kansas City and Chicago found the technology helped improve police response times in locating victims and evidence from a crime scene, but “does not lead to more arrests and convictions for gun crimes and does not reduce these crimes in the areas where it is deployed.”
Critics say the technology only leads to over-policing of Black and Latino communities. SPD won’t disclose the exact locations of the detection devices, but the majority of the sensors are located in Ward 2. According to U.S. Census data, Ward 2 includes the poorest neighborhoods in the city, and a high percentage of residents are Black.
Gregory previously told IT he’s noncommittal on supporting a renewal of the technology.
“It just depends on how me and the chief’s conversation goes, and how we can put something together as a city to make sure that we’re going to use that data to address those areas,” he said.
However, Gregory thinks positively of the technology. “There are pluses to ShotSpotter,” he said, such as helping police locate victims.
Even so, he said the city has to move past just collecting data on troubled areas.
“I’m against the tool, if it’s just the tool itself,” he said.
He added, “The areas that get the highest amount of gunshots, those areas, of course, are policed,” Gregory said. “We have to take it a step further. Put real concentration on the homes, put real concentration on the weeds, the grass and things of that nature.”
He described a 2022 community event, Project Southtown Cleanup, as an initiative he’d like to see reintroduced to the east side. Gregory said community organizations and Public Works focused on cleaning up the blocks surrounding Feitshans Elementary School on 15th Street between Stuart and Kansas streets.
“Not only did they go out that weekend, but they also, prior to the event, cleaned alleys, cut trees and did a lot of work in those areas,” he said.
He added, “We have to really put a priority on those areas or we’ll always be paying for ShotSpotter,” noting that he doesn’t want the city paying for the technology indefinitely.
“Either we’re going to the neighborhoods and helping those neighborhoods grow, or we’re not,” Gregory said. “And we need to do more.”
Maria Gardner Lara is a staff writer for Illinois Times. She has a master’s degree in journalism from the Public Affairs Reporting program at University of Illinois Springfield and served as a corps member with Report for America at the NPR station in DeKalb.
