“On the morning of July 4, 2026, 32-year-old Xavier Bautista was shot and killed in Cambridge, Massachusetts,” notes a news summary. He was a black and Hispanic city employee. “The delayed response to the shooting occurred roughly two months after the Cambridge City Council voted to remove the ShotSpotter acoustic gunshot detection system.”
The gunshot detection system was removed after “racial justice” activists objected to it on the grounds that it was racist. ShotSpotter has saved many lives. But it has also led to the arrests of many shooters, who are disproportionately black. So activists claim ShotSpotter is racist.
Shootings are disproportionately committed by blacks. 72% of Minnesota’s murders are committed by blacks, who are only 8.3% of Minnesota’s population. Blacks account for at least half of all murders in the U.S., despite being only a seventh of the U.S. population. More than half of all people arrested for murder in 2019 were black. Rates of committing homicide “for blacks were more than 7 times higher than the rates for whites” between 1976 and 2005, according to the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics in its publication, Homicide Trends in the United States.
The removal of ShotSpotter by progressive city governments is costing lives. “Police unions and some officials have stated that first responders could have arrived up to an hour earlier if the technology had still been active. Community members have held public meetings to demand answers regarding the deactivation of the system,” notes a news source.
WCVB reported:
A Massachusetts father and soon-to-be husband was fatally shot early Saturday morning near a park on Norfolk Street in Cambridge, just two blocks from his home.
“He was a very caring brother; he was a very caring father,” said the sister of Xavier Bautista….
Bautista’s best friend said they had attended a party and stopped at McDonald’s before he dropped Bautista off at the corner of the street near his home.
“We went to a party, we went to McDonald’s after, and then I dropped him off at the corner of the street,” his friend said.
An hour after the shooting, a passerby discovered Bautista’s body on the ground and alerted police. Authorities said they had not received any reports of gunshots in the area.
Bautista, 32, was the father of a five-year-old son and was soon to be married.
“It sucks to know that anything could have made any difference, and it sucks to know that my brother was laying on the ground alone for an hour,” Angeles said.
Bautista’s family and the Cambridge Police Patrol Officers Association are questioning whether the city’s recent removal of ShotSpotter, a gunfire detection system, contributed to the delay in emergency response. The technology had been available in the area where Bautista’s body was found until the city council canceled it two months ago.
The Boston Herald adds:
Two police unions in Cambridge are saying technology that detected gunshots in the city but was removed by a city council vote in May could have helped a man found shot dead over the weekend.
Department of Public Works employee Xavier Bautista was discovered dead around 5:30 a.m. Saturday near the intersection of Broadway and Norfolk Street. Based on the preliminary investigation, Bautista was likely shot just before 4:30 a.m….
“There was no opportunity for the victim to receive emergency aid for approximately 60 minutes,” the Cambridge Police Patrol Officers Association and Cambridge Police Superior Officers Association said in a joint statement reported in multiple outlets. “This is directly related to the City Council’s mandate removing ShotSpotter technology from deployment in Cambridge.”
A city spokesperson confirmed that the technology had been deployed in that area where Bautista was found to detect gunfire before it was voted to be removed by the city council in May.
“If ShotSpotter detection was received at the time of this incident, Cambridge emergency personnel would have had the opportunity to discover the scene much sooner than 60 minutes after the incident, and render emergency aid to the victim,” the unions’ statement said.
“Cambridge disabled Shot Spotter because they said it was racist. Then a black Public Works employee got shot, lay undiscovered for over an hour while bleeding out in a public park, and died because first responders didn’t know a shooting happened,” observes Swann Marcus.
If the shooter had been detected and arrested, that could save the lives of other innocent people. Locking up criminals keeps them from killing more innocent people. When inmates are released, they tend to commit more crimes. Nationally, 81.9% of all state prisoners released in 2008 were subsequently arrested within a decade, including 74.5% of those 40 or older at the time of their release. (See Bureau of Justice Statistics, Recidivism of Prisoners in 24 States Released in 2008: A 10-Year Follow-Up Period (2008-2018), pg. 4, Table 4)). Incarcerating those criminals incapacitates them and stops them from committing crimes against innocent people.
Preventing murder by catching shooters disproportionately benefits minorities, because roughly half of all murder victims are black — even though only a seventh of the population is black — and some murder victims are Hispanic. In 2019, there were 13,927 murder victims, of whom 7,484 were black victims. Black-on-black killings are depressingly common — most black murder victims are killed by a black killer.
