When a fraud policing tech gets taken down, does it make a sound?

Chicago is finally ditching ShotSpotter. (Although, you might notice here that Johnson is dragging his feet a bit.)

Mayor Brandon Johnson announced Tuesday that he won’t renew the city’s controversial contract with ShotSpotter, making good on a key campaign promise to do away with the gunshot detection system that has come under heavy fire for allegedly being overly costly and ineffective.

After the Sun-Times reported on the decision earlier in the day, Johnson’s office issued a statement saying the city “will decommission the use of ShotSpotter technology on September 22,” meaning cops will have access to the system throughout the historically violent summer months and the Democratic National Convention.

"During the interim period, law enforcement and other community safety stakeholders will assess tools and programs that effectively increase both safety and trust, and issue recommendations to that effect,” the mayor’s office said.

The move comes after several years of mounting evidence that the technology is ineffective and, in fact, actively harmful. 

He insisted the technology is “unreliable and overly susceptible to human error,” adding that it “played a pivotal role” in the fatal police shooting of 13-year-old Adam Toledo in March 2021.

Many of those concerns were reiterated by critics of ShotSpotter, who frame it as a costly surveillance tool that has led to overpolicing in minority communities. Proponents argue it’s a lifesaving resource that gives cops another much-needed tool to respond to gun violence.

Last week, the Sun-Times reported the Cook County state’s attorney’s office had conducted a review of ShotSpotter that found the technology had a minimal effect on prosecuting gun violence cases.

ShotSpotter was previously slammed in a May 2021 report by the MacArthur Justice Center at the Northwestern School of Law, which found that nearly 86% of police deployments to alerts of gunfire prompted no formal reports of any crime.

In another scathing report that August, the city’s Office of the Inspector General concluded the technology rarely leads to investigatory stops or evidence of gun crimes.

Ever behind-the-curve, though are New Orleans public figures who reflexively promote the fraudulent technology as a "solution" whenever crime and policing is missing. (Here's JP Morrell doing that not even a scant two years ago, for example.) The more cynical among us would posit that this has something to do with the presence of local political and business personages on the company's board.  But it doesn't have to be that.  This city is backwards enough on its own.

Congratulations, Mayor Oliver Thomas

I can't pay attention the Trump indictment. It just seems like so much boring celebrity gossip to me. Anyway, I missed this one a few days ago.  

In Louisiana, the flamboyant former Gov. Edwin Edwards, who spent eight years in prison on corruption charges, tried, and failed, to mount a political comeback with a run for Congress in 2014.

Voters in New Orleans were more forgiving of the City Council member Oliver Thomas, who was imprisoned after pleading guilty in 2007 to taking bribes, but was returned to the Council in 2021. Mr. Thomas spent years trying to come to grips with his transgressions both privately and publicly; at one point he even played himself in a theatrical production based on his downfall.

Clancy DuBos, a New Orleans political analyst, said that Mr. Thomas earned back voters’ trust by facing up to his guilt, and then engaging in extensive volunteer and community service work. “He’s seen as someone who’s fallen but he’s done a complete arc of redemption,” said Mr. DuBos. He thinks Mr. Thomas could one day be mayor.

It's always dangerous territory to find oneself in agreement with Clancy DuBos. But there is context.  This article had to be pointed out to me last night because I compared OT, not to Trump the way this story does, but to Paul Vallas who we all just watched lose the Chicago mayoral runoff.  This was a surprising development to me for a whole host of reasons. Chief among them being that the kind of Vallas coalition described by Chicago tweeters (privatizing NGOs, vestigial political machines, cops and real estate moguls stoking crime panic) is insurmountably dominant in New Orleans.

He already sucked as a centrist neo-liberal privatization fossil from 20 years ago, and then he went MAGA radio host as a hobby. Built a coalition of remnant Daley machine grifters, deluded billionaires, online reactionaries, and the police. Just an absolute demon of a candidate.

— Metra Eccentric (@MetraEccentric) April 5, 2023

All of that describes a figure like Oliver Thomas. He even has his own radio show! 

