The police aren't just customers, they're salesmen
"The hyper-localized nature of policing makes this strategy particularly effective"
Hello everyone. Lot’s of posts lately! Did you see the four year anniversary State of the Newsletter Address? Or our newest regular column by Liz Goodfellow, “Worcester Speaks!” ft Jenn Gaskin?
The 50 percent off Four Year Anniversary deal is good until June 30!
In the post today: , a dive on the recent news that interim chief Paul Saucier applied for a job at ShotSpotter, a quick word on Mill Street, former City Manager Mike O’Brien’s involvement in a rent price-fixing cartel, then some odds and ends
Lots to discuss!
The police aren’t just the customers, they’re also the salesmen
Neal McNamara over at the Patch put up a story the other day that really tied the whole room together vis-a-vis Shotspotter.
Worcester Interim Police Chief Paul Saucier pursued a job last year at SoundThinking — the maker of the controversial gunshot detection tool ShotSpotter — after years of being an advocate for the company's technology inside the police department, city documents show.
You don’t say!
Saucier filed the conflict-of-interest statement last summer, a month before he was promoted to interim chief. A month after doing so, he interviewed for a job at SoundThinking (the company formerly known as ShotSpotter, which I will refer to as “ShotSpotter” for the rest of this piece). The job title was “customer success director,” according to the Patch, and the role was “driving revenue growth through upsells and cross-sells with current customers.”
Customers here means police departments, of course. Saucier would have been a good fit, since he already upsold his own municipality on ShotSpotter’s “crime forecasting” AI service a few years prior. Before that, he played a key role in expanding the coverage area of the primary gunshot detection service. More than anyone in the department, perhaps, Saucier is responsible for bringing ShotSpotter to the city and keeping it here. He told the Patch he became the department’s “subject matter expert” on ShotSpotter.
Gotta hand it to him: that’s a lot of ammunition to bring to an interview for a sales job. Looks a lot like he’s been doing that job for years already.
ShotSpotter is among the local issues I’ve paid attention to the most closely over the years. I’ve listened to Saucier talk about it dozens of times at dozens of meetings. It always struck me that he was very well versed in a certain company line—quick to cite talking points that appear on the company’s website, quick with counter-arguments to scrutiny, quick to discredit independent studies, and comfortably familiar with the political battles in other cities, especially Chicago. He’s careful to highlight some data points, while others have to be pried out of him. In short, he’s always read to me as a little bit too much of a salesman.
The evidence Neal dug up here brings an important reality into focus. Saucier seeking this job after years of successful advocacy on the company’s behalf is big news, but not because it’s some exception. He’s not doing anything technically wrong, per se. Public officials are free to pursue employment opportunities in the private sector. This isn’t some outlandish corruption.
No, it’s news because it’s the rule. Saucier has been following an increasingly common path for police officials across the country, as new surveillance technologies emerge from the tech sector that rely primarily on municipal contracts.
The police aren’t just the customers, they’re also the salesmen.
The story of Saucier and ShotSpotter provides a very clear illustration of this little-discussed idea: The business model for companies like ShotSpotter is not rooted in the products it offers, but on the ability to convert public officials into advocates. In other words, what they’re really in the business of detecting isn’t acoustic information—it’s human motivation: What compels a guy like Saucier to work on our behalf?
What could be better than the promise of an easier and better paying job? One that’s within the “law enforcement community”? More money and less stress and you still get to feel like a cop?
A guy like Saucier might find that plenty enticing. He might consider what he needs to do to pursue that opportunity. He might pay attention when other police chiefs get hired. Copy what they did to do so.
Police chiefs have a unique ability—one no salesman could dream of possessing—to augment the political reality of their city. They can make a product like ShotSpotter synonymous with “the police.” With such an advocate-chief, decisions on whether to buy ShotSpotter products quickly become pro- or anti-police referendums. And the brand of “anti-police” is a reliable death sentence for local elected officials.
So let’s look at a short moment from the city council meeting Tuesday, keeping in mind the idea that ShotSpotter’s main product is not tech but guys like Saucier.
A good question!
On Tuesday night, Councilor Thu Nguyen asked the chief about this directly. They began: “The other thing I want to address is the elephant in the room...”
