Police officials have agreed to limit their expansion plan for ShotSpotter, the technology long used in Minneapolis to pinpoint where guns are fired, as a compromise following concerns by some progressive city council members who remain skeptical of its efficacy.

Minneapolis police were seeking to increase its nearly 7-mile network of acoustic sensors to broader swaths of the south side, including the Whittier, Loring Park and LynLake neighborhoods, where violent crime trends have shifted since 2020. Last month, Community Safety Commissioner Todd Barnette and Chief Brian O’Hara asked a City Council committee to renew the contract through March 21, 2027 at a cost of just under $1 million.

“ShotSpotter does save lives,” said Barnette, who compared the popular gunshot detection system to home smoke detectors. The system acts as a first line of defense, he said, by alerting emergency dispatchers within 60 seconds of a microphone’s activation, helping officers reach a critical incident — and any gunshot victims — faster. Often times, police are dispatched to a scene via ShotSpotter before a 911 call ever comes in.

Yet, ShotSpotter has become controversial in recent years as concerns mounted about potential civil liberties violations involving the surveillance equipment. Critics claim the system is unreliable, does not reduce crime or improve clearance rates, and leads to discriminatory policing of minority residents.

Amid pushback from Council members Robin Wonsley and Jeremiah Ellison, who said they were uncomfortable extending the contract for another three years without more comprehensive data on the service and its broader impact in Minneapolis, police officials proposed an alternative: limit the contract to a two-year term and scale back the expansion plan from 2 miles to just .6 — covering parts of Loring Park and Whittier, which contain some of the city’s worst emergent hotspots.

At least seven homicides have occurred in that radius since 2022.

“I think this is a very data-informed decision,” Council member Katie Cashman, whose 7th ward will include some of those new sensors, said during an Administrative & Enterprise and Oversight Committee meeting Monday.

Ellison also praised the more moderate expansion plan that would help them lean into increased evaluation and oversight sought through an external audit. The city is seeking a third-party academic to study Minneapolis’ use of ShotSpotter and produce a report on its efficacy by March 2026, before the new contract is set to expire.

Ahead of Tuesday’s presidential debate and less than two weeks before early voting begins, Minnesota Democratic leaders are keeping their focus on the former president and abortion rights.

Despite Gov. Tim Walz’s nomination as the Democrats’ vice presidential candidate, almost all the talk at a Monday news conference from Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan, St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter and DFL Party Chair Ken Martin was focused on the conservative Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025,” a collection of policy proposals the think tank wants to see enacted if former president Donald Trump is reelected, and the possibility that abortion would be banned nationwide.

Flanagan said policies like abortion bans are already being enacted in some parts of the country.

“Half the women in this country do not have access to safe, legal abortions,” she said. “We know that because they are coming here.”

The combative tone was a marked contrast to the “politics of joy” tone that Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign has sought to strike, especially since Walz joined the ticket.

“It is happening right now and we don’t have to wait until day one” of a second Trump administration, Flanagan said.

Neither Minnesota GOP Chair David Hann nor Tayler Rahm, a senior adviser to Trump’s campaign in Minnesota, responded to voicemail messages Monday.

The Democrats also attacked Trump on style.

“Does she have the time? Does she have the wits? Does she get involved?” McKenzie said. “The Moms for Liberty, they do have the passion, so they’re good workers. They can get the job done. Yeah. I would work with them in a second if they wanted to be a public servant.”

In greater Minnesota, there’s a great need to see beyond politics. There’s a shortage of candidates for all sorts of local offices in greater Minnesota, from township boards, school boards, city councils, county commissions, as well as library boards, hospital boards, boards of adjustment, planning and zoning boards, and more. During the last election, the City of Millerville in Douglas County couldn’t get anybody to run for mayor. The city council had to appoint someone.

Women make up half the population but tend to hold a much smaller proportion of local offices than men. It’s a natural group to tap to fill these positions.

Fewer than one in five county commission seats in Minnesota are held by women, said Sheila Kiscaden, a former state legislator and current Olmsted County commissioner.

“Women frequently have to be asked many times before they run,” she said. “And if you’re the only woman out in your rural county running for office, it’s different to run as a woman than as a guy because we still have some assumptions about women’s roles and men’s roles.”

Kiscaden also mentored Prosser, a former business owner who moved to Clearwater County less than a decade ago, and where only one woman has ever served on the county commission, as far as Prosser knows. Women tend to broaden the scope of county commissions, said Kiscaden – introducing concerns about children and the elderly, for instance.