Cambridge Selects 40 Residents for Surveillance Tech Assembly Through Lottery

Forty residents were selected through a lottery drawing to advise Cambridge on its surveillance technology, including the controversial gunshot detection software ShotSpotter.

The selection comes two months after the City Council pushed to create the resident assembly in response to concerns over the use of ShotSpotter and a lack of resident voices in conversations surrounding surveillance technology across the city.

The residents were chosen from a pool of more than 400 and will meet with experts and formally discuss the use of surveillance devices before preparing recommendations for the City Council on how they should be used.

To recruit participants, the city mailed invitations to join the assembly to 15,000 households last month. Jackson L. Price, the city’s director of community engagement, said during Monday’s drawing that the response rate — about three percent — was “pretty typical” for resident assemblies, and praised the city’s outreach efforts.

The city then took the hundreds of residents who applied to join the assembly and created randomized lists of 40 that were intended to be representative of the city demographically — giving nearly a thousand permutations that could become the final body. Residents were clustered by age, gender, educational background, housing status, neighborhood, and experience with gun violence in the city in order to “reach the demographic targets” the city set for the assembly, Price said.

Cambridge Mayor Sumbul Siddiqui then spun bingo cages to randomly select one of the randomized groups. She lauded the selection as a “historic day” for the city, as the event cemented Cambridge as the first city in Massachusetts to successfully put together a first resident assembly.

The city outlined the demographic breakdown of the selected 40 residents. Almost half are between the ages of 16 and 34, and 38 percent have graduate, professional, or advanced degrees. The demographics also accounted for housing status, with three percent of selected residents living in permanent supportive housing, while 35 percent own their homes.

Price praised the city’s “intentional community-driven design,” noting that applicants ranged from 16 to older than 75 years old.

The city also aimed to specifically recruit residents who had been impacted by gun violence — door knocking in neighborhoods disproportionately affected by gun violence, including the Port, to encourage them to apply.

Of those selected, 15 percent have personally experienced gun violence, 18 percent have a family member or someone close to them who directly experienced gun violence, and 18 percent come from neighborhoods impacted by gun violence.

Price said during an interview after the drawing that city staff were met with “curiosity, openness, and already some understanding” when knocking doors for the assembly, which he said was “encouraging.”

The assembly will meet with experts and formally discuss the use of surveillance devices before preparing recommendations for the City Council on technology, including ShotSpotter — which the city has waffled on the use of for the last five months.

The Council moved to terminate the city’s contract with SoundThinking, ShotSpotter’s parent company, in May due to concerns over data privacy. But after the fatal shooting of 32-year-old Xavier Bautista in July, the city temporarily reactivated the system in August.

Bautista’s killing sparked heavy criticism against city leaders as residents argued the city had failed to adequately include residents’ voices in decisions surrounding violence prevention and surveillance technology in the city, like ShotSpotter. The Council ordered city staff to begin assembling the resident advisory body in August, now forming the group two months later.

The assembly will hold its first meeting on Oct. 24, after chosen residents confirm their participation.

—Staff writer Shawn A. Boehmer can be reached at [email protected] and on Signal at shawnb.18. Follow him on X @ShawnBoehmer.

—Staff writer Claire A. Michal can be reached at [email protected] and on Signal at ClaireMichal.154.