Depending on the audience, it was either a flip-flop under pressure, or a show of humility from elected leaders willing to give the public more say in how decisions are made.
Councilor Marc McGovern, who changed his vote, said it’s the latter.
“Too often, and you see this at the national level, people dig in. They dig into the talking points: ‘I’m just gonna say and do what’s going to appease my people and I’m not going to think critically about anything. I’m not going to be open to different ways of thinking,’ ” McGovern said. “I wish elected bodies would be more open to changing their minds and saying, ‘Hey, maybe we’ve got to take a step back. Maybe we went too far.’ ”
ShotSpotter devices listen for sounds that might be gunshots and alert first responders so they can race to the scene. Cambridge, like Boston, Somerville, and many other cities in Massachusetts, has used it for more than a decade. The system is funded by a federal grant.
Five councilors voted to turn ShotSpotter off, citing concerns about privacy, false positives, and how the devices can lead to over-policing. Two voted present, while two others opposed shutting it down.
But the council was moved to revisit that decision after the July 4 death of Cambridge DPW worker Xavier Bautista. Law enforcement said he was shot around 4:30 a.m. that morning, but that no one called for help until his body was discovered at a Cambridge street corner more than an hour later.
Police have so far declined to share more details about Bautista’s injuries, but the case fueled complaints that his life could have been saved if ShotSpotter had been active at the time and sent first responders to his aid sooner.
At a public meeting days after the shooting, many residents of the neighborhood where Bautista was killed sharply criticized councilors for not doing enough to consult with them when they decided to end the use of ShotSpotter.
So amid pushback, including from local police unions and Bautista’s family, the City Council reversed course. The vote to turn them back on and launch a new effort to gauge resident sentiment on the issue went 6-3.
Both McGovern and fellow Councilor Sumbul Siddiqui, who also serves as mayor, reversed their earlier votes and supported resuming ShotSpotter.
Both said that their views on the technology hadn’t changed, but that they saw this as a second chance to have the more robust discussion they should have had in the first place.
“I believe the community deserves the opportunity to participate in a thoughtful, evidence-based process before we make a longer-term decision,” Siddiqui said at Monday’s meeting. “This . . . is not about reaching a predetermined outcome, nor is it an endorsement of the technology. It’s about making sure that whatever decision we ultimately make is informed by both evidence and the lived experiences of the people who are most affected.”
Two other councilors who had voted “present,” Burhan Azeem and Catherine Zusy, joined them.
Azeem said he decided against making a firm decision back in May because he was hoping Cambridge would consider an alternative technology or other public safety measures at the same time. He hopes a public review will allow that discussion to play out more fully this time.
“I’m not here to defend ShotSpotter as the single best use of technology. If there was something else, and if we had a choice, I would choose something else. But I also don’t support just withdrawing from it,” Azeem said in an interview. “Maybe by having a lot of people come into a meeting and have a discussion, we can end up in a more nuanced place than a binary choice.”
Three councilors — Patricia Nolan, Ayah Al-Zubi, and Jivan Sobrinho-Wheeler — stuck with their earlier decision voting to disable the ShotSpotter devices.
A Cambridge spokesperson said the city had begun the process of turning the devices back on but couldn’t say exactly when they would be operational again.
A spokesperson for SoundThinking, the company that provides ShotSpotter to cities across the country, cheered the vote. “We remain committed to working with the City of Cambridge and its residents to support thoughtful, evidence-based public safety solutions that respect privacy and civil liberties,” it said.
While it is unusual for cities to turn their ShotSpotter devices off and then back on again, the spokesperson for the company said it has happened before, including in Erie, Pa., and Richland County, S.C.
Moving forward, Cambridge City Manager Yi-An Huang has been tasked with convening what councilors have dubbed a “resident assembly,” which will be asked to deliberate on the city’s use of ShotSpotter and other “public safety strategies.”
It calls for the city to take extraordinary steps, including selecting participants at random using a lottery system, weighted to include people in areas prone to gun violence.
Cambridge spokesperson Jeremy Warnick said the city hadn’t used such a selective public review process before, but pointed to Colorado, where a “civic assembly” was used by one community to consider uses for a former college football stadium, and by another to debate deployment of license plate-reading cameras.
While some recent public meetings have been packed with people opposed to ShotSpotter, elected leaders here have said it can be hard to get a clear view of the opinions of residents who do not show up to meetings.
City Councilor E. Denise Simmons, who strongly supports ShotSpotter, has said she believes there are people — including low-income residents and people of color — whose views on the benefits of surveillance were not adequately considered before the city’s vote to turn the devices off.
She said Monday that she was not convinced an assembly of randomly selected residents would reflect what she said was the underrepresented perspective of people in the city who live in fear of gun violence.
“Engage people on the basic level, find them where they are, and bring them to the table,” Simmons said. “As well-intended as you may be, it has to be authentic, and I haven’t seen that yet.”
Spencer Buell can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him @SpencerBuell.