It was a pleasant surprise to see a city councilor bring up a news story—any news story—about issues in the police department. Unfortunately, it’s a rare occurrence. Nguyen posed the question: Is Saucier required to recuse himself when talking about ShotSpotter? You know... given that he tried to get a job with them and relentlessly promotes the company’s service at every opportunity. It’s a good question!
Saucier and the city manager did their best to write it off.
Saucier said: “I applied for a job that has nothing to do with my performance.”
But that’s not entirely true, because at his current job, Saucier has basically served as a sales rep for the company. He continued:
“I give my opinion based on facts.”
Which facts, though? And are they even that? Facts? Let’s take a look at what Saucier means when he says that word.
Saucier’s Facts
Every time in recent memory the interim chief has been made to speak publicly about ShotSpotter, he reliably cites two “facts”: He says Shotspotter is 95 percent accurate in detecting gunshots. He also says 80 percent of gunshots do not get reported to the police.
Both of these “facts” are directly cribbed from marketing material provided by the company, and they’re both shaky at best. The “95 percent accuracy” point, for instance, is based on reporting of false alarms from police departments—which is voluntary. If there’s no report of an inaccurate activation, it’s considered accurate by the company.
The more accurate way to represent this “fact” is that 5 percent of false positives led police departments to send a totally optional and probably time consuming complaint to the company. And even that is suspect. The company is very secretive with its data, calling it a “trade secret” and thus exempt from public record law.
The “80 percent of gunshots going unreported” line is even more spurious. It may be cut from whole cloth—the product of deliberate data manipulation. The Cancel ShotSpotter campaign puts it this way:
ShotSpotter regards gunshots separated by nine seconds or more as separate alerts. An event with multiple gunshots, that a witness would perceive as one “incident”, can have multiple ShotSpotter alerts. People don’t call 911 once per bullet, they call 911 once per shooting.
Example: If someone shoots a gun twice, the two shots are ten seconds apart, and a person nearby calls 911 one time to report the incident, ShotSpotter will say half of all gunshot incidents went unreported by the public.
So the 80 percent figure has more to do with the disparity between two definitions of “incident” than anything. But we can’t really know. The company doesn’t show the work behind the claim.
There are the “facts,” according to Saucier.
Several times over the past month, Saucier has given more specific numbers on ShotSpotter activations in Worcester. The way he presents these numbers isn’t clear, and serves to obfuscate the data, whether intentional or not. Mostly, he does this by way of omission. Numbers that are inconvenient for his defense of the product have been pried from him, in painfully confusing fashion, over several public meetings. The data he’s been most reticent to provide is the total number of activations, which you really need for a complete picture.
Here’s a quick breakdown of the 2023 Worcester ShotSpotter data, per numbers provided by Saucier:
Total confirmed shootings citywide: 116
This figure is absent any consideration of ShotSpotter. It’s just the overall number of documented shooting incidents citywide last year.
Total ShotSpotter activations: 517
This figure is absent any confirmed shootings. It’s just the number of times ShotSpotter alerted the police of a gunshot it detected.
You’ll notice it’s five times larger than the confirmed shootings number. And keep in mind ShotSpotter only covers a small geographic section of the city. About a quarter of it, roughly.
As Saucier has described several times, each ShotSpotter alert triggers a response from two squad cars and a supervisor. And only the supervisor can “clear the scene,” according to Saucier. So that’s 517 times that happened in the small portion of the city with gun detection microphones.
Activations that yielded evidence of shooting: 70
Of the 517 times ShotSpotter “detected” a gunshot, officers found evidence just 70 of those times. That’s 13 percent of the time.
One of Saucier’s favorite ShotSpotter talking points is that in 41 of these 70 confirmed shootings, no one called the police. He uses the line to show that ShotSpotter leads the police to evidence they wouldn’t gather otherwise. Shell casings, mostly. But this data point also illustrates a converse reality: In 29 of the 70 confirmed incidents, ShotSpotter was redundant. Someone called it in the old fashion way.
Activations that yielded evidence of an otherwise unreported shooting: 41
Of the 517 activations, the cops documented 41 confirmed gunshots that they wouldn’t have otherwise documented. That’s 8 percent of activations leading to non-redundant gunshot confirmations.
