BREAKING: Cambridge Council votes 5-2 to disable gunshot detectors to protect black residents and migrants pic.twitter.com/3NTzyxXBth
— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) May 19, 2026
On Monday, the Cambridge, Massachusetts city council voted to end the use of its ShotSpotter system in the Boston suburb. ShotSpotter is a series of microphones that detect the sound of gunshots and dispatch police when that happens. This is the same Massachusetts city, by the way, where a lone wacko went on a random shooting spree (with a firearm that’s banned in the state) just last week.
ShotSpotter certainly has its problems in terms of accuracy. But as the Harvard Crimson reports, local police consider it a plus . . .
Acting Police Commissioner Pauline E. Wells urged councilors to keep the system in place, arguing that ShotSpotter gives police a tool to respond to gunfire when residents do not call 911.
“There have been at least 11 times when ShotSpotter detected gunfire in our city, and not a single 911 call came in — not one. That means 11 moments when no one reached for the phone, 11 moments when officers would have no direction, 11 moments when seconds were slipping away, and ShotSpotter was the only reason help was there at all,” Wells said.
Why turn off ShotSpotter then? Simple. The city’s “progressive” population is very uncomfortable with what the system might reveal and who might be exposed as a result.
Activists and councilors have also questioned whether data collected by ShotSpotter could be shared with federal immigration enforcement agencies, potentially violating Cambridge’s sanctuary city ordinance. SoundThinking owns the data collected by its microphones, which have been installed in hundreds of cities across the country.
Just listen to some of the comments from those making the case for scrapping ShotSpotter before the city council in the video above.
[ShotSpotter] puts black and brown communities in Cambridge in very real danger.
The BIPOC members of the Cambridge community are more likely to be recorded by ShotSpotter and thus are more vulnerable to potential abuses of the data and recordings collected by the company as well as dangerous over-policing. Surveillance does not equal safety. We do not need microphones on top of buildings, listening to every loud noise and sending in police in order to be safe.
And there you have it. The real reason behind the push to kill the system is that the city’s lefties are concerned that the perps the system might identify will skew uncomfortably toward communities they see as as “underserved,” protected or oppressed.
Does ShotSpotter help police find criminals? The local 5-O seems to think so. They obviously see it as a plus.
But it clearly offends the sensibilities of Cambridge’s ultra-progressive population to think that someone of a protected class or sexual preference might wind up in jail or — God forbid — an ICE detention center as a result.
So it seems that fighting crime and protecting the law-abiding population are secondary considerations. The way the right-thinking population of Cambridge see it, it’s far better to have a few more dead and injured victims than to take the chance of revealing some ideologically inconvenient truths about who might be committing those crimes. So the next time anti-gun leftists claim that they’re very concerned about crime, try not to laugh too loudly in their faces.