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To the Cambridge community,
First and foremost, The Black Response extends our deepest condolences to the family, loved ones, friends, and community of Xavier Bautista. We grieve the loss of a life to gun violence, and we recognize that behind every public discussion of violence is a family experiencing an immeasurable and deeply personal loss.
From a Black radical tradition, we understand grief not as separate from politics, but as a demand that we confront the conditions that make preventable death possible. We mourn with those who loved Xavier, and we extend our solidarity to everyone carrying the pain of his death.
We respect the family, their grief, and the gravity of this moment. In addition, members of the community have asked The Black Response to speak specifically because some have suggested that ShotSpotter might have been helpful in this situation. We believe that suggestion requires a response, not because we wish to politicize a family’s loss, but because surveillance technologies are often expanded in the immediate aftermath of tragedy, when grief and fear can make it more difficult to ask hard questions about whether those technologies actually make our communities safer.
This shooting took place on July 4th weekend, a particularly difficult time for gunshot detection systems because of the large number of fireworks. Systems like ShotSpotter can have trouble telling the difference between fireworks and gunshots. That context matters. We should be very careful about using this tragedy to claim that ShotSpotter would have made a difference, especially when fireworks make it harder for the system to identify gunfire accurately.
Also, numerous studies have shown ShotSpotter devices are highly inaccurate at the best of times, routinely missing gunshots and also generating false alerts regularly. This evidence was presented at city council meetings over two years - as were concerns that ShotSpotter violates civil and constitutional rights and might be sharing data with ICE. The police made no proposals to address these concerns, and the city council therefore voted to stop using these devices.
Finally, even when a ShotSpotter device successfully detects a gunshot, what good does this do? The gunshot has already happened. Police unions in Cambridge have suggested that ShotSpotter alerts help first responders arrive on the scene faster. But, the most recent study of this issue found that in Chicago, the opposite was true. Response times actually got faster after ShotSpotter devices were removed.
But our concern goes deeper than whether ShotSpotter could have detected one particular shooting.
We are deeply concerned that the larger point is being missed.
The solution to gun violence is not cameras and microphones everywhere. It is not the permanent expansion of surveillance infrastructure in Black, Brown, immigrant, working-class, and over-policed communities. It is not turning neighborhoods into data-collection zones while leaving the social conditions that produce violence fundamentally untouched.
We need social responses to social problems.
If we are serious about ending gun violence, we must create real alternatives for people who are at risk of perpetrating violence and for people at risk of being harmed by it. That means investing in credible messengers, violence interruption, youth employment, stable housing, mental health care, trauma support, conflict mediation, reentry support, education, community institutions, and meaningful economic opportunity. It means giving people actual pathways away from violence before a trigger is pulled.
Technological fixes cannot substitute for political courage or social investment. Surveillance systems may produce alerts, data, contracts, and profits, but they do not resolve the conditions that generate interpersonal violence. They do not create housing. They do not heal trauma. They do not provide a young person with a future. They do not mediate a conflict before it becomes deadly. They do not transform the material conditions in which violence takes root.
What they do reliably produce is revenue for the executives and corporations that sell surveillance technology to cities by promising safety. Every tragedy risks becoming another sales pitch: more sensors, more microphones, more cameras, more data collection, more police technology. We reject the idea that grief should become a market opportunity for surveillance companies.
The Black Response believes our communities deserve more than a technological response to a social crisis. We deserve investments that reduce violence at its roots. We deserve institutions that support people before a crisis becomes a catastrophe. We deserve public safety strategies built around human needs rather than corporate products.
We again extend our deepest condolences to Xavier Bautista’s family, loved ones, and community. We hold their grief with respect. And precisely because every life lost matters, we believe we must insist on solutions to violence capable of doing more than listening for gunshots after violence has already occurred.
We need social responses to social problems. We need investment in people, not an ever-expanding architecture of surveillance.
In solidarity,
The Black Response
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