Note: The following op-ed was submitted to the Boston Globe for publication on May 28, 2026 but never published.
Two years ago, our organization, The Black Response, initiated a campaign to stop use of ShotSpotter in our community. We are an immigrant-, Black-, and brown-led grassroots organization based in Cambridge. Towards that aim, we catalyzed the Stop ShotSpotter Camberville Coalition to end the City’s use of this microphone surveillance technology. We did so because this campaign aligns with our goals to address public safety at its roots. On May 18, 2026, the Cambridge City Council voted (5-2-2) to remove the microphones. This is a victory, for our campaign and for the City of Cambridge and its people. However, our efforts and their legitimacy are now being erased. We want to set the record straight, about ShotSpotter and about our involvement.
Our campaign raised many concerns about ShotSpotter in Cambridge—including that it jeopardizes our city’s welcoming city policy. In Cambridge, and throughout the Metro Boston Homeland Security Region, ShotSpotter is funded by the Department of Homeland Security, the parent organization of ICE. ShotSpotter is also owned by the for-profit company SoundThinking, which retains rights to all the data that it collects. As a technology, it is faulty, and it contributes to overpolicing of Black and Brown neighborhoods.
We organized for years, canvassing, making public testimony, coalition and base building, and ultimately increasing political pressure for this vote to pass.
The Boston Globe recently published an op-ed, authored by the two City Councillors who voted to keep ShotSpotter, titled “What Cambridge got wrong about ShotSpotter.” This op-ed contains numerous inaccuracies.
First, we want to set the record straight on ShotSpotter’s ability to record conversations: ShotSpotter devices do record personal conversations.
As Boston University Professor Spencer Piston made clear in his presentation on ShotSpotter on June 2, 2025, several court cases clearly and definitively illustrate this. (People v. Johnson (California), Commonwealth v. Denison (Massachusetts) (see pg 176),Commonwealth v. Rios (Massachusetts)). In the Commonwealth v. Denison case, the ShotSpotter microphones picked up voices of others yelling at Jason Denison to stop, followed by gunshots. The judge ultimately ruled this evidence inadmissible due to a violation of Mass. Wiretap laws.
Second, ShotSpotter is unreliable at accurately detecting gunshots and alerting local police.
Our research shows that accuracy in Cambridge is poor. Using data from the Cambridge Police Department’s Bridgestat monthly reports, we analyzed “Shooting & Shots Fired in Cambridge.” We extracted data on reported shots fired, including the asterisk indicating whether a ShotSpotter alert was generated. We then created a dashboard overlaying leaked ShotSpotter microphone locations with the city’s shots-fired data. This dashboard clearly illustrates that, even in neighborhoods where ShotSpotter microphones have been installed, ShotSpotter frequently fails to alert police of verified gunfire incidents.
Third, civil rights experts have shown that ShotSpotter compromises constitutional rights and violates the Cambridge Surveillance Technology Ordinance. Meanwhile, ShotSpotter has not been shown to significantly increase response times or health outcomes.
The ACLU of Massachusetts, which authored the City of Cambridge’s Surveillance Technology Ordinance, stated that ShotSpotter does not meet the City’s ordinance standards.
The Electronic Privacy Information Center has filed petitions urging the Department of Justice to investigate whether federal funding for ShotSpotter violates Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits racial discrimination in programs receiving public funds.
During the April 29, 2026 Public Safety Committee hearing on ShotSpotter, Harvard Cyber Law Clinic Professor Mason Kortz explained that the City of Cambridge is not a party to the contract that currently governs the use of ShotSpotter in Cambridge. So, we as Cantabridgians are not even protected by the terms of the contract.
Meanwhile, in an NBC News Boston publication (2024), Northeastern University Professor Eric Piza, a quantitative criminologist, stated that “police officers arrive on scene a little bit quicker with ShotSpotter calls, however we didn’t find any improvements on public safety.” He continues, “Shootings did not go down in the ShotSpotter areas after the installation of ShotSpotter, shootings were not any more likely to be solved in either city after the deployment of ShotSpotter.”
Though some articles have indicated slight increases in response times (up to 12%), the data does not support that ShotSpotter improves healthcare outcomes for gunshot victims (Hartford, CT study, 2021).
We presented all this evidence and more to the Cambridge City Council on June 2, 2025 and April 29, 2026. It convinced many residents, including Black and Brown immigrants living in the Port and Riverside, who came out to make public comments at four meetings in the last year. Over and over, they stated that ShotSpotter made them feel less safe, and that they did not consent to being recorded in exchange for marginal, speculative benefits promised by a for-profit company. Five city councilors were convinced by the evidence.
Yet, even in victory, a familiar socio-political pattern reemerged. The organizing labor of Black and brown grassroots leaders has largely been erased from public narratives.
In press coverage, TBR was not acknowledged as the driving force behind the coalition and the anti-ShotSpotter organizing. This feeds the false narrative that ShotSpotter is being removed despite impacted communities wanting it.
Further, the council has repeatedly questioned whether the affected communities even have opinions about ShotSpotter. Our canvasses and community education events have been the only systematic effort to get answers to those questions.
Select powerful voices aligned with surveillance were elevated as the “reasonable” or “authentic” representatives of Black concern—such as Councillor Simmons. Meanwhile, the people living under the daily weight of surveillance and organized abandonment, especially those who present a more nuanced argument against surveillance and for safety, are sidelined. Not all Black and brown voices are heard equally.
When city leaders say they want to hear from “impacted communities,” they want to hear from the Black resident who supports more policing because they fear neighborhood violence; that voice becomes highly elevated as proof that surveillance is desired by communities of color. Black and brown people who critique policing as structurally violent are dismissed as fringe, ideological, or manipulated by white liberals.
This framing is historically dishonest.
The struggle against policing and surveillance stems from a vast Black radical tradition critiquing policing, incarceration, and state violence, from Bayard Rustin’s 22 Days on a Chain Gang to Martin Luther King Jr.’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail, from Angela Davis to Mariame Kaba and Ruth Wilson Gilmore. To portray contemporary abolitionists or anti-surveillance organizing as foreign to Black political thought is to erase generations of Black intellectual and grassroots labor.
It is also a profound misreading of who bears the costs of surveillance.
In Cambridge, the communities with the highest concentration of ShotSpotter devices were largely Black, brown, immigrant, and low-income neighborhoods. These residents expressed fear, skepticism, bias and exhaustion regarding ShotSpotter locations as racially biased. Yet many of those voices remained unheard because they were quieter, more vulnerable, or unwilling to publicly confront police departments and elected officials on their turf. Others lacked the time to attend hearings because working-class people often cannot afford the luxury of sustained civic participation.
That absence is at best misinterpreted as consent and most often is a form of narrative cooptation used as consent.
But silence under surveillance is not agreement. Within our retaliatory and carceral society, sometimes silence is survival. So, we brought some of these voices into the space. Some residents sent public comments as recordings because they were afraid to speak in person, fearing retaliation for their housing or immigration status.
Communities that experience the highest levels of policing are often those least empowered to define public safety policy. However, in this case, the campaign was shaped and led by people directly affected. We have suggestions to “what are the alternatives to ShotSpotter,” and they start with investment in proven solutions like youth employment. We will continue to engage deeply in these conversations and hope the City Council will too.
The Black Response (TBR) is a civic association consisting of Black and African residents of Cambridge, Mass., working to replace policing and other carceral systems with community-grounded solutions for public safety. For more information, TBR can be reached at general@theblackresponsecambridge.com.
