Chicago is cutting a $500,000 check to Michael Williams, a South Side man who spent nearly a year in jail after prosecutors charged him with a 2020 murder that leaned heavily on an alert from the city’s ShotSpotter gun-detection system. The payout ends a federal lawsuit Williams filed in 2022 and was entered by a U.S. district judge without City Council sign-off, turning his case into a prime exhibit in the fight over whether acoustic surveillance tools help solve crimes or just turbocharge bad policing in Chicago’s South and West Side neighborhoods.
According to WTTW News, city attorneys made an offer of judgment for $500,000, which U.S. District Judge Georgia Alexakis approved, so the money could be paid without aldermanic approval. Court filings reviewed by WTTW show Williams accepted the offer before the case reached trial, bringing his federal civil rights suit, filed in July 2022, to a close.
How Williams Was Charged
On May 31, 2020, Williams says he was giving a young man a ride when a gunman fired into his car. The passenger, 25-year-old Safarian Herring, later died, according to reporting on the case. As detailed by the Associated Press, prosecutors built much of their theory around an audio alert from ShotSpotter that investigators argued linked a recorded gunshot to Williams’ vehicle. By July 2021, prosecutors asked a judge to dismiss the murder charge, saying they no longer had enough evidence to move forward.
Williams' Lawsuit And The Lawyers' Take
In July 2022, Williams fired back in federal court. He sued Chicago, asking a judge to forbid the city from relying on SoundThinking’s ShotSpotter system and demanding damages for the time he spent locked up, according to the MacArthur Justice Center, which represents him. The complaint says police “put blind faith in ShotSpotter evidence” and did not seriously chase down other leads, a theory the MacArthur team argued was at the heart of what went wrong. “We are glad to get Michael some measure of justice,” Jonathan Manes, senior counsel at the MacArthur Justice Center, said in the group’s statement on the settlement.
Why The Technology Is Contested
ShotSpotter’s accuracy and methods have been under the microscope for years. A multi-part investigation by the Associated Press reviewed internal materials that showed human analysts sometimes reclassified what the sensors picked up and warned that the system can misidentify routine sounds as gunfire. The company itself has cautioned that its microphones do not always catch shots fired inside cars or buildings.
Researchers with the UChicago Justice Project analyzed Chicago police beats and found that areas that once had ShotSpotter sensors actually saw steeper drops in homicides after the microphones were shut off, complicating claims that the tool is essential for public safety. Civil-rights attorneys and community advocates say that a high rate of false alerts has fueled disruptive deployments and unlawful stops concentrated in predominantly Black and Latino neighborhoods.
City Settlements And Political Fallout
Williams’ payout is not the first time ShotSpotter-related litigation has cost Chicago. The Chicago Sun-Times reported that in August 2025, the city paid $90,000 to settle a separate lawsuit that claimed officers used ShotSpotter alerts as a pretext for unlawful street stops. That earlier settlement, paired with the Williams judgment, has sharpened questions from aldermen, grassroots organizers, and civil-rights groups as officials debate whether Chicago should sign any new contract for gunshot-detection services at all.
What Comes Next
The Williams judgment does not include any admission that the city was legally at fault, the Law Department said in a statement reviewed by WTTW News. Mayor Brandon Johnson has publicly said he will not approve a new deal until the city can “find something that works,” and the 2026 budget sets aside $5 million for software licensing and maintenance that could fund future proposals. For now, the payout to Williams closes one chapter in Chicago’s long-running fight over surveillance tech, policing tactics, and whether pricey sensors are helping or hurting the neighborhoods that live with them every day.