And the rates of arrests and guns recovered are much lower than even that, as we’ll get to.
So that brings us to the next data point, which does not enter the conversation around here almost ever, but is the most crucial for understanding why Shotspotter is problematic.
ShotSpotter activations that yielded no evidence of a shooting: 447
Of the 517 times ShotSpotter “detected” a gunshot, the officers who responded found no evidence of a gunshot 447 times. That is 87 percent of the time. This should call into question the company line that ShotSpotter is 95 percent accurate. (It would be interesting to know if Worcester police have bothered to report any of these 447 incidents to the company!).
More than the accuracy question, this number lends credence to the over-policing concerns. ShotSpotter only covers the poorest and least white neighborhoods of the city. This figure represents 447 times officers have descended into those neighborhoods looking for a shooter that the app told them was there. That’s 447 more times they went into neighborhoods looking for trouble than they would have otherwise. That’s 447 more times they wasted time and resources that could have been spent otherwise.
So consider that when you look at these last two numbers.
Number of firearms seized on calls involving ShotSpotter activations: 12
Number of arrests for gun related charges on calls involving ShotSpotter: 8
That’s an extremely low yield on both fronts—2.3 percent on guns recovered, 1.5 percent on arrests.
Then, lastly, a number that’s a bit of editorializing on my part.
Number of gunshots prevented: 0
But not that much editorializing.
ShotSpotter doesn’t prevent gun violence. It hasn’t in any city that’s used it. This has been well documented.
ShotSpotter marketing material loudly claims that it “saves lives”—something Saucier has repeated often—but upon closer inspection the claim is a reference to reduced response times, not less gunfire. People still get shot but the cops get there a little quicker sometimes. Sort of thin. But the “saves lives” line implies prevention at a glance. People like Saucier and the majority of the city council are all too happy to indulge in it.
Despite this marketing line, the company is careful to distance itself from prevention claims in a legal sense. In the fine print of the contract document it sends to cities, there’s language that explicitly states the product does not prevent crime.
Section 7.C. reads: “ShotSpotter does not warrant or represent, expressly or implicitly, that the Software or Subscription Services or its use will: result in the prevention of crime...”
They’re also careful to distance themselves from anything untoward that might happen as a result of one of their “detections.”
This isn’t an abstract concern. In 2021, a ShotSpotter activation sent a Chicago police officer on the hunt for a supposed shooter. Instead, the officer shot 13-year-old Adam Toledo in the chest, killing him. The boy’s hands were raised over his head, and they were empty.
Without ShotSpotter, it wouldn’t have happened. It’s the event that set in motion a protest movement in Chicago that recently forced the city to part ways with the company.
In recent meetings, Saucier has made a few statements on Chicago. He called the protests “all political,” a ploy by the mayor for personal gain. He said that actually the city’s aldermen all want ShotSpotter back now. They realize it was a mistake to get rid of it, he said.
It’s not a fair way to characterize the situation, given that ShotSpotter doesn’t actually leave Chicago until September. And it was only two aldermen, one of which is a former cop. It makes me wonder where he got this particularly distorted talking point.
As laid out in a substantive 2016 article in Forbes, ShotSpotter’s strategy entails maintaining “close relationships” with police officials, via frequent email correspondence.
City and company officials have worked together behind the scenes putting on press conferences and publishing studies showing a decrease in violent crime, emails show.
Given that Saucier is the self-described “subject matter expert” on ShotSpotter, and has worked with the company for a decade, it’s not a stretch to assume he’s getting some of the stuff he says at public meetings directly from the company.
While Saucier has cited the Chicago situation several times, he’s never mentioned Adam Toledo. That wouldn’t make for a good sales pitch, after all.
During the short exchange with Nguyen Tuesday night, he continued the sales pitch—positioned himself as an expert.
“I’ve researched this subject extensively over 10 years,” he said. What did that research entail? Reading the company’s reports and marketing material?
Then, after making that claim to authority, he moved quickly to the actual independent research conducted on ShotSpotter—there’s a lot, and most of it is damning—and wrote it all off wholesale:
“The information you’re seeing out there has nothing to do with facts.”
