Op-ed: Chicago’s ultra-progressive mayor cuts crime-fighting tech to fund community organizers and aid criminals

Why is Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson allowing a contract with a gunshot-detection tech company to expire, against the wishes of most Chicagoans?

The contract with Shotspotter, the company that provides remote gunfire detection in about 2,000 locations across the city, was set to expire on Monday.

“Polls show a vast majority of Chicagoans want to keep the technology, which data now strongly suggests is helping to save lives that otherwise would be lost to gun violence. But more importantly, it is the residents of the Chicago neighborhoods most devastated by this senseless mayhem who most want ShotSpotter retained. Those are the Chicagoans, the majority of them Black, that this mayor has vowed to rebuff,” writes the Chicago Tribune editorial board.

The Tribune called the mayor’s decision “one for the record books when it comes to head-scratching political decisions.”

So did the city council, which is normally a rubber stamp organization for any Chicago mayor. 

The city council voted on Thursday to keep the technology, 33-17, one vote short of a veto-proof supermajority. 

The Tribune noted that 12 of the 17 black city aldermen on the council, whose ward voters gave Johnson 76% of the vote, supported the proposal to keep the gunshot detection technology. 

So why is Johnson nixing the system?  

He says the system is too expensive and produces too few results.  

“We’ve spent $100 million on what essentially is walkie-talkies on a stick,” Johnson said. 

In fact, the system cost $53 million over 6 years, or about $8 million per year out of a $2 billion annual police budget.  

The truth is that Johnson wants the $8 million annually to go to his allied community organizers in the city under the guise that the technology is racist, and the city would be better off with community “intervention,” that turns would-be gang members into community organizers. 

“We know what creates violence in a neighborhood,” Johnson told fellow social justice rent seekers in March. “It is the lack of job opportunities. It’s disengagement. Disengagement from school, or access to alternate pathways to careers. It’s disengagement from housing, and you have housing instability, and of course, storefront vacancies and other disparities.” 

Johnson added that Chicago had to “directly address the racial and social economic disparities that contribute to the violence.” 

Johnson wants to address those disparities by giving money earmarked for Shotspotter to organizations like Chicago’s CRED, run by Arne Duncan, Obama’s former secretary of education. 

“CRED has developed highly targeted ‘place-based’ strategies to intervene directly in ongoing disputes, drawing on both crime data and street intelligence from our outreach workers,” writes CRED. 

Arne himself lives in Washington, D.C., although he owns a multi-million dollar home in Chicago on a city “block [full] of power hitters,” who likely don’t need gunshot detection technology. 

But what Johnson might really be after is the support of organized crime, such as gangs, in those wards where the votes are so critical to his re-election. 

He also likely wants the heft that street-level community organizers offer him when it comes to getting out the vote in wards controlled by Johnson allies. 

Chicago politicos have a long history of cooperating with criminal agendas to stay in office. 

“Vote for Roti and nobody gets hurt,” joked one long-time alderman with mob ties, Fred Roti, who went to prison in 1993. 

Politicians in Chicago cooperating with criminals happened in the 1920s; it happened in the 1960s; it happened in the 1990s; and all times in between. 

Ward heelers were still operative in 2019, bullying and harassing voters in Chicago to vote “the right way.” 

It’s known as the Chicago Way.  

It would be naive to at least not consider the possibility that a mayor, who is struggling with a 27% approval rating, might be making decisions with an eye to securing some electoral benefit from somebody, in true Chicago Way fashion. 

As Chicago Magazine noted, when politicians sit down with gang members, the criminals aren’t interested in combating crime. 

They simply ask, “What can you give me?” 

To which the politicos answer, “What do you want?” 

Sometimes the answer for both sides is so obvious.