The Chicago City Council approved an order on Wednesday intended to block far-left mayor Brandon Johnson from removing ShotSpotter gunshot-detection technology from the neighborhoods that want to continue using it.

The order, by alderman David Moore, passed with a 34-14 vote after a contentious hearing. It requires the mayor to provide the council with advance notice of any decision to stop funding violence-prevention tools — including ShotSpotter — in any ward, and to require a full council vote before the technology is defunded.

The order also requires ShotSpotter’s parent company, SoundThinking, to collect more data in the coming months on the tool’s accuracy, the number of alerts it sends that don’t have corresponding 911 calls, and how many weapons and shell casings are retrieved and how many arrests are made because of the alerts.

“Chicago neighborhoods are plagued with shootings and gun violence,” reads the order, which adds that by unilaterally ending the ShotSpotter contract, “Mayor Brandon Johnson and his staff have put at risk the communities that utilize SoundThinking/ShotSpotter, almost all black and brown communities.”

Johnson, it says, has “usurped the will of the City Council.”

The council’s move comes about four months after Johnson canceled ShotSpotter, in part to appease the anti-police activists who helped to elect him. He then negotiated a nine-month extension to keep the tool — at a steep price — into the fall, after the city hosts the Democratic National Convention. Johnson claims he’s giving the police department a “runway” to wind down its use of the technology.

Johnson contends that the council has no “legal standing” to strip him of the power to cancel the ShotSpotter contract, and that “ward-by-ward contracting” isn’t feasible, according to a report in the Chicago Sun-Times.

It’s unclear if Johnson will veto the measure, which would be the first time he’s used the veto since he took office last year. The council would need 34 votes to override a veto.

Supporters of the order argued on Wednesday that ShotSpotter is a “very important tool” and that keeping it in wards that want it is about “saving lives.” ShotSpotter, they said, allows the police to respond to shooting victims they wouldn’t otherwise know about.

Alderman Anthony Beale noted that most gunshots are not reported to authorities.

“Our communities have become complacent with gunfire because we hear it all the time,” he said, adding that ShotSpotter “fills the void.” He urged his colleagues not to “take away this tool that we need” and to “get past the politics.”

“Sometimes you have campaign promises you just need to break,” he said.

Alderwoman Monique Scott said there was recently a mass shooting in her ward. “This is something my community needs,” she said of ShotSpotter. “There were 90 shots, six shooters. Not one person called the police.”

ShotSpotter opponents attempted to block the vote with a motion to send the order back to a committee that had already debated it and approved it for more discussion.

Alderman Raymond Lopez argued against that move.

“We don’t need to play stupid, because we know what this is about,” he said. “There are those of us who stand with victims and stand with law enforcement, and there are those of us who are politicizing this so they can continue to stand with criminals.”

Opponents of the tool argued that Chicago residents don’t call the police because of a lack of trust, that ShotSpotter doesn’t prevent shootings, and that leaders should invest in addressing the “root causes” of the violence plaguing the city.

“We haven’t seen gun violence go down as a result of this system,” Alderwoman Jessica Fuentes said. “The safest communities in our city don’t have ShotSpotter.”

Moore argued that opponents of his measure “didn’t do their homework.” The order, he said, is about collecting more data so ward leaders can make informed decisions for their neighborhoods. He contended that the order is legal.

Ahead of the vote, the Chicago Police Department released new data about the impact that ShotSpotter has had in saving lives and helping investigators collect evidence.

According to the data, since January 2021, police aided 103 gunshot victims after receiving a ShotSpotter alert with no corresponding 911 call, according to the Chicago Tribune. The data also found that police responded faster to ShotSpotter alerts than to 911 calls.

Since 2018, police alerted to gunfire by ShotSpotter alone have recovered 1,688 guns and 62,824 shell casings and made 1,645 arrests, the Tribune reported.

In Chicago, many of the ShotSpotter opponents appear to be leftist activists, organizers, and “journalists” who previously were part of Defund CPD and the police-abolitionist movement that grew during the unrest of 2020.

Some claim that the technology is too expensive and ineffective. The most zealous anti-ShotSpotter activists say it is “racist” and “evil,” that it is overly deployed in minority communities, and that it is dangerous because it sends amped-up cops with itchy trigger fingers into minority neighborhoods.

But many of the loudest voices in support of the technology come from the communities that have been hardest hit by gun violence.

Ahead of Wednesday’s vote, SoundThinking CEO Ralph Clark described the anti-ShotSpotter movement to the Sun-Times as “very small, but loud.” He told the paper that a number of the tool’s opponents “come from the defund the police movement and this is just a . . . first cousin of defund the police.”