This comment is in line with a pattern of Saucier dismissing all criticism and inquiry as “political.” Recently, he similarly dismissed a report by ACLU Massachusetts on Boston, which found that 70 percent of activations led to dead ends. When Councilor Khrystian King brought that report up at a recent budget hearing, Saucier was quick to counter with a Boston Herald story about an error in one of the thousands of activations the ACLU reviewed. “You gotta watch out where you get your information,” he said to King.
Back to the exchange on Tuesday.
Nguyen pressed again for a comment on whether Saucier’s application to ShotSpotter represented a conflict of interest.
Saucier, growing increasingly defensive, countered: “We use Ford vehicles. Does that mean I can never apply for a job at Ford?”
To which Nguyen basically said hey this is nothing personal but can someone please answer the question?
Saucier again answered himself, though he shouldn’t have been the one to do so. He said he provided the conflict of interest form “for transparency” but “I probably didn’t have to do that.”
Again—not an answer.
Finally, someone else stepped in. City Manager Eric Batista said “there is no legal conflict here” because Saucier withdrew his application to ShotSpotter once the interim chief position opened up. Basically: since he’s not looking to get hired anymore, there’s no conflict. But what does that mean about the period of time when he was looking to get hired? No answer to that question, of course.
This short moment was the most interesting part of a longer council conversation. Most councilors, of course, defended Saucier and ShotSpotter. It was made clear neither are going anywhere as a result of this. There are, at best, four votes against ShotSpotter on an 11-member council. The chief left the conversation with no reason to stop advocating on behalf of the company.
The interesting question, to my mind, is not whether Saucier is violating conflict of interest law.
It’s what his cozy relationship with the company says about the changing nature of policing, and the way privatization is wiggling its way in via tech products.
Revolving Door
This Saucier story serves as a perfect little example of a national problem. Companies like ShotSpotter rely heavily—almost exclusively—on municipal contracts for revenue. But their service is proprietary technology, and as such it’s heavily guarded. Fiduciary responsibility compels that secrecy. So you have a private company that needs public revenue but can’t afford public scrutiny. The situation calls for a good salesman, and who better than the police chief of a given municipality? At the same time, the company hires a lot of cops—for jobs that are likely much less stressful and much better paying and further removed from public scrutiny.
The opportunity this presents to a veteran police officer like Saucier is obvious: Familiarize yourself with the company’s marketing material, demonstrate you can be a good salesman to your municipality, and then use that track record to show why you deserve a job.
There’s a fantastic article by Anna Bower in The Flaw which traces ShotSpotter’s relationship with police officials: “Shots Fired, and Profited On: Inside the Campaign against “ShotSpotter” in Chicago.” While the focus is Chicago, the larger theme is how local police departments are becoming both customers and advocates for surveillance technologies. The “revolving door” hiring strategy, which Saucier was trying to get in on, serves as leverage to make police officials like Saucier the good marketers they need. Bower writes:
The hyper-localized nature of policing makes this strategy particularly effective. While city councils typically allocate the budget, police departments retain significant influence over how to use the money—and public officials are often hesitant to second-guess those decisions.
And, aside from a handful of large cities, most police departments lack the expertise or infrastructure needed to systematically review their own data and evaluate the impact of a given technology on public safety.
The idea of reviewing the data has not even been broached here, as far as I can tell.
Police, traditionally revered as “experts,” in fact know very little about the technology they use today. Instead, they tend to trust private companies to tell them how a product works.
Hence Saucier’s familiarity with the marketing material!
And, like most consumers, they often rely on peer recommendations and positive word-of-mouth to make buying decisions. This puts corporations like ShotSpotter in a powerful position to influence buying based on strategic relationships with law enforcement.
Here’s a totally hypothetical situation: the police chief of a city adamantly defends a surveillance technology that the city pays for, citing company marketing material as factual data and discrediting all criticisms and independent studies as “political” and “inaccurate.” The police chief’s staunch support and dismissal of criticism produces a “culture war” style political reality in the municipality. Anti-ShotSpotter becomes a stand-in for Anti-Cop. City Councilors who do not want to be seen as Anti-Cop adopt the chief’s talking points and vote accordingly. Scrutinizing the technology becomes a “radical position.” Whether it works or not becomes a secondary concern to the implications of asking those questions. The ShotSspotter vote becomes a referendum on “reasonable” versus “radical.” The majority vote to signal they’re reasonable and not radical.
