ShotSpotter's gone, but city still needs to find gunshot victims fast

I am a trauma surgeon on the South Side, and in my world, every second counts. That’s especially true in a city like ours where thousands of people are shot every year.

Recently, an 18-month-old boy was shot in the abdomen. His small intestine was emerging from bullet holes the size of a half-dollar coin. Minutes after the injury, he arrived in our operating room where we repaired holes in his kidney and intestine. He lives.

A middle-aged father of two was shot in the chest — an especially dangerous injury because a collapsed lung can cut off blood flow to the heart and cause death in minutes. His pulse was gone but, thanks to paramedics performing CPR, we were able to save him.

A 26-year-old male with a gunshot wound in his abdomen arrived within four minutes of his injury. He walked out of the hospital 10 days later. A 22-year-old involved in a similar incident on the same day arrived closer to 20 minutes after the injury. I don’t know why it took that long for him to arrive, but he died.

Stories like these happen every day at our trauma center, and while there are many factors that determine whether a victim survives, one of the most critical is time. The sooner they arrive at the trauma center, the more likely we can save them.

So I am troubled by the debate around ShotSpotter, a gunshot detection technology that has been in Chicago for several years but has now been discontinued. By most accounts, within 60 seconds of a shooting, ShotSpotter notifies police of the exact time, location and number of shots fired. Like all technology, it’s not perfect. Some alerts are false.

Shootings go unreported

According to police, however, response times were faster to ShotSpotter alerts than to 911 calls without ShotSpotter alerts. Police also point out that many shootings are not reported.

In fact, I understand the Chicago Police Department has a campaign to encourage people to call 911 when they hear shots because so many shootings go unreported. I have also read news reports of gunshot victims discovered hours, if not days, after incidents. In most cases, the victims bleed out and die.

Critics of ShotSpotter say it contributed to overpolicing. They also say — and police acknowledge — that ShotSpotter data rarely helped police solve crimes. Apparently, ShotSpotter was initially sold as a crime-fighting tool as opposed to a life-saving tool.

Like most people, I want shooters held accountable. We can’t live safely if gun violence goes unpunished. My work in violence prevention has shown me that in the absence of actual justice, street justice results.

But my primary goal as a medical professional is saving lives, and that is directly connected to time. If ShotSpotter got police and paramedics to the scene of a shooting faster than the 911 system alone, then I cannot imagine why we got rid of it. I am glad to hear that the city is now soliciting new proposals for essentially the same purpose.

It is also worth noting the trauma center I founded in 2018 at the University of Chicago Hospital came as a result of public pressure from activists who argued lives were being lost due to extended travel times from the South Side, which did not have a trauma center.

Gun violence researchers affirm their argument. In fact, researchers from the University of Chicago have shared data suggesting that ShotSpotter “likely” saved up to 85 lives per year in Chicago because of faster response times.

One final argument against ShotSpotter is it diverts police resources away from active emergencies. If true, maybe that’s not a ShotSpotter problem; maybe it’s a triage problem.

Like medical resources, police resources are not unlimited. The CPD needs to decide where, when and how to respond. A single gunshot in a low-crime neighborhood may not prompt a full-scale, high-speed police response, but 100 shots in a high-crime neighborhood presumably would, and should. I am not qualified to judge CPD’s triaging skills.

But I am qualified to make a judgment about what it takes to save lives in a city plagued by overwhelming levels of gun violence: At the very top of my list is a public safety system that brings gunshot victims to trauma centers as quickly as possible.

Selwyn Rogers Jr., M.D., is the founding director of the University of Chicago Medicine Trauma Center and the Dr. James E. Bowman, Jr. Professor of Surgery at the University of Chicago.

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