So, yeah, I agree with Clancy. If you're looking to place an early bet on #NOLAMayor 2025, OT is a good spot to lay some money. (Also pretty good spot to lay money if you're looking for a favorable parking contract but we knew that already.)  But the reason isn't because New Orleans voters are "more forgiving" so much as there just isn't any alternative for them to believe in here.

Island hopping

The insidious thing about charterization is that it not only destroyed the union but it also set workers on a long struggle to claw it back independent school by independent school.  Nearly twenty years have passed and so far they've won 6 out of 71 schools back. 

Living School joins Rooted School, International High School, Bricolage Academy, Morris Jeff Community School and Ben Franklin High School as organized collective bargaining units. Teachers in New Orleans who do not work at a unionized school can join United Teachers of New Orleans.

A small percentage of New Orleans' 71 charter schools are unionized. After Hurricane Katrina, thousands of public school teachers were fired and schools were taken over by the Recovery School District or transformed into charters, ending the contract between the city and the union.

And, of course, in the meantime, there have been thousands of lives uprooted and communities destroyed by the charter project that will never come back. Also one of the primary villains in this plot is about to be elected mayor of Chicago today.  

When Vallas went to New Orleans in 2007, the city was still reeling from the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina, which had made landfall two years earlier. In 2003, a Democrat-controlled Louisiana legislature had taken control of schools across the state by establishing the Recovery School District (RSD), which took over “underperforming” schools, the majority of which were initially in New Orleans.

The RSD fired the district’s teachers, who were unionized and mostly Black, middle-aged professionals, and replaced them with younger, whiter, out-of-town TFA recruits. Dix Moore-Broussard, a longtime arts teacher in New Orleans, told the TRiiBE that after Katrina, the district laid everyone off. (In 2010 Duncan, who was then secretary of education, said Katrina was “the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans.”)

“We got notice that they weren’t opening the schools and we could go pick up our last check,” she said. “Everybody just got $2,000, and it was the most insulting thing ever.”

But hey 6 of the 71 privatized schools now have their own little unions. Celebrate the little victories, I guess, but there's no justice here.

The problem is we'll keep letting it happen

Rick Perlstein takes us on a brief tour of Rahm Emmanuel's worst sins and they are many. It's difficult to pick a favorite but I always enjoy the bits that are almost too super-villainous to be real.

The city also rolled out a new “smart card” system for customers to pay transit fares, a product of the San Diego-based defense contractor Cubic. The system, known as Ventra, worked about as well as Lucille Ball on a factory production line: some people would get on the bus for free, while others would be charged several times. The cards were supposed to double as debit cards for Chicago’s “unbanked” poor. But buried deep within the thousand-page contract with Cubic were nice little Easter eggs, like the seven-dollar fee for customers who didn’t use the card for eighteen months, and another five dollars tacked on for each dormant month after that.

The damage done by amoral power brokers like Rahm is always obvious to everyone once they finally receive their comeuppance.  But somehow that never helps us to undo that damage or even learn to change the course that allowed it to happen.

Perlstein concludes,

Now the sins of Emanuel are finally catching up with him. Lucky for him, however, the compounding police-shooting scandal has erased from the news a peccadillo from this past November: the mayor’s press team was eavesdropping and recording reporters while they interviewed aldermen critical of the mayor. A spokesman responded to the press by saying that their only intent was also “to make sure reporters have what you need, which is exactly what you have here.” That made no sense. But then so much of the legend of Rahm Emanuel’s brilliant career makes little sense. The bigger question, perhaps, is what this says about a political party and the political press that bought the legend in the first place.

Even as we're finally tiring of this person in particular, there's never a shortage of "smart guys" willing to hand out favors to wealthy benefactors and punish poor people more or less for existing in the first place just waiting to become the next celebrated realist grown up who gets things done. In modern American politics there is no higher calling.

The only way to change that is to do something about these people while we have a chance to... you know.. quit electing them to stuff. But Hillary has a double digit lead so...