ShotSpotter secures its contract from the municipality without having to prove they deserve it.
The majority of councilors get to demonstrate they’re “pro- police” which is the most important thing to be for re-election purposes. On the flip side councilors who opposed the deal take a political hit for it.
The city shuffles taxpayer money from its operating budget to the company, which appears as earnings in shareholder reports. It’s a hefty sum, equivalent to about five or six teacher salaries. The company reports strong quarterly earnings and the stock price ticks up.
The police chief has something to talk about when it comes time to apply for a position at Shotspotter. He’s able to show concrete proof of his value and commitment to the company.
Every outcome in this totally hypothetical situation relies on the company’s “strategic relationships with law enforcement,” as Bower describesd it.
Despite the fact the above situation is 100 percent definitely hypothetical, it’s pretty obvious there’s a strategic relationship here in Worcester between Saucier and ShotSpotter.
Saucier’s decision to forgo his pursuit of a ShotSpotter job in favor of the interim chief role only means that ShotSpotter’s “strategic relationship” remains secure here. They can rely on our money as long as he’s there. And they don’t even have to pay him!
Not yet, at least.
Kate Toomey saved Mill Street (lol)
In more lighthearted council news, the Mill Street redesign survived yet another round of bad faith interference from the cranks. In a hilarious turn of events, it was a crank who saved it. Kate Toomey provided the crucial sixth vote to defeat Moe Bergman’s order to change Mill Street back. Per the Patch:
The 6-5 vote against Bergman's order hinged on At-Large Councilor Kate Toomey, who made clear that she's no supporter of the Mill Street redesign. Toomey effectively voted against Bergman only because the city agreed to return with data on the redesign in six months.
So in six months we get to watch this same show all over again. Such a waste of time. But it’s important that every time these cranks try to undo progress, they lose in embarrassing fashion.
I thought Ben White put it best with this one.
Mike “Price Fixer” O’Brien
Need to give a quick signal boost to a story from This Week In Worcester that shouldn’t get lost: Former City Manager Mike O’Brien, now a developer, is embroiled in a massive national rental price-fixing scandal, with direct implications for Worcester renters.
In “Former City Manager’s Firm Accused of Rent Price Fixing,” Tom Marino reports:
WinnCompanies, where former Worcester City Manager Michael O’Brien is executive vice president, and Greystar, the largest property management firm in the world, are two of 34 co-defendants in multiple antitrust lawsuits. The litigation alleges collusion and illegal price fixing of residential rent prices.
Both companies manage multi-family properties in Worcester.
This lawsuit revolves around a spurious piece of new technology—much like ShotSpotter! But this one is for landlords and developers, and it’s called RealPage.
The other week I spent some time looking into RealPage after the FBI conducted a raid on the headquarters of property giant Cortland Management as part of an investigation into “algorithmic price-fixing.” The implications are huge, as described in The Big newsletter:
RealPage has been working with at least 21 large landlords and institutional investors, encompassing 70% of multi-family apartment buildings and 16 million units nationwide, to systematically push up rents. And RealPage isn’t just some software company distorting rental markets, it’s also owned by Thoma Bravo, one of the biggest private equity firms in the U.S. So yeah, this scandal matters. (RealPage is also lobbying up, which politically connected firms do…)
Unfortunately, I totally missed the local angle here. So I’m glad This Week In Worcester caught it. Via WinnCompanies, O’Brien is party to what many are alleging is a cartel of dozens of large landlords and property developers working together via RealPage to artificially inflate rents in markets across the country.
WinnCompanies has a dozen rental properties in Worcester County, including four in Worcester, per TWIW. Another company implicated in the lawsuit, Greystar, owns three rental properties in Worcester.
But the price-fixing is a national scheme, juicing rents everywhere in a coordinated fashion.
It says an awful lot, I think, that of our three most recent city managers, one is a developer embroiled in this lawsuit, one is in control of state housing policy and promising a housing solution that consists of tax breaks to developers, and the third one is careful to make sure that nothing comes through his administration which inconveniences any developers in any way. All three were hired the same way, also.
It’s no surprise there’s a Worcester connection to this story.
Quick note on Katie’s “cancerversary”
A year ago Katie got a call that changed both our lives forever. The anniversary of that was Wednesday.
The weeks that followed were terrifying, frustrating, maddening, spirit breaking. It’s not an experience anyone should know how to handle. But there it was, and we handled it. The terror and the panic muted over time, replaced by the annoyance and frustration of endless trips to the hospital, endless calls with doctors, endless well-meaning friends and family looking for information from us we either didn’t have, didn’t want to talk about, or felt too deflated to articulate.
Our lives settled into a new routine. Slow, boring, quiet. Painful some days, others close to normal. Something you don’t hear a lot about is the quiet mourning of a life you had before. Not so much that every day is hell but that every day is just... not the day it would be otherwise. Another day closer to some sort of vague finish line the doctors have outlined for you. It was a lot of waiting around in uncomfortable uncertainty.
But as the months carried on and the good news from the doctors kept coming in, every day also came with an incremental lightness. There’s no such thing as “going back to the way things were”—something we’re both still learning—but the multiple surgeries and the chemo and the radiation are in the past now. The doctors pronounced Katie cancer free. And every day at least for me comes with a new rush of that lightness. Now, one year out, it’s not like before but it’s almost normal. A new sort of normal. And I get to wake up every day and play with Katie’s new hair and say oooo look at that it’s getting so long and Katie says not long enough and I say but it will be.
It’s weird I think to make an anniversary of something so awful, but just this moment of reflection has me understanding how important it is to do so. It’s a strangely nice feeling to measure against the worst day of your life. We were terrified and we were crying and now we’re laughing and Katie’s looking so good and we’re both looking forward to the mullet her hair’s going to naturally grow into.
I haven’t written much about this experience because until now it was all why bother—It sucks, next question. Unless it was to ask for money of course which is worse than why bother. Humiliating, frankly. But now that Katie’s cancer-free and one infusion shy of getting out of the St. Vincents routine it feels nice to put all this down. I’m so glad my love is on the other side of this thing now and I truly hope that none of you have to experience what we did. And I’ll never know what Katie went through. No one but her will. When I think about that it makes me even more proud to be her silly little guy.
Odds and ends
One more plug for that 50 percent off deal.
And tips are nice too!
Happy one year of Bad Advice on Worcester Sucks! Shaun Connolly’s first column for us appeared on June 22, 2023. Time flies!
There were a lot of interesting stories this week.
Midland Street School Principal Christina Guertin, who you may remember from the time she let John Monfredo into the school to read to children, is facing accusations of racism and retaliation. She apparently removed two Black children from her school after their parent complained about racist treatment (and two Jewish children after a Santa Claus incident?!). Yikes.
There was that whole weird bomb threat thing, remember that? Police said they found two small homemade explosive devices on Madison Street and Harrison Street on Thursday. Haven’t really heard much since. Hm.
The old Smokestack BBQ on Green Street, dormant for a while now, is slated to become a Chinese hot pot restaurant after a housing development deal fell apart. Good news for the Canal District to have a restaurant back in that spot.
I have a sickly feeling this “speed limit survey” thing could turn into another Mill Street type crank fiasco. So in an abundance of caution I think everyone should fill it out a few times.
Not Worcester specific but highly relevant: SCOTUS Rules on Homelessness as DOJ Reveals a War on the Poor in the American Prospect.
The DOJ’s report lays bare the inner workings of the aggressive law enforcement campaigns in response to a nationwide epidemic of homelessness, including deploying police to “clear out” homeless encampments. It’s a stark contrast to the picture that the conservative justices apparently imagine in Grants Pass, Oregon’s public camping ban. The report makes clear that there are multiple constitutional provisions that can apply to prohibit the kinds of broad, forceful sweeps of homeless encampments seen in some cities.
We’re still waiting for the SCOTUS ruling on homelessness to come down. Check out the video essay I made explaining the ruling and the implications.
Ok that’s all for today! Til next time.
Reading this, it occurred to me that I rarely feel it necessary to call in things that sound like gunshots because I know that Worcester has ShotSpotter to handle that.